from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host David on tape hi everybody welcome to the special edition of the cube insights powered by ETR over the past several weeks we've been running breaking analysis on various market segments and today we're gonna talk about the robotic process automation market the spending data from ETR really shows that that market is poised for for continued growth it's been rocketing these segments are independent editorial they are not sponsored in any way although two of the companies that I'll be talking about today are sponsors of the cube automation anywhere and uipath both sponsor the cube we we attend their shows but they have absolutely no input over these editorial segments it's 100% data-driven based on ETR data and cube insight opinions in my opinions so thank you for watching let's get into it so Alex if you bring up the first slide I want to share with people what the robotic process automation market is and what you need to know about it it's a small but very fast-growing market according to a combination of Forrester and and Gartner data it's around one and a half to 1.7 billion dollars this year and it's growing at over 60 percent per year Gartner calls it the fastest growing software sub segment that they tracked garden just put out a Magic Quadrant on this space which was you know is always interesting reading despite what you think about magic quadrants it's essentially software robots that are automating repetitive mundane tasks and I underline tasks in this chart because it's largely tasks simple tasks that are being automated in a big way as opposed to really big complex processes they tend to be targeted at line of business users and it very popular in environments like finance and service roles and and back office areas where they're a repetitive common tasks that people frankly hate and we're going to give you some feedback from from customers there are a number of upstarts in the space uipath automation anywhere blue prism these these companies have attracted a massive influx of venture capital particularly uipath an automation anywhere over a billion and a half dollars in the last couple of years there monster valuations take those three companies their valuations are up over ten billion dollars and growing uipath for example several months ago announced that it had more than 200 million dollars in annual recurring revenue they were just at eight million dollars two years ago so you're seeing just this this massive growth a lot of influx of capital and a lot of jockeying for position now users that we've talked to will express a great deal of business impact related to the introduction and application of RPA in their business so I want you to take a look at this video of one practitioner that we interviewed at a cube event let's listen to to see what Jeanne younger has to say and then we'll come back and talk about it it's interesting because I also teach the Six Sigma courses there and one of them my slides I've had for years teaching that classes most business processes are like between 3.2 and 3.6 3.8 Sigma which is like 95 to 98% accurate and I said that's all the better we can usually do because of the expense that it would normally be to get us to a Six Sigma you look at the places that have Six Sigma it's life-threatening airline you know airplane engines you hope they're at least 7 Sigma you know those type of things but business processes 3 5 3 2 but now I get to change that because with our PA I can make them Six Sigma very cheap very cheaply because I can pull them in I got my bought it comes over pulls the information and there's no double king there's no miss keys its accuracy 100% accuracy this is a perfect example of how companies are applying robotic process automation to to improve existing business processes you would never try to get a standard business process up to Six Sigma it's just not worth it and as Jean younger explained now she can get there very inexpensively with our PA there many many other use cases but I wanted to share that one with you now the next slide I'm going to show you comes from ETR ETR is an organization that runs a panel is about a 4,500 user panel and they focus on spending intentions they do periodic surveys throughout the year they capture a fairly large number of users and what they're spending on that built this great taxonomy and we've been partnering with ETR to share with you some of that insights and what this slide shows is really spending intentions from the july 2019 survey asking about the second half spending intentions on the sector of robotic process automation you can see here the N is 1068 respondents in that July survey on the left-hand side you can see four vendors that we've chose to profile uipath automation anywhere blue prism and pega systems a company that's been around for a long time and is not exclusively focused on RPA they've got more of a business process focus and I'll come back to that but what this slide shows is really the spending intentions around four areas the bright red is we're going to leave the platform stop spending we're out of here the lighter red is we're gonna spend less in the second half the gray is we're flat the dark green is we're gonna increase spending in the lime green is where a new customer coming on so if you subtract the red from the green you get what ETR calls the net score and that is an indication of spending intentions and momentum so the higher the net score the better you can see here uipath leads the pack with an 81% next score ironically that's the identical next school net score as was snowflake in this survey we profiled the enterprise data warehouse market and snowflake was one of the leaders there so uipath and snowflake even though there are sort of different markets and different levels of maturity sort of around in the same net score so two very hot companies and you can see going down the list automation anywhere 69% blue prism 53% and pega systems 44% actually these are all very strong compared to some of the other market segments we track like for instance if you look at the disk array market and some of the legacy disk array companies some of the enterprise data warehouse companies you'll see sometimes negative scores now on the right-hand side and the black you see shared accounts what this says this is the number of accounts that were mentioned as intending to spend on or in the case of the dark red leave or in the case of the bright green add but the number of counts out of that 1068 corpus of data that mentioned these respective companies so you can see relatively small you know 68 for uipath 42 for automation anywhere 45 for blue prism and only 27% repair systems but these I remind you were still significantly statistically significant enough to at least get indications so you can see again your UI path leads but all of the companies are actually quite strong on a relative basis so the next slide that I want to show you Alex if you bring this up is a time series for some of these leading competitors over over time so we'll go back to January of 18 and the number of shared accounts back then was relatively small it was in the low double digits and in some cases the single digits but as we go to the right you can start to see it it increases in terms of the shared accounts out of that a thousand 1068 from this past survey so you can see uipath at that 81% next score of net score very high but but also automation anywhere very very strong blue prism you can see the decline in that yellow line but again very very strong with a 53% Nets so this space is is new and it's in it's very hot I say it's new and then it's been around for a while but it's really starting to take off and then you can see see Pegasus Thames you're lower than these other companies but still very very strong at 44% now we'll tell you the folks at Wycombe on the the analyst side of our house have gone out they've done some research they maybe it was about 18 months ago they they downloaded the UI paths Community Edition they tried to do the same for automation anywhere in blue prison they tried to get access to the software so they could apply it and you know run some robots against some mundane tasks they were only able to get the automation of the sorry the uipath software which was very simple to install and apply and you know some simple tasks they couldn't get the automation anywhere in blue president you had to go to resellers and it was sort of this complicated you know setup so that was sort of a red flag that we put up but but the UI paths you know claims that their stuff was easy to use some of their users that we've talked to you know talked about it in the context of low code and so we've we've clarified some of that we don't have as much data on automation anywhere in blue prism although we've covered automation anywheres events customers you know seemed quite happy and and reporting strong business impacts don't have as much information at this time on blue prisms on blue prism we have attended some of the peg assistance events just as observers I was saying before I come back to them they take more of a holistic approach to business process it's really not they're not positioning themselves as a standalone RPA vendor which you know frankly I wouldn't do if I were up against uipath and automation anywhere because they've got so much influx of capital they've got modern platforms that are ostensibly easy to use so packet system seems to be look going after our PA in a much sort of broader context around process business process engineering so in summer you just want to say so the very fast-growing market there's a book there's a lot of competition you got uipath automation anywhere blue prism there's about 15 or 20 players in this space that are sort of sizable it's a combination of as they say standalone robotic process automation players with integrated BPM players like Pegasus Thames it's important remember you're largely here automating existing procedures and tasks you know you're not doing a lot of necessarily re-engineering it so that's you know some people are concerned about that saying okay we're kind of paving the cart path at the same time practitioners are reporting that it's having a major business impact and and although they've also said that's not likely to reduce headcount rather we're redirecting resources you're not firing people because you're bringing in robots so people aren't necessarily losing their jobs over this they're just shifting away from that sort of undifferentiated heavy lifting that they hate doing mundane tasks automating that and moving on to more strategic items so a lot of discussion in the industry about artificial intelligence in in machine learning and some folks have said well AI and RP a they have nothing to do with each other I will say this that that machine learning has been injected into the RP a space via computer vision and a good example is it recognized a button like a send button if you know you're sending out you know emails or pushing a certain button every day at the you can automate that process so computer vision is a key part of this and again it's something that certain RPF Enders are touting I know uipath again talks about that a lot but the business impact is tangible and this is based on customer feedback a lot of customer feedback you know generally speaking you're seeing CFOs are hopping on to this they're seeing this is a really good way to take out some of the inefficiencies in their business refocus people on higher value activities and so we're going to continue to watch this RPA space I think it's going to be big we see big s eyes coming into this we're talking about companies like Accenture IBM Deloitte PwC Ernie Young those guys are starting to you know go after the space and I've always said this about the the big sis they love to eat at the trough so with there's money there they find it and they go hard after it so thanks for watching everybody we're gonna continue to report on this space this is Dave Volante with cube insights powered by ETR we'll see you next time

>> Announcer: From Boston, Massachusetts it's The Cube. Covering AWS re:Inforce 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. This is The Cube's live coverage of AWS re:Inforce in Boston, Massachusetts. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vallante. This is re:Inforce. This is the inaugural conference for AWS on the security and Cloud security market. A new category being formed from an events standpoint around Cloud security. Our next guest is Cube alumni guest analyst Corey Quinn, and Cloud Economist with the Duckbill Group. Good to see you again. Great to have you on. Love to have you come back, because you're out in the hallways. You're out getting all the data and bringing it back and reporting. But this event, unlike the other ones, you had great commentary and analysis on. You were mentioned onstage during the Keynote from Stephen Smith. Congratulations. >> Thank you. I'm still not quite sure who is getting fired over that one, but somehow it happened, and I didn't know it was coming. It was incredibly flattering to have that happen, but it was first "Huh, awesome, he knows who I am." Followed quickly by "Oh dear, he knows who I am." And it, at this point, I'm not quite sure what to make of that. We'll see. >> It's good news, it's good business. All press is good press as they say, but let's get down to it. Obviously, it's a security conference. This is the inaugural event. We always love to go to inaugural events because, in case there's no second event, we were there - >> Corey: Oh yes >> for one event. So, that's always the case. >> Corey: Been there since the beginning is often great bragging rights. And if there isn't a second one, well, you don't need to bring it up ever again. So, they've already announced there's another one coming to Houston next year. So that'll be entertaining. >> So a lot of people were saying to us re:Inforce security event, some skepticism, some bullish on the sector. obviously, Cloud is hot. But the commentary was, oh, no one's really going to be there. It's going to be more of an educational event. So, yeah, it's more of an educational event for sure. That they're talking about stuff that they can't have time to do and reinvent. But there's a lot of investment going on there. There are players here from the companies. McAfee, you name the big name companies here, they're sending real people. A lot of biz dev folks trying to understand how to build up the sector. A lot of technical technologists here, as well. Digging in to some of the deep conversations. Do you agree? What's your thoughts of the event? >> I'm surprised, I was expecting this to be a whole bunch of people trying to sell things to other people, who were trying to sell them things in return, and it's not. There are, there are people who are using the Cloud for interesting things walking around. And that's fantastic. One thing that's always struck me as being sort of strange, and why I guess I feel sort of spiritually aligned here if nothing else. Is cost and security are always going to be trailing functions. No company is excited to invest in those things, until immediately after they really should have been investing in those things and weren't. So with time to market, velocity are always going to be something much valuable and important to any company strategically. But, we're seeing people start to get ahead of the curve in some ways. And that's, it's refreshing and frankly surprising. >> What is the top story in your mind? Top three stories coming out of re:Inforce. From industry standpoint, or from a product standpoint, that you think need to be told or amplified, or not being told, be told? >> Well there's been the stuff that we've seen on the stage and that's terrific. And, I think that you've probably rehashed those a fair bit with other guests. For me, what I'm seeing, the story that resonates as I walk around the Expo Hall here. Is we're seeing a bunch of companies that have deep roots in data centered environments. And now they're trying to come up with stories that resonate with Cloud. And if they don't, this is a transformational moment. They're going to effectively, likely find themselves in decline. But, they're not differentiating themselves from one another particularly well. There are a few very key things that we're seeing people operate within. Such as, with the new port mirroring stuff coming out of NVPC Traffics. You're right. You have a bunch of companies that are able to consume those, or flow logs. If you want to go back in time a little bit, and spit out analysis on this. But you're not seeing a lot of differentiation around this. Or, Hey we'll take all your security events and spit out the useful things. Okay, that is valuable, and you need to be able to do that. How many vendors do you need in one company doing the exact same thing? >> You know, we had a lot of sites CSO's on here and practitioners. And one of the comments on that point is Yeah, he's like, "Look I don't need more alerts." "I need things fixed." "Don't just tell me what's going on, fix it." So the automation story is also a pretty big one. The VCP traffic mirror, I think, is going to be just great for analytics. Great for just for getting that data out. But what does it actually impact In the automation piece? And the, okay there's an alert. Pay attention to it or ignore it. Or fix it. Seems to be kind of the next level conversation. Your thoughts around that piece. >> I think that as we take a look at the space and we see companies continuing to look at things like auto remediation. Automation's terrific, until the first time it does something you didn't want it to do and takes something down. At which point no one trusts it ever again. And that becomes something hard to tend to. I also think we're starting to see a bit of a new chapter as alliance with this from AWS and it's relationship with partners. I mean historically you would look at re:Invent, and you're sitting in the Expo Hall and watching the keynote. And it feels like it's AWS Red Wedding. Where, you're trying to see who's about to get killed by a feature that just comes out. And now were seeing that they've largely left aspects of the security space alone. They've had VPC flow logs for a long time, but sorting through those yourself was always like straining raw sewage with your teeth. You had to find a partner solution or build something yourself out of open source tooling from spit and duct tape. There's never been a great tool there. And it almost feels like they're leaving that area, for example, alone. And leaving that as an area rife for partners. Now how do you partner with something like AWS? That's a hard question to answer. >> So one of the other things we've heard from practitioners is they don't want incrementalism. They're kind of sick of that. They want step functions, that do as John said, remediate. >> Corey: Yeah. So, like you say, you called it the Red Wedding at the main stage. What does a partner have to do to stay viable in this ecosystem? >> Historically, the answer to that has always been to continue innovating ahead of the bow wave of AWS's own innovation. The problem is you see that slide that they put on in every event, that everyone who doesn't work at AWS sees. That shows the geometric increase in number of feature and service releases. And we all feel this sinking sensation of not even the partner side. But, they're releasing so much that I know some of that is going to fix things for my company, but I'll never hear it. Because it's drowned in the sheer volume of what they're releasing. AWS is rapidly increasing their pace of innovation to the point where companies that are not able to at least match that are going to be in for a bad time. As they find themselves outpaced by the vendor they're partnering with. >> And you heard Liberty Mutual say their number one challenge was actually the pace of Cloud. Being able to absorb all these new features >> Yes. >> And so, you mentioned the partner ecosystem. I mean, so it's not just the partners. It's the customers as well. That bow is coming faster than they can move. >> Absolutely. I can sit here now and talk very convincingly about services that don't exist. And not get called out on them by an AWS employee who happens to be sitting here. Because no one person can have all of this in their head anymore. It's outpaced most people's ability to wrap their heads around that and contextualize it. So people specialize, people focus. And, I think, to some extent that might be an aspect of why we're seeing re:Inforce as its own conference. >> So we talked a lot of CSO's this trip. >> Yeah. >> John: A lot of one on ones. We had some interviews. Some private meetings. I'm going to read you a list of key areas that they brought up as concern. I want to get you're reaction to. >> Sure. >> You pick the ones out you think are very relevant. >> Sure. >> Speedily, very fast. Vendor lock in. Spend. >> Not concerned. Yep. Security Native. >> Yeah. >> Service provider supplier relationship. Metrics, cloud securities, different integration, identity, automation, work force talent, coding security, and the human equation. There were all kind of key areas that seemed to glob and be categorically formed. Your thoughts to those. Which ones do you think jump out as criticalities on the market? >> Sure. I think right now people talking about lock in are basically wasting their time and spinning their wheels. If you, for example, you go with two cloud providers because you don't want to be locked into one. Well now there's a rife partner ecosystem. Because translating things like IAM into another provider's environment is completely foreign. You have to build an entire new security model on top of things in order to do that effectively. That's great. In security we're seeing less of an aversion to lock in than we are in other aspects of the business. And I think that is probably the right answer. Again, I'm not partisan in this battle. If someone wants to go with a different Cloud provider than AWS, great! Awesome! Make them pick the one that makes sense for your business. I don't think that it necessarily matters. But pick one. And go all in on that. >> Well this came up to in a couple of ways. One was, the general consensus was, who doesn't like multi Cloud? If you can seamlessly move stuff between Clouds. Without having to do the modification on all this code that has to be developed. >> Who wouldn't love that? But the reality is, doesn't exist. >> Corey : Well. To your point, this came up again, is that workplace, workforce talent is on CSO said "I'm with AWS." "I have a little bit of Google. I could probably go Azure." "Maybe I bought a company with dealing some stuff over there." "But for the most part all of my talent is peaked on AWS." "Why would I want to have three separate security teams peaking on different things? When I want everyone on our stack." They're building their own stacks. Then outsourcing or using suppliers where it supports it. >> Sure. >> But the focus of building their own stacks. Their own security. Coding up was critical. And having a split competency on code bases just to make it multi, was a non starter. >> And I think multi Cloud has been a symptom. I mean, it's more than a strategy. I think it's in a large part a somewhat desperate attempt by a number of vendors who don't have their own Cloud. To say Hey, you need to have a multi Cloud strategy. But, multi Cloud has been really an outcome of multiple projects. As you say, MNA. Horses for courses. Lines of business. So my question is, I think you just answered it. Multi Cloud is more complex, less secure, and probably more costly. But is it a viable strategy for things other than lock in? >> To a point. There are stories about durability. There's business reasons. If you have a customer who does not want their data living one one particular Cloud provider. Those are strategic reasons to get away from it. And to be clear, I would love the exact same thing that you just mentioned. Where I could take what I've built and run that seamlessly on other providers. But I don't just want that to be a pile of VM's and maybe some disc. I want those to be the higher level services that take care of massive amounts of my business for me. And I want to flow those seamlessly between providers. And there's just no story around that for anything reasonable or modern. >> And history would say there won't really ever be. Without some kind of open source movement to - >> Oh yes. A more honest reading of some of the other cloud providers that are talking about multi cloud extensively translates that through a slight filter. To, we believe you should look into Multi Cloud. Because if you're going all in on a single provider there is no way in the world it's going to be us. And that's sort of a challenge. If you take a look at a number of companies out here. If someone goes all in on one provider they will not have much, if anything, to sell them of differentiated value. And that becomes the larger fixture challenge for an awful lot of companies. And I empathize with that, I really do. >> Amazon started to do a lot of channel development. Obviously their emphasis on helping people make some cash. Obviously their vendors are, ecosystems a fray. Always a fray. So sheer responsibility at one level is, well we only have one security model. We do stuff and you do stuff. So obviously it's inherently shared. So I think that's really not a surprise for me. The issue is how to get successful monetization in the ecosystem. Clearly defining lines of, rules of engagement, around where the white spaces are. And where the differentiation can occur. Your thoughts on how that plays out. >> Yeah. And that's a great question. Because I don't think you're ever going to get someone from Amazon sitting in a room. And saying Okay, if you build a tool that does this, we're never, ever, ever going to build a thing that does that. They just launched a service at re:Invent that talks to satellites in orbit. If they're going to build that, I don't, there's nothing that I will say they're never going to get involved with. Their product strategy, from the outside, feels like it's a post it note that says Yes on it. And how do you wind up successfully building and scaling a business around that? I don't have a clue. >> Eddie Jafse's on the record here in The Cube and privately with me on my reporting. Saying never say never. >> Never say never. >> We'll never say never. So that is actually an explicit >> Take him at his word on that one. >> Right. And I'm an independent consultant. Where my first language is sarcasm. So, I basically make fun of AWS in the newsletter and podcast. And that seems to go reasonably well. But, I'm never going to say that they're not going to move into self deprecation as a business model. Look at some of their service names. They're clearly starting to make inroads in that space. So, I have to keep innovating ahead of that bow wave. And for now, okay. I can't fathom trying to build a business model with a 300 person company and being able to continue to innovate at that pace. And avoid the rapid shifts as AWS explores on new offers. >> And I what I like about why, well, we were always kind of goofing on AWS. But we're fanboys as well, as you know. But what I love about AWS is that they give the opportunity for their partners. They give them plenty of head's up. It's pretty much the rules of engagement is never say never. But if they're not differentiating, that's their job. >> Corey: Yeah. >> Their job is to be better. Now one thing Amazon does say is Hey we might have a competing service, but we're always going to favor the customer. So, the partner. If a customer wants an Amazon Cloud trail. They want Cloud trail for a great example. There's been requests for that. So why wouldn't they do it? But they also recognize it's bus - people in the ecosystem that do similar things. >> Corey: Yeah. >> And they are not going to actively try to put them out of business, per se. >> Oh yeah! One company that's done fantastically well partnering with everyone is PagerDuty. And even if AWS were to announce a service that wakes you up in the middle of the night when something breaks. It's great. Awesome. How about you update your status page in a timely fashion first? Then talk about me depending on the infrastructure that you run to tell me when the infrastructure that you run is now degraded? The idea of being able to take some function like that and outsource worked well enough for them to go public. >> So where are the safe points in the ecosystem? So obviously a partner that has a strong on-prem presence that Amazon wants to get access to. >> That's a short term, or maybe even a mid term strategy. Okay. Professional services. If you're Accenture, and Ernie Young, and Deloitte, PWC, you're probably okay. Because that's not a business that Amazon really wants to be in. Now they might want to, they might want to automate as much to that as possible. But the world's going to do that anyway. But, what's your take where it's safe? >> I would also add cost optimization to that. Not from a basis of technical capability. And I think that their current tooling is disappointing. I'd argue that cost explorer and the rest of their billing situation is the asterisk next to customer obsession if we're being perfectly honest. But there's always going to be some value in an external party coming in from that space. And what form that takes is going to change. But, it is not very defensible internally to say our Cloud spend is optimized, because the vendor we're writing those large checks to tells us it is. There's always going to be a need for some third-party validation. And whether that can come through software? >> How big is that business? >> It's a great question. Right now, we're seeing that people are spending over 30 billion dollars a year on AWS and climbing. One thing we can say with a certainty in almost every case is that people's Cloud bills are not getting smaller month over month. >> Yep. >> So, it's a growing market. It's one that people feel incredibly acutely. And when you get a few drinks into people and they start complaining about various aspects of Cloud, one of the first most common points that comes up is the bill. Not that it's too high, but that it is inscrutable. >> And so, just to do a back of napkin tam, how much optimization potential is there? Is it a ten percent factor? More? >> It depends on the level of effort you're willing to invest. I mean, there's a story for almost environments where you can save 70% on your Cloud bill. All you have to do is spend 18 months of rewriting everything to use serverless primitives. Six of those months you'll be hard down across the board. And then, wait where did everyone go? Because no one's going to do that. >> Dave: You might be out of business. So it's always a question of effort spent doing optimization, versus improving features, speeding time to market and delivering something that will generate for more revenue. The theoretical upside of cost optimization is 100% of your Cloud bill. Launching the right service or product can bring in multiples of that in revenue. >> I think my theory on differentiation, Dave, is that I think Amazon is basically saying in so many words, not directly. But it's my interpretation. Hold on to the rocket ship of AWS as long as you can. And if you can get stable, hold on. If you fall off that's just your fault, right? So, what that means is, to me, move up the stack. So Amazon is clearly going to continue to grow and create scale. So the benefits to the companies create a value proposition that can extract rents out of the marketplace from value that they create on the Amazon growth. Which means, they got to lock step with Amazon on growth. And cost leap, pivot up to where there's space. And Amazon is just a steam roller that will come in. The rocket ship that's going so fast. Whatever metaphor. And so people who just say We made a deal with Amazon, we're in. And then kind of sit idle. Will probably end up getting spun off. I mean, cause it's like they fall off and Amazon will be like All right so we did that. You differentiate enough, you didn't innovate enough. But, they're going to give everyone the opportunity to take a place with the growth. So the strategy, management wise, is just constantly push the envelope. >> So that's implicit in the Amazon posture. What's explicit in Amazon's posture is build applications on our platform. And you should be okay. You know? For a while. >> Yeah. And again, I think that a lot of engineers get stuck in a trap of building something and spending all their time making their code quality as best as possible. But, that's not going to lead to a business outcome one way or another. We see stories of companies hitting success with a tire fire of an infrastructure all the time. Twitter used to display massive downtime until they were large enough to justify the time and expense of a massive rewrite. And now Twitter is effectively up all the time. Whether that's good or not is a separate argument. But, they're there. So there's always going to be time to fix things. >> Well the Twitter example is a great example. Because they built it on rails. >> Yes. >> And they put it on Amazon Cloud. It was just kind of a hack, and then all of the sudden Boom, people loved it. And then, that's to me, the benefit of Cloud. One you get the scape velocity, the investment to start Twitter was fairly low, given what the success was. And then they had to rewrite, because the scale was bursting up. That's called prototyping. >> Oh yeah. >> That's what enterprises have to do. This is the theme of, agile. Get started as a theme, just dig in. Do a hack up font. But don't get confuse that with scale. That's where the rubber meets the road. >> Right and the, Oh Cloud isn't for us because we're an exception case. There are very few companies for whom that statement is true in the modern era. And, do an honest analysis first, before deciding we're going to build our own data centers because we can do it for cheaper. If you're Dropbox, putting storage in, great. Otherwise you're going to end up in this story where Oh, well, we have 20 instances now, so we can do this cheaper in Iraq somewhere. I will bet you a house you're wrong. But okay. >> Yeah. People are telling me that. Okay final question for you. As you've wandered around and been in the sessions, been in the analyst thing. What are some slice of life commentary stories you've bumped into that you found either funny, clever, insulting, or humorous? What's out on the floor? What are some of the conversations? >> One of the best ones was a company I'm not going to name, but the story they told was fantastic. They have, they're primarily on Azure. But they also have a strong secondary presence with AWS, and that's fascinating to me. How does that work internally? It turns out their cloud of choice is Azure. And they have to mandate that with guardrails in place. Because if you give developers a choice they will all go and build on AWS instead. Which is fascinating. And there are business reasons behind why they're doing what they're doing. But that story was just very humorous. I can't confirm or deny whether it was true or not. Because it was someone with way too much to drink telling an awesome story. But the idea of having to forcibly drag your developers away from a thing in a favor of another thing? >> That's like being at a bad party. It's like Oh, the better party is over there. All my friends are over there. >> But they have a commitment to Microsoft software estate. So, that's likely why they're. >> They just deal with Microsoft. >> And I'm not saying this is necessarily the wrong approach. I just find it funny. >> Might be the right business decision, but when you ask the developers, we see that all the time, John. >> All the time. I mean I had a developer one time come to me and start, he like "Look, we thought it would be great to build on Azure. We were actually being paid. They were writing checks to incent us. And I had a revolt. Engineers were revolting. Because the reverse proxies as there was cobbled together services. And they weren't clean native services and primitives. So the engineers were revolting. So they, we had to turn down the cash from Microsoft and go back to Amazon." >> Azure is much better now, but they have to outrun that legacy shadow of at first, it wasn't great. And people try something once, "That was terrible!" Well would you like to try it again now? "Why would I do that? It was terrible!" And it takes time to overcome that knee-jerk reaction. >> Well, but to your point about the business decision. It might make business sense to do that with Microsoft. It's maybe a little bit more predictable than Amazon is as a partner. >> Oh the way to optimize your bill on another Cloud provider that isn't AWS these days is to call up your account rep and yell at them. They're willing to buy business in most cases. That's not specific to any one provider. That's most of them. It's challenging to optimize free, so we don't see the same level of expensive bill problems in most companies there as well. >> Well the good news is on Microsoft, and I was a really big critic of Azure going back a few years ago. Is that they absolutely have changed their philosophy going back, I'd say two, three years ago. In the past two years, particular 24 months, they really have been cranking. They've been pedaling as fast as they can. They're serious. There's commitment from the top. And then they tell us, so there's no doubt. They're doing it also with the Kubernetes. What they're seeing, as they're doing is phenomenal. So... >> Great developer jobs at Microsoft. >> They're in for the long game. They're not going to be a fad. No doubt about it. >> No. And we're not going to see for example the Verizon public Cloud the HP public Cloud. Both of which were turned off. The ones that we're seeing today are largely going to be to stay of the big three. Big four if we include Alibaba. And it's, I'm not worried about the long term viability of any of them. It's just finding their niche, finding their market. >> Yeah, finding their lanes. Cory. Great to have you on. Good to hear some of those stories. Thanks for the commentary. >> Thank you. >> As always great guest analyst Cube alumni, friend, analyst, Cory Quinn here in the Cube. Bringing all the top action from AWS re:Inforce. Their first inaugural security conference around Cloud security. And Cube's initiation of security coverage continues, after this break. (upbeat electronic music)

(cheerful music) >> Live from San Francisco. It's theCUBE. Covering IBM Think 2019. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin. We are at day one of IBM Think 2019, I'm with Dave Vellante. Hey Dave! Hey Lisa, good to see you. The new improved Moscone. >> Exactly, and Stu Miniman, yeah. >> Shiny. >> Yeah, this is the new, it is shiny, The carpets smells new. This is the second annual IBM Think, gentleman where there's this conglomeration of five to six previous events. Doesn't really kick off yet today. I think Partner World starts today but here we are in San Francisco. Moscone North, I think south, and west they have here expecting about 25,000 people. No news yet today, Dave, so let's kind of talk about where IBM is right now with the early part of Q1 of 2019. Red Hat acquisition just approved by shareholders last month. What are your thoughts on the status of Big Blue? >> Well, I think you're right, Lisa, that the Red Hat news is the big news for IBM. We're now entering the next chapter but if you look back for the last five years IBM had to go out and pay two billion dollars for a soft layer to get into the cloud business. That was precipitated by the big, high profile loss of the CIA deal against Amazon. So that was a wake up call for IBM. So they got into the public cloud game. So that's the good news. The bad news is the public cloud's not easy when you're going up against the likes of Google and Microsoft and of course, Amazon. But the linchpin of IBM's cloud strategy is it's SAS portfolio. Over the last 20 years Steve Mills and his organization built a very large software business which they now have migrated into their cloud and so they've got that advantage much like Oracle. They're not a big, dominant cloud infrastructure as a service player but they have a platform where they can put things like Cognitive Solutions and Watson and offer those SAS services to clients. So you'll check on that but when you'll peel through the numbers IBM beat it's numbers last quarter. Stock was up. You know, when it announced the Red Hat acquisition the stock actually got crushed because when you spend 34 billion dollars on a company, you know the shareholders don't necessarily love that but we'll talk about the merits of that move. But they beat in the fourth quarter. They beat on the strength of services. So IBM remains largely a services company, about 60% plus of it's revenues comes from services. It's a somewhat lower margin business, even though IBM margins have been ticking up. As I say, you go back the last five, six years IBM Genesys did Mike's it's microelectronics business, which was a, you know, lost business. It got rid of it's x86 business which is a x86 server business, which is a low margin business. So again, like Oracle, it's focusing on high margin software and services and now we enter the era, Stu, of hybrid cloud with the Red Hat acquisition. A lot of money to pay, but it gets IBM into the next generation of multi cloud. >> Yeah, Dave, the knock I've had against IBM is in many ways they always try to be all things to all people and of course we know you can be good at some things but, you know, it's really tough to be great at everything. And, you know, you talked about cloud, Dave, you know, the SoftLayer acquisition to kind of get into public cloud but, you know, IBM is not one of the big players in public cloud. It's easy. It's Amazon and then followed by you know, Azure, Google, and let's talk Alibaba if we're talking globally. In a multi cloud world IBM has a strong play. As you said, they've got a lot of application assets, they have public cloud, they partner with a lot of the different cloud players out there and with Red Hat they get a key asset to be able to play across all of these multi cloud environments whether we're talking public cloud, private cloud, across all these environments. IBM's been pushing hard into the Kubernetes space, doing a lot with Istio. You know, where they play there, in Red Hat is a key piece of this puzzle. Red Hat running at about three billion dollars of revenue and paying 34 billion dollars but, you know, this is a linchpin as to say how does IBM stay relevant in this cloud world going forward? It's really a you know, a key moment for IBM as to what this means. A lot of discussion as to you know, it's not just the revenue piece but what will Red Hat do to the culture of IBM? IBM has a strong history in open source but you know, you got to, you have a large bench of Red Hat's strong executive team. We're going to see some of them here at the show. We're even going to have one Red Hat executive on our program here and so what will happen once this deal finally closes, which is expected later this year, probably October if you read, you know everything right. But what will it look like as to how will, you know, relatively small Red Hat impact the larger IBM going forward? >> Well, I think it's a big lever, right? I mean we were, Lisa, we were at Cisco Live in Barcelona last week kind of laying out the horses on the track for this multi cloud. Cisco doesn't own it's own public cloud. VMware and Dell don't own it's own public cloud. They both tried to get into the public cloud in the early days and IBM does own it's own public cloud as does Oracle but they're also going hard after this notion of multi cloud as is Cisco, as is VMware. So it sort of sets up the sort of Cisco, IBM Red Hat, VMware, Dell, sort of competing to get after that multi cloud revenue and then HPE fits in there somewhere. We can talk about that. >> So I saw a stat the other day that said in 2018, 80% of companies moved data or apps from public cloud. Reasons being security, control, cost, performance. So to some of the things I've read, Dave, that you've covered recently, if IBM isn't able to really go head to head against the Azures and the AWS, what is their differentiator in this new, hybrid multi cloud world? Is it being able to bring AI, Watson, Cognitive Solutions, better than their competitors in that space that you just mentioned? >> Yeah, IBM does complicate it. You know and cloud and hybrid cloud is complicated and so that's IBM's wheelhouse. And so it tends not to do commodity. So if it's complicated and sophisticated and requires a lot of services and a lot of business processing happening and things like that, IBM tends to excel. So, you know, if you do the SWOT analysis it's big opportunity is to be that multi-cloud provider for it's largest customers. And the larger customers are running, you know, transaction systems on mainframe. They're running cognitive systems on things like power. They've got a giant portfolio, at IBM that is, and they can cobble things together with their services and solve problems and that's kind of how IBM approaches the marketplace. Much different than say, Stu, Cisco or VMware. >> Yeah, Dave, you're absolutely right. You know one of the things I look at is you know, in this multi-cloud space we've see the SI's that are very important there. Companies like Accenture and KPMG and the like. IBM partners with them but IBM also has a large services business. So, you know who's going to be able to help customers get in there and figure out this rather complicated environment. So we are definitely one of the things I want to dig into this week is understand where IBM is at the Cisco Show, Dave. We've talked about their messaging was the bridge to you know what's possible. You know meet the customers where they are, show them how to reach into the future and from Cisco's standpoint, it's strong partnerships with AWS and Google at the forefront. So IBM has just one of the broadest portfolios in the industry. They absolutely play in every single piece but you know customers need good consulting as to Okay, what's going to be the fit for my business. How do I modernize, how do I go forward? And IBM's been down this trip for a number of years. >> Well the in the legacy of Ginni Rometty, in my opinion is going to be determined by the pace at which it can integrate Red Hat and use Red Hat as a lever. Ginni Rometty, when she was doing the roadshow with Jim Whitehurst kept saying it's not a backend loaded deal, and the reason it's not a backend loaded deal is because IBM is a 20 plus billion dollar outsourcing business and they're going to plug Red Hat right into that business to modernize applications. So there's a captive revenue source for IBM. In my view they have to really move fast, faster than typically IBM moves. We've been hearing about strategic initiatives and cloud, and Watson and it's been moving too slow in my opinion. The Red Hat acquisition has to move very very quickly. It's got to move at the speed of cloud and that's going to determine in my opinion-- >> So, actually, so a couple of weeks after the acquisition Red Hat had brought in an analyst to hear what was going on, and while the discussion is Red Hat will stay a distinct brand, there's going to be no lay offs were >> Yeah absolutely. >> Going to keep them separate, what they will get is IBM can really help them scale so >> Yep. Red Hat is getting into some new environments, you know that whole services organization, Red Hat doesn't have that. So IBM absolutely can plug in there and we think really accelerate, the old goal for Red Hat was okay how do we get from that three billion dollars to five billion dollars in the next couple of years. IBM thinks that they can accelerate that even faster. >> And Lisa I think the good news is IBM has always had an affinity toward open source. IBM was really the first, really to make a big investment you know they poured a billion dollars into Linux as a means of competing with Microsoft back in the day, and so they've got open source chops. So for those large IBM customers that might not want to go it alone on open source and you know Red Hat's kind of the cool kid on the block. But at the same time, you know there's some risks there. Now IBM can take that big blue blanket wrap it around it's largest customers and say okay, we've got you covered in open source, we've got the Red Hat asset, and we've got the services organization to help you modernize your application portfolio. >> One of the things too that Stu, you brought up a couple minutes ago is culture. And so looking at what, Red Hat estimates that it's got about eight million developers world wide using their technologies and this is an area that IBM had historically not been really focused on. What are some of the things that you're expecting to hear this week or see this week with respect to the developer community embracing IMB? >> Yeah and Lisa it's not like IBM hasn't been trying to get into the developer community. I remember back at some of the previous shows Edge and Pulse and the like, they would have you know Dev at and try to do a nice little piece of it but it really didn't gain as much traction as you might like. Compare and contrast that with cisco, we've been watching over the last five years the DevNet community. They've got over half a million developers on that platform. So you know, developer engagement usually requires that ground level activity where I've seen good work from IBM has been getting into that cloud native space. So absolutely seen them at the Kubernetes shows working in the container space very heavily and of course that's an area that Red Hat exceeds. So the Linux developers are absolutely there. Now you mentioned how many developers Red Hat has and in that multi cloud, cloud native space, you know Red Hat one of the leaders if not kind of the leader in that space and therefore it should help super charge what IBM is doing, give them some credibility. I'd love to see how many developers we see at this show, you know, you've been to this show Dave and you've been to this show before, it looked more enterprisey to me from the outside-- >> Well, I'm glad you brought up developers because that is the lynch pin of the Red Hat acquisition. If you look at the companies that actually have in the cloud that have a strong developer affinity obviously Microsoft does and always had AWS clearly does Google has you know it's developer community. Stu you mentioned Sisco. Sisco came at it from a networking standpoint and opened up it's network for infrastructure's code. One of the few legacy hardware companies that's done a good job there. VMware, you know not so much. Right? Not really a big developer world and IBM has tried as you pointed out. When they announced Bluemix but that really didn't take off in the developer world. Now with Red Hat IBM, it's your point eight million developers. That is a huge asset for IBM and one that as I said before it absolutely has to leverage and leverage fast. >> And what are you expectations in terms of any sort of industry deeper penetration? There's been some big cloud deals, cloud wins that IBM has made is recent history. One of them being really big in the energy sector. Are you guys kind of expecting to see any sort of industry deeper penetration as a result of what the Red Hat Acquisition will bring? >> Well thats IBM's strength. Stu you pointed out before, it's Accenture, you know Ernie Young, to a lesser extend maybe KPNG but those big SI's and IBM. When IBM bought PWC Gerstner transformed the company and it became a global leader with deep deep industry expertise. That is IBM's you know, savior frankly over these past many many years. So it can compete with virtually anybody on that front and so yes absolutely every industry is being transformed because of digital transformation. IBM understands this as well as anybody. It's a boon for services, it's a good margin business and so that's their competitive advantage. >> Yeah I mean it ties back into their services. I think back when I lived on the vendor side I learned a lot of the industry off of watching IBM. I see how many companies are talking about smarter cities. IBM had you know a long history of working In those environment's. Energy, industrial, IBM is very good at digging into the needed requirements of specific industries and driving that forward. >> So we're going to be here for four days as we mentioned, today is day one. We're going to be talking a lot about this hybrid multi-cloud world. But some of the double clicks we're going to do is talking about data protection, modern data protection, you know a lot of the statistics say that there's eighty percent of the worlds data isn't searchable yet. We all hear every event we do guys, data is the new oil. If companies can actually harness that, extract insights faster than their competition. Create new business models, new services, new products. What are your expectations about how, I hear a lot get your data AI ready. As a marketer I go, what does that mean? What are your thoughts Stu on, and we're sitting in a lot of signage here. How is IBM going to help companies get AI, Data rather AI ready and what does that actually mean? >> So IBM really educated a lot of the world and the broader world as to what some of this AI is. I mean I know we all watched many years ago when Watson was on Jeopardy and we kind of hit through the past the peak and have been trying to sort out okay well how can IBM monetize this? They're taking Watson and getting it into healthcare, they're getting it into all these other environments. So IBM is well known in the AI space. Really well known in the data space but there's a lot of competition and we're still relatively early in the sorting how this new machine learning and AI are going to fit in there. You know we spent a lot of time looking at things like RPA was kind of the gateway drug of AI if you will robotic process automation. And I'm not sure where IBM fit's into that environment. So once again IBM has always had a broad portfolio they do a lot of acquisitions in the space. So you know how can they take all those pieces, pull them together, get after the multicloud world, enable developers to be able to really leverage data even more that's possible and as you said you know more than eighty percent of data today isn't used, you know from an infrastructure stand point I'm looking at how do things like edge computing all get pulled into this environment and lot of questions still. >> IBM is going after hard problems like I said before. You don't expect IBM to be doing things like ad serving with Alexa. You know that's not IBM's game, they're not going to appropriate to sell ad's they're going to take really hard complex problems and charge a lot of money for big services engagements to transform companies. That's their game and that's a data game for sure. >> It's a data game and one of the pieces too that I'm excited to learn about this week is what they're doing about security. We all know you can throw a ton of technology at security and infrastructure but there's the people piece. So we're going to be having a lot of conversations about that as well. Alright guys looking forward to a full week with you and with John joining us at IBM Think I'm Lisa Martin for Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE live day one IBM Think 2019. Stick around we'll be right back with our next guest. (energetic electronic music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. >> Hi everybody, Dave Vellante here with Stu Miniman. We're here to unpack the recent acquisition that IBM announced of Red Hat. $34 billon acquisition financed with cash and debt. And Stu, let me get us started. Why would IBM spend $34 billion on Red Hat? Its largest acquisition to date of a software company had been Cognos at $5 billion. This is a massive move. IBM's Ginni Rometty called this a game changer. And essentially, my take is that they're pivoting. Their public cloud strategy was not living up to expectations. They're pivoting to hybrid cloud. Their hybrid cloud strategy was limited because they didn't really have strong developer mojo, their Bluemix PaaS layer had really failed. And so they really needed to make a big move here, and this is a big move. And so IBM's intent, and Ginni Rometty laid out the strategy, is to become number one in hybrid cloud, the undisputed leader. And so we'll talk about that. But Stu, from Red Hat's perspective, it's a company you're very close to and you've observed for a number of years, Red Hat was on a path touting a $5 billion revenue plan, what happened? Why would they capitulate? >> Yeah Dave, on the face of it, Red Hat says that IBM will help it further its mission. We just listened to Arvin Krishna from IBM talking with Paul Cormier at Red Hat, and they talked about how they were gonna keep the Red Hat brand alive. IBM has a long history with open source. As you mentioned, I've been working with Red Hat, gosh, almost 20 years now, and we all think back to two decades ago, when IBM put a billion dollars into Linux and really pushed on open source. So these are not strangers, they know each other really well. Part of me looks at these from a cynicism standpoint. Somebody on Twitter said that Red Hat is hitting it at the peak of Kubernetes hype. And therefore, they're gonna get maximum valuation for where the stock is. Red Hat has positioned itself rather well in the hybrid cloud world, really the multicloud world, when you go to AWS, when you go to the Microsoft Azure environment, you talk to Google. Open source fits into that environment and Red Hat products specifically tie into those environments. Remember last year, in Boston, there's a video of Andy Jassy talking about a partnership with Red Hat. This year, up on stage, Microsoft with Azure partnering deeply with Red Hat. So Red Hat has done a nice job of moving beyond Linux. But Linux is still at its core. There definitely is concern that the operating system is less important today than it was in the past. It was actually Red Hat's acquisition of CoreOS for about $250 million earlier this year that really put a fine point on it. CoreOS was launched to be just enough Linux to live in this kind of container and Kubernetes world. And Red Hat, of course, like we've seen often, the company that is saying, "We're going to kill you", well you go and you buy them. So Red Hat wasn't looking to kill IBM, but definitely we've seen this trend of softwares eating the world, and open sources eating software. So IBM, hopefully, is a embracing that open source ethos. I have to say, Dave, for myself, a little sad to see the news. Red Hat being the paragon of open source. The one that we always go to for winning in this space. So we hope that they will be able to keep their culture. We've had a chance, many times, to interview Jim Whitehurst, really respected CEO. One that we think should stay involved in IBM deeply for this. But if they can keep and grow the culture, then it's a win for Red Hat. But still sorting through everything, and it feels like a little bit of a capitulation that Red Hat decides to sell off rather than keep its mission of getting to five billion and beyond, and be the leading company in the space. >> Well I think it is a bit of a capitulation. Because look, Red Hat is roughly a $3 billion company, growing at 20% a year, had that vision of five billion Its stock, in June, had hit $175. So while IBM's paying a 60% premium off of its current price, it's really only about 8 or 9% higher than where Red Hat was just a few months ago. And so I think, there's an old saying on Wall Street, the first disappointment is never the last. And so I think that Red Hat was looking at a long slog. They reduced expectations, they guided lower, and they were looking at the 90-day shot clock. And this probably wasn't going to be a good 'nother couple of years for Red Hat. And they're selling at the peak of the market, or roughly the peak of the market. They probably figured, hey, the window is closing, potentially, to do this deal. Maybe not such a bad time to get out, as opposed to trying to slog it out. Your thoughts. >> Yeah, Dave, I think you're absolutely right. When you look at where Red Hat is winning, they've done great in OpenStack but there's not a lot of excitement around OpenStack. Kubernetes was talked about lots in the announcement, in the briefings, and everything like that. I was actually surprised you didn't hear as much about just the core business. You would think you would be hearing about all the companies using Red Hat Enterprise Linux around the world. That ratable model that Red Hat really has a nice base of their environment. It was talking more about the future and where Kubernetes, and cloud-native, and all of that development will go. IBM has done middling okay with developers. They have a strong history in middleware, which is where a lot of the Red Hat development activity has been heading. It was interesting to hear, on the call, it's like, oh well, what about the customers that are using IBM too say, "Oh well, if customers want that, we'll still do it." What about IBM with Cloud Foundry? Well absolutely, if customers wanna still be doing it, they'll do that. So you don't hear the typical, "Oh well, we're going to take Red Hat technology "and push it through all of IBM's channel." This is in the IBM cloud group, and that's really their focus, as it is. I feel like they're almost limiting the potential for growth for Red Hat. >> Well so IBM's gonna pay for this, as I said, it's an all cash deal. IBM's got about 14 and a half billion dollars on the balance sheet. And so they gotta take out some debt. S&P downgraded IBM's rating from an A+ to an A. And so the ratings agency is going to be watching IBM's growth. IBM said this will add 200 basis points of revenue growth over the five year CAGR. But that means we're really not gonna see that for six, seven years. And Ginni Rometty stressed this is not a backend loaded thing. We're gonna find revenue opportunities through cross-selling and go-to-market. But we have a lot of questions on this deal, Stu. And I wanna sorta get into that. So first of all, again, I think it's the right move for IBM. It's a big move for IBM. Rumors were that Cisco might have been interested. I'm not sure if Microsoft was in the mix. So IBM went for it and, as I said, didn't pay a huge premium over where their stock was back in June. Now of course, back in June, the market was kind of inflated. But nonetheless, the strategy now is to go multi-cloud. The number one in the multi-cloud world. What is that multi-cloud leadership? How are we gonna measure multi-cloud? Is IBM, now, the steward of open source for the industry? To your point earlier, you're sad, Stu, I know. >> You bring up a great point. So I think back to three years ago, with the Wikibon we put together, our true private cloud forecast. And when we built that, we said, "Okay, here's the hardware, and software, "and services in private cloud." And we said, "Well let's try to measure hybrid cloud." And we spent like, six months looking at this. And it's like, well what is hybrid cloud? I've got my public cloud pieces, and I've got my private cloud pieces. Well there's some management layers and things that go in between. Do I count things like PaaS? So do you save people like Pivotal and Red Hat's OpenShift? Are those hybrid cloud? Well but they live either here or there. They're not usually necessarily helping with the migration and moving around. I can live in multiple environments. So Linux and containers live in the public, they live in the private, they don't just fly around in the ether. So measuring hybrid cloud, I think is really tough. Does IBM plus Red Hat make them a top leader in this hybrid multi-cloud world? Absolutely, they should be mentioned a lot more. When I go to the cloud shows, the public cloud shows, IBM isn't one of the first peak companies you think about. Red Hat absolutely is in the conversation. It actually should raise the profile of Red Hat because, while Red Hat plays in a lot of the conversations, they're also not the first company that comes to mind when you talk about them. Microsoft, middle of hybrid cloud. Oracle, positioning their applications in this multi-cloud world. Of course you can't talk about cloud, any cloud, without talking about Amazon's position in the marketplace. And SAS is the real place that it plays. So IBM, one of their biggest strengths is that they have applications. Dave, you know the space really well. What does this mean vis-à-vis Oracle? >> Well let's see, so Oracle, I think, is looking at this, saying, alright. I would say IBM is Oracle's number one competitor in the enterprise. You got SAP, and Amazon obviously in cloud, et cetera, et cetera. But let me put it this way, I think Oracle is IBM's number one competitor. Whether Oracle sees it that way or not. But they're clearly similar companies, in terms of their vertical integration. I think Oracle's looking at this, saying, hey. There's no way Oracle was gonna spend $34 billion on Red Hat. And I don't think they were interested in really spending any money on the alternatives. But does this put Canonical and SUSE in play? I think Oracle's gonna look at this and sort of message to its customers, "We're already number one in our world in hybrid cloud." But I wanna come back to the deal. I'm actually optimistic on the deal, from the standpoint of, I think IBM had to make a big move like this. Because it was largely just bumping along. But I'm not buying the narrative from Jim Whitehurst that, "Well we had to do this to scale." Why couldn't they scale with partners? I just don't understand that. They're open. This is largely, to me, a services deal. This is a big boon for IBM Services business. In fact, Jim Whitehurst, and Ginni even said that today on the financial analyst call, Jim said, "Our big constraint was "services scale and the industry expertise there." So what was that constraint? Why couldn't they partner with Accenture, and Ernie Young, and PwC, and the likes of Deloitte, to scale and preserve greater independence? And I think that the reason is, IBM sees an opportunity and they're going hard after it. So how will, or will, IBM change its posture relative to some of those big services plays? >> Yeah, Dave, I think you're absolutely right there. Because Red Hat should've been able to scale there. I wonder if it's just that all of those big service system integrators, they're working really closely with the public cloud providers. And while Red Hat was a piece of it, it wasn't the big piece of it. And therefore, I'm worried on the application migration. I'm worried about the adoption of infrastructure as a service. And Red Hat might be a piece in the puzzle, but it wasn't the driver for that change, and the move, and the modernization activities that were going on. That being said, OpenShift was a great opportunity. It plays in a lot of these environments. It'll be really interesting to see. And a huge opportunity for IBM to take and accelerate that business. From a services standpoint, do you think it'll change their position with regard to the SIs? >> I don't. I think IBM's gonna try to present, preserve Red Hat as an independent company. I would love to see IBM do what EMC did years ago with VMware, and float some portion of the company, and truly have it at least be quasi-independent. With an independent operating structure, and reporting structure from the standpoint of a public company. That would really signal to the partners that IBM's serious about maintaining independence. >> Yeah now, look Dave, IBM has said they will keep the brand, they will keep the products. Of all the companies that would buy Red Hat, I'm not super worried about kinda polluting open source. It was kinda nice that Jim Whitehurst would say, if it's a Red Hat thing, it is 100% open source. And IBM plays in a lot of these environments. A friend of mine on Twitter was like, "Oh hey, IBM's coming back to OpenDaylight or things like that." Because they'd been part of Cloud Foundry, they'd been part of OpenDaylight. There's certain ones that they are part of it and then they step back. So IBM, credibly open source space, if they can let Red Hat people still do their thing. But the concern is that lots of other companies are gonna be calling up project leads, and contributors in the open source community that might've felt that Red Hat was ideal place to live, and now they might go get their paycheck somewhere else. >> There's rumors that Jim Whitehurst eventually will take over IBM. I don't see it, I just don't think Jim Whitehurst wants to run Z mainframes and Services. That doesn't make any sense to me. Ginni's getting to the age where IBM CEOs typically retire, within the next couple of years. And so I think that it's more likely they'll bring in somebody from internally. Whether it's Arvin or, more likely, Jim Kavanaugh 'cause he's got the relationship with Wall Street. Let's talk about winners and losers. It's just, again, a huge strategic move for IBM. Frankly, I see the big winners is IBM and Red Hat. Because as we described before, IBM was struggling with its execution, and Red Hat was just basically, finally hitting a wall after 60-plus quarters of growth. And so the question is, will its customers win? The big concern I have for the customers is, IBM has this nasty habit of raising prices when it does acquisitions. We've seen it a number of times. And so you keep an eye on it, if I were a Red Hat customer, I'd be locking in some attractive pricing, longterm. And I would also be calling Mark Shuttleworth, and get his take, and get that Amdahl coffee cup on my desk, as it were. Other winners and losers, your thoughts on some of the partners, and the ecosystem. >> Yeah, when I look at this and say, compare it to Microsoft buying GitHub. We're all wondering, is this a real game changer for IBM? And if they embrace the direction. It's not like Red Hat culture is going to just take over IBM. In the Q&A with IBM, they said, "Will there be influence? Absolutely. "Is this a marriage of equals? No. "We're buying Red Hat and we will be "communicating and working together on this" But you can see how this can help IBM, as to the direction. Open source and the multi-cloud world is a huge, important piece. Cisco, I think, could've made a move like this. I would've been a little bit more worried about maintaining open source purity, if it was somebody like Cisco. There's other acquisitions, you mentioned Canonical and SUSE are out there. If somebody wanted to do this, the role of the operating system is much less important than it is today. You wouldn't have seen Microsoft up on stage at Red Hat Summit this year if Windows was the driver for Microsoft going forward. The cloud companies out there, to be honest, it really cements their presence out there. I don't think AWS is sitting there saying, "Oh jeez, we need to worry." They're saying, "Well IBM's capitulated." Realizing that, "Sure they have their own cloud, "and their environment, but they're going to be "successful only when they live in, "and around, and amongst our platform of Amazon." And Azure's gonna feel the same way, and same about Google. So there's that dynamic there. >> What about VMware? >> So I think VMware absolutely is a loser here. When I went back to say one of the biggest strengths of IBM is that they have applications. When you talk about Red Hat, they're really working, not only at the infrastructure layer, but working with developers, and working in that environment. The biggest weakness of VMware, is they don't own the applications. I'm paying licenses to VMware. And in a multi-cloud world, why do I need VMware? As opposed to Red Hat and IBM, or Amazon, or Microsoft, have a much more natural affinity for the applications and the data in the future. >> And what about the arms dealers? HPE and Dell, in particular, and of course, Lenovo. Wouldn't they prefer Red Hat being independent? >> Absolutely, they would prefer that they're gonna stay independent. As long as it doesn't seem to customers that IBM is trying to twist everybody's arms, and get you on to Z, or Power, or something like that. And continues to allow partnerships with the HPEs, Dells, Lenovos of the world. I think they'll be okay. So I'd say middling to impact. But absolutely, Red Hat, as an independent, was really the Switzerland of the marketplace. >> Ginni Rometty had sited three growth areas. One was Red Hat scale and go-to-market. I think there's no question about that. IBM could help with Red Hat's go-to-market. The other growth vector was IBM's products and software on the Red Hat stack. I'm less optimistic there, because I think that it's the strength of IBM's products, in and of themselves, that are largely gonna determine that success. And then the third was Services. I think IBM Services is a huge winner here. Having the bat phone into Red Hat is a big win for IBM Services. They can now differentiate. And this is where I think it's gonna be really interesting to see the posture of Accenture and those other big guys. I think IBM can now somewhat differentiate from those guys, saying, "Well wait, "we have exclusive, or not exclusive, "but inside baseball access to Red Hat." So that's gonna be an interesting dynamic to watch. Your final thoughts here. >> Yeah, yeah, Dave, absolutely. On the product integration piece, the question would be, you're gonna have OpenAPIs. This is all gonna work with the entire ecosystem. Couldn't IBM have done more of this without having to pay $34 billion and put things together? Services, absolutely, will be the measurement as to whether this is successful or not. That's probably gonna be the line out of them in financials, that we're gonna have to look at. Because, Dave, going back to, what is hybrid, and how do we measure it? What is success for this whole acquisition down the line? Any final pieces to what we should watch and how we measure that? >> So I think that, first of all, IBM's really good with acquisitions, so keep an eye on that. I'm not so concerned about the debt. IBM's got strong free cash flow. Red Hat throws off a billion dollars a year in free cash flow. This should be an accretive acquisition. In terms of operating profits, it might take a couple of years. But certainly from a standpoint of free cash flow and revenue growth, I think it's gonna help near-term. If it doesn't, that's something that's really important to watch. And then the last thing is culture. You know a lot of people at these companies. I know a lot of people at these companies. Look, the Red Hat culture drinks the Kool-Aid of open. You know this. Do they see IBM as the steward of open, and are they gonna face a brain drain? That's why it's no coincidence that Whitehurst and Rometty were down in North Carolina today. And Arvin and Paul Cormier were in Boston today. This is where a lot of employees are for Red Hat. And they're messaging. And so that's very, very important. IBM's not foolish. So that, to me, Stu, is a huge thing, is the culture. Dave, IBM is no longer the navy suit with the red tie, and everybody buttoned down. People are concerned about like, oh, IBM's gonna give the Red Hat people a dress code. Sure, the typical IBMer is not in a graphic tee and a hoodie. But, Dave, you've seen such a transformation in IBM over the last couple of decades. >> Yeah, definitely. And I think this really does, in my view, cement, now, the legacy of Ginny Rometty, which was kinda hanging on Watson, and Cognitive, and this sort of bespoke set of capabilities, and the SoftLayer acquisition. It, now, all comes together. This is a major pivot by IBM. I think, strategically, it's the right move for IBM. And I think, if in fact, IBM can maintain Red Hat's independence and that posture, and maintain its culture and employee base, I think it does change the game for IBM. So I would say, smart move, good move. Expensive but probably worth it. >> Yeah, where else would they have put their money, Dave? >> Yeah, right. Alright, Stu, thank you very much for unpacking this announcement. And thank you for watching. We'll see you next time. (mellow electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering InterConnect 2017. Brought to you by IBM. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. We're live here at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas for the wrap-up of IBM InterConnect 2017. I'm John Furrier. My co-host this week, my partner in crime, co-CEO, co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media Inc. with myself, Dave Vellante. Dave, it's been a great week. I just feel like I have been Watsonized and Blockchained and cloud all week. As we wrap up InterConnect, I want to get your thoughts on IBM, the cloud business, the big data marketplace, some of the things that we're seeing at the 100 of events we go to. We've got our events coming up, we're going to be in Munich next month, we got DockerCon, but a lot of developer events coming up, but in general, we get to see the landscape, in some cases, that others don't see. Let's talk about that, so before we get into the landscape, let's about IBM, IBM's prospects. This show, just quick stat, almost double the online traffic we're seeing on IBMGO than World of Watson, which was the biggest show we've ever done with theCUBE that we've seen. So, an interest, it's a data point. Unpack the data, you can see that there's a lot of global interest in what IBM is doing right now with the cloud and with Watson, and certainly with Blockchain you add another disruptive enabler potentially to what will either be a brilliant IBM strategy or a complete crash and burn. I think this is an IBM go big or go home moment with Ginni Rometty. I love her messaging, I love her three pillars, enterprise strong, data first, cognitive to the core. That is solid messaging, all three pillars. To me, it's clear. IBM is at a reinvention moment, it's all coming together, but it's a go big or go home moment for them. >> Well, you know, John, I mean, Ginni when she took over, sorry, she was running strategy before she became CEO, I mean, IBM had a choice, they could go double down on infrastructure and go knock it out with Dell and EMC and HP, or they could go up the value chain. And my ongoing joke is Dell bought EMC, IBM buys some other company, and that to me underscores the differentiation in thinking. Oracle, I think, is a little different, but Oracle and IBM are somewhat similar, I think you'd agree, in that they've got a big SaaS portfolio, they're trying to vertically integrate, they're trying to drive high value margin businesses. The difference is IBM's much more services oriented than, say, an Oracle, and that's still, as I say, a big challenge for IBM. But I'm more, I'm a bull on IBM. >> Why is that? >> I think the strategy is, number one, they're relevant. We talked for years about how we weren't that excited about Microsoft because they weren't relevant. Satya Nadella came in, all of a sudden, they're relevant again. I think IBM is highly relevant in the minds of CEOs, CIOs, CCOs, CDOs, all the C-suite, IBM is super relevant there, just as are Accenture and Ernie Young and all the big SIs. But IBM's got tons of products beneath it, number one. Number two, despite the fact that, you called it out several years ago, they bought software for 2.4 billion, it was a bare metal hosting company, alright, but IBM's turning that into >> Bluemix. >> a cloud business with Bluemix, right. And they're building, bringing in acquisitions like Cleversafe, like Aspera, like Ustream, and others, where they're bringing services that are differentiated. You can only get Watson on IBM's cloud, you can only get IBM's Blockchain on IBM's cloud, so they're bringing in value-added services, and there's only one place you can get them, and I think that's a viable strategy that's going to throw off a lot of cash, and it's going to lead to success. >> And by the way, they're also continuing to invest in open source. So, again, that's-- >> That's the other piece. I wanted to talk to you, and this is your wheelhouse. IBM's open source mojo is not just lip service, alright. They have deep-rooted DNA in open source and their strategy around it, and they've proven that they can monetize open source. What's their model, I mean, explain the model because I think it's instructive. >> I mean, open source, there's a lot of different models. Red Hat-- >> For IBM, I mean. >> IBM's model of open source is very clear. If you look at what they've done with just Blockchain as a great example, they have mobilized their company, and they did it with Bluemix as well with the cloud, once they said, "We want to get in the cloud game," once, "We want to do Blockchain," they go open source at the core, then they get their entire brain trust workin' on it. It's not just a hand wave, some division, they're kind of reorganizing on the fly, they're kind of agile organization, which some may read as chaotic, but to me, I think that's just good management practice in this day and age. They get an open source project, and they drive that home, and they have people contributing and giving that to the community, and then adding value on top and differentiating. It's just classic 101, create some value, and create some differentiation with your products, and by the way, if you don't want to use our products, build your own, or hey, use the open source code. That's pretty much an over-simplified version of open source. >> But Blockchain's a great example of this, right? So, they see the leverage in open source project, they put all these resources in, and they say, okay, now let's build our product on top of that, let's get the open source community leverage and this is, let me ask you this, does IBM, so several years ago when IBM announced Bluemix, you were pretty critical. >> John: I was very critical. >> IBM has to win the developer audience or it's cooked in this game. >> That's what I said. >> How is it done, how would you grade them? >> I think they're doing very well. I think IBM is, again, to use your word, they're not putting lip service in it. So, I was joking with Meg Swanson last night, I saw Adam Gunther when they interviewed on theCUBE, and I was critical. I didn't say that their cloud was bad, I was just saying it's just not as, just got a lot of work to do, Amazon's kickin' ass, which we now know that happened, right. But they've done well. They've done well, they've ran hard, they've gone the table stakes on the enterprise. I still think they got some more work to do, we can analyze, I'm putting out my cloud ratings matrix, I'm going to put IBM on that list, I have Google and Amazon done. I'm going to add Microsoft Azure and IBM onto the mix in the comparison matrix. But IBM has done good with the developers. They've just invested 10 million in this announcement, and they're ramping up. I wouldn't say they're throwing just money at it, they got people, so I would give them, I'd give them a B-plus, A-minus score because they're hustlin', they're doing it. Are they totally blowing it out of the water? No, I don't think they're pushing hard enough there. I think they could give it some more gas, I think they could do more with it, personally thinking. But you know, Dr. Angel Diaz was on earlier today. They're going at their own pace. >> But you agree they're in the game. >> Oh, totally. >> Making good progress. >> They're totally, IBM is totally in the cloud game, and they don't get a lot of credit for it. Either does Oracle, by the way. Somehow, people seem to talk about Azure and Google. Google is so far behind, in my opinion, they're not even close. I think it's Amazon, Azure, IBM and Oracle and Google all kind of in that-- >> Juxtapose Oracle's developer cred, even though it owns Java, with IBM's. How would you compare the two? >> Very similar, I think. Different approaches, but again, to your point, IBM's relevant, Oracle's relevant. We had this question about VMware when they did the deal with AWS. They have customers and they have cash, so they're not going anywhere. It's not like IBM's a sinking ship. It's not like Oracle's a sinking ship. Now, that being said, there's a huge shift in the business, and I would say in that scenario, Google is in a very good position, so I've been very critical on Google only because they're trying to be acting like they're an enterprise flag. They're not, I mean, Google's got great tech, TensorFlow, machine learning. Google has great cloud tech, but in that game, they're up in the number one, two spot. But in the enterprise side, they're not close. They're workin' on that. So, that's my critique of Google. Microsoft has got the DNA for the enterprise, so Microsoft and Oracle to me are more similar than comparing IBM and Oracle. I'd say IBM is a lot more like Google and Amazon, kind of in-between, but Oracle and Microsoft look the same to me. Big install base, highly differentiated, stacks aren't perfect, but it looks good on paper, and they're gettin' business. And Oracle's earnings, by the way, were very explosive due to the cloud growth. >> Another question I like to ask sometimes is, okay, what would you have done differently if you had a choice? Like when Gerstner was running IBM, he chose to consolidate the company, essentially, not consolidate, but focus on services, one throat to choke, single-faced IBM. Great customer service and build the services business, buy-in, PWC, et cetera, that was the key. What could you have done differently that could've said, well-- >> John: For IBM? >> Yeah, at the time, you could have said, "We're spin out different product groups. "We're going to be the best at microprocessors, "or disk drives, or database, or software." >> I think IBM moved too slow. >> That's a historical example. Given what IBM's doing today, what would you have done differently if you were Ginni Rometty five or six years ago? >> I would've done what they're doing now three years ago. We were, when we started working with them with CUBE, IOD events, and Pulse. >> Dave: Information on Demand. >> You had a lot of silence. I think, if I had to go back and get a mulligan, if I was Ginni Rometty, I would've moved faster. >> Dave: Done that faster. >> Hindsight's 20-20 on that, but it wasn't that clear. But again, it's the big aircraft carrier, it can only move so fast. I think what they're doing now is good strategy, and they're price strong, data force, cognitive to the core is a good strategy. Now, cognitive is words for AI, and that's their word, cognitive 'cause of Watson, but essentially, machine learning and AI is going to be a big pillar there, and then, the data first is more of an architectural component that's very good. But in general, Dave, the cloud is, this is what's going on in my find. It's so obvious to me. The big data marketplace that was we defined by Cloudera and Hadoop and Hortonworks just never panned out. It morphed into a bigger picture, and so, Hadoop is part of, now, a bigger ecosystem. Cloud was growing very fast. Those two worlds are coming together and growing very rapidly independent with big data, with machine learning, AI, and IOT. They're coming together. The intersection of the big data and the cloud. >> Cloud-mapping data. That was Yuri Burton from 2005. >> But it's coming together really fast, and the IOT is the real business driver. I know there's not a lot of stuff shipping yet in the sim stuff out there, but merging IOT into IT into business process and into developer mindset, whether it's an Indiegogo up to full-on developers is the accelerant that's going to fuel the AI value. To me, that's the intersection point of big data and cloud, and that is the home run, that's the holy grail, and that's going to be disrupting some preexisting decisions by big vendors who made bets, and I'm talkin' about bets made in the past five years, not like bets made 20 years ago or 10 years ago. I think the IOT is going to really shape the game. The other thing I worry about now, in my opinion, is a lot of AI-washing. People say, "Oh, AI." You see people on the stage, "Oh, we did this with AI." There's no AI, it's augmented intelligence, which is basically predictive analytics. You know, true AI is not yet here, it's a little bit hyped up, not that I mind that. I think that the machine learning is the real meat on the bone right now, I think that's the core enabler. Machine learning is by far the most important trend in the computer science world today as it relates to integrating that capability into cloud native, microservices, and overall application. >> I agree, I mean, AI is still a heavy lift, but to me, the key, I go back to something you were saying, is developers. That's the lever that's going to give you the ability to move large mountains. If you don't have that developer community, and you don't have open source chops, you're going to struggle a little bit. You're going to be either in a swim lane like Oracle with its database and its red stack, and maybe you can break out of that, but I'm not sure it wants to. Or you're going to be stuck in infrastructure lane. >> Yeah, but the developers are driving all the action right now. My point about machine learning, if you look at the shows just recently, and certainly we have the history of the past year, machine learning is the sexiest trend in every show. Last show was Google Next, machine learning with TensorFlow, both open source. Machine learning's not new, it's just now accelerating the developer. The developers want to move faster, and I think things like machine learning, things like cognitive that IBM puts out there, are great catalysts. That's going to be a big thing we're going to watch, obviously, we have a big developer community at SiliconANGLE, so something to watch. >> What's next? We've got a chief data scientist summit next week in Silicon Valley, we're going to be at the-- >> Let's look at my Friday show this week. Every Friday I do the Silicon Valley Friday show with me and guests, we got that goin' on, so always check that out on soundcloud.com/johnfurrier, or check out my Facebook feed, facebook.com/johnfurrier. But in terms of CUBE events, we've got DataWorks in Munich on April 2nd, DockerCon in Austin, Oracle Marketing Sum Experience, Red Hat, Dell EMC World, Service Now, Open Stack, Big Data in London. >> It's going to be a busy spring. >> Lot of stuff going on. Great stuff. >> Deb, we'll see you in July. >> In bumper sticker, Dave, this show, encapsulate your thoughts. >> Well, I think it's all about cloud, data, and cognitive coming together in a way that allows business value and differentiation through the end customer. That's what this show is about to me. It's not about infrastructure, cloud and infrastructure, that's kind of table stakes. It's all about differentiation up the stack, creating, enabling new business models. >> My encapsulation is the enterprise strong, data first, cognitive to the core message that Ginni said, that translates into IBM's shoring up their base products and putting an innovation strategy around Blockchain and soon to be cognitive computing at a whole 'nother level, and I think they're going to have a real innovation strategy and continue to use what they did with Watson, the winning formula. Put something out there that's a guiding principle and draft the company behind it. I think that, to me, is my big walk away, and I think Blockchain will potentially level, has game-changing capabilities, and if that plays out like Watson's playing out, then IBM could be in great shape on both shoring up the base in cloud and their business and having an innovation strategy that extends them out. That to me is the reason why I'm bullish on them. So, great show, Dave Vellante. Thanks to the guys, thanks for everyone watching. That's it for us here in theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante wrapping up IBM InterConnect 2017. Thanks for watching, stay with us, and follow us at theCUBE on Twitter and siliconangle.tv on the web. Thanks for watching. (electronic keyboard music)

but cute at servicenow knowledge 14 is sponsored by service now here are your hosts Dave vellante and Jeff trick okay we're back this is Dave vellante with Jeff Frick were here live at moscone south and this is the knowledge 14 conference 6600 people here growing was about 4,000 last year you seen this conference grow and about the same pace as a services service now stop line they're growing at sixty percent plus on pace to do over 600 million in revenue this year on pace to be a billion-dollar company and we have the CFO here Mike Scarpelli cube alum Mike great to see you again thank you so this is amazing I mean Moscone is a great venue of the aria last year's kind of intimate you know and now you're really sort of blowing it out I would expect next year you're going to be in the into the big time of conferences well I got a budget for that Tiffany I'm a budget I know it's going to cost more just like the attendance is going up fifty sixty percent the costs are going up as well too but our partners are really important and our partners offset a lot of those costs will get over eight million in sponsorship revenue to offset that so when we expect next year will see a corresponding increase in the sponsorship revenue as well well it's impressive you have a lot of strong partners particularly the system integrator consultancy types you know we saw I hope it will miss somebody definitely saw sent you there last night we start Ernie young giving a presentation k p.m. ET le is about so cloud sherpas yeah the cloud shippers and so we had them on earlier she have a lot of these facilitators which is a great sign for you and they're realizing okay there's there's money to be made around the ServiceNow ecosystem helping customers implement so that's going to make you really happy no you know one of the things that's really important for us with the system integrators is today they haven't really brought us any deals but they've been very influential in accelerating deals and we think that theme is going to continue and based upon what they're seeing they're able to do in the ServiceNow ecosystem in terms of professional service consulting engagement we think that's going to start to motivate them to now bring us into deals that we were never in before but what they have been able to do as well besides just accelerate is have the deals grow beyond IT and we see that numerous on global 2000 accounts for us and you're not trying to land grab the professional services business that's clear effect when you talk to some of your customers when I've ever last year when your customer scoop is complaining that your your price is real high on the surface of suck which it probably makes you happy because it leaves more room for you for your partners and that's really not a long-term piece of your revenue II think you've said publicly you want to be less than fifteen percent of your business right yes yes we have a little bit of a ongoing debate internally my preference is not to see the professional service organization grow in terms of headcount with the pure implementation people the area that I would like to see it grow is more on the training side unfortunately some of our customers they insist that we are part of the professional service engagement so those are more the ones that we're going to be involved and if a customer is looking for a lower-cost alternative we want to make it fair for our partner so that we're not competing with them so they can come up with a lower price to offer a good quality service is important though that it's not going for the lowest price our partners need to make investment so it can be a quality implementations this is a number of early implementations that were done by partners that were some of our smaller partners where they really didn't meet the the expectations of those customers that we've had to go in and fix some of those engagements so the number one goal for our professional service is to ensure we have happy customers because happy customers renew and buy more which are two of the key drivers for our growth so you keep growing like crazy blew it out last quarter to get a 181 million in Billings revenues up 60-plus percent you're throwing off cash hitting all your metrics of course the stock went down oh there you go not much more you could do but you got to really be pleased with the consistent performance and really predictability it seems of the company yeah no I'm since I've been the CFO company it's going to be coming on three years suit in the summer the one thing that I will say about this business model is it's extremely predictable in terms of the the forecasting and what helps with that is the fact that we have such high renewal rates that really helps because we really since I've been here we've never lost any major accounts I think our renewal rate has been averaging north of ninety-five percent and in terms of our upsells or up sells have been very consistent on average they run about a third of our business every quarter and that was Frank has made comments before too that if we don't sign on another customer we can still grow twenty-five percent per year plus just based upon the upsell business opportunity that we have within our existing installed base of customers that's penetrating accounts deeper more seats more licenses more processes and applications yeah the main grower of our upsells are the main contributor to our upsells within our customers really has been additional seat licenses because many of our customers we still have even fully penetrated IT and as we roll out more applications or make our applications more feature-rich as we talked about as Frank his keynote he talked a little bit today aitee costing we've always had that as an application but that's going to be coming out as a much more feature-rich application it's going to be a lot more usable to some of our customers when that goes live that's going to drive more licenses because many times it's different people with an IT that are the process users behind that and then it's going outside of IT as well with the adoption of people enterprise service management concept that Frank's been talking about that will drive incremental users as well too we do have some additional products such as orchestration discovery with a vast majority of our growth and customers is additional licensing so very consistent performance like I say the stock pull back a little bits interesting you guys worked a Splunk tableau smoking hot stocks of all pullback obviously it's almost like you trade as a groupie even though completely different companies completely different business models you don't compete really at all but so you kind of got to be flattering to be in that yeah obviously but it's I looked at as X this is good in a way this is a healthy you know pull back it's maybe a buying opportunity for people that wanted to get in and there are a lot of folks that I'm sure they're looking at that do you I mean how much attention do you even pay for it i know most CFOs i took a say look we can't control it all we can control is you know what we can control and that's what we focus on but you even look at things like that you order your thoughts on you know and unfortunately there is a little bit of a psychology going on here with some of our employees and they're always asking and my comment to them is the only price that matters is the day you sell and this pullback that we've seen recently this is not uncommon was I expecting it to happen right now you know I don't if I if I could predict those things a lot of different line of business but what I will say history is the best indicator of the future and even a company like salesforce com one of our large investors last week he sent me an email and said you do realize that in the first five years of sales force being a public it had forgot if it was four or five fifty percent pullbacks in the stock price so this this happens it will happen I guarantee it will happen again sometime in the future but not just with us with all the other companies I'd be more concerned if it was we were the only company that traded down and everyone stayed up but we're all trading down we all came back today it's interesting and you kind of burned the shorts last year and they've made some money now but but you know Peter Lynch they don't ever short great companies and it's very hard to too short great companies your timing has to be perfect so and your core business you know like for instance a workday is is fundamentally very profitable or you know it should be right and because you're spending like crazy on sales and marketing you're expanding into into AP you're expanding your total available market and you're still throwing off cash what if you can talk about that a little bit you had said off camera your goal is to really be you know so throw off little cash basically be cash flow breakeven yes yes so you know you can only grow at a certain pace last quarter we added 150 new people into our sales and marketing organization that was the the largest number that we've ever added in one quarter we actually added 273 net new employees in q1 that was the most we've ever added in a quarter and even with all those ads we still had very good positive cash flow so it's pretty hard to add at any faster pace than what we're doing right now and so you know I just I don't see us being cashflow negative anytime in the future right now unless something happened and write it have to be a pretty major catastrophe thing and it's not going to be specific to service now it will be kind of across the board we're all CIOs stop spending and the other thing I learned here I thought maybe I just wasn't paying attention to earlier conference calls but the AP focus a large percentage of the global 2000 is in asia-pacific so you're out nation-building right I won't if he could talk about that sure so in two thousand and from March 31st 2013 till March 31st 2014 we open up in 10 new countries most of those were in asia-pacific there's still more countries we're going to be going into an asia-pacific and why are we going into these countries we're going into these countries because that's where the global 2000 accounts are that is our strategy because we focus on quality of customers not quantity of customers what I mean by quality of quality customers one that can grow over time to be a very large customer and even in 2013 we went into Italy and people said at the time well why are you going into Italy we went to Italy because they have global 2000 have 30-something global 2000 accounts even though the Italian economy wasn't doing well global 2000 customers still spend it's not specific to that country their global we signed to global 2000 counts in Italy last quarter so we have a history of showing that if we go into those countries we will be successful in winning those global 2000 and will continue there are some global 2000 so in geographies where it's going to take some time before we actually have a physical presence such as mainland China we do not have any sales people in mainland China today Russia we did not have any people in Russia today how about Ukraine you know we have no one in Ukraine today good thing about Hitler you get to go visit there that's your country I wanted to talk about the TAM yesterday last year we had I kind of watched it but but I was asking Colombo questions about the team because it was you know very interesting I saw a lot of potential want to try to understand how big it could be you and I talked about you had said its north eight billion of course the the stock took off i think it probably 10 billion from a value standpoint I didn't my own tam of mid year I did a blog post I had it up to 30 billion so I started to understand it was a top down it wasn't a bottom up but you guys are starting to sort of communicate to him a little bit differently you got had the help desk and then beyond that the IT Service Management and then you you've essentially got the operations strike the operations management and even now sort of enterprise and business management so I wonder if you could talk about how you look at the the tam and any attempts that you've made to quantify it sure so there's really four markets we play in that really intersect with one another in the core of our market is the IT Service Management that's kind of our beachhead and how we go into accounts in that market right now when historically when we went public gartner groups of the world they looked at it as a helpdesk replacement market they were saying as a 1.4 to 1.6 billion dollar market what they were missing is there's many other things in that space IT service management such as ppm such as our cmdb such as asset management a lot of these things aren't in your traditional help desk we think based upon the rate at which we've been extracting from the market that somewhere we can afford a six billion dollar market opportunity just IT Service Management and then IT Service Management is a subset of the overall enterprise service management market that Frank has been talking about we talked about in our analyst state we think that is potentially as high as 10x the size of our IT Service Management so that can get you up to say that 40 billion dollar plus and then you as well have the IT operations management space IT Service Management you just have the legacy vendors down there nothing innovative happening down there service relationship a lot of white space a lot of stuff that's being done in email lotus notes microsoft access sharepoint those are the markets were going after there really are no true systems in and that's in that space it's those one-off custom apps IT operations management there is a lot of innovation happening down that in that space it is very crowded with some new vendors as well as the legacy vendors the area that will plan might be the whole 18 billion dollar market at IDC talks about you know it's still early innings but it's at least two billion of that market 24 billion will be going after and then Frank brought up this concept of the whole business analytics as well too we talked about we did our acquisition in mirror 42 in 2013 and the business analytics kind of sits at the top of enterprise service relationship management the market we can go after in there that's a that's a whole market into itself at least as big as the enterprise service management but we're not going after that whole market it's just the business analytics to the extent it relates to enterprise service management so that's at least a couple billion more unfortunately this is what we believe there is no published reports out there and times going to is going to tell it similar to when Salesforce went public no one believed the opportunity in front of it and now look how big that come have a 30 billion dollar plus company valuations are depends on what time of year it is what the markets doing but over the long term you know you can sort of do valuation analysis it in the CFO world is there some kind of thought in terms of the ratio between an organization's tan and it's in its valuation you know I mean these other things raid obviously the leadership etc but but for the top companies there a relationship I personally don't get wrapped up in valuation you know I can't control that I can't control public company multiples the only thing we have control over is running our own business and we're going to stay very focused on running our business and let other we'll take care of the valuation good business you picked a good one yes no I I'm very pleased with this one excellent all right Mike well listen thanks very much for coming on the cube we're up against the clock and I always appreciate you thank you Dave time up alrighty bryce bravely request with our next guest we're live from tony south this is dave vellante with jeff record right back