(gentle synth music) (music ends) >> Welcome back to Supercloud 2, an open industry collaboration between technologists, consultants, analysts, and of course practitioners to help shape the future of cloud. At this event, one of the key areas we're exploring is the intersection of cloud and data. And how building value on top of hyperscale clouds and across clouds is evolving, a concept of course we call "Supercloud". And we're pleased to welcome our friends from Enterprise Technology research, Erik Bradley and Darren Brabham. Guys, thanks for joining us, great to see you. we love to bring the data into these conversations. >> Thank you for having us, Dave, I appreciate it. >> Yeah, thanks. >> You bet. And so, let me do the setup on what is Supercloud. It's a concept that we've floated, Before re:Invent 2021, based on the idea that cloud infrastructure is becoming ubiquitous, incredibly powerful, but there's a lack of standards across the big three clouds. That creates friction. So we defined over the period of time, you know, better part of a year, a set of essential elements, deployment models for so-called supercloud, which create this common experience for specific cloud services that, of course, again, span multiple clouds and even on-premise data. So Erik, with that as background, I wonder if you could add your general thoughts on the term supercloud, maybe play proxy for the CIO community, 'cause you do these round tables, you talk to these guys all the time, you gather a lot of amazing information from senior IT DMs that compliment your survey. So what are your thoughts on the term and the concept? >> Yeah, sure. I'll even go back to last year when you and I did our predictions panel, right? And we threw it out there. And to your point, you know, there's some haters. Anytime you throw out a new term, "Is it marketing buzz? Is it worth it? Why are you even doing it?" But you know, from my own perspective, and then also speaking to the IT DMs that we interview on a regular basis, this is just a natural evolution. It's something that's inevitable in enterprise tech, right? The internet was not built for what it has become. It was never intended to be the underlying infrastructure of our daily lives and work. The cloud also was not built to be what it's become. But where we're at now is, we have to figure out what the cloud is and what it needs to be to be scalable, resilient, secure, and have the governance wrapped around it. And to me that's what supercloud is. It's a way to define operantly, what the next generation, the continued iteration and evolution of the cloud and what its needs to be. And that's what the supercloud means to me. And what depends, if you want to call it metacloud, supercloud, it doesn't matter. The point is that we're trying to define the next layer, the next future of work, which is inevitable in enterprise tech. Now, from the IT DM perspective, I have two interesting call outs. One is from basically a senior developer IT architecture and DevSecOps who says he uses the term all the time. And the reason he uses the term, is that because multi-cloud has a stigma attached to it, when he is talking to his business executives. (David chuckles) the stigma is because it's complex and it's expensive. So he switched to supercloud to better explain to his business executives and his CFO and his CIO what he's trying to do. And we can get into more later about what it means to him. But the inverse of that, of course, is a good CSO friend of mine for a very large enterprise says the concern with Supercloud is the reduction of complexity. And I'll explain, he believes anything that takes the requirement of specific expertise out of the equation, even a little bit, as a CSO worries him. So as you said, David, always two sides to the coin, but I do believe supercloud is a relevant term, and it is necessary because the cloud is continuing to be defined. >> You know, that's really interesting too, 'cause you know, Darren, we use Snowflake a lot as an example, sort of early supercloud, and you think from a security standpoint, we've always pushed Amazon and, "Are you ever going to kind of abstract the complexity away from all these primitives?" and their position has always been, "Look, if we produce these primitives, and offer these primitives, we we can move as the market moves. When you abstract, then it becomes harder to peel the layers." But Darren, from a data standpoint, like I say, we use Snowflake a lot. I think of like Tim Burners-Lee when Web 2.0 came out, he said, "Well this is what the internet was always supposed to be." So in a way, you know, supercloud is maybe what multi-cloud was supposed to be. But I mean, you think about data sharing, Darren, across clouds, it's always been a challenge. Snowflake always, you know, obviously trying to solve that problem, as are others. But what are your thoughts on the concept? >> Yeah, I think the concept fits, right? It is reflective of, it's a paradigm shift, right? Things, as a pendulum have swung back and forth between needing to piece together a bunch of different tools that have specific unique use cases and they're best in breed in what they do. And then focusing on the duct tape that holds 'em all together and all the engineering complexity and skill, it shifted from that end of the pendulum all the way back to, "Let's streamline this, let's simplify it. Maybe we have budget crunches and we need to consolidate tools or eliminate tools." And so then you kind of see this back and forth over time. And with data and analytics for instance, a lot of organizations were trying to bring the data closer to the business. That's where we saw self-service analytics coming in. And tools like Snowflake, what they did was they helped point to different databases, they helped unify data, and organize it in a single place that was, you know, in a sense neutral, away from a single cloud vendor or a single database, and allowed the business to kind of be more flexible in how it brought stuff together and provided it out to the business units. So Snowflake was an example of one of those times where we pulled back from the granular, multiple points of the spear, back to a simple way to do things. And I think Snowflake has continued to kind of keep that mantle to a degree, and we see other tools trying to do that, but that's all it is. It's a paradigm shift back to this kind of meta abstraction layer that kind of simplifies what is the reality, that you need a complex multi-use case, multi-region way of doing business. And it sort of reflects the reality of that. >> And you know, to me it's a spectrum. As part of Supercloud 2, we're talking to a number of of practitioners, Ionis Pharmaceuticals, US West, we got Walmart. And it's a spectrum, right? In some cases the practitioner's saying, "You know, the way I solve multi-cloud complexity is mono-cloud, I just do one cloud." (laughs) Others like Walmart are saying, "Hey, you know, we actually are building an abstraction layer ourselves, take advantage of it." So my general question to both of you is, is this a concept, is the lack of standards across clouds, you know, really a problem, you know, or is supercloud a solution looking for a problem? Or do you hear from practitioners that "No, this is really an issue, we have to bring together a set of standards to sort of unify our cloud estates." >> Allow me to answer that at a higher level, and then we're going to hand it over to Dr. Brabham because he is a little bit more detailed on the realtime streaming analytics use cases, which I think is where we're going to get to. But to answer that question, it really depends on the size and the complexity of your business. At the very large enterprise, Dave, Yes, a hundred percent. This needs to happen. There is complexity, there is not only complexity in the compute and actually deploying the applications, but the governance and the security around them. But for lower end or, you know, business use cases, and for smaller businesses, it's a little less necessary. You certainly don't need to have all of these. Some of the things that come into mind from the interviews that Darren and I have done are, you know, financial services, if you're doing real-time trading, anything that has real-time data metrics involved in your transactions, is going to be necessary. And another use case that we hear about is in online travel agencies. So I think it is very relevant, the complexity does need to be solved, and I'll allow Darren to explain a little bit more about how that's used from an analytics perspective. >> Yeah, go for it. >> Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think any modern, you know, multinational company that's going to have a footprint in the US and Europe, in China, or works in different areas like manufacturing, where you're probably going to have on-prem instances that will stay on-prem forever, for various performance reasons. You have these complicated governance and security and regulatory issues. So inherently, I think, large multinational companies and or companies that are in certain areas like finance or in, you know, online e-commerce, or things that need real-time data, they inherently are going to have a very complex environment that's going to need to be managed in some kind of cleaner way. You know, they're looking for one door to open, one pane of glass to look at, one thing to do to manage these multi points. And, streaming's a good example of that. I mean, not every organization has a real-time streaming use case, and may not ever, but a lot of organizations do, a lot of industries do. And so there's this need to use, you know, they want to use open-source tools, they want to use Apache Kafka for instance. They want to use different megacloud vendors offerings, like Google Pub/Sub or you know, Amazon Kinesis Firehose. They have all these different pieces they want to use for different use cases at different stages of maturity or proof of concept, you name it. They're going to have to have this complexity. And I think that's why we're seeing this need, to have sort of this supercloud concept, to juggle all this, to wrangle all of it. 'Cause the reality is, it's complex and you have to simplify it somehow. >> Great, thanks you guys. All right, let's bring up the graphic, and take a look. Anybody who follows the breaking analysis, which is co-branded with ETR Cube Insights powered by ETR, knows we like to bring data to the table. ETR does amazing survey work every quarter, 1200 plus 1500 practitioners that that answer a number of questions. The vertical axis here is net score, which is ETR's proprietary methodology, which is a measure of spending momentum, spending velocity. And the horizontal axis here is overlap, but it's the presence pervasiveness, and the dataset, the ends, that table insert on the bottom right shows you how the dots are plotted, the net score and then the ends in the survey. And what we've done is we've plotted a bunch of the so-called supercloud suspects, let's start in the upper right, the cloud platforms. Without these hyperscale clouds, you can't have a supercloud. And as always, Azure and AWS, up and to the right, it's amazing we're talking about, you know, 80 plus billion dollar company in AWS. Azure's business is, if you just look at the IaaS is in the 50 billion range, I mean it's just amazing to me the net scores here. Anything above 40% we consider highly elevated. And you got Azure and you got Snowflake, Databricks, HashiCorp, we'll get to them. And you got AWS, you know, right up there at that size, it's quite amazing. With really big ends as well, you know, 700 plus ends in the survey. So, you know, kind of half the survey actually has these platforms. So my question to you guys is, what are you seeing in terms of cloud adoption within the big three cloud players? I wonder if you could could comment, maybe Erik, you could start. >> Yeah, sure. Now we're talking data, now I'm happy. So yeah, we'll get into some of it. Right now, the January, 2023 TSIS is approaching 1500 survey respondents. One caveat, it's not closed yet, it will close on Friday, but with an end that big we are over statistically significant. We also recently did a cloud survey, and there's a couple of key points on that I want to get into before we get into individual vendors. What we're seeing here, is that annual spend on cloud infrastructure is expected to grow at almost a 70% CAGR over the next three years. The percentage of those workloads for cloud infrastructure are expected to grow over 70% as three years as well. And as you mentioned, Azure and AWS are still dominant. However, we're seeing some share shift spreading around a little bit. Now to get into the individual vendors you mentioned about, yes, Azure is still number one, AWS is number two. What we're seeing, which is incredibly interesting, CloudFlare is number three. It's actually beating GCP. That's the first time we've seen it. What I do want to state, is this is on net score only, which is our measure of spending intentions. When you talk about actual pervasion in the enterprise, it's not even close. But from a spending velocity intention point of view, CloudFlare is now number three above GCP, and even Salesforce is creeping up to be at GCPs level. So what we're seeing here, is a continued domination by Azure and AWS, but some of these other players that maybe might fit into your moniker. And I definitely want to talk about CloudFlare more in a bit, but I'm going to stop there. But what we're seeing is some of these other players that fit into your Supercloud moniker, are starting to creep up, Dave. >> Yeah, I just want to clarify. So as you also know, we track IaaS and PaaS revenue and we try to extract, so AWS reports in its quarterly earnings, you know, they're just IaaS and PaaS, they don't have a SaaS play, a little bit maybe, whereas Microsoft and Google include their applications and so we extract those out and if you do that, AWS is bigger, but in the surveys, you know, customers, they see cloud, SaaS to them as cloud. So that's one of the reasons why you see, you know, Microsoft as larger in pervasion. If you bring up that survey again, Alex, the survey results, you see them further to the right and they have higher spending momentum, which is consistent with what you see in the earnings calls. Now, interesting about CloudFlare because the CEO of CloudFlare actually, and CloudFlare itself uses the term supercloud basically saying, "Hey, we're building a new type of internet." So what are your thoughts? Do you have additional information on CloudFlare, Erik that you want to share? I mean, you've seen them pop up. I mean this is a really interesting company that is pretty forward thinking and vocal about how it's disrupting the industry. >> Sure, we've been tracking 'em for a long time, and even from the disruption of just a traditional CDN where they took down Akamai and what they're doing. But for me, the definition of a true supercloud provider can't just be one instance. You have to have multiple. So it's not just the cloud, it's networking aspect on top of it, it's also security. And to me, CloudFlare is the only one that has all of it. That they actually have the ability to offer all of those things. Whereas you look at some of the other names, they're still piggybacking on the infrastructure or platform as a service of the hyperscalers. CloudFlare does not need to, they actually have the cloud, the networking, and the security all themselves. So to me that lends credibility to their own internal usage of that moniker Supercloud. And also, again, just what we're seeing right here that their net score is now creeping above AGCP really does state it. And then just one real last thing, one of the other things we do in our surveys is we track adoption and replacement reasoning. And when you look at Cloudflare's adoption rate, which is extremely high, it's based on technical capabilities, the breadth of their feature set, it's also based on what we call the ability to avoid stack alignment. So those are again, really supporting reasons that makes CloudFlare a top candidate for your moniker of supercloud. >> And they've also announced an object store (chuckles) and a database. So, you know, that's going to be, it takes a while as you well know, to get database adoption going, but you know, they're ambitious and going for it. All right, let's bring the chart back up, and I want to focus Darren in on the ecosystem now, and really, we've identified Snowflake and Databricks, it's always fun to talk about those guys, and there are a number of other, you know, data platforms out there, but we use those too as really proxies for leaders. We got a bunch of the backup guys, the data protection folks, Rubric, Cohesity, and Veeam. They're sort of in a cluster, although Rubric, you know, ahead of those guys in terms of spending momentum. And then VMware, Tanzu and Red Hat as sort of the cross cloud platform. But I want to focus, Darren, on the data piece of it. We're seeing a lot of activity around data sharing, governed data sharing. Databricks is using Delta Sharing as their sort of place, Snowflakes is sort of this walled garden like the app store. What are your thoughts on, you know, in the context of Supercloud, cross cloud capabilities for the data platforms? >> Yeah, good question. You know, I think Databricks is an interesting player because they sort of have made some interesting moves, with their Data Lakehouse technology. So they're trying to kind of complicate, or not complicate, they're trying to take away the complications of, you know, the downsides of data warehousing and data lakes, and trying to find that middle ground, where you have the benefits of a managed, governed, you know, data warehouse environment, but you have sort of the lower cost, you know, capability of a data lake. And so, you know, Databricks has become really attractive, especially by data scientists, right? We've been tracking them in the AI machine learning sector for quite some time here at ETR, attractive for a data scientist because it looks and acts like a lake, but can have some managed capabilities like a warehouse. So it's kind of the best of both worlds. So in some ways I think you've seen sort of a data science driver for the adoption of Databricks that has now become a little bit more mainstream across the business. Snowflake, maybe the other direction, you know, it's a cloud data warehouse that you know, is starting to expand its capabilities and add on new things like Streamlit is a good example in the analytics space, with apps. So you see these tools starting to branch and creep out a bit, but they offer that sort of neutrality, right? We heard one IT decision maker we recently interviewed that referred to Snowflake and Databricks as the quote unquote Switzerland of what they do. And so there's this desirability from an organization to find these tools that can solve the complex multi-headed use-case of data and analytics, which every business unit needs in different ways. And figure out a way to do that, an elegant way that's governed and centrally managed, that federated kind of best of both worlds that you get by bringing the data close to the business while having a central governed instance. So these tools are incredibly powerful and I think there's only going to be room for growth, for those two especially. I think they're going to expand and do different things and maybe, you know, join forces with others and a lot of the power of what they do well is trying to define these connections and find these partnerships with other vendors, and try to be seen as the nice add-on to your existing environment that plays nicely with everyone. So I think that's where those two tools are going, but they certainly fit this sort of label of, you know, trying to be that supercloud neutral, you know, layer that unites everything. >> Yeah, and if you bring the graphic back up, please, there's obviously big data plays in each of the cloud platforms, you know, Microsoft, big database player, AWS is, you know, 11, 12, 15, data stores. And of course, you know, BigQuery and other, you know, data platforms within Google. But you know, I'm not sure the big cloud guys are going to go hard after so-called supercloud, cross-cloud services. Although, we see Oracle getting in bed with Microsoft and Azure, with a database service that is cross-cloud, certainly Google with Anthos and you know, you never say never with with AWS. I guess what I would say guys, and I'll I'll leave you with this is that, you know, just like all players today are cloud players, I feel like anybody in the business or most companies are going to be so-called supercloud players. In other words, they're going to have a cross-cloud strategy, they're going to try to build connections if they're coming from on-prem like a Dell or an HPE, you know, or Pure or you know, many of these other companies, Cohesity is another one. They're going to try to connect to their on-premise states, of course, and create a consistent experience. It's natural that they're going to have sort of some consistency across clouds. You know, the big question is, what's that spectrum look like? I think on the one hand you're going to have some, you know, maybe some rudimentary, you know, instances of supercloud or maybe they just run on the individual clouds versus where Snowflake and others and even beyond that are trying to go with a single global instance, basically building out what I would think of as their own cloud, and importantly their own ecosystem. I'll give you guys the last thought. Maybe you could each give us, you know, closing thoughts. Maybe Darren, you could start and Erik, you could bring us home on just this entire topic, the future of cloud and data. >> Yeah, I mean I think, you know, two points to make on that is, this question of these, I guess what we'll call legacy on-prem players. These, mega vendors that have been around a long time, have big on-prem footprints and a lot of people have them for that reason. I think it's foolish to assume that a company, especially a large, mature, multinational company that's been around a long time, it's foolish to think that they can just uproot and leave on-premises entirely full scale. There will almost always be an on-prem footprint from any company that was not, you know, natively born in the cloud after 2010, right? I just don't think that's reasonable anytime soon. I think there's some industries that need on-prem, things like, you know, industrial manufacturing and so on. So I don't think on-prem is going away, and I think vendors that are going to, you know, go very cloud forward, very big on the cloud, if they neglect having at least decent connectors to on-prem legacy vendors, they're going to miss out. So I think that's something that these players need to keep in mind is that they continue to reach back to some of these players that have big footprints on-prem, and make sure that those integrations are seamless and work well, or else their customers will always have a multi-cloud or hybrid experience. And then I think a second point here about the future is, you know, we talk about the three big, you know, cloud providers, the Google, Microsoft, AWS as sort of the opposite of, or different from this new supercloud paradigm that's emerging. But I want to kind of point out that, they will always try to make a play to become that and I think, you know, we'll certainly see someone like Microsoft trying to expand their licensing and expand how they play in order to become that super cloud provider for folks. So also don't want to downplay them. I think you're going to see those three big players continue to move, and take over what players like CloudFlare are doing and try to, you know, cut them off before they get too big. So, keep an eye on them as well. >> Great points, I mean, I think you're right, the first point, if you're Dell, HPE, Cisco, IBM, your strategy should be to make your on-premise state as cloud-like as possible and you know, make those differences as minimal as possible. And you know, if you're a customer, then the business case is going to be low for you to move off of that. And I think you're right. I think the cloud guys, if this is a real problem, the cloud guys are going to play in there, and they're going to make some money at it. Erik, bring us home please. >> Yeah, I'm going to revert back to our data and this on the macro side. So to kind of support this concept of a supercloud right now, you know Dave, you and I know, we check overall spending and what we're seeing right now is total year spent is expected to only be 4.6%. We ended 2022 at 5% even though it began at almost eight and a half. So this is clearly declining and in that environment, we're seeing the top two strategies to reduce spend are actually vendor consolidation with 36% of our respondents saying they're actively seeking a way to reduce their number of vendors, and consolidate into one. That's obviously supporting a supercloud type of play. Number two is reducing excess cloud resources. So when I look at both of those combined, with a drop in the overall spending reduction, I think you're on the right thread here, Dave. You know, the overall macro view that we're seeing in the data supports this happening. And if I can real quick, couple of names we did not touch on that I do think deserve to be in this conversation, one is HashiCorp. HashiCorp is the number one player in our infrastructure sector, with a 56% net score. It does multiple things within infrastructure and it is completely agnostic to your environment. And if we're also speaking about something that's just a singular feature, we would look at Rubric for data, backup, storage, recovery. They're not going to offer you your full cloud or your networking of course, but if you are looking for your backup, recovery, and storage Rubric, also number one in that sector with a 53% net score. Two other names that deserve to be in this conversation as we watch it move and evolve. >> Great, thank you for bringing that up. Yeah, we had both of those guys in the chart and I failed to focus in on HashiCorp. And clearly a Supercloud enabler. All right guys, we got to go. Thank you so much for joining us, appreciate it. Let's keep this conversation going. >> Always enjoy talking to you Dave, thanks. >> Yeah, thanks for having us. >> All right, keep it right there for more content from Supercloud 2. This is Dave Valente for John Ferg and the entire Cube team. We'll be right back. (gentle synth music) (music fades)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, we're at Reinvent 22, AWS's big show going on here at the Venetian. Several thousand, tens of thousands of folks packing that exhibit four and going to sessions and also learning a lot about what's going on in the cloud space. And today we're going to talk about speed, velocity, to be specific. And with me to do that is Chris Wegmann who's the global technology and business lead for the Accenture AWS business group. And Chris is with Accenture. And then Erik Farr immediately on my right, is the global technology leader again for the AWS business group, but at AWS. So very similar titles guys, you're making it tough on the host. But glad to have you with us here. Really appreciate the time. So let's talk about velocity, you know, what's that all about? And Erik, I'll let you jump in on that. And then Chris, you go from there. How about that? >> Yeah, so with velocity, it's really about innovation. It's really about trying to speed the way that we help our customers, not just innovate through the AWS services, but with Accenture. With their ability to come in and really just kind of bring their expertise in industries and in the technology underpinnings and kind of all of the aspects of what we do together as a partnership. >> Okay. Chris? >> Yeah, so when we came up with a concept around velocity, we worked backwards from the customers the traditional Amazon way, right? So, we looked across a lot of the programs we were doing with our customers as well as we were doing internally when we were building assets to take to the market on AWS. And we found we were spending way too much time, anywhere from six to eight months just getting all the foundation in place, all the integration in place, getting the services to the point where we could actually build on top of it or our customers could build on top of it. And we got challenged. We said, there's got to be a better way, right? And so we took a different look at it. We said, can we go build an application? Can we go build code versus accelerators or our blueprints or that type of stuff that really would allow us to walk into a customer or walk into one of our internal organizations that had a an idea around an application or solution to be built on AWS to take to our customers as a service. And said can we go through just a very simple set of checklist, predefined architectures, predefined solutions and that stuff, and can we just crank it out, right? Can we, and that's what we've built. We built this tool and platform based on that concept. So it's designed and it is helping us internally as well as our customers just go that much faster and get to that innovation that Erik talked about. >> So how did it happen between the two of you? >> Yeah. >> It's not easy, right? I mean, as good as your culture is there's still going to be some bumps along the way right? And so how did that evolve? What was that process like? >> Yeah, it's a great question. So I've been working with Accenture for over five years, working with Chris and other people at Accenture. And over those years we've spent countless discussions with our customers all around the world. And just like Chris said, we see all of the different scenarios that our customers are having to deal with. We see the pain points, we try to figure out how do we get better next time? How do we do this in such a way that allows them, those customers to really kind of innovate using AWS, which is what we're all trying to get to. And during that process we started to realize there's a few key themes that we're seeing, right? Not just the foundations, right, what you build off of at the base level, but the data aspects. Like how is a customer going and developing their data lake, so their data meshes, right? How is this happening? And what we've realized is that we are kind of doing that on a custom basis often and we realize we could actually speed that much faster, faster to value, faster to customer appreciation and additional usage and development of their solutions on AWS. >> So I look at it is, from the beginning we started the business group and the reason why we have very similar names is 'cause we represent each side of the organizations that are here. And when we started the business group seven years ago, the whole idea was better together, right? We should be able to come together and help our clients move that much faster, right? And that's what really was at the foundation of this, right? And how we built this, right? We came together, we both saw the problems, right? Obviously AWS has an immense set of services, has an immense set of capabilities. We had a lot of experience of implementing these. Came together, worked together to build this platform. And it's been a great journey, right? I mean, it's great to see the experiences from both sides come together. Some of the common problems, we each had different ways of addressing them and we had to go and debate, which was the best way. And we really are leveraging our joint customers here as well is to get inputs from them since we were working backwards for them. We've now taken this and pulled them into it and really gotten inputs from them on really what they're looking for above and beyond the services they have today. This is designed not just to be something we go use at the beginning of a journey, right? A cloud journey, it's to help customers continue through their journey as well. >> So, and I might have missed this, so I apologize if I did. But we always talk about speed, right? Everybody's about faster, quicker, more efficient and that. So what makes velocity a unique animal in that respect? What exactly is it delivering then for a customer that isn't just kind of baked into the services you'd be proposing to them anyhow? >> Yeah. So first off velocity is designed with automation at the core, right? So instead of having people going in and making changes or anything like that, it's all completely code backed and automated, right? So that alone allows for immense ability for us to go in and actually accelerate that journey for the customer. But in addition to that, because velocity was all developed to work together with this code, it actually allows these pieces and these components to be deployed together, to work together and to ultimately support that customer use case without actually having to go and recreate that every time. >> Okay. And can you gimme an idea, Chris, about somebody or at least how this has been put into practice then yeah? >> So I'll give you a couple examples. One, internally, right? So as part of our relationship, we're investing in these joint industry solutions, right? So industries, we're working with our different industry clients to solve industry specific problems, right? They're not thinking about, okay, let me go lay down a cloud foundation and go do that. They said, I've got a problem I want you to fix. Insurance is a great example, the underwriting processes and insurance, right? So our insurance teams really looked and said, okay, this is what we're going to go build. This is what we need to modernize that process. So instead of going back and going and building all the components they needed, building a data lake, right? Figuring out how data lake's going to work together, build the automation to create all the different EC2 instances and all the different services, security, all that stuff. You know, we were able to very quickly take velocity, go through a very short process with them, understand what they needed and use that code to create that entire environment. And it's not tied to that once it's created, right? So at that point you can still take the updates that we're giving on new services and things like that, but it's their environment, they're able to build on top of it. And it allowed them to rapidly create this insurance platform, right, that they're now taking out into clients. We're taking that same platform we use there and embedding it in every offering, every service that we give to our customers. So whether we're going out and build a cloud foundation, right? Whether we're rebuilding a cloud foundation because hey, it didn't stay up or keep up with the new services that came out from AWS, or we're going and building a data lake, right? Our customers want to take, they don't want to have to do all that heavy lifting in a lot of cases. They don't want it to go make a lot of those hard decisions, right? They want it kind of rebuilt. And what I love about velocity from the beginning, Erik talked about blocks, building blocks, right? And we also heard from our customers is, "I don't want to buy just one thing, right? And I have one size fits all. Hey, I'm really want something around data. Can you gimme that block? I really need something around compliance. Can you gimme that block?" Good example in Accenture, the compliance portion is an area that our internal organization really wanted. So we were able to give them that block. So we're hopeful that this just gives our clients that much more flexibility and move that much faster. >> So, go ahead EriK. >> Yeah, I was going to say I think to to the point too, the other aspect that we get with velocity is the idea and that the vision is that it's designed to be evergreen. And what that means is as AWS, as we release new services to the market, like we're doing this week right? We as the joint development group of velocity are taking those new services, those new features and updating them so that those functionalities are available to our customers that are already using velocity or that are going to use velocity into the future so that they're all taking advantage of it without having to go and do it into their own environments. >> That's what I was asking you about, about if there's a 2.0 down the road or I mean, how do you meet those growing needs and new capabilities that maybe don't exist now but they will a year from now, six months from now? Yeah so, what's on the drawing board right now? >> Yeah, so yeah, just I'll start. The one area that we're really looking at heavily, so the the velocity fabric is really just the underpinning technology that we've already been talking about. We've also got a set of activators, which is really the fact that we're kind of joint deploying this to our customers. But to answer your question, we have a concept of accelerators. So these accelerators are there to be developed over time and they're going to allow us to take those customer use cases that are typically kind of at a microservice level, right? Something smaller than an entire solution or an entire application. And use those to accelerate either the development of solutions into our customer environment or to accelerate our ability to create solutions to then take it out to our customers. So that's on the roadmap for '23 and beyond. >> So I'll build on what Erik was talking a little bit. A 2.0 is actually today, right? Multiple new services came out today, obviously through the site partnership, we had some insights on what's coming, right? And we could start building to those and start knowing customers are going to want to use those. And the idea of velocity is they don't have to go and figure that out themselves, right? So we'll be able to hand that off fairly shortly after those services are released to general availability. And the customers of Velocity will be able to start using 'em, right? And they don't have to go figure out how to integrate 'em and so on. So that's what's in the future. We'll continue to do that, right? We're committed to this. These industry solutions are going to grow, right? I mean that was one of the big reasons we built this. We knew we were going to be building a lot of these industry solutions. We already got several of 'em that are out in the market and we need this platform to do that. So you'll see a lot of velocity powered industry solutions coming out of Accenture. >> Who came up with the name? >> It's a great question. We wanted something around speed, right? 'Cause that's what it, further, faster. >> BLO did it, right? >> Exactly right. Everyone loves speed, right? And that's what we're talking about. So we really looked at lots of names, obviously, and Velocity is one of those ones that just stuck. It felt really right. It felt like it captured what we were trying to do in the market. You know, Accenture, we don't name a lot of things one off, right? They're really focused on what they do. And this was an exception to that because we thought, and we think that it's really going to drive the speed of our customers. And that was a challenge. And we're starting to see that. We're starting to see the improvement and speed that we can get our customers into the cloud. It's awesome. >> Yeah, it caught my attention right away. >> Yeah. >> So success on nicely done there. >> But I also think that velocity is not just about speed, it's speed in the right direction, right? >> Oh, sure. It's meant to design it in the way that our customers are leading and that we can then go along that journey with them. >> Right, yeah. The last thing you want is to go really fast in the wrong way. >> That's exactly right. That's exactly right. >> That's bad recipe. And you've had very few of those. You've had a lot of good recipes. Thanks for the time fellas, we appreciate. >> No, thanks for having us. >> All about Velocity and that offering going out to the marketplace in a, I guess a modernized version. Could you call it modernized now? By the way, it's only been around for couple years. It's all modernized. You are watching the executive summit sponsored by Accenture and also theCUBE, which is the leader in tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>>Hello, everyone. Welcome to the cubes coverage here. New York city for AWS Amazon web services summit 2022. I'm John furrier, host of the cube with Dave ante. My co-host. We are breaking it down, getting an update on the ecosystem. As the GDP drops, inflations up gas prices up the enterprise continues to grow. We're seeing exceptional growth. We're here on the ground floor. Live at the Summit's packed house, 10,000 people. Eric Bradley's here. Chief STR at ETR, one of the premier enterprise research firms out there, partners with the cube and powers are breaking analysis that Dave does check that out as the hottest podcast in enterprise. Eric. Great to have you on the cube. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you so much, John. I really appreciate the collaboration always. >>Yeah. Great stuff. Your data's amazing ETR folks watching check out ETR. They have a unique formula, very accurate. We love it. It's been moving the market. Congratulations. Let's talk about the market right now. This market is booming. Enterprise is the hottest thing, consumers kind of in the toilet. Okay. I said that all right, back out devices and, and, and consumer enterprise is still growing. And by the way, this first downturn, the history of the world where hyperscalers are on full pumping on all cylinders, which means they're still powering the revolution. >>Yeah, it's true. The hyperscalers were basically at this two sun system when Microsoft and an AWS first came around and everything was orbiting around it. And we're starting to see that sun cool off a little bit, but we're talking about a gradient here, right? When we say cool off, we're not talking to shutdown, it's still burning hot. That's for sure. And I can get it to some of the macro data in a minute, if that's all right. Or do you want me to go right? No, go go. Right. Yeah. So right now we just closed our most recent survey and that's macro and vendor specific. We had 1200 people talk to us on the macro side. And what we're seeing here is a cool down in spending. We originally had about 8.5% increase in budgets. That's cool down is 6.5 now, but I'll say with the doom and gloom and the headlines that we're seeing every day, 6.5% growth coming off of what we just did the last couple of years is still pretty fantastic as a backdrop. >>Okay. So you, you started to see John mentioned consumer. We saw that in Snowflake's earnings. For example, we, we certainly saw, you know, Walmart, other retailers, the FA Facebooks of the world where consumption was being dialed down, certain snowflake customers. Not necessarily, they didn't have mentioned any customers, but they were able to say, all right, we're gonna dial down, consumption this quarter, hold on until we saw some of that in snowflake results and other results. But at the same time, the rest of the industry is booming. But your data is showing softness within the fortune 500 for AWS, >>Not only AWS, but fortune 500 across the board. Okay. So going back to that larger macro data, the biggest drop in spending that we captured is fortune 500, which is surprising. But at the same time, these companies have a better purview into the economy. In general, they tend to see things further in advance. And we often remember they spend a lot of money, so they don't need to play catch up. They'll easily more easily be able to pump the brakes a little bit in the fortune 500. But to your point, when we get into the AWS data, the fortune 500 decrease seems to be hitting them a little bit more than it is Azure and GCP. I >>Mean, we're still talking about a huge business, right? >>I mean, they're catching up. I mean, Amazon has been transforming from owning the developer cloud startup cloud decade ago to really putting a dent on the enterprise as being number one cloud. And I still contest that they're number one by a long ways, but Azure kicking ass and catching up. Okay. You seeing people move to Azure, you got Charlie bell over there, Sean, by former Amazonians, Theresa Carlson, people are going over there, there there's lift over at Azure. >>There certainly is. >>Is there kinks in the arm or for AWS? There's >>A couple of kinks, but I think your point is really good. We need to take a second there. If you're talking about true pass or infrastructure is a service true cloud compute. I think AWS still is the powerhouse. And a lot of times the, the data gets a little muddied because Azure is really a hosted platform for applications. And you're not really sure where that line is drawn. And I think that's an important caveat to make, but based on the data, yes, we are seeing some kinks in the armor for AWS. Yes. Explain. So right now, a first of all caveat, 40% net score, which is our proprietary spending metric across the board. So we're not like raising any alarms here. It's still strong that said there are declines and there are declines pretty much across the board. The only spot we're not seeing a decline at all is in container, spend everything else is coming down specifically. We're seeing it come down in data analytics, data warehousing, and M I, which is a little bit of a concern because that, that rate of decline is not the same with Azure. >>Okay. So I gotta ask macro, I see the headwinds on the macro side, you pointed that out. Is there any insight into any underlying conditions that might be there on AWS or just a chronic kind of situational thing >>Right now? It seems situational. Other than that correlation between their big fortune 500, you know, audience and that being our biggest decline. The other aspect of the macro survey is we ask people, if you are planning to decline spend, how do you plan on doing it? And the number two answer is taking a look at our cloud spend and auditing it. So they're kind say, all right, you know, for the last 10 years it's been drunken, sail or spend, I >>Was gonna use that same line, you know, >>Cloud spend, just spend and we'll figure it out later, who cares? And then right now it's time to tighten the belts a little bit, >>But this is part of the allure of cloud at some point. Yeah. You, you could say, I'm gonna, I'm gonna dial it down. I'm gonna rein it in. So that's part of the reason why people go to the cloud. I want to, I wanna focus in on the data side of things and specifically the database. Let, just to give some context if, and correct me if I'm, I'm a little off here, but snowflake, which hot company, you know, on the planet, their net score was up around 80% consistently. It it's dropped down the last, you know, quarter, last survey to 60%. Yeah. So still highly, highly elevated, but that's relative to where Amazon is much larger, but you're saying they're coming down to the 40% level. Is that right? >>Yeah, they are. And I remember, you know, when I first started doing this 10 years ago, AWS at a 70%, you know, net score as well. So what's gonna happen over time is those adoptions are gonna get less and you're gonna see more flattening of spend, which ultimately is going to lower the score because we're looking for expansion rates. We wanna see adoption and increase. And when you see flattening a spend, it starts to contract a little bit. And you're right. Snowflake also was in the stratosphere that cooled off a little bit, but still, you know, very strong and AWS is coming down. I think the reason why it's so concerning is because a it's within the fortune 500 and their rate of decline is more than Azure right >>Now. Well, and, and one of the big trends you're seeing in database is this idea of converging function. In other words, bringing transaction and analytics right together at snowflake summit, they added the capability to handle transaction data, Mongo DB, which is largely mostly transactions added the capability in June to bring in analytic data. You see data bricks going from data engineering and data science now getting into snowflake space and analytics. So you're seeing that convergence Oracle is converging with my SQL heat wave and their core databases, couch base couch base is doing the same. Maria do virtually all these database companies are, are converging their platforms with the exception of AWS. AWS is still the right tool for the right job. So they've got Aurora, they've got RDS, they've got, you know, a dynamo DV, they've got red, they've got, you know, going on and on and on. And so the question everybody's asking is will that change? Will they start to sort of cross those swim lanes? We haven't seen it thus far. How is that affecting the data >>Performance? I mean, that's fantastic analysis. I think that's why we're seeing it because you have to be in the AWS ecosystem and they're really not playing nicely with others in the sandbox right now that now I will say, oh, Amazon's not playing nicely. Well, no, no. Simply to your point though, that there, the other ones are actually bringing in others at consolidating other different vendor types. And they're really not. You know, if you're in AWS, you need to stay within AWS. Now I will say their tools are fantastic. So if you do stay within AWS, they have a tool for every job they're advanced. And they're incredible. I think sometimes the complexity of their tools hurts them a little bit. Cause to your point earlier, AWS started as a developer-centric type of cloud. They have moved on to enterprise cloud and it's a little bit more business oriented, but their still roots are still DevOps friendly. And unless you're truly trained, AWS can be a little scary. >>So a common use case is I'm gonna be using Aurora for my transaction system and then I'm gonna ETL it into Redshift. Right. And, and I, now I have two data stores and I have two different sets of APIs and primitives two different teams of skills. And so that is probably causing some friction and complexity in the customer base that again, the question is, will they begin to expand some of those platforms to minimize some of that friction? >>Well, yeah, this is the question I wanted to ask on that point. So I've heard from people inside Amazon don't count out Redshift, we're making, we're catching up. I think that's my word, but they were kind of saying that right. Cuz Redshift is good, good database, but they're adding a lot more. So you got snowflake success. I think it's a little bit of a jealousy factor going on there within Redshift team, but then you got Azure synapse with the Synap product synapse. Yep. And then you got big query from Google big >>Query. Yep. >>What's the differentiation. What are you seeing for the data for the data warehouse or the data clouds that are out there for the customers? What's the data say, say to us? >>Yeah, unfortunately the data's showing that they're dropping a little bit whose day AWS is dropping a little bit now of their data products, Redshift and RDS are still the two highest of them, but they are starting to decline. Now I think one of the great data points that we have, we just closed the survey is we took a comparison of the legacy data. Now please forgive me for the word legacy. We're gonna anger a few people, but we Gotter data Oracle on-prem, we've got IBM. Some of those more legacy data warehouse type of names. When we look at our art survey takers that have them where their spend is going, that spends going to snowflake first, and then it's going to Google and then it's going to Microsoft Azure and, and AWS is actually declining in there. So when you talk about who's taking that legacy market share, it's not AWS right now. >>So legacy goes to legacy. So Microsoft, >>So, so let's work through in a little context because Redshift really was the first to take, you know, take the database to the cloud. And they did that by doing a one time license deal with par XL, which was an on-prem database. And then they re-engineered it, they did a fantastic job, but it was still engineered for on-prem. Then you along comes snowflake a couple years later and true cloud native, same thing with big query. Yep. True cloud native architecture. So they get a lot of props. Now what, what Amazon did, they took a page outta of the snowflake, for example, separating compute from storage. Now of course what's what, what Amazon did is actually not really completely separating like snowflake did they couldn't because of the architecture, they created a tearing system that you could dial down the compute. So little nuances like that. I understand. But at the end of the day, what we're seeing from snowflake is the gathering of an ecosystem in this true data cloud, bringing in different data types, they got to the public markets, data bricks was not able to get to the public markets. Yeah. And think is, is struggling >>And a 25 billion evaluation. >>Right. And so that's, that's gonna be dialed down, struggling somewhat from a go to market standpoint where snowflake has no troubles from a go to market. They are the masters at go to market. And so now they've got momentum. We talked to Frank sluman at the snowflake. He basically said, I'm not taking the foot off the gas, no way. Yeah. We, few of our large, you know, consumer customers dialed things down, but we're going balls to the >>Wall. Well, if you look at their show before you get in the numbers, you look at the two shows. Snowflake had their summit in person in Vegas. Data bricks has had their show in San Francisco. And if you compare the two shows, it's clear, who's winning snowflake is blew away from a, from a market standpoint. And we were at snowflake, but we weren't at data bricks, but there was really nothing online. I heard from sources that it was like less than 3000 people. So >>Snowflake was 1900 people in 2019, nearly 10,000. Yeah. In 2020, >>It's gonna be fun to sort of track that as a, as an odd caveat to say, okay, let's see what that growth is. Because in fairness, data, bricks, you know, a little bit younger, Snowflake's had a couple more years. So I'd be curious to see where they are. Their, their Lakehouse paradigm is interesting. >>Yeah. And I think it's >>And their product first company, yes. Their go to market might be a little bit weak from our analysis, but that, but they'll figure it out. >>CEO's pretty smart. But I think it's worth pointing out. It's like two different philosophies, right? It is. Snowflake is come into our data cloud. That's their proprietary environment. They're the, they think of the iPhone, right? End to end. We, we guarantee it's all gonna work. And we're in control. Snowflake is like, Hey, open source, no, bring in data bricks. I mean data bricks, open source, bring in this tool that too, now you are seeing snowflake capitulate a little bit. They announce, for instance, Apache iceberg support at their, at the snowflake summit. So they're tipping their cap to open source. But at the end of the day, they're gonna market and sell the fact that it's gonna run better in native snowflake. Whereas data bricks, they're coming at it from much more of an open source, a mantra. So that's gonna, you know, we'll see who look at, you had windows and you had apple, >>You got, they both want, you got Cal and you got Stanford. >>They both >>Consider, I don't think it's actually there yet. I, I find the more interesting dynamic right now is between AWS and snowflake. It's really a fun tit for tat, right? I mean, AWS has the S three and then, you know, snowflake comes right on top of it and announces R two, we're gonna do one letter, one number better than you. They just seem to have this really interesting dynamic. And I, and it is SLT and no one's betting against him. I mean, this guy's fantastic. So, and he hasn't used his war chest yet. He's still sitting on all that money that he raised to your point, that data bricks five, their timing just was a little off >>5 billion in >>Capital when Slootman hasn't used that money yet. So what's he gonna do? What can he do when he turns that on? He finds the right. >>They're making some acquisitions. They did the stream lit acquisitions stream. >>Fantastic >>Problem. With data bricks, their valuation is underwater. Yes. So they're recruiting and their MNAs. Yes. In the toilet, they cannot make the moves because they don't have the currency until they refactor the multiple, let the, this market settle. I I'm, I'm really nervous that they have to over factor the >>Valuation. Having said that to your point, Eric, the lake house architecture is definitely gaining traction. When you talk to practitioners, they're all saying, yeah, we're building data lakes, we're building lake houses. You know, it's a much, much smaller market than the enterprise data warehouse. But nonetheless, when you talk to practitioners that are actually doing things like self serve data, they're building data lakes and you know, snow. I mean, data bricks is right there. And as a clear leader in, in ML and AI and they're ahead of snowflake, right. >>And I was gonna say, that's the thing with data bricks. You know, you're getting that analytics at M I built into it. >>You know, what's ironic is I remember talking to Matt Carroll, who's CEO of auDA like four or five years ago. He came into the office in ma bro. And we were in temporary space and we were talking about how there's this new workload emerging, which combines AWS for cloud infrastructure, snowflake for the simple data warehouse and data bricks for the ML AI, and then all now all of a sudden you see data bricks yeah. And snowflake going at it. I think, you know, to your point about the competition between AWS and snowflake, here's what I think, I think the Redshift team is, you know, doesn't like snowflake, right. But I think the EC two team loves it. Loves it. Exactly. So, so I think snowflake is driving a lot of, >>Yeah. To John's point, there is plenty to go around. And I think I saw just the other day, I saw somebody say less than 40% of true global 2000 organizations believe that they're at real time data analytics right now. They're not really there yet. Yeah. Think about how much runway is left and how many tools you need to get to real time streaming use cases. It's complex. It's not easy. >>It's gonna be a product value market to me, snowflake in data bricks. They're not going away. Right. They're winning architectures. Yeah. In the cloud, what data bricks did would spark and took over the Haddo market. Yeah. To your point. Now that big data, market's got two players, in my opinion, snow flicking data, bricks converging. Well, Redshift is sitting there behind the curtain, their wild card. Yeah. They're wild card, Dave. >>Okay. I'm gonna give one more wild card, which is the edge. Sure. Okay. And that's something that when you talk about real time analytics and AI referencing at the edge, there aren't a lot of database companies in a position to do that. You know, Amazon trying to put outposts out there. I think it runs RDS. I don't think it runs any other database. Right. Snowflake really doesn't have a strong edge strategy when I'm talking the far edge, the tiny edge. >>I think, I think that's gonna be HPE or Dell's gonna own the outpost market. >>I think you're right. I'll come back to that. Couch base is an interesting company to watch with Capella Mongo. DB really doesn't have a far edge strategy at this point, but couch base does. And that's one to watch. They're doing some really interesting things there. And I think >>That, but they have to leapfrog bongo in my >>Opinion. Yeah. But there's a new architecture emerging at the edge and it's gonna take a number of years to develop, but it could eventually from an economic standpoint, seep back into the enterprise arm base, low end, take a look at what couch base is >>Doing. They hired an Amazon guard system. They have to leapfrog though. They need to, they can't incrementally who's they who >>Couch >>Base needs to needs to make a big move in >>Leap frog. Well, think they're trying to, that's what Capella is all about was not only, you know, their version of Atlas bringing to the cloud couch base, but it's also stretching it out to the edge and bringing converged database analytics >>Real quick on the numbers. Any data on CloudFlare, >>I was, I've been sitting here trying to get the word CloudFlare out my mouth the whole time you guys were talking, >>Is this another that's innovated in the ecosystem. So >>Platform, it was really simple for them early on, right? They're gonna get that edge network out there and they're gonna steal share from Akamai. Then they started doing exactly what Akamai did. We're gonna start rolling out some security. Their security is fantastic. Maybe some practitioners are saying a little bit too much, cuz they're not focused on one thing or another, but they are doing extremely well. And now they're out there in the cloud as well. You >>Got S3 compare. They got two, they got an S3 competitor. >>Exactly. So when I'm listening to you guys talk about, you know, a, a couch base I'm like, wow, those two would just be an absolute fantastic, you know, combination between the two of them. You mean >>CloudFlare >>Couch base. Yeah. >>I mean you got S3 alternative, right? You got a Mongo alternative basically in my >>Opinion. And you're going and you got the edge and you got the edge >>Network with security security, interesting dynamic. This brings up the super cloud date. I wanna talk about Supercloud because we're seeing a trend on we're reporting this since last year that basically people don't have to spend the CapEx to be cloud scale. And you're seeing Amazon enable that, but snowflake has become a super cloud. They're on AWS. Now they're on Azure. Why not tan expansion expand the market? Why not get that? And then it'll be on Google next, all these marketplaces. So the emergence of this super cloud, and then the ability to make that across a substrate across multiple clouds is a strategy we're seeing. What do you, what do you think? >>Well, honestly, I'm gonna be really Frank here. The, everything I know about the super cloud I know from this guy. So I've been following his lead on this and I'm looking forward to you guys doing that conference and that summit coming up from a data perspective. I think what you're saying is spot on though, cuz those are the areas we're seeing expansion in without a doubt. >>I think, you know, when you talk about things like super cloud and you talk about things like metaverse, there's, there's a, there, there look every 15 or 20 years or so this industry reinvents itself and a new disruption comes out and you've got the internet, you've got the cloud, you've got an AI and VR layer. You've got, you've got machine intelligence. You've got now gaming. There's a new matrix, emerging, super cloud. Metaverse there's something happening out there here. That's not just your, your father's SAS or is or pass. Well, >>No, it's also the spend too. Right? So if I'm a company like say capital one or Goldman Sachs, my it spend has traditionally been massive every year. Yes. It's basically like tons of CapEx comes the cloud. It's an operating expense. Wait a minute, Amazon has all the CapEx. So I'm not gonna dial down my budget. I want a competitive advantage. So next thing they know they have a super cloud by default because they just pivoted their, it spend into new capabilities that they then can sell to the market in FinTech makes total sense. >>Right? They're building out a digital platform >>That would, that was not possible. Pre-cloud >>No, it wasn't cause you weren't gonna go put all that money into CapEx expenditure to build that out. Not knowing whether or not the market was there, but the scalability, the ability to spend, reduce and be flexible with it really changes that paradigm entire. >>So we're looking at this market now thinking about, okay, it might be Greenfield in every vertical. It might have a power law where you have a head of the long tail. That's a player like a capital one, an insurance. It could be Liberty mutual or mass mutual that has so much it and capital that they're now gonna scale it into a super cloud >>And they have data >>And they have the data tools >>And the tools. And they're gonna bring that to their constituents. Yes, yes. And scale it using >>Cloud. So that means they can then service the entire vertical as a service provider. >>And the industry cloud is becoming bigger and bigger and bigger. I mean, that's really a way that people are delivering to market. So >>Remember in the early days of cloud, all the banks thought they could build their own cloud. Yeah. Yep. Well actually it's come full circle. They're like, we can actually build a cloud on top of the cloud. >>Right. And by the way, they can have a private cloud in their super cloud. Exactly. >>And you know, it's interesting cause we're talking about financial services insurance, all the people we know spend money in our macro survey. Do you know the, the sector that's spending the most right now? It's gonna shock you energy utilities. Oh yeah. I was gonna, the energy utilities industry right now is the one spending the most money I saw largely cuz they're playing ketchup. But also because they don't have these type of things for their consumers, they need the consumer app. They need to be able to do that delivery. They need to be able to do metrics. And they're the they're, they're the one spending right >>Now it's an arms race, but the, the vector shifts to value creation. So >>It's it just goes back to your post when it was a 2012, the trillion dollar baby. Yeah. It's a multi-trillion dollar baby that they, >>The world was going my chassis post on Forbes, headline trillion dollar baby 2012. You know, I should add it's happening. That's >>On the end. Yeah, exactly. >>Trillions of babies, Eric. Great to have you on the key. >>Thank you so much guys. >>Great to bring the data. Thanks for sharing. Check out ETR. If you're into the enterprise, want to know what's going on. They have a unique approach, very accurate in their survey data. They got a great market basket of, of, of, of, of data questions and people and community. Check it out. Thanks for coming on and sharing with. >>Thank you guys. Always enjoy. >>We'll be back with more coverage here in the cube in New York city live at summit 22. I'm John fur with Dave ante. We'll be right back.

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> In our 2020 predictions post, we said that organizations would begin to operationalize their digital transformation experiments and POCs. We also said that based on spending data that cybersecurity companies like CrowdStrike and Okta were poised to rise above the rest in 2020, and we even said the S&P 500 would surpass 3,700 this year. Little did we know that we'd have a pandemic that would make these predictions a virtual lock, and, of course, COVID did blow us out of the water in some other areas, like our prediction that IT spending would increase plus 4% in 2020, when in reality, we have a dropping by 4%. We made a number of other calls that did pretty well, but I'll let you review last year's predictions at your leisure to see how we did. Hello, everyone. This is Dave Vellante and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights powered by ETR. Erik Bradley of ETR is joining me again for this Breaking Analysis, and we're going to lay out our top picks for 2021. Erik, great to see you. Welcome back. Happy to have you on theCUBE, my friend. >> Always great to see you too, Dave. I'm excited about these picks this year. >> Well, let's get right into it. Let's bring up the first prediction here. Tech spending will rebound in 2021. We expect a 4% midpoint increase next year in spending. Erik, there are a number of factors that really support this prediction, which of course is based on ETR's most recent survey work, and we've listed a number of them here in this slide. I wonder if we can talk about that a little bit, the pace of the vaccine rollout. I've called this a forced march to COVID, but I can see people doubling down on things that are working. Productivity improvements are going to go back into the business. People are going to come back to the headquarters and that maybe is going to spur infrastructure on some pent-up demand, and work from home, we're going to talk about that. What are your thoughts on this prediction? >> Well, first of all, you weren't wrong last year. You were just, (laughs) you were just delayed. Just delayed a little bit, that's all. No, very much so. Early on, just three months ago, we were not seeing this optimism. The most recent survey, however, is capturing 4%. I truly believe that still might be a little bit mild. I think it can go even higher, and that's going to be driven by some of the things you've said about. This is a year where a lot of spending was paused on machine learning, on automation, on some of these projects that had to be stopped because of what we all went through. Right now, that is not a nice to have, it's a must have, and that spending is going quickly. There's a rapid pace on that spending, so I do think that's going to push it and, of course, security. We're going to get to this later on so I don't want to bury the lede, but with what's happening right now, every CISO I speak to is not panicked, but they are concerned and there will definitely be increased security spending that might push this 4% even higher. >> Yeah, and as we've reported as well, the survey data shows that there's less freezing of IT, there are fewer layoffs, there's more hiring, we're accelerating IT deployments, so that, I think, 34% last survey, 34% of organizations are accelerating IT deployments over the next three months, so that's great news. >> And also your point too about hiring. I was remiss in not bringing that up because we had layoffs and we had freezes on hiring. Both of that is stopping. As you know, as more head count comes in, whether that be from home or whether that be in your headquarters, both of those require support and require spending. >> All right, let's bring up the next prediction. Remote worker trends are going to become fossilized, settling in at an average of 34% by year-end 2021. Now, I love this chart, you guys. It's been amazingly consistent to me, Erik. We're showing data here from ETR's latest COVID survey. So it shows that prior to the pandemic, about 15 to 16% of employees on average worked remotely. That jumped to where we are today and well into the 70s, and we're going to stay close to that, according to the ETR data, in the first half of 2021, but by the end of the year, it's going to settle in at around 34%. Erik, that's double the pre-pandemic numbers and that's been consistent in your surveys over the past six month, and even within the sub-samples. >> Yeah, super surprised by the consistency, Dave. You're right about that. We were expecting the most recent data to kind of come down, right? We see the vaccines being rolled out. We kind of thought that that number would shift, but it hasn't, it has been dead consistent, and that's just from the data perspective. What we're hearing from the interviews and the feedback is that's not going to change, it really isn't, and there's a main reason for that. Productivity is up, and we'll talk about that in a second, but if you have productivity up and you have employees happy, they're not commuting, they're working more, they're working effectively, there is no reason to rush. And now imagine if you're a company that's trying to hire the best talent and attract the best talent but you're also the only company telling them where they have to live. I mean, good luck with that, right? So even if a few of them decide to make this permanent, that's something where you're going to really have to follow suit to attract talent. >> Yeah, so let's talk about that. Productivity leads us to our next prediction. We can bring that up. Number three is productivity increases are going to lead organizations to double down on the successes of 2020 and productivity apps are going to benefit. Now, of course, I'm always careful to cautious to interpret when you ask somebody by how much did productivity increase. It's a very hard thing to estimate depending on how you measure it. Is it revenue per employee? Is it profit? But nonetheless, the vast majority of people that we talk to are seeing productivity is going up. The productivity apps are really the winners here. Who do you see, Erik, as really benefiting from this trend? This year we saw Zoom, Teams, even Webex benefit, but how do you see this playing out in 2021? >> Well, first of all, the real beneficiaries are the companies themselves because they are getting more productivity, and our data is not only showing more productivity, but that's continuing to increase over time, so that's number one. But you're 100% right that the reason that's happening is because of the support of the applications and what would have been put in place. Now, what we do expect to see here, early on it was a rising tide lifted all boats, even Citrix got pulled up, but over time you realize Citrix is really just about legacy applications. Maybe that's not really the virtualization platform we need or maybe we just don't want to go that route at all. So the ones that we think are going to win longer term are part of this paradigm shift. The easiest one to put out as example is DocuSign. Nobody is going to travel and sit in an office to sign a paper ever again. It's not happening. I don't care if you go back to the office or you go back to headquarters. This is a paradigm shift that is not temporary. It is permanent. Another one that we're seeing is Smartsheet. Early on it started in. I was a little concerned about it 'cause it was a shadow IT type of a company where it was just spreading and spreading and spreading. It's turned out that this, the data on Smartsheet is continuing to be strong. It's an effective tool for project management when you're remotely working, so that's another one I don't see changing anytime. The other one I would call out would be Twilio. Slightly different, yes. It's more about the customer experience, but when you look at how many brick and mortar or how many in-person transactions have moved online and will stay there, companies like Twilio that support that customer experience, I'll throw out a Qualtrics out there as well, not a name we hear about a lot, but that customer experience software is a name that needs to be watched going forward. >> What do you think's going to happen to Zoom and Teams? Certainly Zoom just escalated this year, a huge ascendancy, and Teams I look at a little differently 'cause it's not just video conferencing, and both have done really, really well. How do you interpret the data that you're seeing there? >> There's no way around it, our data is decelerating quickly, really quickly. We were kind of bullish when Zoom first came out on the IPO prospects. It did very well. Obviously what happened in this remote shift turned them into an absolute overnight huge success. I don't see that continuing going forward, and there's a reason. What we're seeing and hearing from our feedback interviews is that now that people recognize this isn't temporary and they're not scrambling and they need to set up for permanency, they're going to consolidate their spend. They don't need to have Teams and Zoom. It's not necessary. They will consolidate where they can. There's always going to be the players that are going to choose Slack and Zoom 'cause they don't want to be on Microsoft architecture. That's fine, but you and I both know that the majority of large enterprises have Microsoft already. It's bundled in in pricing. I just don't see it happening. There's going to be M&A out there, which we can talk about again soon, so maybe Zoom, just like Slack, gets to a point where somebody thinks it's worthwhile, but there's a lot of other video conferencing out there. They're trying to push their telephony. They're trying to push their mobile solutions. There's a lot of companies out there doing it, so we'll see, but the current market cap does not seem to make sense in a permanent remote work situation. >> I think I'm inferring Teams is a little different because it's Microsoft. They've got this huge software estate they can leverage. They can bundle. Now, it's going to be interesting to see how and if Zoom can then expand its TAM, use its recent largesse to really enter potentially new markets. >> It will be, but listen, just the other day there was another headline that one of Zoom's executives out in China was actually blocking content as per directed by the Chinese government. Those are the kind of headlines that just really just get a little bit difficult when you're running a true enterprise size. Zoom is wonderful in the consumer space, but what I do is I research enterprise technology, and it's going to be really, really difficult to make inroads there with Microsoft. >> Yep. I agree. Okay, let's bring up number four, prediction number four. Permanent shifts in CISO strategies lead to measurable share shifts in network security. So the remote work sort of hyper-pivot, we'll call it, it's definitely exposed us. We've seen recent breaches that underscore the need for change. They've been well-publicized. We've talked a lot about identity access management, cloud security, endpoint security, and so as a result, we've seen the upstarts, and just a couple that we called, CrowdStrike, Okta, Zscaler has really benefited and we expect them to continue to show consistent growth, some well over 50% revenue growth. Erik, you really follow this space closely. You've been focused on microsegmentation and other, some of the big players. What are your thoughts here? >> Yeah, first of all, security, number one in spending overall when we started looking and asking people what their priority is going to be. That's not changing, and that was before the SolarWinds breach. I just had a great interview today with a CISO of a global hospitality enterprise to really talk about the implications of this. It is real. Him and his peers are not panicking but pretty close, is the way he put it, so there is spend happening. So first of all, to your point, continued on Okta, continued on identity access. See no reason why that changes. CrowdStrike, continue. What this is going to do is bring in some new areas, like we just mentioned, in network segmentation. Illumio is a pure play in that name that doesn't have a lot of citations, but I have watched over the last week their net spending score go from about 30 to 60%, so I am watching in real time, as this data comes in in the later part of our survey, that it's really happening Forescout is another one that's in there. We're seeing some of the zero trust names really picking up in the last week. Now, to talk about some of the more established names, yeah, Cisco plays in this space and we can talk about Cisco and what they're doing in security forever. They're really reinventing themselves and doing a great job. Palo Alto was in this space as well, but I do believe that network and microsegmentation is going to be something that's going to continue. The other one I'm going to throw out that I'm hearing a lot about lately is user behavior analytics. People need to be able to watch the trends, compare them to past trends, and catch something sooner. Varonis is a name in that space that we're seeing get a lot of adoptions right now. It's early trend, but based on our data, Varonis is a name to watch in that area as well. >> Yeah, and you mentioned Cisco transitioning, reinventing themselves toward a SaaS player. Their subscription, Cisco's security business is a real bright spot for them. Palo Alto, every time I sit in on a VENN, which is ETR's proprietary roundtable, the CISOs, they love Palo Alto. They want to work, many of them, anyway, want to work with Palo Alto. They see them as a thought leader. They seem to be getting their cloud act together. Fortinet has been doing a pretty good job there and especially for mid-market. So we're going to see this equilibrium, best of breed versus the big portfolio companies, and I think 2021 sets up as a really interesting battle for those guys with momentum and those guys with big portfolios. >> I completely agree and you nailed it again. Palo Alto has this perception that they're really thought leaders in the space and people want to work with them, but let's not rule Cisco out. They have a much, much bigger market cap. They are really good at acquisitions. In the past, they maybe didn't integrate them as well, but it seems like they're getting their act together on that. And they're pushing now what they call SecureX, which is sort of like their own full-on platform in the cloud, and they're starting to market that, I'm starting to hear more about it, and I do think Cisco is really changing people's perception of them. We shall see going forward because in the last year, you're 100% right, Palo Alto definitely got a little bit more of the sentiment, of positive sentiment. Now, let's also realize, and we'll talk about this again in a bit, there's a lot of players out there. There will probably be continued consolidation in the security space, that we'll see what happens, but it's an area where spending is increasing, there is a lot of vendors out there to play with, and I do believe we'll see consolidation in that space. >> Yes. No question. A highly fragmented business. A lack of skills is a real challenge. Automation is a big watch word and so I would expect, which brings us, Erik, to prediction number five. Can be hard to do prediction posts without talking about M&A. We see the trend toward increased tech spending driving more IPOs, SPACs and M&A. We've seen some pretty amazing liquidity events this year. Snowflake, obviously a big one. Airbnb, DoorDash, outside of our enterprise tech but still notable. Palantir, JFrog, number of others. UiPath just filed confidentially and their CEO said, "Over the next 12 to 18 months, I would think Automation Anywhere is going to follow suit at some point." Hashicorp was a company we called out in our 2020 predictions as one to watch along with Snowflake and some others, and, Erik, we've seen some real shifts in observability. The ELK Stack gaining prominence with Elastic, ChaosSearch just raised 40 million, and everybody's going after 5G. Lots of M&A opportunities. What are your thoughts? >> I think if we're going to make this a prediction show, I'm going to say that was a great year, but we're going to even have a better year next year. There is a lot of cash on the balance sheet. There are low interest rates. There is a lot of spending momentum in enterprise IT. The three of those set up for a perfect storm of more liquidity events, whether it be continued IPOs, whether it could be M&A, I do expect that to continue. You mentioned a lot of the names. I think you're 100% right. Another one I would throw out there in that observability space, is it's Grafana along with the ELK Stack is really making changes to some of the pure plays in that area. I've been pretty vocal about how I thought Splunk was having some problems. They've already made three acquisitions. They are trying really hard to get back up and keep that growth trajectory and be the great company they always have been, so I think the observability area is certainly one. We have a lot of names in that space that could be taken out. The other one that wasn't mentioned, however, that I'd like to mention is more in the CDN area. Akamai being the grandfather there, and we'll get into it a little bit too, but CloudFlare has a huge market cap, Fastly running a little bit behind that, and then there's Limelight, and there's a few startups in that space and the CDN is really changing. It's not about content delivery as much as it is about edge compute these days, and they would be a real easy takeout for one of these large market cap names that need to get into that spot. >> That's a great call. All right, let's bring up number six, and this is one that's near and dear to my heart. It's more of a longer-term prediction and that prediction is in the 2020s, 75% of large organizations are going to re-architect their big data platforms, and the premise here is we're seeing a rapid shift to cloud database and cross-cloud data sharing and automated governance. And the prediction is that because big data platforms are fundamentally flawed and are not going to be corrected by incremental improvements in data lakes and data warehouses and data hubs, we're going to see a shift toward a domain-centric ownership of the data pipeline where data teams are going to be organized around data product or data service builders and embedded into lines of business. And in this scenario, the technology details and complexity will become abstracted. You've got hyper-specialized data teams today. They serve multiple business owners. There's no domain context. Different data agendas. Those, we think, are going to be subsumed within the business lines, and in the future, the primary metric is going to shift from the cost and the quality of the big data platform outputs to the time it takes to go from idea to revenue generation, and this change is going to take four to five years to coalesce, but it's going to begin in earnest in 2021. Erik, anything you'd add to this? >> I'm going to let you kind of own that one 'cause I completely agree, and for all the listeners out there, that was Dave's original thought and I think it's fantastic and I want to get behind it. One of the things I will say to support that is big data analytics, which is what people are calling it because they got over the hype of machine learning, they're sick of vendors saying machine learning, and I'm hearing more and more people just talk about it as we need big data analytics, we need 'em at the edge, we need 'em faster, we need 'em in real time. That's happening, and what we're seeing more is this is happening with vendor-agnostic tools. This isn't just AWS-aligned. This isn't just GCP-aligned or Azure-aligned. The winners are the Snowflakes. The winners are the Databricks. The winners are the ones that are allowing this interoperability, the portability, which fully supports what you're saying. And then the only other comment I would make, which I really like about your prediction, is about the lines of business owning it 'cause I think this is even bigger. Right now, we track IT spending through the CIO, through the CTO, through IT in general. IT spending is actually becoming more diversified. IT spending is coming under the purview of marketing, it's coming under the purview of sales, so we're seeing more and more IT spending, but it's happening with the business user or the business lines and obviously data first, so I think you're 100% right. >> Yeah, and if you think about it, we've contextualized our operational systems, whether it's the CRM or the supply chain, the logistics, the business lines own their respective data. It's not true for the analytics systems, and we talked about Snowflake and Databricks. I actually see these two companies who were sort of birds of a feather in the early days together, applying Databricks machine learning on top of Snowflake, I actually see them going in diverging places. I see Databricks trying to improve on the data lake. I see Snowflake trying to reinvent the concept of data warehouse to this global mesh, and it's going to be really interesting to see how that shakes out. The data behind Snowflake, obviously very, very exciting. >> Yeah, it's just, real quickly to add on that if we have time, Dave. >> Yeah, sure. >> We all know the valuation of Snowflake, one of the most incredible IPOs I've seen in a long time. The data still supports it. It still supports that growth. Unfortunately for Databricks, their IPO has been a little bit more volatile. If you look at their stock chart every time they report, it's got a little bit of a roller coaster ride going on, and our most recent data for Databricks is actually decelerating, so again, I'm going to use the caveat that we only have about 950 survey responses in. We'll probably get that up to 1,300 or so, so it's not done yet, but right now we are putting Databricks into a category where we're seeing it decelerate a little bit, which is surprising for a company that's just right out of the gate. >> Well, it's interesting because I do see Databricks as more incremental on data lakes and I see Snowflake as more transformative, so at least from a vision standpoint, we'll see if they can execute on that. All right, number seven, let's bring up number seven. This is talking about the cloud, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud. The battle to define hybrid and multi-cloud is going to escalate in 2021. It's already started and it's going to create bifurcated CIO strategies. And, Erik, spending data clearly shows that cloud is continuing its steady margin share gains relative to on-prem, but the definitions of the cloud, they're shifting. Just a couple of years ago, AWS, they never talk about hybrid, just like they don't talk about multi-cloud today, yet AWS continues now to push into on-prem. They treat on-prem as just another node at the edge and they continue to win in the marketplace despite their slower growth rates. Still, they're so large now. 45 billion or so this year. The data is mixed. This ETR data shows that just under 50% of buyers are consolidating workloads, and then a similar, in the cloud workloads, and a similar percentage of customers are spreading evenly across clouds, so really interesting dynamic there. Erik, how do you see it shaking out? >> Yeah, the data is interesting here, and I would actually state that overall spend on the cloud is actually flat from last year, so we're not seeing a huge increase in spend, and coupled with that, we're seeing that the overall market share, which means the amount of responses within our survey, is increasing, certainly increasing. So cloud usage is increasing, but it's happening over an even spectrum. There's no clear winner of that market share increase. So they really, according to our data, the multi-cloud approach is happening and not one particular winner over another. That's just from the data perspective that various do point on AWS. Let's be honest, when they first started, they wanted all the data. They just want to take it from on-prem, put it in their data center. They wanted all of it. They never were interested in actually having interoperability. Then you look at an approach like Google. Google was always about the technology, but not necessarily about the enterprise customer. They come out with Anthos which is allowing you to have interoperability in more cloud. They're not nearly as big, but their growth rate is much higher. Law of numbers, of course. But it really is interesting to see how these cloud players are going to approach this because multi-cloud is happening whether they like it or not. >> Well, I'm glad you brought up multi-cloud in a context of what the data's showing 'cause I would agree we're, and particularly two areas that I would call out in ETR data, VMware Cloud on AWS as well as VM Cloud Foundation are showing real momentum and also OpenStack from Red Hat is showing real progress here and they're making moves. They're putting great solutions inside of AWS, doing some stuff on bare metal, and it's interesting to see. VMware, basically it's the VMware stack. They want to put that everywhere. Whereas Red Hat, similarly, but Red Hat has the developer angle. They're trying to infuse Red Hat in throughout everybody's stack, and so I think Red Hat is going to be really interesting to, especially to the extent that IBM keeps them, sort of lets them do their own thing and doesn't kind of pollute them. So, so far so good there. >> Yeah, I agree with that. I think you brought up the good point about it being developer-friendly. It's a real option as people start kicking a little bit more of new, different developer ways and containers are growing, growing more. They're not testing anymore, but they're real workloads. It is a stack that you could really use. Now, what I would say to caveat that though is I'm not seeing any net new business go to IBM Red Hat. If you were already aligned with that, then yes, you got to love these new tools they're giving you to play with, but I don't see anyone moving to them that wasn't already net new there and I would say the same thing with VMware. Listen, they have a great entrenched base. The longer they can kick that can down the road, that's fantastic, but I don't see net new customers coming onto VMware because of their alignment with AWS. >> Great, thank you for that. That's a good nuance. Number eight, cloud, containers, AI and ML and automation are going to lead 2021 spending velocity, so really is those are the kind of the big four, cloud, containers, AI, automation, And, Erik, this next one's a bit nuanced and it supports our first prediction of a rebound in tech spending next year. We're seeing cloud, containers, AI and automation, in the form of RPA especially, as the areas with the highest net scores or spending momentum, but we put an asterisk around the cloud because you can see in this inserted graphic, which again is preliminary 'cause the survey's still out in the field and it's just a little tidbit here, but cloud is not only above that 40% line of net score, but it has one of the higher sector market shares. Now, as you said, earlier you made a comment that you're not necessarily seeing the kind of growth that you saw before, but it's from a very, very large base. Virtually every sector in the ETR dataset with the exception of outsourcing and IT consulting is seeing meaningful upward spending momentum, and even those two, we're seeing some positive signs. So again, with what we talked about before, with the freezing of the IT projects starting to thaw, things are looking much, much better for 2021. >> I'd agree with that. I'm going to make two quick comments on that, one on the machine learning automation. Without a doubt, that's where we're seeing a lot of the increase right now, and I've had a multiple number of people reach out or in my interviews say to me, "This is very simple. These projects were slated to happen in 2020 and they got paused. It's as simple as that. The business needs to have more machine learning, big data analytics, and it needs to have more automation. This has just been paused and now it's coming back and it's coming back rapidly." Another comment, I'm actually going to post an article on LinkedIn as soon as we're done here. I did an interview with the lead technology director, automation director from Disney, and this guy obviously has a big budget and he was basically saying UiPath and Automation Anywhere dominate RPA, and that on top of it, the COVID crisis greatly accelerated automation, greatly accelerated it because it had to happen, we needed to find a way to get rid of these mundane tasks, we had to put them into real workloads. And another aspect you don't think about, a lot of times with automation, there's people, employees that really have friction. They don't want to adopt it. That went away. So COVID really pushed automation, so we're going to see that happening in machine learning and automation without a doubt. And now for a fun prediction real quick. You brought up the IT outsourcing and consulting. This might be a little bit more out there, the dark horse, but based on our data and what we're seeing and the COVID information about, you said about new projects being unwrapped, new hiring happening, we really do believe that this might be the bottom on IT outsourcing and consulting. >> Great, thank you for that, and then that brings us to number nine here. The automation mandate is accelerating and it will continue to accelerate in 2021. Now, you may say, "Okay, well, this is a lay-up," but not necessarily. UiPath and Automation Anywhere go public and Microsoft remains a threat. Look, UiPath, I've said UiPath and Automation Anywhere, if they were ready to go public, they probably would have already this year, so I think they're still trying to get their proverbial act together, so this is not necessarily a lay-up for them from an operational standpoint. They probably got some things to still clean up, but I think they're going to really try to go for it. If the markets stay positive and tech spending continues to go forward, I think we can see that. And I would say this, automation is going mainstream. The benefits of taking simple RPA tools to automate mundane tasks with software bots, it's both awakened organizations to the possibilities of automation, and combined with COVID, it's caused them to get serious about automation. And we think 2021, we're going to see organizations go beyond implementing point tools, they're going to use the pandemic to restructure their entire business. Erik, how do you see it, and what are the big players like Microsoft that have entered the market? What kind of impact do you see them having? >> Yeah, completely agree with you. This is a year where we go from small workloads into real deployment, and those two are the leader. In our data, UiPath by far the clear leader. We are seeing a lot of adoptions on Automation Anywhere, so they're getting some market sentiment. People are realizing, starting to actually adopt them. And by far, the number one is Microsoft Power Automate. Now, again, we have to be careful because we know Microsoft is entrenched everywhere. We know that they are good at bundling, so if I'm in charge of automation for my enterprise and I'm already a Microsoft customer, I'm going to use it. That doesn't mean it's the best tool to use for the right job. From what I've heard from people, each of these have a certain area where they are better. Some can get more in depth and do heavier lifting. Some are better at doing a lot of projects at once but not in depth, so we're going to see this play out. Right now, according to our data, UiPath is still number one, Automation Anywhere is number two, and Microsoft just by default of being entrenched in all of these enterprises has a lot of market share or mind share. >> And I also want to do a shout out to, or a call out, not really a shout out, but a call out to Pegasystems. We put them in the RPA category. They're covered in the ETR taxonomy. I don't consider them an RPA vendor. They're a business process vendor. They've been around for a long, long time. They've had a great year, done very, very well. The stock has done well. Their spending momentum, the early signs in the latest survey are just becoming, starting to moderate a little bit, but I like what they've done. They're not trying to take UiPath and Automation Anywhere head-on, and so I think there's some possibilities there. You've also got IBM who went to the market, SAP, Infor, and everybody's going to hop on the bandwagon here who's a software player. >> I completely agree, but I do think there's a very strong line in the sand between RPA and business process. I don't know if they're going to be able to make that transition. Now, business process also tends to be extremely costly. RPA came into this with trying to be, prove their ROI, trying to say, "Yeah, we're going to cost a little bit of money, but we're going to make it back." Business process has always been, at least the legacies, the ones you're mentioning, the Pega, the IBMs, really expensive. So again, I'm going to allude to that article I'm about to post. This particular person who's a lead tech automation for a very large company said, "Not only are UiPath and AA dominating RPA, but they're likely going to evolve to take over the business process space as well." So if they are proving what they can do, he's saying there's no real reason they can't turn around and take what Appian's doing, what IBM's doing and what Pega's doing. That's just one man's opinion. Our data is not actually tracking it in that space, so we can't back that, but I did think it was an interesting comment for and an interesting opportunity for UiPath and Automation Anywhere. >> Yeah, it's always great to hear directly from the mouths of the practitioners. All right, brings us to number 10 here. 5G rollouts are going to push new edge IoT workloads and necessitate new system architectures. AI and real-time inferencing, we think, require new thinking, particularly around processor and system design, and the focus is increasingly going to be on efficiency and at much, much lower costs versus what we've known for decades as general purpose workloads accommodating a lot of different use cases. You're seeing alternative processors like Nvidia, certainly the ARM acquisition. You've got companies hitting the market like Fungible with DPAs, and they're dominating these new workloads in the coming decade, we think, and they continue to demonstrate superior price performance metrics. And over the next five years they're going to find their way, we think, into mainstream enterprise workloads and put continued pressure on Intel general purpose microprocessors. Erik, look, we've seen cloud players. They're diversifying their processor suppliers. They're developing their own in-house silicon. This is a multi-year trend that's going to show meaningful progress next year, certainly if you measure it in terms of innovations, announcements and new use cases and funding and M&A activity. Your thoughts? >> Yeah, there's a lot there and I think you're right. It's a big trend that's going to have a wide implication, but right now, it's there's no doubt that the supply and demand is out of whack. You and I might be the only people around who still remember the great chip famine in 1999, but it seems to be happening again and some of that is due to just overwhelming demand, like you mentioned. Things like IoT. Things like 5G. Just the increased power of handheld devices. The remote from work home. All of this is creating a perfect storm, but it also has to do with some of the chip makers themselves kind of misfired, and you probably know the space better than me, so I'll leave you for that on that one. But I also want to talk a little bit, just another aspect of this 5G rollout, in my opinion, is we have to get closer to the edge, we have to get closer to the end consumer, and I do believe the CDN players have an area to play in this. And maybe we can leave that as there and we could do this some other time, but I do believe the CDN players are no longer about content delivery and they're really about edge compute. So as we see IoT and 5G roll out, it's going to have huge implications on the chip supply. No doubt. It's also could have really huge implications for the CDN network. >> All right, there you have it, folks. Erik, it's great working with you. It's been awesome this year. I hope we can do more in 2021. Really been a pleasure. >> Always. Have a great holiday, everybody. Stay safe. >> Yeah, you too. Okay, so look, that's our prediction for 2021 and the coming decade. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcast. You'll find it. We publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com, and you got to check out etr.plus. It's where all the survey action is. Definitely subscribe to their services if you haven't already. You can DM me @dvellante or email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. This is Dave Vellante for Erik Bradley for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, everyone. Be well and we'll see you next time. (relaxing music)

>> 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)

(funky music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California. This is a CUBE conversation. >> Welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with the CUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studios havin' a CUBE conversation, but for a little bit of something different. Instead of having our guest here locally in Palo Alto we've got him all the way across the country, across the pond, all the way over to Holland, and he's in Utrecht, and we're happy to welcome Erik Klein. He is the infrastructure architect for FrieslandCampina. Erik thanks for joining us today. >> Thank you for having me. >> Absolutely, so before we get started, a little background on FrieslandCampina for people that aren't familiar with the company. >> FrieslandCampina is a co-operative company owned by farmers, predominantly in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. It's a international company. We have about 34 countries with, we have, at our sales offices, our plans in there, we are one of the biggest dairy companies in the world, and love to be there. It's a very good company to work for. >> It's amazing, I was doing a little research, I mean the scale is amazing. You guys, you operate in 100 countries, exporting. You've got offices in 34 countries. I think it said of 23,000 plus employees. It's quite a big operation. >> Yup. >> So, >> A big operation doing about 10 billion liters, or kilograms, of milk a year. >> Great, so, it's a dairy, we're here talking about digital transformation; it's always fascinating to me, kind of, the reach of digital transformation in everybody's company. Everyone says everyone's really a software company, you know, kind of built around a different product or service. So what were some of the challenges that you were looking towards in 2018-2019 in terms of digital transformation in this mature industry of dairy? >> The challenges that we're having is that you have to make sure that everything is safe. The products are safe, but also the data is safe. But also that we have a lot of things move through the Cloud, and also that the performance of those applications moves through the Cloud, is to the end user's satisfaction as well. So you're not looking only at transferring data safely from the Cloud into our offices, into our production environment, also protecting our production environments from everything that's going bad on the Internet, but also having to make sure that the applications are performing to the liking of the end user, so to speak, to our customer and our consumers. >> And was the objective to build new applications in the Cloud, or was it more kind of lift-and-shift some of your older applications in the Cloud? Because those are two very different challenges. >> Yeah, it's a lift-and-shift of our older applications. For example we're now in the middle of moving our SAP environment to the Cloud, at least the development test and user environments are moved to the Cloud. The other ones remain still within a traditional data center environment, and we have moved all of our Office 365, so that's Skype for Business, SharePoint, but all the other applications to the Cloud as well. >> Ha ha. >> And there we have all this additional transformation, the challenges that really comes back to the end user. >> Those are huge applications; SAP and Office 365. Those are not insignificant >> Yup. >> applications at all. So what were some of the challenges, I'm sure we have a lot of your peers watching this. What is some of the tips and tricks that you can share with them? Big challenges that you had to overcome? Things you thought about, maybe some things that you didn't think about in that transformation? >> If you look at the SAP landscape, it's the sheer amount of interfaces between the different components of SAP. That's was something that made us decide not to move SAP to the Cloud, not the production environment and the systems Environment. That was too big of an impact. That would take too long to do and we don't have that time. If you look at Office 365, the fact that Microsoft is very averse in having anything in the middle, that brought us some real challenges. And and we did that already in 2014-2015 and we had our fair share of all fun and games. >> Ha ha ha, so what was different about it then than today? I mean obviously the Cloud has moved quite a bit. I don't know if you can mention which Cloud you put it in? >>Yeah correct, the fact that Zscaler now, does the updating, and all the changes within the Microsoft environment. So you don't have to do it yourself. You don't have to constantly monitor the ARS feeds from Microsoft, do all the changes yourself. Now it's all done by Zscaler, all the SSL bypass, the authentication bypass has been set correctly. So when that came on board that made our life a lot easier. >> Wow. >> The first part of the migration that we did in in Europe, especially in the bigger locations like Amersfoort, which has our headquarters, we really had our challenges to keep the end user satisfied. >> So just, again, kind of the scale of the end users. You mentioned that a couple of times. Is this in support of all the 23,000 people that are employed at FrieslandCampina? Is it a subset, or is it remote workers? How are you, kind of, allocating this effort? >> It is indeed all users, except for the factory workers. We don't allow people that work in production direct access to the internet. So those people are not as much excluded, but they have special PCs where they work on. So you're looking currently at about 15,000 people that are working with Office 365 directly on a day-to-day basis within FrieslandCampina. >> Wow, so the other thing you've talked about repeatedly is not only satisfaction with the users who are interfacing with the systems, but security. So what were some of the >> Yup. >> security considerations that you considered? How did you, kind of, bake security into your process? And, as we hear all the time as we go to different shows, including security shows, you know, it's not a bolt-on anymore; you have to be thinking security throughout the whole pipeline of the process. So how did you think about it? How did you attack it? How did you solve some of those problems? >> We started thinking about it already in 2012. We had, at that time within FrieslandCampina, a program specifically driven out of the LT environment, so the operational technology, so the production IT, so to speak, and they come up with an architecture based on the ISO 9599 norm, and we took that on board as IT and continued to work on that. So from 2014 we already had in our plans, the architecture to separate the various layers of the ISO 9599 framework into security zones, and we're constantly building on that one. We're refining it, we're improving it. >> Another question on security, really, and kind of the network architecture. Did you have to re-do anything within your network architecture to make this move to the Cloud possible? How did you address the network? >> It was a completely redesigned. It was a complete redesign. In the, previous to that, we just had IT, and we had one or two firewalls on-site that connects to a certain part of OT, and that was it. And now we have an architecture where we can integrate all different flavors of OT. There's no need for OT to have their own internet connections for maintenance, for support, et cetera. It's all integrated and secure. We made, and the reason for that is that you can't, in this day and age, have an island structure. Everything needs to be integrated. Everything needs to talk to each other, et cetera. >>  So Erik, this interview is sponsored by Zscaler. You're a customer of theirs. I'm just curious if you can talk a little bit about how, you know, their offering enabled you to do stuff that maybe you couldn't do before. How did you get involved with them? How are they working with them throughout this project? And how has that really been an enabler for your, you know, your move to the Cloud? >> In 2013-2014 there was a request from the business, a very strong drive from the business, that looked into breakouts, specifically to get localized contact, driven out of the, how do say that, marketing department. And then we looked at, okay, how can we enable that without creating firewalls on every location we're having, making it very expensive, etcetera. And at that time our provider, Verizon, came up, let's do a Cloud security with Verizon, with Zscaler, and do a proof of concept, and build on that one. So that worked. That gave us more regularity, if the people in the countries that needed localized content got the localized content, speeding up the application for the specific countries, so no happening from Tokyo, Japan, back to Singapore, back to websites in Japan. So that helps a lot, but like I said it was early days so we had our challenges in getting that working, getting it secure, getting the traffic to the correct Zscaler node, and so on. So we did make, from the initial set-up of this network, a number of iterations to come to where we are today. >> Great. >> So it's not one decision and then it works. No, it's a decision, see what has worked, which challenge you're getting, and then take it to the next level. >> Right. >> If we do the same thing with Zscaler as they're offering today it will be a lot quicker. We will have a number of those challenges that we had at that time, we will not have today. >> So as you look forward, what's kind of next. As you mentioned this isn't a one-stop shop. This is an ongoing process. What are, kind of, your next priorities, you know, over the next six months or so as you guys continue on this journey? >> To another data center, so not to the Cloud but to a different data center, so that's a big, really a big program. The other thing we're looking at is how can we improve remote access, provide extra benefits as part. We also look at the ZPA product of Zscaler. We're doing a proof of concept, probably in the second half of this year. So, but on the other side, this year, 2019, FrieslandCampina is a, how do you say that in proper English, stop and look back and see what's really important, what we need to go forward. So it's not going crazy on all different kind of projects. It is, okay, what will actually contribute to the profitability of FrieslandCampina going forward. >> I think that's a really great close. I know it's late in Utrecht. I appreciate you taking some time out of your evening, and I was going to ask you the last question, you know, what advice would you have for your peers, for other practitioners that are looking at this, and, you know, either in the process or planning out their journey, but I think you hit on a big one right there which is really focus on the things that matter, focus on the things that really make a difference, and just don't start doing science experiments all over the place because you can, or it's fun, or it's interesting. >> Well, what my worries are for the future, and what, not keeps me awake at night, but that that's too much, is the bad that's going around in this world is getting stronger. They have more resources than we, as a company, has to defend for us against, and the acute challenge would be, is identifying what is your traffic that is good flowing in your network. Because if you're knowing what is good everything that's not defined as being good can be immediately defined as being bad. In that case you'll have a better position in preventing yourself against everything that's going wrong, like WannaCry. If you know that WannaCry is using a well known port used all over the place in FrieslandCampina. But if you then see that same port being used to communicate between servers that never communicated before, or to workstations to servers that never communicated before, then you say, okay, stop that one immediately, because that's not good. >> Right. >> And at that moment our biggest challenge is identifying what is the traffic that's good within our network. >> Well that's a great tip, you know, that's great. You know what the positives are, and if it doesn't make the the green list then shut 'er down and (chuckling) find out what's going on. >> Correct. >> All right. >> Correct. And the reason why we identified WannaCry is that somebody, for some reason, identified Hey this server never talked with that device: Why? >> Yeah, we're hearing that, >> And because, all. >> because with IOT you have to do that, right? >> You have to do that. >> 'Cause everything's IP connected, right? Whether it's the shades and the HVAC system all the way down to all your manufacturing processes, distribution processes, >> Correct. >> IT systems. >> Correct, correct. Our big advantage was that the call back to the command and control servers was already blocked by Zscaler so it didn't hurt us that much. >> Yeah, well good, we got to keep the cows safe, keep the milk safe, and the, >> Yeah, absolutely. >> what did you say, the 10 billion gallons of milk that you guys kick out a year, or something like that? >> Yep. >> It's amazing, ha ha. >> It's amazing. >> All right Erik, well thanks for sharing your story. Good luck on your future transformations, and good luck next week; thanks for stopping by. >> Thank you very much. >> All right. >> All right. >> All right, he's Erik, I'm Jeff, you're watching the CUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studios and Utrecht, Holland. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (funky music)

(funky music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California. This is a CUBE conversation. >> Welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with the CUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studios havin' a CUBE conversation, but for a little bit of something different. Instead of having our guest here locally in Palo Alto we've got him all the way across the country, across the pond, all the way over to Holland, and he's in Utrecht, and we're happy to welcome Erik Klein. He is the infrastructure architect for FrieslandCampina. Eric thanks for joining us today. >> Thank you for having me. >> Absolutely, so before we get started, a little background on FrieslandCampina for people that aren't familiar with the company. >> FrieslandCampina is a co-operative company owned by farmers, predominantly in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. It's a international company. We have about 34 countries with, we have, at our sales offices, our plans in there, we are one of the biggest dairy companies in the world, and love to be there. It's a very good company to work for. >> It's amazing, I was doing a little research, I mean the scale is amazing. You guys, you operate in 100 countries, exporting. You've got offices in 34 countries. I think it said of 23,000 plus employees. It's quite a big operation. >> Yup. >> So, >> A big operation doing about 10 billion liters, or kilograms, of milk a year. >> Great, so, it's a dairy, we're here talking about digital transformation; it's always fascinating to me, kind of, the reach of digital transformation in everybody's company. Everyone says everyone's really a software company, you know, kind of built around a different product or service. So what were some of the challenges that you were looking towards in 2018-2019 in terms of digital transformation in this mature industry of dairy? >> The challenges that we're having is that you have to make sure that everything is safe. The products are safe, but also the data is safe. But also that we have a lot of things move through the Cloud, and also that the performance of those applications moves through the Cloud, is to the end user's satisfaction as well. So you're not looking only at transferring data safely from the Cloud into our offices, into our production environment, also protecting our production environments from everything that's going bad on the Internet, but also having to make sure that the applications are performing to the liking of the end user, so to speak, to our customer and our consumers. >> And was the objective to build new applications in the Cloud, or was it more kind of lift-and-shift some of your older applications in the Cloud? Because those are two very different challenges. >> Yeah, it's a lift-and-shift of our older applications. For example we're now in the middle of moving our SAP environment to the Cloud, at least the development test and user environments are moved to the Cloud. The other ones remain still within a traditional data center environment, and we have moved all of our Office 365, so that's Skype for Business, SharePoint, but all the other applications to the Cloud as well. >> Ha ha. >> And there we have all this additional transformation, the challenges that really comes back to the end user. >> Those are huge applications; SAP and Office 365. Those are not insignificant >> Yup. >> applications at all. So what were some of the challenges, I'm sure we have a lot of your peers watching this. What is some of the tips and tricks that you can share with them? Big challenges that you had to overcome? Things you thought about, maybe some things that you didn't think about in that transformation? >> If you look at the SAP landscape, it's the sheer amount of interfaces between the different components of SAP. That's was something that made us decide not to move SAP to the Cloud, not the production environment and the systems Environment. That was too big of an impact. That would take too long to do and we don't have that time. If you look at Office 365, the fact that Microsoft is very adverse in having anything in the middle, that brought us some real challenges. And and we did that already in 2014-2015 and we had our fair share of all fun and games. >> Ha ha ha, so what was different about it then than today? I mean obviously the Cloud has moved quite a bit. I don't know if you can mention which Cloud you put it in? >> Yeah correct, the fact that Zscaling now, does the updating, and all the changes within the Microsoft environment. So you don't have to do it yourself. You don't have to constantly monitor the ARS feeds from Microsoft, do all the changes yourself. Now it's all done by Zscaler, all the SSL bypass, the authentication bypass has been set correctly. So when that came on board that made our life a lot easier. >> Wow. >> The first part of the migration that we did in in Europe, especially in the bigger locations like Amersfoort, which has our headquarters, we really had our challenges to keep the end user satisfied. >> So just, again, kind of the scale of the end users. You mentioned that a couple of times. Is this in support of all the 23,000 people that are employed at FrieslandCampina? Is it a subset, or is it remote workers? How are you, kind of, allocating this effort? >> It is indeed all users, except for the factory workers. We don't allow people that work in production direct access to the internet. So those people are not as much excluded, but they have special PCs where they work on. So you're looking currently at about 15,000 people that are working with Office 365 directly on a day-to-day basis within FrieslandCampina. >> Wow, so the other thing you've talked about repeatedly is not only satisfaction with the users who are interfacing with the systems, but security. So what were some of the >> Yup. >> security considerations that you considered? How did you, kind of, bake security into your process? And, as we hear all the time as we go to different shows, including security shows, you know, it's not a bolt-on anymore; you have to be thinking security throughout the whole pipeline of the process. So how did you think about it? How did you attack it? How did you solve some of those problems? >> We started thinking about it already in 2012. We had, at that time within FrieslandCampina, a program specifically driven out of the LT environment, so the operational technology, so the production IT, so to speak, and they come up with an architecture based on the ISO 9599 norm, and we took that on board as IT and continued to work on that. So from 2014 we already had in our plans, the architecture to separate the various layers of the ISO 9599 framework into security zones, and we're constantly building on that one. We're refining it, we're improving it. >> Another question on security, really, and kind of the network architecture. Did you have to re-do anything within your network architecture to make this move to the Cloud possible? How did you address the network? >> It was a completely redesigned. It was a complete redesign. In the, previous to that, we just had IT, and we had one or two firewalls on-site that connects to a certain part of OT, and that was it. And now we have an architecture where we can integrate all different flavors of OT. There's no need for OT to have their own internet connections for maintenance, for support, et cetera. It's all integrated and secure. We made, and the reason for that is that you can't, in this day and age, have an island structure. Everything needs to be integrated. Everything needs to talk to each other, et cetera. >> So Erik, this interview is sponsored Zscaler. You're a customer of theirs. I'm just curious if you can talk a little bit about how, you know, their offering enabled you to do stuff that maybe you couldn't do before. How did you get involved with them? How are they working with them throughout this project? And how has that really been an enabler for your, you know, your move to the Cloud? >> In 2013-2014 there was a request from the business, a very strong drive from the business, that looked into breakouts, specifically to get localized contact, driven out of the, how do say that, marketing department. And then we looked at, okay, how can we enable that without creating firewalls on every location we're having, making it very expensive, et cetera. And at that time our provider, Verizon, came up, let's do a Cloud security with Verizon, with Zscaler, and do a proof of concept, and build on that one. So that worked. That gave us more regularity, if the people in the countries that needed localized content got the localized content, speeding up the application for the specific countries, so no happening from Tokyo, Japan, back to Singapore, back to websites in Japan. So that helps a lot, but like I said it was early days so we had our challenges in getting that working, getting it secure, getting the traffic to the correct Zscaler node, and so on. So we did make, from the initial set-up of this network, a number of iterations to come to where we are today. >> Great. >> So it's not one decision and then it works. No, it's a decision, see what has worked, which challenge you're getting, and then take it to the next level. >> Right. >> If we do the same thing with Zscaler as they're offering today it will be a lot quicker. We will have a number of those challenges that we had at that time, we will not have today. >> So as you look forward, what's kind of next. As you mentioned this isn't a one-stop shop. This is an ongoing process. What are, kind of, your next priorities, you know, over the next six months or so as you guys continue on this journey? >> To another data center, so not to the Cloud but to a different data center, so that's a big, really a big program. The other thing we're looking at is how can we improve remote access, provide extra benefits as part. We also look at the CPA product of Zscaler. We're doing a proof of concept, probably in the second half of this year. So, but on the other side, this year, 2019, FrieslandCampina is a, how do you say that in proper English, stop and look back and see what's really important, what we need to go forward. So it's not going crazy on all different kind of projects. It is, okay, what will actually contribute to the profitability of FrieslandCampina going forward. >> I think that's a really great close. I know it's late in Utrecht. I appreciate you taking some time out of your evening, and I was going to ask you the last question, you know, what advice would you have for your peers, for other practitioners that are looking at this, and, you know, either in the process or planning out their journey, but I think you hit on a big one right there which is really focus on the things that matter, focus on the things that really make a difference, and just don't start doing science experiments all over the place because you can, or it's fun, or it's interesting. >> Well, what my worries are for the future, and what, not keeps me awake at night, but that that's too much, is the bad that's going around in this world is getting stronger. They have more resources than we, as a company, has to defend for us against, and the acute challenge would be, is identifying what is your traffic that is good flowing in your network. Because if you're knowing what is good everything that's not defined as being good can be immediately defined as being bad. In that case you'll have a better position in preventing yourself against everything that's going wrong, like WannaCry. If you know that WannaCry is using a well known port used all over the place in FrieslandCampina. But if you then see that same port being used to communicate between servers that never communicated before, or to workstations to servers that never communicated before, then you say, okay, stop that one immediately, because that's not good. >> Right. >> And at that moment our biggest challenge is identifying what is the traffic that's good within our network. >> Well that's a great tip, you know, that's great. You know what the positives are, and if it doesn't make the the green list then shut 'er down and (chuckling) find out what's going on. >> Correct. >> All right. >> Correct. And the reason why we identified WannaCry is that somebody, for some reason, identified Hey this server never talked with that device: Why? >> Yeah, we're hearing that, >> And because, all. >> because with IOT you have to do that, right? >> You have to do that. >> 'Cause everything's IP connected, right? Whether it's the shades and the HVAC system all the way down to all your manufacturing processes, distribution processes, >> Correct. >> IT systems. >> Correct, correct. Our big advantage was that the call back to the command and control servers was already blocked by Zscaler so it didn't hurt us that much. >> Yeah, well good, we got to keep the cows safe, keep the milk safe, and the, >> Yeah, absolutely. >> what did you say, the 10 billion gallons of milk that you guys kick out a year, or something like that? >> Yep. >> It's amazing, ha ha. >> It's amazing. >> All right Erik, well thanks for sharing your story. Good luck on your future transformations, and good luck next week; thanks for stopping by. >> Thank you very much. >> All right. >> All right. >> All right, he's Erik, I'm Jeff, you're watching the CUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studios and Utrecht, Holland. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (funky music)

>> from Washington, D. C. It's the queue covering science logic. Symposium twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Science Logic. >> Hi, I'm student men and this is the Cubes coverage of Science Logic. Symposium twenty nineteen here at the Ritz Carlton in Washington, D. C. Been four hundred sixty. People here just finished the afternoon Kino, and they've actually gone off to the evening event. It's thie yet to be finished. Spy Museum. They get a good three sixty view of Washington D. C. So the hallways are a little echoing in quiet but really excited to have on the final guest of the day. Eric Gordon, who's the vice president of business development and alliances as science logic. Erik, thanks so much for joining me, >> thanks to you. Great to be here. >> All right, so busy. Dev and Alliances. I've talked to a number of your partner's. I've gone through a lot of things, but you wear, I think, just like your CEO. A few different hats. Ah, and your old let's let's get into what your role is that the company? >> Yeah, it's actually changed over time, but for the most part I've to court responsibilities. One is I'm looking after our ecosystem of technology partners. And so we have from key strategic CE that we work with in the marketplace, in the cloud space on the data center, all across the ecosystem, a lot of different technologies. But we also have products that we resell input on our priceless that combined to create a solution for our customers in the second half of what my responsible is really focused on. What is our product strategy around integration? Automation? Because those Air Corps components to our platform and I look after that with several different teams. >> So let's talk about that the ecosystem pit person, the alliances. Because I got a lot of shows. I talked to a lot of companies, and it's all too easy for companies to be like, Oh, we're we're the best and we do so many different things. And when I first heard about the space in a ops, it's like, Oh, well, I I Ops is replacing a lot of waves and, you know, your average customer replaces fourteen tools. I heard there's one customer who replaces fifty tools, but at the same time, there was a strong focus about integrations in deeper even some of the products that you say, Yeah, there's overlap in that competitive, you know, you're working with those environments, so give us a little bit of the philosophy, how you balance that, you know, we want to do it all and help our customers to do lots of different things. And especially when you get to big customers and service providers, we understand that it's a big world and there never is that, you know, mythical single pane of glass. >> Yeah, no, totally agree. And we hear this a lot. You know, I've got a tool for this. I got a tool for that and or I had to Vendor come in and say that they could do it all. And you know, really, At the end of the day, if there's there's no one vendor on DH, you know the Venn diagrams of functionalities, air overlapping. That's the nature of the industry. And when we saw this on the early days of it with the big monopolies. But I think right now it's it's around. How do we saw the customer problem? Mohr effectively, From our perspective, we look at the combination of things. First is is what solutions out there give us good data data that we can use data that we can enrich, how we can leverage that to help drive better insights from other types of data that we collect so that theirs is where integration is a keep part of this on DH. What we know is that ultimately in our space, we're doing about monitoring a core collection. We're goingto have to click with everybody, so we're gonna have to integrate with any partner that might have some form of I. P are connected through an I p address to some sort of a p I. We need that data. So we have partnerships on that side. I think really, what's interesting is when we think about things like workflow or orchestration or types of mediation, we might integrate with other technologies to enrich that data further. So we look for partners that ultimately our customers air using things that we can do consolidation and drive better outcome with that enrich date experience. >> Yes, so let's drill down one little bit if you talk about like, you know a PM and SM tools out there some recent announcements and and you digging deeper on there. What what are some of the highlights? So one >> thing is, if you already have, like, agents are often come up, Our customs says, Well, I've got an A P M. Agent that's already doing some things. Well, that's great. We can leverage that, that there's some good insight that we can gather from either to apologies or other metrics or like in user experience. But we also go deeper on other aspects, like on the network side or on the infrastructure side, or on the the cloud service aside. So, you know, ultimately, it's a conversation of say, what? What can we leverage? What, what's accurate, what's in real time? And if there's things that we can, you know, gather, then that's our primary strategy. So I you know, I do think the ecosystem plays a key role in a i ops, but really, to do that, it's run automation because anything that we do, we have to do with scale and we have to do with security. We have to do it with the intent of driving some form of outcome. And so, you know, those are the key principles behind selecting technology partners. >> Okay, Let's talk some about that automation. It was a big discussion in the keynote this morning. Really talking about the maturity model. One of the analysts up there says you really want to make sure you separate things like, you know, the machine learning piece of it with the automation. The observation I've made a couple of times is, you know, yes. We all know you can automate a really bad process. And so I need toe, you know, make sure, you know, do I have good data And, you know, how am I making automation make me better Not just, you know, to change things. >> Yeah, well, I think it's Science Lodge that we look at. Automation is in every part of what we do within the product. From the from the collection of how we automate it scale how we consolidate that data. And then we're doing a lot of the data preparation using automation technologies. And then when we start to analyze and enrich that data, we're also using it Other algorithmic approaches, for example, topology and context. So if we know that some things connected weaken Dr An automation to make an inference and that data then feeds into the final step, which is around how we action on that. So we drive automation in the classic sense to say trigger workflow or, let's say, update another system of record or system of truth like a C M G B or a notification. And so one of things that we did hear from Garden this morning is engaging in an SM process. Is a core part of AI ai ops as muchas data collection and driving other forms of automation. >> All right, Do you have some examples of you know how automation you're helping your customers love any customer stories you've got along that line? >> Well, >> really. You know, there's so many stories we're hearing the halls of Symposium, and so it's it's it's hard to pick one, but, you know, I think all ten times what we say is, what what's driving your service desk time like you've got people you know, looking at all of these different dispirit systems, and we can look at it. Let's say a top end of your most sort of frequented events or alerts, or even look at your top service desk incidents and say, How could we automate that, you know. And some of that automation could be at the technology level, you know, simplest as restarting a service or prove you re provisioning of'Em. Or it could be clearing a log or even maybe shutting down an event because it's irrelevant. So there's There's several different examples in the cloud as well. Terms of how things air provisioning attached. And if we see something out of a policy, we can alarm that say, hey, maybe my storage costs are going to accelerate because someone made a bad change. So there's different ways that we can apply automation during the life cycle. But I think enhancing the service management component perhaps is one of the most impactful ones, >> you know. So, Eric, we azan industry automation been something we've been talking about for quite a while now, and they're they're sometimes pushback of, you know, from the end, users especially, you know, some of the practitioners out there as you know. Well, I could do it better. You know, the fear that you're going to lose your job. How are you seeing that progressing and you know, how were things different today? Both from a technology standpoint, as well as from your customers. Can't wait. >> I think if you asked any enterprise CIA already service provider, service delivery manager, they'd always say, I'd love to operate as much as I can when you get down on the practitioner level. You know, obviously I think there's some sort. Like I I do my job, Thank you very much. I have my favorite wit, my process. So I think there's a conversation depending on. You know, if we're saying hey from the practitioner side, is there set of data that you need or set of scripts? Or are things that you're doing manually that we can put into a workflow? And at the at the business layer, it's like, Do you feel like you're getting the value from some of the investments you've made? And is, how is automation? Help you realize that an example there is. We see oftentimes is around the quality of data that's going into the C, M. D. B and from AA AA. Lot of times we see that their investment in technology is like service now, and other platforms is fairly high expense, and they want to optimize that, and they want to realize the power of automation at the at the service level. So if we can, if we can convince, if you will, through a set of really concrete use cases that the data coming from science logic at the speed and the quality can actually improve the seemed to be to >> the level of >> really efficient automation. All of a sudden, people start to see that as a change as an opportunity. And that's where I think a I Ops is helping change the narrative, to say how automation Khun B really, really applied rather than just being this mystical concept that is hard to do. And, you know, people don't liketo think that a robot's taking their job. I think what's gonna happen is that machine learning algorithms are going to make jobs easier and, you know, ultimately were far, far from the point where a ized doing something and some sort of, you know, crazy automata way. But I think it's the deep learning, moving a machine learning to you. No good quality data sets that dr meaningful insights that's giving us a lot better view until where automation could play in the >> future. Yeah, absolutely. It's our belief that you know, automation. There's certain things that you probably don't want to do because repetitive, it's boring or mistake prone on DH. Therefore, you know automation can really help those environments move forward. You could move up the stack. You can manage those environment. There's definitely some retraining that that needs to happen often. But you know that the danger is if you're if you're doing now what you were doing five years ago, chances are your competition is moving along and, you know, finding a better way to do it. >> You know, just a point on this soup is really around the velocity of data that's coming in. So we're seeing, you know, we talked about the three bees. You know, the volume of data. You have to use automation to be able to manage that huge amount of different data sources, the variety. There's no human that can process the amount of machine information from the amount of technologies that you have on DH that you know. Obviously it's speed, right. The velocity and that is that is clearly not going to be something that any human could be capable of doing. And so there's a relationship here between technology and human processes and science logics and a really interesting position right now to really kind of help with that process. But more importantly, accelerate the value by being all to process it and make it intelligent. >> Wait, Erica, you're saying I'm not neo from the Matrix and I can't, you know, read through everything and be able to move faster than physics allows. Give >> yourself maybe fifteen, twenty years. We might be. You know that that you know, I don't think that that many people can really predict the impact of the you know, we'LL say machinery, evolving toe, artificial intelligence and there's it's going to be very used, case specific. But we do know one thing is that algorithms? Air helping. But algorithms are dependent on that clean data stack, right? And And if you can't handle the scale, then obviously there's going. It's going to be minimized in terms. Is total utility >> alright? Well, Eric, I get the good to let you give us that the final word from science logic from Symposium twenty nineteen on the Cube. >> So you know, the first thing is is this is there's two things that we learned from this event. The first thing is, is how our customers you're evolving in this dynamic space. And what we know is that if if you don't change, it's going to be a problem. Because the only consistent thing is change and change is happening faster on it. And we call that disruption. And so what we want to do is we want to understand how science AJ is a technology company. I can really help that customer go through that transition with confidence. And then, more importantly, is what could we do? Delivering better, more enrich solutions to our customers that actually are changing the way the game is played. And so we feel like we're a disrupter in the A ops market. We are. Certainly Forrester has helped us recognize that. But But we're not done work. We're continuing on this journey. >> All right, Well, Eric, routine. Thank you so much for sharing your insights and the journey towards Aye, Aye, Ops. Thanks so much to. All right. Well, that comes to an end of what we're doing here at science Logic. Symposium twenty nineteen. I know. I learned a lot. I hope you did too. I'm stew Minutemen. Thanks so much from our whole crew. Here it's Silicon Angle Media's The Cube. Check out the cube dot net for all the videos from this show, as well as where we'LL be in the future. Reach out if you have any questions and once again, thanks for joining us.

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering AWS re:Invent 2018! Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. It's the Cube's live coverage here in Las Vegas, at AWS re:Invent 2018. I'm John Furrier, here with Lauren Cooney. Host of the Cube: Amazon web services. There are maybe 2,000 people here at their event, re:Invent annual conference, breaking it all down. Storage, computer networking, part of the main infrastructures involving changing very rapidly and spawning new use cases, new value propositions, it's creating a great ecosystem dynamic. We're here with Erik Kaulburg, who is the vice president of Infinidat, Cube alumni, great to see you again. >> Nice to see you as well. >> Been on the Cube multiple times. I think last time it was at VMWorld, or a studio? >> At, actually, our product launch for the cloud storage solution, as well. >> So, you guys got a great reputation. Take a minute, just, for the folks who might now know Infinidad, explain what you guys do, and your disruptive innovation. >> So, for Infinidad, we're all about tier-one environments, and it's the data piece of that environment, today, although that may not be forever. And, it's consumed through a couple of different modalities, so one of our big pieces of news earlier this year was that we were going beyond just the InfiniBox solution, which we shipped over four exabytes of to enterprises all around the world today, and broadening that to address the secondary storage market with InfiniGuard and Neutrix Cloud, which is a way to consume our capabilities completely as an iAd service in conjunction with other public clouds. >> Let's get that in a second, I want to get to the product in a second, but I want to first get your take on the market conditions, cloud storage, you're seeing pure storage had a big announcement of now they're doing a device, now doing software on premise, Amazon's going to have a device on premise, it's up for the cloud. Like, what the hell is going on? Storage is certainly growing like crazy. What does the market look like? Obviously, API, microservices, these are important things. Data still is the number one opportunity, but still a challenge. You guys are the center of it, what's the market look like to you? >> Absolutely, I couldn't agree more with the idea that data is at the middle of everything, and the lines are getting blurry between on-prem and public cloud environments as well. So, what I'm seeing in general is that companies which used to sell boxes, or primarily sell boxes today, are trying to figure out ways to play in the public cloud environments, and they're taking one of two paths. One is to develop a solution that's kind of leveraging the built-in infrastructure from the major public clouds, and the other is to build alongside it and enable those major public clouds, and potentially do so in a slightly less captive manner. So, that's what I'm kind of seeing across the industry, with regards to the public cloud. >> What's the role of storage here at re:Invent, because, like I said, Holy Trinity is of infrastructures, computer storage, and networking, and as that evolves, with each one having its new capabilities with Cloudify, is enabling new opportunities. What is the storage role now in the modern era of cloud as it is today? What's your view on that? >> Well, part of it is just providing excellent data services that are at the core of so many of these emerging environments. Like, we were listening to Monday Night Live yesterday, and one of the distinguished folks on there from the machine learning team was talking about the importance of getting more training data, so that you can run these more advanced machine learning workflows, and get things done quicker. We use less PHP type resources to get a problem solved, so I think that category of solutions, where you're using more storage capabilities as an enabler for more business value, or more value in the end application, is a trend that's going to absolutely continue for quite a while. >> What's the hottest area in Amazon cloud native world for storage that you see a lot of customers gravitating to? What's the number one? >> Well, I think, in general if you look at the adoption patterns of their block, file, and objects storage offerings, object is still dominating the vast majority of those kinds of use cases, and it comes from the perspective of applications that were written with cloud native services in mind. However, we think, I think, that there's a whole opportunity there, outside of the traditional, traditional cloud native object architectures, in the block and file arena, which has largely been untapped by the data and storage services, and that's an area where we and others in the industry are looking to augment. >> What is the competition? What's, like, NetApp doing? Let me ask, everyone's got to be on mobile clouds. Amazon, clearly the leader. They're making the market, so unless, say Kubernetes doesn't intermediate their services, for the most part, that's the market leader, but you got to play on a lot of clouds, because customers aren't going to have one cloud, they're going to certainly be hybrid on premises and cloud, but certainly be on multiple clouds. What's, like, NetApp and these guys doing? What's the competition doing? >> So, what I see NetApp doing is taking that kind of cloud captive approach, to be honest, what I see is they've got tied immigration, which is very impressive, with several major public cloud vendors. However, the challenge is, when you want cross those silos, you have a little bit more complexity that arises with that approach. >> Like what? >> So, you may have to spin up a separate set of data in Azure. Let's say, if you want to have an application cross the boundaries between AWS and Azure. >> Okay, let's get back to your storage solution. Neutrix Cloud, what is this about? Explain the product at a high level, we drill into it. >> So on a fundamental level, we believe in flexibility of Infinidad, and that's extended through all sorts of aspects of our product portfolio, but specifically, with regards to cloud storage, Neutrix delivers flexibility of having an outside set of infrastructure that's still tightly integrated with the major public clouds, including AWS, of course, and it delivers high resiliency, the five nines SLA, which we've talked about, which we believe is best in class, as well as enterprise-grade capabilities that previously you really had to look to an on-prem array to be able to achieve. Large-scale snapshot operations, asynchronous and synchronous replication natively built in, all these kinds of things, which make it easier to take tier one applications from an on-prem environment and bring those to the public cloud environments. >> And what's the core problem that you solved with this product? >> It's, you can't get tier one cloud storage today. What we would argue, anyway, and our customers are telling us that the features and capabilities, and even business guarantees provisions around the cloud storage offerings in the market today simply don't exist to the level that they need to be to support the last, let's say, 30% of applications that have not yet moved on to the public clouds. So, that's what we're addressing, making it easier for storage to accomplish that. >> You guys always have impressive customers, always see the big names, give some examples of some use cases. >> So, our customers have fallen into two categories, with regards to Neutrix Cloud adoption. The easy case, and the most natural for many of them, since they are buying our on-prem infrastructure at a large scale today, is, well, let's start replicating that infrastructure to the Neutrix cloud environment, maybe do it as a disaster-recovery target, things like that, and we think that there's value there. There's lots of companies which do DR as a service, to be honest, we don't see that as necessarily the core competency, but it's a stepping stone to the second use case, which is cloud adoption for these tier one applications, and bringing them the flexibility of potentially having multiple cloud platforms addressing the same data. >> We talked about the cloud guys, so we don't want to put you on the spot here, because this is the same patterns happening. Old world storage was stack up the storage, and provision the storage, stuff goes on there, block, file, that good stuff. Now, with the cloud, and Amazon, this is where I want to get the Amazon tie-in with you guys, because storage is not necessarily just a magic, quadrant-like thing. Oh, back-up and recovery, this and that, you're starting to see much more of a platform approach. And successful platforms enable things to be successful. It's not like I built it for this, purpose-built kind of storage. Do you guys see yourselves as a data platform, and if so, what does that mean, and what are those key value points that you're creating off that platform? >> I think you said it, actually, better than I did, that ultimately, we want customers to be able to consume our differentiated data services in whatever modality they prefer. So, if that's an on-prem infrastructure piece, if that's a back-up optimizing environment, if that's a public cloud service, we offer all those today, and customers can take their data from one to the other or even view it as a single, kind of, data architecture that crosses all of those traditional silos. >> So, were you looking at, you know, kind of one of the things that I'm listening to you guys chat, and one of the things that I'm thinking of is, how hard is it for a customer to actually adopt your technology and deliver it, you know, utilize it, across multiple environments? >> So, many of the traditional on-prem infrastructure players have great barriers associated with their public cloud services. We're not one of them. We took an intentionally different approach, and learned from companies like AWS on how you can get clients easily onto the solution, how they can pay for it easily, and how, ultimately, they can deploy it in a large scale public cloud environment very easily. That's a huge part of the investment that we put into developing the Neutrix Cloud service. >> Right. >> So we can have clients up and running in less than a day, from initial contact to large scale adoption, and it could be even faster than that as well. >> Now onto your relations with Amazon. What's it like, what's the details of it, what's the value, what's the connection point? >> I think we all agree that tier one applications are the last major bastion for public cloud adoption. These are things which you would have had on legacy big iron infrastructure, and so, to the extent Neutrix Cloud enables those tier one applications to move to the public cloud, to move to AWS, there's a lot of synergy there in the relationship, so we're absolutely an Amazon technology partner. We enjoy great working relationship with them, there are certainly areas where we overlap, but if we all agree on the end goal, we've been able to make some impressive business strategies. >> So, who are you competitors that you're most, kind of, focused on? Well, you shouldn't be focused on your competitors, you should be focused on what you're doing, but who are the competitors that kind of keep you up a little bit at night? >> I would say others that people would lump in this space, include NetApp Solutions in the public cloud environments, we see a couple of small start-ups, like Zadara, for example, from time to time, but to be honest, the biggest competitive kind of scenario that we see is just using the native public cloud services. And customers have to think about, well, I'm planning on replatforming my application, how am I going to design it from a storage perspective and often they don't even think that there are alternatives beyond the native offerings that could potentially add more value to their environments. So, that's when we come into the conversation, and from that point forward, generally, if we have a good enterprise type workload, the value proposition is instant and obvious. >> You know, when you guys came out, we've been following you guys since your founding, Gabe and I would always talk about Infinidat. You got good pedigree of a team. Classic storage. You have a good storage market. You guys take a different approach with this start-up. Founders did this time. How do you describe the key differentiator for you guys? What's the, you mentioned earlier, it's the tier one storage, but what's the secret sauce, what's the culture like? People want to peek inside Infinidad. What are they buying? What are they really getting, besides the product performance? What's the culture like, what's the company's view on the future world, serious insight. >> I think there's several elements to that, of course, but a lot of it comes from that founding DNA. So, Moshe Yanai, who basically defined the enterprise storage category overall back in EMC, had a succession of teams that he's built over the years, and he's really brought all of those key elements together. Three generations of storage expertise. >> Successful, by the way, three generations of exits, >> Absolutely, yeah. Building an organic business, selling a business, and now this is the business that he wants to leave to his grandchildren at some point. >> How's it going so far, how's business in general? >> Well, you know, we're private, so I can't say specifics, but I'd say we're definitely heading in the right direction. Growth has been phenomenal, the adoption of our portfolio solutions, in addition to just the core product, has really put us in a position of a very strong, long-term independence. >> Portfolios in terms of product capabilities or industries you're serving, or both? >> It's, actually, on both fronts. I was referring to the product portfolio but we've definitely broadened from our initial base in the financial services sector, which is a hard nut to crack in general, as a, you know, into a lot of different use cases, because it turns out that industries have a high demand for data across virtually every sector. So, we go where the data is. >> What's next? What's the next milestone for you guys? What're you lookin' to do next? >> Well, we did just have a major product release, so I'm glad that we've that, you know, out there, we're getting customers in the cloud space. I think the end of this year is going to be very, very strong for us from a business perspective and then next year, lots of great product announcements, and then ultimately, you know, we'll say some more on the business momentum there as well. >> All right, Erik, thanks for coming on the Cube show, thanks for the update. Infinidad, check them out, successful exit, multiple ties in the entrepreneurial team there, growing, doing great, storage has been going away, neither is networking, and neither is computing, it's only going to get better, stronger, as the cloud brings in more capabilities with machine learning and more use cases, new work loads, new capabilities. The Cube bringing it down with two sets here in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier and Lauren Cooney, on set one. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (electronic music)

(relaxing music) >> We're back, joining me now are Gregory Touretsky and Erik Kaulberg, both senior directors at Infinidat overseeing much of the company's portfolio. Gregory, let's talk multi-cloud. It's become a default part of almost all IT strategies, but done wrong it can generate a lot of data related costs and risks. What's Infinidat's prospective? >> So before we go there, I would mention this phenomenon for data gravity. So we see, as many of our customers report that, as much as the amount of data grows in there organization, it becomes much harder for them to move applications and services to a different data center or to a different public cloud. So, the more data they accumulate, the harder it becomes to move it. And they get locked into this, so it is so. We believe that any organization deserves a way to move freely between different public clouds or data centers, and that's the reason why we are thinking about this multi-cloud solution. And how we can provide easy way for the companies to move between different organizations, different data centers. >> So clearly there's a need to be able to optimize your cost to the benefits associated with data. Erik, as we think about this, what are some of the key considerations that most enterprises have to worry about? >> I think that the biggest one overall is the strategic nature of cloud choices. At one point cloud was a back room, it was a dark shadow IT kind of thing. You saw some IT staff member go sign up for Gmail and that spread, or Dropbox or things like that. But now CIOs are thinking, "Well I got to get "all these cloud services under control "and I'm spending a whole lot of money "with one of the big two cloud providers." And so that's really kind of the strategic rationale for why we're saying organizations, especially large enterprises, require this kind of sovereign storage that dis-aggregates the data from the public clouds to truly enable the possibility of cloud competition as well as to truly deliver on the promise of the agility of public clouds. >> So, great conversation, but we're here to actually talk about something specifically Nutrix. Gregory, what is it? >> Sure, so Nutrix is a completely new offering that we come with. We are not selling here any box or appliance for the customers to deploy in their data center. We are looking about a cloud service that is provided by Infinidat. We are building our infrastructure in a major caller, partnering with Equinix and others. We are finding a data centers that are adjacent to the major public clouds, such AWS or Azure, to ensure very low latency and high bandwidth connectivity. And then we build our infrastructure there with the Infinibox Storage and the networking gear that allows our customers to really use this for two main reasons. So one use case is disaster recovery. If a customer has our storage on peram, in his data center, they may use our efficient implication mechanism to copy data, and get second copy outside of the data without building the second data center. So in case of disaster they can recover. The other use case that we see is very interesting for the customers. Is an ability to consume data while running the application in the public cloud, directly from our storage. So they can do any first mount or ice scuzzy mount to storage available from our cloud, and then run the application. We are also providing capability to consume the same file system from multiple clouds at the same time. So you may run your application both in Amazon and Microsoft clouds and still access and share the data. >> Sounds like it's also an opportunity to simplify ramping into a cloud as well. Is that one of the use cases? >> Absolutely, yeah, so it's basically a combination of those two use cases that I described. The customers may applicate data from the on peram environment into the Nutrix cloud and then consume it from the public cloud. >> So Erik, this concept has been around for awhile, even if it hasn't actually been realized. What makes this, in particular, different? >> Well I think there's a couple of elements to it. So number one is, we don't really see that there's a true enterprise grade public cloud storage offering today for active data. And so we're basically bringing in all that rich heritage of Infinibox capabilities and those technologies we've developed over a number of years to deliver an enterprise grade storage except without the box as a service. So that's a big differentiator for us versus the native public cloud storage offerings. And then, when you look at the universe of other companies who are trying to develop, let's say cloud adjacent type offerings, we believe we have the right combination of that scalable technology with the correct business model that is aligned to the way that people are buying cloud today. So that's kind of the differentiation in a nut shell. >> It's not just a box, there's also some managed services associated with it right? >> Well actually it's not a box, that's the whole idea. So the entire thing is a consumable service. It is you're paying buy the drink, it's a simple flat pricing of nine cents per gigabyte per month. And we, it's essentially as easy to consume as the native public clouds storage offerings. >> So as you look forward and imagine the role that this is going to play in conjunction with some of the other offerings, what should customers be looking to out of Nutrix in conjunction with the rest of the portfolio? >> Sure, so basically they can get, as Erik mentioned, what they like with Inifinbox without dealing with the box. They get fully managed service, they get freedom of choice, they can move applications easily between different public clouds and to or from the on peram environment without thinking about the egress costs. And they can get great capabilities, great features like, snapshots hideable, snapshots without overpaying to the public cloud providers. >> So, better economics, greater flexibility, better protection in the risking of the data overall. >> Absolutely! >> At scale! >> Yes >> Alright, great! So I want to thank very much, Gregory, Erik, for being hereon theCUBE. We'll be right back to get the analyst perspective from Eric Burgener from IDC. (upbeat electronic music)

(electronic music) >> Narrator: From Gillette stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2018 presented by SiliconANGLE. >> I'm Stu Miniman, and we're at the VTUG Winter Warmer 2018. Always love at these user conferences, and we get to talk to a lot of the users, and we've had a bunch. Next user we have on the program is Erik Kurlanska, who's a systems engineer at MMC. Thanks so much for joining us, Erik. >> Thanks. >> Alright, tell us a little bit about your background. You're coming down here from Maine. The people that run this event are also from Maine. >> Yeah, I mean, it's a nice event. I've been for the past four years, and I learn something new every year. It's a good time. It's a good networking moment for a bunch of people, and there's always something new on the horizon. That's what I like. >> So you're a systems engineer. >> Tell us a little bit about what you do in your role, the industry you're in, things like that. >> Yeah, I'm in the healthcare industry in Maine and like you said, what I do is basically one of the lead virtualization people in my group and we're just basically every day working on VMware and new products coming in, new applications, building them up and testing and that kind of great stuff. >> Can you give us just thumbnail sketches to kind of location, number of servers, number of people on your team? >> Erik: Sure, yeah. >> How do you manage it as to number of VMs or however? >> On our team right now there's three of us and that's just the virtualization team. We have a couple thousand VMs, probably 110 servers, Blades, all Cisco Blades nowadays. And that's the extent of what we have, and for storage we have many, many petabytes of storage. >> Okay, tell me. You're in healthcare. You've got virtualization. The good thing is, there's nothing changing in your environment, right? >> (laughs) Right. >> There's not new requirements from the business. I'm sure they're throwing tons of money at you, and the government stays completely out of your way. So what are some of the challenges you're facing? >> Exactly. The challenges there are, again, it's money. What can you do for such a small amount of money? Again, we're trying to find very good tools to monitor our everything, networking, servers, virtualization. That's one piece that we've had trouble in the past with a good tool to monitor everything across the board. We're just having a hard time trying to find that, to be honest, so it's a struggle. >> Yeah, tell me what tools have you worked through and what's the gap? I always love to hear, it's like, "Okay, hey vendors. "You're listening. Here's a user that saying you are failing "To meet the requirements that they have." So come on, give them product requirements. >> We've tried a few big ones, and we want a monitor. So for instance, from VMware, we've just stood up vRealize, We have vRealize Business, vRealize Operations, Log Insight, bringing all that in now and personally I think some of that should have been just part of the product to start. So it is what it is. But that's a whole subset of tools that we need just to manage our virtualization environment. We also have another tool called Turbonomic. We've used that for years, and it's done pretty well for us. But again on the networking side, that's a whole different department. So those guys have their own separate tools. They use WhatsUp Gold. They've had challenges with that, and all along the way, every different vendor, like we have Epic for one of our major EMRs, and they have their own sets of monitoring tools for just Epic, so it's tough to get one straight answer from one company. We also have another product called ControlUp. I don't know if you're familiar with that one. For all of them to give us one concise answer, it's nearly impossible. >> Yeah, unfortunately we have this joke that single pane of glass is spelled P-A-I-N. >> Exactly. >> Because that is what IT feels when they're trying to do this these days. If you were to have the magic wand out there, what are you looking for? Obviously it needs to be free and support everything, but what are some of the big gaps that you see? >> Part of it is, integration with the management interface tools. We have Cisco's UCS Manager. That's one interface. You have to go to manage this. You can't get there from here kind of thing. I'm from Maine, so. (Stu chuckles) You can't manage your Cisco stuff right from VMware, and then you have ControlUp that you need to go to another pane. There's just 10 panes of glass. You can spend all day looking at 10 different things and get eight to ten different answers. >> I thought vCenter should be at the center of a lot of things there. Don't most of the vendors kind of integrate well? I would think especially all the VMware products would have a similar look and feel now. >> They should. They should. >> They're just not meeting up to what they need to. >> I think they're trying with like Lifecycle Manager for instance from VMware. They're trying to get there, but it's not there yet. It really isn't. If you start greenfield, I would say, and you start with Lifecycle Manager, and you bring in all those products in one fell swoop, it'll probably work great, but for us, that hasn't been the case. >> Okay. Talk about what brings you to an event here. What have you seen so far? What interests you in the keynotes? When are you going to go to the breakouts? I'm sure the hallway conversations are of use. >> Sure. The hallway conversations are one of the big things for us because you meet people in the industry, a lot of them are doing the same thing, using the same tools, having the same problems, and it's great to talk about them and come up with solutions between ourselves and converse in that fashion. It's a great experience to come to these. You learn a lot from a lot of people. >> Any specific technologies or areas that you're specifically interested in digging into? >> So Hyper-Converged, we're trying to get into that a little bit more, and there's three or four major players, and we're evaluating all of them now. I've spoken to other people at other hospitals locally that have some Hyper-Converged, and they're happy with one product versus another, so I'm just trying to, pros and cons of that, see what we can. >> Let me ask, is there a certain business challenge just to simplify overall going into Hyper-Converged? Is the economics of it, the management of it, what's kind of the business objective to look at that space? >> We have a couple smaller hospitals, and they have a lot of legacy storage, a lot of legacy servers and Blades, and again, Hyper-Converged is a good fit for them because they can just plop everything in one unit and call it good, and so we're trying to do that for a couple smaller hospitals and kind of bring them into the fold that way. >> How does cloud fit in your overall picture, or does it fit into your discussion today? Cloud, the SaaS application, everybody's using some, public cloud regulations might be hurting you. But what is the cloud scenario for you? >> Right now we have just a few apps that are cloud-based. And that's it. Not a lot in the cloud because we're healthcare so far. >> Alright, Erik, anything else from kind of the hallway conversation that you're hearing, some of the big challenges you're seeing, or what people are excited about these days? >> I think right now the big thing is the Spectre/Meltdown thing. Nobody really knows what it's going to do. UCS, we're still waiting for Cisco to come out with firmware for the Blades and kind of to go through that testing. VMware came out with some patches, they pulled them back. So it's kind of a big mess, and it worries us a bit. However, all of our Blades, everything is RAM-bound basically for us. We even have most of our Blades have 768 gigs of RAM, but CPUs at 20%. The memory's 90% used, so that's what it is. >> So just if I hear you right, if all of a sudden they said, "Hey, you're going to get 30% less "performance there," you'd be like, "Yawn. That really didn't impact us." >> Exactly. >> It's more the security gaps that you need fixed now. >> And we can't fix them because the solution isn't there. So, yeah. >> Stu: Hoo, boy. >> It's tough. It's a new challenge every day. >> (laughs) Yeah, just last thing. How do you keep up with everything that's going on? >> Well that's, again, a great question. I think it's hard. It gets harder and harder, and they want you to do more with less every day. I'm not sure how we keep up, really. Get a tool that can do everything. That just doesn't exist yet. >> Erik Kurlanska, really appreciate you sharing with your peers, which is really a main function of a user group like this. We're thrilled to be able to share this with our community. I'm Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube covering VMworld 2017 brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. (electronic music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone. Live here, day three coverage, I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. VMworld 2017, we're in the the VM village for wall to wall coverage of VMworld. Our next two guests, Erik Kaulberg who's the senior director of cloud solutions and Jason Chamiak who's the senior systems engineer of Peak 10. Guys, welcome back. Infinidat, you guys are doing great. >> Absolutely, it's been a wonderful year for us. >> We were just talking on camera, got surprised when we kind of went live. Day three, and we were just talking about Infinidat's history and the growth you guys have and just kind of the DNA of the company, how you guys attack the accounts and then kind of profile storage guys you go after and you're disruptive but you're not doing anything super-radical technically, you just come in blocking and tackling with storage solutions for big industrial clients. Give us this update. >> Absolutely, I mean I'd say that the disruption is in two areas. One, it's in how we're approaching the clients and where we're going in the data center. Most typical disruptors would start at the edge and eventually get to the core but Infinidat's modus operandi, from day one, was let's start in the core and then broaden the aperture so we're out there displacing VMAX, we're out there displacing legacy storage arrays that are used for Tier 1 workloads from day one and that strategy has worked out great for us with 260% year over year growth just this past quarter. It's been a wild ride. >> So one of the things that people may or may not know is that this whole scene here at VMworld is all about disruption, oh, the computer industry's thrown upside down. You guys have a very simple approach, come in and just get a better price performance, more bang for the buck if you will, but really deliver some of that core storage. Can you just take a minute to elaborate on that specific point? >> Absolutely, so the story line is really about commodity hardware paired with awesome software that makes all the difference versus the traditional architectures. So what we do with our combination of flash and DRAM and high-capacity hard drives allows us to make sure that the workloads are in the right place at the right time all the time and that means something transformational for our large-scale clients. And the challenge that we see as, versus all the other startups in this space or the smaller companies in this space, that ultimately you have real challenges doing that at scale unless you have the intelligence and the expertise that our three generations of storage leadership have really brought together. >> So Jason, I wonder if we can bring Peak 10 and ViaWest, recent merger, but bring you into the conversation. Maybe talk about, briefly, your company and your role. >> Yeah, sure, so Peak 10 and ViaWest were a hybrid IT company. We specialize in collocation and cloud services and we package that in with managed and professional services. We were looking for a way to consolidate a bunch of the dedicated client arrays that we had out there and we needed a good shared solution that offered high performance that we could throw a bunch of different workloads onto. We evaluated a bunch of flash arrays and other hybrid arrays and Infinidat just happened to outperform pretty much everything that we benchmarked. >> And your role is to look after that infrastructure? >> Yeah, so currently, we have 11 InfiniBox arrays ranging from the 1000 series up to the 6000. We have about four petabytes of physical space and almost 10 petabytes of virtual space. >> So, before we get into the environment, we want to do that, what are the, I mean, as a service provider, obviously, SLAs are super important, you're merging companies so you got a bunch of different infrastructure, you're going to have to deal with that down the road. But like a lot of service providers, you mentioned sort of you wanted to consolidate things, you are probably servicing different workloads with different types of infrastructure but what are the big drivers in your business? You know, cloud obviously, the big wave is here, what are the things that are driving your business that effect IT specifically? >> So one of the things is we want our clients to be able to get to market faster. So, with the InfiniBox, the implementation and configuration of it is extremely simplified over some of the other storage products that we've used in the past. So we're able to get our clients up to speed, they start to use the infrastructure sooner and the performance benefit is amazing. We've actually had testimonials from clients that have put their workload that they had residing on other vendor products, as soon as we put them on, even a shared InfiniBox, not even a dedicated but a shared InfiniBox with other workloads running, they've seen as much as a 500% to 800% improvement in application performance. >> So, paint a picture of your environment, at least the part that you're responsible and have visibility on. What's it look like? I mean, kind of workloads, servers, storage capacities, I mean, whatever you feel comfortable sharing. >> Yeah, sure. So I work on the platform engineering team and we're responsible for the infrastructure and code that make up our client center cloud offering and that is based on VMware and the InfiniBox. So we have a mixed workload. We have clients that have physical servers connecting that run Oracle RAC installations. They'll have Hadoop clusters, large SQL servers, whether that's normal OLTP or analytical workloads in addition to large and small VMware deployments. And we just run that all together on the same unit and there's no hotspots. >> Dave: Are you virtualizing RAC? >> I don't believe so, we may have some. >> Dave: But it's not possible and common that people don't? >> Yeah, I can tell you we do have some virtualized SQL server clusters out there along with physical, you name it, we have it out there. >> Okay, so take us back to pre-Infinidat. What was life like? What was the conversation like with Infinidat? You know, small company comes in knocking at your door, hey, I got an array to sell you. Take us through that story. >> We ended up with, like I mentioned before, we ended up with a lot of dedicated arrays for clients. I think, at one point, we were over 70 dedicated arrays. >> Dave: 70? >> Yeah. So that becomes kind of a management nightmare when it comes to patching and things like that. But even before we get to how we got that many, for each individual client, we try and talk to them, take a look at their workload and then from that, we would have to model what kind of RAID groups we need, how many disks within those RAID groups, so there was a lot of consulting time involved in getting the correct configuration for them. Moving to the InfiniBox, we don't have that problem. We don't have an option to do different types of RAID groups, everything just works within the infrastructure that's there. So we've saved a ton of time having to do all that consulting work beforehand and that also adds to, you know, quicker time to market for our clients. >> So you essentially consolidated a large number of arrays down to an InfiniBox infrastructure, is that right? >> Yeah, so we have, like I said before, we have 11. We have those scattered across multiple locations. >> Okay, and the biggest impact was what, time? People time or? >> Time, there's less time for deployment configuration. We spend less time looking at performance problems so we have more time to focus on the more important things. We do a lot of monitoring and things like that for these arrays now, we do trending and everything. We have time to actually put forth for creating those scripts and those infrastructures. >> So can you talk about performance? I mean, Erik, you could maybe address this too. Infinidat has basically said, look, you don't need an all-flash array, we can deliver a little bit of flash and a lot of spinning disk and work our algorithmic magic and deliver better performance than an all-flash array. Am I summarizing your point of view correctly? >> You got it, exactly. I mean, we would say that the all-flash array movement is great for certain workloads but by and large, for the 80, 90% of common data center environments, it's just a way to make storage expensive again. (laughing) >> Hear, hear, come to the party. And so Jason, from your experience, can you talk about the performance, did you look at other all-flash alternatives or other alternatives to Infinidat? >> Yeah, so we actually started looking at all-flash arrays to start off with because we knew that, with a cloud type infrastructure, we're going to be putting all these varied workloads on there. And we tested several flash arrays, we benchmark those when we get them in, and we actually saw more consistent and better performance across all those workloads from the InfiniBox. And, as you know, with the flash, you pay a lot for a much smaller amount of capacity so that was a problem too. So, from a cost perspective and performance perspective, the InfiniBox pretty much beat out all the competitors. >> I'm sorry if I missed this, how much capacity are you managing? >> So, right now, we have four petabytes of physical, about 10 petabytes of virtual. >> And how many people manage that? >> Probably just a handful of people and it's basically set it and forget it. >> So it's arms and legs? You know, like constantly tuning and... >> Yeah, we don't have to do any of that stuff, it's optimized from the start. >> And that was obviously different prior to the installation of Infinidat or? >> Yeah, before, there was a lot of, you know, like I said, tweaking of disconfigurations and storage pools and cache settings and things like that so there was a lot more hand-holding. >> So, what'd you do with all that time that freed up? I mean, what did you do with that labor resource? Where did you point it? >> We put that into our analytics and monitoring platform on the backend so we create a lot of scripts to help us kind of trend capacity and performance for the InfiniBox arrays. >> Erik, I want to ask you the final question for me. The story I'm hearing at VMworld is that as you do more of these projects, some of the costs kind of add up. Where are you guys seeing kind of the opportunity to come in, stabilize operations from storage to endpoint, free up that time, that's always a great value proposition, reduce steps and save time and money. But where is the action happening where the costs start to get out of control, when people start thinking about true private cloud, hybrid cloud, where's the hotspots that customers should look at saying, if you don't be careful, that's going to blow out of control in terms of costs. >> I personally think it's all about scale at some level. Whether you're thinking about a large-scale public cloud deployment or whether you're thinking about going from five all-flash arrays to 50, let's say, that's when the cumulative costs grow at an exponential rate. And that's the opportunity for companies like Infinidat, successfully bringing these multi-petabyte architectures to fruition while managing all the labor costs and all the implementation costs and operational costs. >> So vSAN's been growing like crazy, for instance, let's take that as an example. Those things can add up in price. How do you guys compare to, say, vSAN? >> So, head-to-head against vSAN at scale, there is no comparison frankly. Whether you're looking at-- >> John: You guys benefit over them or? >> Yeah, definitely us over them. When we look at multi-petabyte scale deployments of which there are relatively few in the market today, you have so much investment. One customer quoted $12 million to do what Infinidat could do for $2 million comparing against the vSAN base. >> I'm kind of skeptical on those numbers, I'd like to see, that's a huge delta so we'll have to kind of follow up on that. >> Erik: You'll have to see it to believe it. >> I mean, that's a $10 million savings. >> Erik: Absolutely. >> You're saying that you guys, it's going to save $10 million off the vSAN number. >> In terms of TCL, when you look at, again, it's not the cost of the hardware or even necessarily the software so much but it's the cost of the implementation, it's the opportunity cost versus all of the innovation, like he was mentioning previously, that really eats into the overall budget-- >> Okay, so let's go to the customers, okay, so that's a good value proposition, puts a stake in the ground, good order of magnitude in terms of solar system of value, right, two versus 12, that's significant. How does that play out in reality when you think about those kinds of numbers? Where's that saving coming from? Just the box deployment, the consolidation, where's that coming from? >> It's pretty much all over. So, part of the cost savings that we have too is once you have a large number of individual arrays, you've got to re-up on maintenance costs and things like that. So we're able to have a much lower number of arrays to service that same workload. We've saved there, we save on man-hours for configuration, for performance troubleshooting and things like that. So across the board, we're saving on time for our employees. >> John: Awesome, Erik, Jason, thanks so much for sharing. Bold statement, huge stake in the ground. Good job you guys are aggressive and hey, lower prices and potential performance is what people want so congratulations Infinidat. Here inside The Cube I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, back with more live coverage, day three of three days of coverage after this short break. Back from VMworld 2017. (electronic music)

>> Narrator: It's The Cube. Covering NAB 2017. Brought to you buy HGST. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with The Cube. We're at NAB 2017. It's not only 100,000, it's 102,000 people according to the official press release talking about the media and entertainment and technology. That theme is actually met as the technology is so intimately to media entertainment that you can't separate them out anymore. We're really excited for our next guest. He is right in the heart of it. He's in his happy place. He's leading the whole contingent here. It's Eric Weaver. He's the global director of media, entertainment, and market development for HGST. Eric, welcome. >> Thank you so much. Glad to be here today. >> So first impressions of the show. I'm sure you've been here a 1000 times. It's crazy. >> Yeah, no, it's really amazing. It's always a wonderful show. There's so many great people here really trying to get an understanding of what's coming up, what's going to solve their problems that they're facing right now. >> And the problems keep getting bigger because people want more. I mean it's amazing you walk around the level of gear and equipment. Some of the green screen setups here, they look like professional studios. And now we've gone from HD to 4K to AK to ultra HD. We've got 360 cameras. Little commercial ones by Samsung and professional grade ones. That's only going to increase the complexity of trying to manage all this stuff. >> Absolutely, it's really becoming a reality now that 4K and UHD are coming down the pipe. I think I heard some number that 56% of all sets will be that by 2020. And it's really great because you'll see the creative community starting to embrace HDR or UHD because they have never seen it before and until they go into the color suites and see the difference, they're absolutely blown away. So you're going to have a drive here. You're going to have a drive between the director saying this is what I want, and this is my look, and the camera or the tv set saying, this is what we can produce in theaters and what we can produce. >> Right, we didn't even talk about VR or AI. >> And VR and AI absolutely are some of the hottest topics out there right now. Trying to comprehend. You're also seeing a big shift from 360 video to photogrammetry and computational photography and these things. Volumetric capture. And those things are really going to be taking over in the next couple years and they are huge in understanding how they work for everyone. >> Okay, so you dropped a couple new vocabulary words. I have to have you dig in a little deeper. >> Alright, so volumetric. >> Photogemetric first? >> Photogrammetry. Photogrammetry. So what photogrammetry is is recreating a room with photographs by stitching them together. So for example, I worked on a piece called Wonder Buffalo and in Wonder Buffalo we basically took 956 photographs of a room and then stitched them together at 50 megapixels each and created this whole new room environment. You combine that with what's called volumetric capture. So instead of 12-24 cameras pointing out where you're stuck in a locked position which is a traditional 360 video. You're now doing 36 cameras in and those 36 cameras doing an almost hologram. The big difference here is now all of a sudden you feed it into a gaming engine, like Unity and you can walk around and explore the entire scene. So it's the closest you've ever seen to the Holodeck by maybe Star Trek or something. >> Right. >> It's really quite an amazing experience. >> Now on the other side of the equation, on the simpler side, you know you've got a lot of independent film makers now have YouTube and Vimeo and all these distribution platforms and you know, I'm a huge Casey Neistat fan. You know, he's got his little $2000 camera and he's out shooting and getting tremendous views so the focus on audience and story telling and sort of the democratization of distribution is another huge trend. >> Absolutely. Really big. YouTube is, what's fascinating about something like YouTube is YouTube wasn't possible a couple years ago. Something like the Cloud made YouTube possible. If you historically look back, you'll see something like the electricity juxtaposition, and until Niagara Falls was there, we didn't have the ability to have electricity in such volumes. And so some of the breakthrough cases might have been like Upcoa, who produced aluminum. They were burning, tearing down whole forests to put together furnaces that could burn hot enough to make it. Now that they have cost effective aluminum, or electricity, they could do this. The same situation was like someone like YouTube. They can scale at a level that we've never seen before and was never possible. >> Right. >> So it opens up whole new opportunities of democratization of video. >> Right. >> Absolutely amazing new tools. >> And then obviously cloud, right? Cloud is changing the world. The big cloud providers like Amazon and Google and Microsoft and a ton of second tier service providers. But they're not kind of on the cloud for big assets is speed of light is too damn slow, you know, getting stuff up and down is a pain. And also you know that's where you really wanted a big machine with local horsepower. >> So. >> But now you've got rendering, all this huge stuff that you need massive scale that you're little machine can't do anymore. >> So a big confusion a lot of people have in cloud is they think about taking their current data center and lifting and shifting it to the cloud. That doesn't work. You have to reimagine how the whole structure works. What do you put up there? Why do you put it up there? Are you using a proxy? Are you using some kind of hybrid workflow to maximize and benefit? Because if you're just dumping something up there and expecting to bounce it back and forth, you're right, speed of light and other things are going to kill you. >> Right. >> But there's other ways out there to leverage that. Principles such as IOA. Inner Oriented Connected Architectures. So placing your storage or your centralized data link at an Equinox or some kind of colo facility, where you can centrally leverage it and then working off proxies, most people don't know that when you're working in your color suite, almost all the time you're still working off proxies because you cannot see all those bits or we cannot get all the bits to the monitors. >> Right, right. >> That we have. So learning how to create the proper workflow there is absolutely critical, and will save you a fortune if you know what you're doing. >> Right. >> Or go to the right people to show you how to do that properly. >> So it's really use the best attributes of both as much as you can. >> Yes, you have to figure out how to use the best attributes of both. >> So the other kind of knock on too much tech in this business is sometimes the storytelling gets lost. And I know because I have a personal pet peeve on a lot of these big huge cinematic explosions that they could still have a story. >> Yes, yes. >> So, you know, I think that having a narrative is still so important. Is that lost? Is that enhanced? How do you see that integrating with the tech? >> So, I think it's absolutely critical. I saw Spielberg speaking at USC a little while back and he was like story, story, story. Tech is simply there to empower the story. And if you lose sight of that, you're absolutely lost. It really is the truth. So for example, I have two shorts out right now and one's at Tribeca one's at South by South West but we focused on the story. Although it's an R and D research project, you have to have a story. >> Right, right. >> That's the only way to move this thing forward. And if you don't have that, everything else is lost. >> Right. Now the other great thing that's happened with cloud and keeper storage and all these advanced infrastructure components is now you can keep everything. >> Yes. >> Data is no longer a liability that is expensive to hold and manage and you got to figure out what you're going to throw away because it's too expensive. Now people finally understand, it is an asset. So it opens up all types of opportunities to store it and do things with it. >> And you're seeing a lot of this shift from tape to object and other things like that because they want to monetize this content. There's so many new mechanisms to monetize content between the Netflix and the other distributors Amazon, and everyone else, that they are realizing this is not just an asset for the closet that you might someday use or sell in some broad agreement to some secondary station in Europe, or somewhere else. These are things that you can monetize on a regular basis. But that actually brings you the next problem. Understanding what you have. >> Right, right. >> People get very confused. They assume that there is one film. There's not one film. There's about 120 versions of the films that are released. Between the versioning such as culturally sensitive areas like the Middle East, to different language titles, to different ad pieces or other inserted parts, there are a lot of different versions to run a film. >> Right. >> And so people don't always understand that. >> And that's interesting but the other account of not gone film or video traditionally, from a metadata point of view in a search and a consumption and discovery point of view, is if I search for a picture and I find the one that I'm looking for, I immediately know that's the one that I want. But if I want to find something that's seven minutes in to an hour long video, how do I find it? How do I consume it? How do I share it. That's an age old problem with this media type. >> So, part of the problem there is that we have not broke down metadata tagging in each of these pictures and these pieces. This is coming. I actually help with ABC help build a tool that created x-ray like Amazon has for production sites, so they could scour and tag all these pieces and begin to say this is an action scene with this character in it, at this point in the movie. That is coming probably a year to a year and a half out. But all of those things will begin to evolve very very soon. >> Right. Certainly a great application for AI. >> Yeah, AI is absolutely hot as well and this is what the studios are trying to get their hands on right now. >> Right. >> People like Netflix have really pioneered some of this work and it originally was to understand how to find content or what people like content like so they could begin to produce content that was relatable to their audience. They've now moved it into things like QC'ing because they are the largest studio in the world at this point. Over 1000 hours. >> Are they the largest studio in the world? >> Netflix is the largest studio in the world right now. >> Wow, I didn't know that. >> So they're doing over 1000 hours I think a season, at this point. >> Amazing. >> But the studios are really trying to, are really doing a lot of work to get their hands on some of this and so there's a lot of really great, high level, private meetings going on that's bringing these industry leaders together. ETC is a wonder place to see that. They talk about these innovations. >> So you're in the middle of it all. You've been doing this for a long time. What are some of your priorities for 2017 and what are some of the things that still just get you up in the morning right now that you're excited about? >> So, absolutely my priorities is going to be cloud. Over the last about a year, 18 months, it's been a massive shift. It was before it was all before no, no, no. And I actually heard this exact quote from somebody at one of the major studios. He said, "It used to be no, no, no, you better have a darn good reason, to now yes, yes, yes, you better have a darn good reason not to." >> Right, to say no. >> Number one, very hot, very on board. The next one again, is VRAR, understanding how VRAR is going to begin to change our lives and produce things. I wasn't originally a big fan of that, I thought of it as kind of 3D, but then I went to USC's VR LA meeting, and there was over 600 students in this group and every single school was represented. Medical, architectural, journalism. These students understand that this is going to touch everybody. I don't know if you ever really got into genuine good content. Someone like a Nonny de la Pena does stuff that touches on more towards journalistic. For example, she did a meeting in San Diego and it's a very terrible rendering but the audio is good and you see a man being beaten from the police and people are calling out saying, "Stop, stop, stop." And you've never felt it so emotionally in your life. This is like bam. It hits you. >> The VR part of it or just that she had great content? >> The VR part of it and the context. >> Okay. >> Of telling a story and what's going wrong with the story. This is going to affect us in a different way and it might not just be they clip pieces for TV shows but it's going to be touching us in a lot of different ways. >> Right. Right. >> Very powerful stuff. >> We talk a lot about the AR. I think the AR piece from a commercial point of view is tremendous too. >> It's absolutely a bigger market. So what's really going to be biggest is mixed reality or MR. MR is going to come in and it's going to fade you between the two things. So, that is really where it's going to meet in the middle. >> You distinctly called out the differentiation between VR and 360. >> Yes. >> How do you split those? >> So when you look at it, if you're looking at 360 video that's a camera rigged stuck in one particular location, it's got 12, 24, 36 cameras all pointing outward, and when you're watching that, you're stuck in a location. You're hostage in more of a traditional film way to what within that 360 scope they want you to kind of be from one spot. When you look at volumetric capture, volumetric capture is the opposite. It allows you to walk around, choose your own point of view, be wherever you want to be within that scene. So, it's where we're going to be going, it's going to be much more like the Holodeck from Star Trek. >> Right. >> Very amazing stuff. >> Alright, well Eric, thank you for taking a few minutes. Congrats. I'm sure you're going to be busy, busy, busy for the next three days so, >> I know. >> So thank you for taking a few minutes with us on The Cube. >> No problem, thank you so much. >> Alright, he's Eric, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching The Cube from NAB 2017 and we'll be back after this short break. Thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)

>> live from the Congress Centre in London, England. It's the queue at M i t. And the digital economy The second machine age Brought to you by headlines sponsor M i t. >> I already We're back Dave along with Student of American Nelson and Macca Fear are back here after the day Each of them gave a detailed presentation today related to the book Gentlemen, welcome back to to see you >> Good to see you again I want to start with you >> on a question. That last question That and he got from a woman when you're >> starting with him on a question that was asked of him Yes. And you'LL see why when you find something you like. You dodged the question by the way. Fair for record Hanging out with you guys makes us smarter. Thank you. Hear it? So the question was >> around education She expressed real concern, particularly around education for younger people. I guess by the time they get to secondary education it's too late. You talked about in the book about the three r's we need to read. Obviously we need to write Teo be able to do arithmetic in our head. Sure. What's your take on that on that question. You >> know those basics, our table stakes. I mean, you have to be able to do that kind of stuff. But the real payoff comes from creativity doing something really new and original. The good news is that most people love being creative and original. You look at a kid playing, you know, whether it there two or three years old, that's all that you put some blocks in front of them. They start building, creating things, and our school system is, Andy was saying in his his talkers, questions was, is that many of the schools are almost explicitly designed to tamp that down to get people to conform, get them to all be consistent. Which is exactly what Henry Ford needed for his factories, you know, to work on the assembly line. But now that machines could do that repetitive, consistent kind of work, it's time to let creativity flourish again. And that's when you got to do on top of those basic skills. >> So I have one, and it's pretty clear that that that are Kramer education model. It's really hard for some kids to accept. They just want they want to run around. They want to go express themselves. They wantto poke a world. That's not what that grid full of desks is designed to do. >> We call that a d d. Now I follow. Yeah, I have one >> Montessori kid out of my foot. Really? He's by far the most creative most ano didactic. You're a Montessori Travel Marie, not the story. Have it right? Is that >> Look, I'm not educational research. I am Amon a story kid. I think she got it right. And she was able to demonstrate that she could take kids out of the slums of Bologna who were, at the time considered mentally defective. There's this notion that the reason the poor are poor because they were they were just mentally insufficient. And she could show their learning and their progress. So I completely agree with Eric. We need all of our students need to be able to Teo, accomplish the basics, to read, to write, to do basic math. What Montessori taught me is you can get there via this completely kind of hippie freeform route. And I'm really happy for that education talk. Talk about you and your students. >> Your brainstorm on things that people could do with computers. Can't. >> Yeah, a lot of money >> this and exercise that you do pretty regularly. What's that? How is >> that evolved? A little >> something. We do it more systematically, I almost always doing in at talking over where With Forum. It's a kind of dinner conversation out we can't get away from. So we're hearing a lot. And you know, there's a recurring patterns that emerged, and you heard some of them today around interpersonal skills around creativity. Still, coordination is still physical coordination. What some of these have in common is that their skills that we've evolved over literally, you know, hundreds of thousands or millions of years. And there are billions of neurons devoted to some of these skills. Coordination, vision, interpersonal skills and other skills like arithmetic is something that's really very recent, and we don't have a lot of neurons devoted to that. So it's not surprising the machines can pick up those more recent skills more than the Maurin eight ones. Now overtime, will machines be able to do more of those other skills? I suspect they probably will exactly how long it will take. That's the question for neuroscientists. The AI researchers >> made me make that country think about not just diagnosing a patient but getting them to comply with the treatment regimen. Take your medicine. Eat better. Stop smoking. We know the compliance rates for terrible for demonstrably good ideas. How do we improve them? Is in a technology solution a little bit. Is it an interpersonal solution? Absolutely. I think we need deeply empathetic, deeply capable people to help each other become healthier, become better people. Right Program might come from an algorithm, but that algorithm on the computer that spits it out is going to be lousy at getting most people to comply. Way need human beings for that. So when >> we talking technology space, we've been evangelizing that people need to get rid of what we call the undifferentiated having lifting. And I wonder if there's an opportunity in our personal life, you think about how much time we spend Well, you know, what are we doing for dinner when we're running the kids around? You know, how do I get dressed in the different things that have here their studies sometimes like waste so much brain power, trying to get rid of these things and there's opportunities. Welcome, Jetsons. Actually, no, they >> didn't have these problems that can help us with some of that. I think people should actually help us with over of it. You know, I actually I have a personal trainer and he's one of the last people that I would ever have exclude from my life because he's the guy who could actually help me lead a healthier life. And I play so much value on that. >> I like your metaphor of this is undifferentiated stuff, that really it's not the stuff that makes you great. It's just stuff you have to do. And I remember having a conversation with folks that s AP, and they said, you know, sure would like to brag about this, but we take away a lot of stuff that isn't what differentiates companies in the back office stuff. Getting your basic bookkeeping, accounting, supply chain stuff done and it's interesting. I think we could use the same thing for for personal lives. Let's get rid of that sort of underbrush of necessity stuff so we can focus on the things that are uniquely good at >> alright so way have to run out when I need garbage bags with toilet paper. Honestly, a drone should show up and drop that on my friends. >> So I wonder when I look at the self driving car that you've talked about, will we reach a point that not only do we trust computers in the car, it's cars to drive herself? But we've reached a point where we're just got nothing. Trust humans anymore because self driving cars there just so much safer and better than what we've got is that coming >> in the next twenty years? I personally think so, and the first time is deeply weird and unsettling. I think both of us were a little bit terrified the first time we drove in the Google Autonomous Car and the Google or driving it hit the button and took his hands off the controls. That was a weird moment. I liken it to when I was learning to scuba dive. Very first breath you take underwater is deeply unsettling because you're not supposed to be doing this. After a few breaths, it becomes background. >> But you know, I was I was driving to the airport to come here, and I look in the lanes left to me. There's a woman, you know, texting, and I'd be much you're terrifying if she wasn't driving. If the computer is doing because then we could be more, that's the right way to think about it. I think the time will come and it may not be that far away. We're the norm's shift exactly the other way around and be considered risky to have a human at the wheel and the safety. That thing that the insurance company will want is to have a machine there. You know, I think this is a temporary phase with Newt technology. We become frightened of them. When microwave ovens first came out, they were weird and wonderful. Not most of us think of them is really kind of boring and routine. Same thing is gonna happen with self driving to accidents. Well, that's the story is, that is, But none of them were. Of course, according to the story >> driving, what's clear is that they're safer than the human driver. As of today, they are only going to get safer. We're not evolving that quick, >> but you got the question. Is that self driving, car driven story? Dr. We laughed because we're live in Boston. But your answer was, Will drive started driving, driving, >> you know, eventually, you know, I think it's fair to say that there's a big difference. You know, the first nineteen, ninety five, ninety nine percent of driving is something that's a lot easier. That last one percent or one hundredth of one percent becomes much, much harder. And right now we've had There's a card just last week that drove across the United States, but there were half a dozen times when he had to have a human interviews and particularly unusual situations. And I think because of our norms and expectations, that won't be enough for a self driving car to be safer than humans will need it to be te next paper or something like maybe >> like the just example may be the ultimate combination is a combination of human and self driving car, >> Maybe situation after situation. I think that's going to be the case and I'LL go back to medical diagnosis. I would at least for the short to medium term, I would like to have a pair of human eyes over the treatment plan that the that being completely digital diagnostician spits out. Maybe over time it will be clear that there are no flaws in that. We could go totally digital, but we can combine the two. >> I think in most cases what anything is right, what you brought up. But you know the case of self driving cars in particular, and other situations where humans have to take over for a machine that's failing for someway like aircraft. When the autopilot is doing things right, it turns out that that transition could be very, very rocky and expecting a human to be on call to be able to quickly grasp what's going on in the middle of a crisis of a freak out that's not reasonable isn't necessarily the best time to be swishing over. So there's a there's a fuel. Human factors issued their of how you design it, not just to the human could take over, but you could make a kind of a seamless transition. And that's not easy. >> Okay, so maybe self driving cars, that doesn't happen. But back to the medical example. Maybe Watson will replace Dr Welby, but have not Dr Oz >> interaction or any nurse or somebody who actually gets me to comply again. But also, I do think that Dr Watson can and should take over for people in the developing world who only have access instead of First World medical care. They've got a smartphone. OK, we're going to be able to deliver absolute top shelf world class medical diagnostics to those people fairly quickly. Of course, we should >> do that and then combine it with a coach who gets people to take the prescription when they're supposed to do it, change their eating habits or communities or whatever else you hear your peers are all losing weight. >> Why aren't you? >> I wantto askyou something coming on. Time here has been gracious with your time and your talk. We're very out spoken about. A couple of things I would summarize. It is you lot must Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking. You're paranoid tens. There's no privacy in the Internet, so get over. >> I didn't say there's no privacy. I know working. I think it's important to be clear on this. I think privacy is really important. I do think it's right that we have, and we should have. What I don't want to do is have a bureaucrat defined my privacy rights for me and start telling >> companies what they can and can't do is a result. What >> I'd much prefer instead is to say, Look, if there are things that we know >> Cos we're doing that we do not approve >> of let's deal with that situation as opposed to trying to put the guard rails in place and fence off the different kinds of innovative, strict growth, right? >> I mean, there's two kinds of mistakes you could make. One is, you can let companies do things and you should have regulated them. The other is. You could regulate them preemptively when you really should have let them do things and both kinds of errors or possible. Our sense of looking at what's happening in Jinan is that we've thrived where we allow more permission, listen innovation. We allowed companies to do things and then go back and fix things rather than when we try and locked down the past in the existing processes, so are leaning. In most cases, not every case is to be a little more free, a little more open recognized that there will be mistakes. It's not gonna be that we're perfectly guaranteed is that there is a risk when you walk across the street but go back and fix things at that point rather than preemptively define exactly how things are gonna play. Let >> me give you an example. If Google were to say to me, Hey, Andy, unless you pay us x dollars per month, we're gonna show the world your last fifty Google searches. I would completely pay for that kind of blackmail, right? Certain your search history is incredibly personal reveals a lot about you. Google is not going to do that. It would just it would crater their own business. So trying to trying to fence that kind of stuff often advance makes a lot of sense to me. Then then then relying on this. This sounds a little bit weird, but a combination of for profit companies and people with three choice that that's a really good guarantor of our freedoms and our rights. So you >> guys have a pretty good thing going. It doesn't look like strangle each other anytime soon. But >> how do you How do you decide who >> does one treat by how you operate with reading the book? It's like, Okay, like I think that was Andy because he's talking about Erica. I think that was Erica's. He's talking, >> but I couldn't tell you. I think it's hard for you to reverse engineer because it gets so co mingled over time. And, you know, I gave the example the end of the talk about humans and machines working together synergistically. I think the same thing is true with Indian me out. You may disagree, but I find that we are smarter when we work together so much smarter. Then when we work individually, we go and bring some things on the blackboard. And I had these aha moments that I don't think I would've had just sitting by myself and do I should be that ah ha moment to Andy. To me, it's actually to this Borg of us working together >> and fundamentally, these air bumper sticker things to say. If after working with someone, you become convinced that they respect you and that you could trust them and like Erik says that you're better off together, that you would be individually, it's a complete no brainer to >> keep doing the work together. Well, we're really humbled to be here. You guys are great contact. Everything is free and available. We really believe in that sort of economics. And so thank you very much for having us here. >> Well, it's just a real pleasure. >> All right, Right there, buddy. We'LL be back to wrap up right after this is Q relied from London. My tea.