>>Hello, wonderful humans and welcome back to The Cube's Thrilling live coverage of AWS Reinvent here in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm joined by my fantastic co-host, John Farer. John, things are really ramping up in here. Day one. >>Yep, it's packed already. I heard 70,000 maybe attendees really this year. I just saw that on Twitter. Again, it continues to show that over the past 10 years we've been here, you're seeing some of the players that were here from the beginning growing up and getting bigger and stronger, becoming more platforms, not just point solutions. You're seeing new entrants coming in, new startups, and the innovation you start to see happening, it's really compelling to fun to watch. And our next segment, we have multi 10 time Cube alumni coming on and a first timer, so it should be great. We'll get into some of the innovation, >>Not only as this guest went on the cube 10 times, he also spoke at the first AWS reinvent, just like you were covering it here with Cube. But without further ado, please welcome Ronan and Kevin from NetApp. Thank you gentlemen, both for being here and for matching in your dark blue. How's the show going for you? Ronan, I'm gonna ask you first, you've been here since the beginning. How does it feel in 2022? >>First, it's amazing to see so many people, right? So many humans in one place, flesh and blood. And it's also amazing to see, it's such a celebration for people in the cloud, right? Like this is our, this is our event, the people in the cloud. I'm really, really happy to be here and be in the cube as well. >>Fantastic. It, it is a party, it's a cloud party. Yes. How are you feeling being here, Kevin? I'm >>Feeling great. I mean, going all the way back to the early days of Spot T, which was the start that eventually got acquired as Spot by NetApp. I mean this was, this was our big event. This is what we lived for. We've gone, I've gone from everything, one of the smaller booths out here on the floor all the way up to the, the huge booth that we have today. So we've kind of grown along with the AWS ecosystem and it's just a lot of fun to get here, see all the customers and talk to everybody. >>That's a lot of fun. Fun. That's the theme that we've been talking about. And we wrote a story about on, on Silicon Angle, more that growth from that getting in and getting bigger, not just an ISV or part of the startup showcase or ecosystem. The progression of the investment on how cloud has changed deliverables. You've been part of that wave. What's the biggest walk away, what's, and what's the most important thing going on now cuz it's not stopping. You got new interests coming in and the folks are rising with the tide and getting platforms built around their products. >>Yeah, I would say, you know, years ago is, is cloud in my decision path and now it's cloud is in my decision path. How much is it and how am I going to use it? And I think especially coming up over the next year, macroeconomic events and everything going on is how do I make my next dollar in the cloud go further than my last dollar? Because I know I'm gonna be there, I know I'm gonna be growing in the cloud, so how do I effectively use it to run my business going forward? >>All right, take a minute to explain Spot now part of NetApp. What's the story? What take us through for the folks that aren't familiar with the journey, where it's come from, where it's today? >>Sure. So SPOT is all about cloud optimization. We help all of our customers deploy scale and optimize their applications in the cloud. And what we do is everything from VMs to containers to any type of custom application you want to deploy, we analyze those applications, we find the best price point to run them, we right size them, we do the automation so your DevOps team doesn't have to do it. And we basically make the whole cloud serverless for you at the end of the day. So whatever you're doing in the cloud, we'll manage that for you from the lowest level of the stack all the way up to the highest level financials. >>Is this what you call the evolved cloud state? >>It is in the evolve clouds a little bit more, and Ronan can touch on that a little bit too. The Evolve clouds not only the public cloud but also the cloud that you're building OnPrem, right? A lot of big companies, it's not necessarily a hundred percent one way or the other. The Evolve cloud is which cloud am I on? Am I on an OnPrem cloud and a public cloud or am I on multiple public clouds in an OnPrem cloud? And I think Ronan, you probably have an opinion on that too. >>Yeah, and and I think what we are hearing from our customers is that many of them are in a situation where a lot of their data has been built for years on premises. They're accelerating their move to the cloud, some of them are accelerating, they're moving into multiple cloud and that situation of an on-prem that is becoming cloudy and cloudy all the time. And then accelerated cloud adoption. This is what the customers are calling the Evolve cloud and that's what we're trying to support them in that journey. >>How many customers are you supporting in this Evolve cloud? You made it seem like you can just turnkey this for everyone, which I am here >>For it. Yeah, just to be clear, I mean we have thousands of customers, right? Everything from your small startups, people just getting going with a few VMs all the way to people scaling to tens and thousands of VMs in the cloud or even beyond VM services and you know, tens of millions of spend a month. You know, people are putting a lot of investment into the cloud and we have all walks of life under our, you know, customer portfolio. >>You know, multi-cloud has been a big topic in the industry. We call it super cloud. Cause we think super cloud kind of more represents the destination to multi-cloud. I mean everyone has multiple clouds, but they're best of breed defaults. They're not by design in most cases, but we're starting to see traction towards that potential common level services fix to late. See, I still think we're on the performance game now, so I have to ask, ask you guys. Performance has becoming back in VO speeds and feeds back during the data center days. Well, I wouldn't wanna talk speeds and feeds of solutions and then cloud comes in. Now we're at the era of cloud where people are moving their workloads there. There's a lot more automation going on, A lot more, as you said, part of the decision. It is the path. Yeah. So they say, now I wanna run my workloads on the better, faster infrastructure. No developer wants to run their apps on the slower hardware. >>I think that's a tall up for you. Ronan go. >>I mean, I put out my story, no developer ever said, give me the slower software performance and and pay more fast, >>Fastest find too fastest. >>Speed feeds your back, >>Right? And and performance comes in different, in different parameters, right? They think it is come throughput, it comes through latency. And I think even a stronger word today is price performance, right? How much am I paying for the performance that that I need? NetApp is actually offering a very, very big advantage for customers on both the high end performance as well as in the dollar per performance. That is, that is needed. This is actually one of the key differentiator that Fsx for NetApp on top is an AWS storage based on the NetApp on top storage operating system. This is one of the biggest advantages it is offering. It is SAP certified, for example, where latency is the key, is the key item. It is offering new and fastest throughput available, but also leveraging some advanced features like tiering and so on, is offering unique competitive advantage in the dollar for performance specifically. >>And why, why is performance important now, in your opinion? Obviously besides the obvious of no one wants to run their stuff on the slower infrastructure, but why are some people so into it now? >>I think performance as a single parameter is, is definitely a key influencer of the user experience. None, none of us will, will compromise our our experience. The second part is performance is critical when scale is happening, right? And especially with the scale of data performance to handle massive amounts of data is is becoming more and more critical. The last thing that I'll emphasize is again is the dollar for performance. The more data you have, the more you need to handle, the more critical for you is to handle it in a cost effective way. This is kind of, that's kind of in the, in the, in the secret sauce of the success of every workload. >>There isn't a company or person here who's not thinking about doing more faster for cheaper. So you're certainly got your finger on the pulse With that, I wanna talk about a, a customer case study. A little birdie told me that a major US airline recently just had a mass of when we're where according to my notes response time and customer experience was improved by 17 x. Now that's the type of thing that cuts cost big time. Can one of you tell me a little bit more about that? >>Yeah, so I think we all flew here somehow, right? >>Exactly. It's airlines matter. Probably most folks listening, they're >>Doing very well right now. Yes, the >>Airlines and I think we all also needed to deal with changes in the flights with, with really enormous amount of complexity in managing a business like that. We actually rank and choose what, what airline to use among other things based on the level of service that they give us. And especially at the time of crunch, a lot of users are looking through a lot of data to try to optimize, >>Plus all of them who just work this holiday weekend sidebar >>E Exactly right. Can't even, and Thanksgiving is one of these crunch times that are in the middle of this. So 70 x improvement in performance means a loss seven >>Zero or >>17 1 7 1 7 x Right? >>Well, and especially when we're talking about it looks like 50,000, 50,000 messages per minute that this customer was processing. Yes. That that's a lot. That's almost a thousand messages a second. Wow. I think my math tees up there. Yeah. >>It does allow them to operate in the next level of scale and really increase their support for the customer. It also allows them to be more efficient when it comes to cost. Now they need less infrastructure to give better service across the board. The nice thing is that it didn't require them for a lot of work. Sometimes when the customers are doing their journey to the cloud, one of the things that kind of hold them back is like, is either the fear or, or maybe is the, the concern of how much effort will it take me to achieve the same performance or even a better performance in the cloud? They are a live example that not only can you achieve, you can actually exceed the performance that I have on premises and really give customer a better service >>Customer a better service. And reliability is extremely important there. 99.9%. 99% >>99. Yes. >>Yes. That second nine obviously being very important, especially when we're talking about the order of magnitude of, of data and, and actions being taken place. How much of a priority is, is reliability and security for y'all as a team? >>So reliability is a key item for, for everybody, especially in crunch times. But reliability goes beyond the nines. Specifically reliability goes into how simple it is for you to enable backup n dr, how protected are you against ransomware? This is where netup and, and including the fsx for NETUP on top richness of data management makes a huge difference. If you are able to make your copy undeletable, that is actually a game changer when it comes to, to data protection. And this is, this is something that in the past requires a lot of work, opening vaults and other things. Yeah. Now it becomes a very simple configuration that is attached to every net up on top storage, no matter where it is. >>We heard some news at VMware explorer this past fall. Early fall. You guys were there. We saw the Broadcom acquisition. Looks like it's gonna get finalized maybe sooner than later. Lot of, so a lot of speculation around VMware. Someone called the VMware like where is VMware as in where they now, nice pun it was, it was actually Nutanix people, they go at each other all the time. But Broadcom's gonna keep vse and that's where the bread and butter, that's the, that's the goose that lays the Golden eggs. Customers are there. How do you guys see your piece there with VMware cloud on AWS that integrates solution? You guys have a big part of that ecosystem. We've covered it for years. I mean we've been to every VM world now called explorer. You guys have a huge customer base with VMware customers. What's the, what's the outlook? >>Yeah, and, and I think the important part is that a big part of the enterprise workloads are running on VMware and they will continue to run on VMware in, in, in the future. And most of them will try to run in a hybrid mode if not moving completely to the cloud. The cloud give them unparallel scale, it give them DR and backup opportunities. It does a lot of goodness to that. The partnership that NetApp brings with both VMware as well ass as well as other cloud vendors is actually a game changer. Because the minute that you go to the cloud, things like DR and backup have a different economics connected to them. Suddenly you can do compute less dr definitely on backup you can actually achieve massive savings. NetApp is the only data store that is certified to run with VMware cloud. And that actually opens to the customer's huge opportunity for unparalleled data protection as well as real, real savings, hard savings. And customers that look today and they say, I'm gonna shrink my data center, I'm gonna focus on, on moving certain things to the cloud, DR and backup and especially DR and backup VMware might be one of the easiest, fastest things to take into the cloud. And the partnership betweens VMware and NetApp might actually give you >>And the ONAP is great solution. Fsx there? Yes. I think you guys got a real advantage here and I want to get into something that's kind of a gloom and doom. I don't have to go negative on this one, Savannah, but they me nervous John. But you know, if you look at the economic realities you got a lot of companies like that are in the back of a Druva, Netta, Druva, cohesive rub. Others, you know, they, you know, there's a, their generational cloud who breaks through. What's the unique thing? Because you know there's gonna be challenges in the economy and customers are gonna vote with their wallets and they start to see as they make these architectural decisions, you guys are in the middle of it. There's not, there may not be enough to go around and the musical chairs might stop or, or not, I'm not sure. But I feel like if there's gonna be a consolidation, what does that look like? What are customers thinking? Backup recovery, cloud. That's a unique thing. You mentioned economics, it's not, you can't take the old strategy and put it there from five, 10 years ago. What's different now? >>Yeah, I think when it comes to data protection, there is a real change in, in the technology landscape that opened the door for a lot of new vendors to come and offer. Should we expect consolidation? I think microeconomic outside and other things will probably drive some of that to happen. I think there is one more parameter, John, that I wanna mention in this context, which is simplicity. Many of the storage vendors, including us, including aws, you wanna make as much of the backup NDR at basically a simple checkbox that you choose together with your main workload. This is another key capabilities that is, that is being, bringing and changing the market, >>But it also needs to move up. So it's not only simplicity, it's also about moving to the applications that you use, use, and just having it baked in. It's not about you going out and finding a replication. It's like what Ronan said, we gotta make it simple and then we gotta bake it into what they use. So one of our most recent acquisitions of Insta Cluster allows us to provide our customers with open source databases and data streaming services. When those sit on top of on tap and they sit on top of spots, infrastructure optimization, you get all that for free through the database that you use. So you don't worry about it. Your database is replicated, it's highly available, and it's running at the best cost. That's where it's going. >>Awesome. >>You also recently purchased Cloud Checker as well. Yes. Do you just purchase wonderful things all the time? We >>Do. We do. We, >>I'm not >>The, if he walk and act around and then we find the best thing and then we, we break out the checkbook, no, but more seriously, it, it rounds out what customers need for the cloud. So a lot of our customers come from storage, but they need to operate the entire cloud around the storage that they have. Cloud Checker gives us that financial visibility across every single dollar that you spend in the cloud and also gives us a better go to market motion with our MSPs and our distributors than we had in the past. So we're really excited about what cloud checker can unlock for us in >>The future. Makes a lot of sense and congratulations on all the extremely exciting things going on. Our final and closing question for our guests on this year's show is we would love your, your Instagram hot take your 32nd hot take on the most important stories, messages, themes of AWS reinvent 2022. Ronan, I'm gonna start with you cause you have a smirk >>And you do it one day ahead of the keynotes, one day ahead with you. >>You can give us a little tease a little from you. >>I think that pandemic or no pandemic face to face or no face to face, the innovation in the cloud is, is actually breaking all records. And I think this year specifically, you will see a lot of focus on data and scale. I think that's, these are two amazing things that you'll see, I think doubling down. But I'm also anxious to see tomorrow, so I'll learn more about it. >>All right. We might have to chat with you a little bit after tomorrow. Is keynotes and whatnot coming up? What >>About you? I think you're gonna hear a lot about cost. How much are you spending? How far are your dollars going? How are you using the cloud to the best of your abilities? How, how efficient are you being with your dollars in the cloud? I think that's gonna be a huge topic. It's on everybody's mind. It's the macro economics situation right now. I think it's gonna be in every session of the keynote tomorrow. All >>Right, so every >>Session. Every session, >>A bulk thing. John, we're gonna have >>That. >>I'm with him. You know, all S in general, you >>Guys have, and go look up what I said. >>Yeah, >>We'll go back and look at, >>I'm gonna check on you >>On that. The record now states. There you go, Kevin. Thank both. Put it down so much. We hope that it's a stellar show for Spotify, my NetApp. Thank you. And that we have you 10 more times and more than just this once and yeah, I, I can't wait to see, well, I can't wait to hear when your predictions are accurate tomorrow and we get to learn a lot more. >>No, you gotta go to all the sessions down just to check his >>Math on that. Yeah, no, exactly. Now we have to do our homework just to call him out. Not that we're competitive or those types of people at all. John. No. On that note, thank you both for being here with us. John, thank you so much. Thank you all for tuning in from home. We are live from Las Vegas, Nevada here at AWS Reinvent with John Furrier. My name is Savannah Peterson. You're watching the Cube, the leader in high tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2020 Virtual brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and the ecosystem partners. >> Hi, and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2020 in Europe, of course, the virtual edition. I'm Stu Miniman, and happy to welcome you back to the program. One of the keynote speakers is also a board member of the CNCF, Vijoy Pandey, who is the Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for Cloud at Cisco. Vijoy, nice to see you, thanks so much for joining us. >> Hi there, Stu, so nice to see you again. It's a strange setting to be in, but as long as we are both healthy, everything's good. >> Yeah, we still get to be together a little bit even though while we're apart. We love the the engagement and interaction that we normally get to the community, but we just have to do it a little bit differently this year. So we're going to get to your keynote. We've had you on the program to talk about "Networking, Please Evolve". I've been watching that journey. But why don't we start at first, you've had a little bit of change in roles and responsibility. I know there's been some restructuring at Cisco since the last time we got together. So give us the update on your role. >> Yeah, so let's start there. So I've taken on a new responsibility. It's VP of Engineering and Research for a new group that's been formed at Cisco. It's called Emerging Tech and Incubation. Liz Centoni leads that and she reports on to Chuck. The charter for the team, this new team, is to incubate the next bets for Cisco. And if you can imagine, it's natural for Cisco to start with bets which are closer to its core business. But the charter for this group is to move further and further out from Cisco's core business and take Cisco into newer markets, into newer products, and newer businesses. I'm running the engineering and resource for that group. And again, the whole deal behind this is to be a little bit nimble, to be a little bit, to startupy in nature, where you bring ideas, you incubate them, you iterate pretty fast, and you throw out 80% of those, and concentrate on the 20% that makes sense to take forward as a venture. >> Interesting. So it reminds me a little bit but different, I remember John Chambers, a number of years back, talking about various adjacencies trying to grow those next multi-billion dollar businesses inside Cisco. In some ways, Vijoy, it reminds me a little bit of your previous company, very well known for driving innovation, giving engineers 20% of their time to work on things, maybe give us a little bit insight, what's kind of an example of a bet that you might be looking at in this space, bring us in tight a little bit. >> Well, that's actually a good question. And I think a little bit of that comparison is all those conversations are taking place within Cisco as well as to how far out from Cisco's core business do we want to get when we're incubating these bets? And yes, my previous employer, I mean, Google X actually goes pretty far out when it comes to incubations, the core business being primarily around ads, now Google Cloud as well. But you have things like Verily and Calico, and others, which are pretty far out from where Google started. And the way we're looking at the these things within Cisco is, it's a new muscle for Cisco, so we want to prove ourselves first. So the first few bets that we are betting upon are pretty close to Cisco's core but still not fitting into Cisco's BU when it comes to, go to market alignment or business alignment. So one of the first bets that we're taking into account is around API being the queen when it comes to the future of infrastructure, so to speak. So it's not just making our infrastructure consumable as infrastructure as code but also talking about developer relevance, talking about how developers are actually influencing infrastructure deployments. So if you think about the problem statement in that sense, then networking needs to evolve. And I've talked a lot about this in the past couple of keynotes, where Cisco's core business has been around connecting and securing physical endpoints, physical I/O endpoints, wherever they happen to be, of whatever type they happen to be. And one of the bets that we are, actually two of the bets, that we're going after is around connecting and securing API endpoints, wherever they happen to be, of whatever type they happen to be. And so API networking or app networking is one big bet that we're going after. Another big bet is around API security. And that has a bunch of other connotations to it, where we think about security moving from runtime security, where traditionally Cisco has played in that space, especially on the infrastructure side, but moving into API security, which is earlier in the development pipeline, and higher up in the stack. So those are two big bets that we're going after. And as you can see, they're pretty close to Cisco's core business, but also are very differentiated from where Cisco is today. And once you prove some of these bets out, you can walk further and further away, or a few degrees away from Cisco's core. >> All right, Vijoy, why don't you give us the update about how Cisco is leveraging and participating in open source? >> So I think we've been pretty, deeply involved in open source in our past. We've been deeply involved in Linux Foundation Networking. We've actually chartered FD.io as a project there and we still are. We've been involved in OpenStack, we have been supporters of OpenStack. We have a couple of products that are around the OpenStack offering. And as you all know, we've been involved in CNCF, right from the get-go, as a foundation member. We brought NSM as a project. I had Sandbox currently, but we're hoping to move it forward. But even beyond that, I mean, we are big users of open source, a lot of those has offerings that we have from Cisco, and you will not know this if you're not inside of Cisco. But Webex, for example, is a big, big user of Linkerd, right from the get-go, from version 1.0, but we don't talk about it, which is sad. I think, for example, we use Kubernetes pretty deeply in our DNAC platform on the enterprise side. We use Kubernetes very deeply in our security platforms. So we're pretty good, pretty deep users internally in our SaaS products. But we want to press the accelerator and accelerate this whole journey towards open source, quite a bit moving forward as part of ET&I, Emerging Tech and Incubation, as well. So you will see more of us in open source forums, not just CNCF, but very recently, we joined the Linux Foundation for Public Health as a premier foundational member. Dan Kohn, our old friend, is actually chartering that initiative, and we actually are big believers in handling data in ethical and privacy-preserving ways. So that's actually something that enticed us to join Linux Foundation for Public Health, and we will be working very closely with Dan and foundational companies that do not just bring open source but also evangelize and use what comes out of that forum. >> All right, well, Vijoy, I think it's time for us to dig into your keynote. We've we've spoken with you in previous KubeCons about the "Network, Please Evolve" theme that you've been driving on. And big focus you talked about was SD-WAN. Of course, anybody that's been watching the industry has watched the real ascension of SD-WAN. We've called it one of those just critical foundational pieces of companies enabling multi-cloud. So help explain to our audience a little bit, what do you mean when you talk about things like Cloud Native SD-WAN and how that helps people really enable their applications in the modern environment? >> Yes, well, I mean, we've been talking about SD-WAN for a while. I mean, it's one of the transformational technologies of our time where prior to SD-WAN existing, you had to stitch all of these MPLS labels and actually get your connectivity across to your enterprise or branch. And SD-WAN came in and changed the game there, but I think SD-WAN, as it exists today, is application-unaware. And that's one of the big things that I talk about in my keynote. Also, we've talked about how NSM, the other side of the spectrum, is how NSM or Network Service Mesh has actually helped us simplify operational complexities, simplify the ticketing and process health that any developer needs to go through just to get a multi-cloud, multi-cluster app up and running. So the keynote actually talked about bringing those two things together, where we've talked about using NSM in the past in chapter one and chapter two. And I know this is chapter three, and at some point, I would like to stop the chapters. I don't want this like an encyclopedia of "Networking, Please Evolve". But we are at chapter three, and we are talking about how you can take the same consumption models that I talked about in chapter two, which is just adding a simple annotation in your CRD, and extending that notion of multi-cloud, multi-cluster wires within the components of our application, but extending it all the way down to the user in an enterprise. And as we saw an example, Gavin Belson is trying to give a keynote holographically and he's suffering from SD-WAN being application-unaware. And using this construct of a simple annotation, we can actually make SD-WAN cloud native, we can make it application-aware, and we can guarantee the SLOs, that Gavin is looking for, in terms of 3D video, in terms of file access for audio, just to make sure that he's successful and Ross doesn't come in and take his place. >> Well, I expect Gavin will do something to mess things up on his own even if the technology works flawlessly. Vijoy, the modernization journey that customers are on is a never-ending story. I understand the chapters need to end on the current volume that you're working on, but we'd love to get your viewpoint. You talk about things like service mesh, it's definitely been a hot topic of conversation for the last couple of years. What are you hearing from your customers? What are some of the kind of real challenges but opportunities that they see in today's cloud native space? >> In general, service meshes are here to stay. In fact, they're here to proliferate to some degree, and we are seeing a lot of that happening, where not only are we seeing different service meshes coming into the picture through various open source mechanisms. You've got Istio there, you've Linkerd, you've got various proprietary notions around control planes like App Mesh, from Amazon, there's Consul, which is an open source project, but not part of CNCF today. So there's a whole bunch of service meshes in terms of control planes coming in. Envoy is becoming a de facto sidecar data plane, whatever you would like to call it, de facto standard there, which is good for the community, I would say. But this proliferation of control planes is actually a problem. And I see customers actually deploying a multitude of service meshes in their environment, and that's here to stay. In fact, we are seeing a whole bunch of things that we would use different tools for, like API gateways in the past, and those functions actually rolling into service meshes. And so I think service meshes are here to stay. I think the diversity of service meshes is here to stay. And so some work has to be done in bringing these things together. And that's something that we are trying to focus in on as well. Because that's something that our customers are asking for. >> Yeah, actually, you connected for me something I wanted to get your viewpoint on, go dial back, 10, 15 years ago, and everybody would say, "Oh, I really want to have a single pane of glass "to be able to manage everything." Cisco's partnering with all of the major cloud providers. I saw, not that long before this event, Google had their Google Cloud Show, talking about the partnership that you have with, Cisco with Google. They have Anthos, you look at Azure has Arc, VMware has Tanzu. Everybody's talking about really the kind of this multi-cluster management type of solution out there, and just want to get your viewpoint on this Vijoy as to how are we doing on the management plane, and what do you think we need to do as an industry as a whole to make things better for customers? >> Yeah, I think this is where I think we need to be careful as an industry, as a community and make things simpler for our customers. Because, like I said, the proliferation of all of these control planes begs the question, do we need to build something else to bring all these things together? I think the SMI proposal from Microsoft is bang on on that front, where you're trying to unify at least the consumption model around how you consume these service meshes. But it's not just a question of service meshes as you saw in the SD-WAN announcement back in the Google discussion that we just, Google conference that you just referred. It's also how SD-WANs are going to interoperate with the services that exist within these cloud silos to some degree. And how does that happen? And there was a teaser there that you saw earlier in the keynote where we are taking those constructs that we talked about in the Google conference and bringing it all the way to a cloud native environment in the keynote. But I think the bigger problem here is how do we manage this complexity of this pallet stacks? Whether it's service meshes, whether it's development stacks, or whether it's SD-WAN deployments, how do we manage that complexity? And single pane of glass is overloaded as a term, because it brings in these notions of big monolithic panes of glass. And I think that's not the way we should be solving it. We should be solving it towards using API simplicity and API interoperability. And I think that's where we as a community need to go. >> Absolutely. Well, Vijoy, as you said, the API economy should be able to help on these, the service architecture should allow things to be more flexible and give me the visibility I need without trying to have to build something that's completely monolithic. Vijoy, thanks so much for joining. Looking forward to hearing more about the big bets coming out of Cisco, and congratulations on the new role. >> Thank you, Stu. It was a pleasure to be here. >> All right, and stay tuned for lots more coverage of theCUBE at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hi everybody, welcome back to London. You're watching The Cube, and we have a special coverage here of the pre-day at AWS headquarters in London. I'm Dave Vellante and The Cube, we go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. Alastair Allen is here, the chief technical officer of Healthcare Kainos Software. It's a Belfast based company, publicly traded company. Alastair, welcome to The Cube. Great to see you, thanks for coming out. You were downstairs earlier addressing the audience, we're gonna talk about that. But first of all, tell us about Kainos. >> So Kainos, Belfast based company, formed in the late '80's a spin out of Queens University in Belfast. We've grown to now over 1300 people and we build digital technology to help people work faster, smarter and better. There's two things we do. We provide digital services, bespoke services for public and private sector organizations across the world, and we provide digital platforms for work day customers and also for healthcare organizations. >> So, when you say digital platforms. What exactly do you mean by that? Tell our audience. >> So, our digital platforms in healthcare is something that we can talk about. So platforms to enable both hospitals to digitize their workflow and also regions, so CCG's , STP's within the NHS. To bring information together using a platform and normalizing that data and making it available to clinicians and patients. >> And this is, your flagship product is called Evolve. Correct? >> Correct. >> And you're one of the sort of founders or inventors of Evolve. Tell us more about Evolve. >> So Evolve, originated just over ten years ago, our first customer was Ipswich Hospital and Ipswich had a big problem with paper, with a large medical records library and they asked us to come in and help them digitize that and make it available in an easy to view, accessible format for their clinicians. >> So tell me more about that. So you digitize it, you take all this mounds of paper and what does that do? Other than reduce the amounts of paper. Does it make it searchable? >> Yeah, we index the content, we apply metadata whenever we capture it, trying to make it accessible for clinicians. I think when you digitize paper , the one good thing paper had going for it was you could pick it up and it was tactile. So we've done a lot of work to try and make it mobile, make it accessible, make it searchable and increasingly now with some of the services that AWS provide, we're able to look at taking that even further and getting more information out of that content. >> Add some color to that. So how has the AWS cloud affected your ability to deliver these capabilities to your customers? >> Well I think, the breathe and depth of services that AWS provide, enables us to be able to innovate quickly, to use services like I've mentioned like comprehend medical. That take the heavy lifting, away from us and helps us focus on delivering better applications for our customers. >> So part of what you do, is you architected the software that's running on the cloud. Can you talk a little bit about the architecture? What you guys have built. Presumably the cloud allows you to scale. >> Alastair Allen: Yeah. >> And take advantage of more innovations. But discuss the architecture if you would. >> So, the product that I originally talked about in 2009 and about four years ago in 2015, we decided to re-platform for the cloud. And that was in response to a number of problems that we were seeing in the market. And moved to patient centered care, a drive to try and standardize care away from the variable nature that was there and also to get away from closed silos of information. And we decided at that point to create our platform natively in the cloud and using the services of Amazon web services. So we created a microservices based architecture that runs in multi-candidate cloud native way. With a AWS. That allows us to adopt disciplines like continuous delivery and cultures like DeVops. We've been able to release value quickly and often to our customers. >> So it was a total rewrite of the platform? >> Yes. So we started again from scratch and we developed that using the modern cloud services. And we've used that then for all use cases as well so we've moved beyond just settings within a hospital. And been able to take that beyond the walls of a hospital, out into the community, into primary care, mental health. And delivering solutions like that, across regions within the NHS, to join up information. Where before clinicians would simply not have had access to those. >> In a sense you're migrating your existing install base to the cloud based platform, as I presume it's a SAS based platform. Is that right? >> So, Evolve Integrated Care is a platform it's a SAS based platform. So we run it, we monitor it, we maintain it and we deliver that as a service to our customers. >> And so your existing customers now have an opportunity to migrate and how does that all work? >> Yeah, so we're talking to our existing customers, how they can leverage the cloud based platform and the breathe of different services that it provides. We very much see an opportunity for helping to digitize a hospital. So how do you optimize the flow of patients through a hospital and making sure that clinicians have access to the information. Many of customers have hundreds of applications, information spread across their estate, bringing that together and orchestrating the workflow for particular pathways or particular conditions. >> Plus they have to manage their own infrastructure, I presume. >> Absolutely, and we want to build applications quickly, they want to focus on delivering healthcare. They don't want to focus on managing ten and server rooms within their hospitals. So, our move to the cloud really came about because of our customers telling us that they're struggling to manage this infrastructure. They wanted us to take some of that burden away from them and to help them with some of their security challenges, availability challenges. Quite often their local infrastructure was not very resilient. And by moving to AWS, we were able to use native cloud services to address many of those challenges. >> So you're taking away that heavy lifting for them. AWS takes it away for you. >> Alastair Allen: Yeah. >> In a large regard as well. While your engineers can obviously program the infrastructure. But how have you seen the customers that have moved and taken advantage of this. What has it done for their business specifically? What's the impact? >> So, what I think, it frees up people within their organization to scale up in other areas to do other things. It frees up physical space as well in many cases. It takes away risks and we've all heard of some of the recent security incidents. Wanna Cry was a huge thing in the NHS not so long ago. Coming around from just simple things like not patching servers and work stations. So, by taking on that responsibility we're freeing up those hospital systems to focus on what they do best. >> How do they do that? Do they kind of retrain folks? What's that been like? I presume it wasn't frictionless but it's an opportunity for people to advance their careers. Do you have any visibility on how your customers have handled that? >> To be honest, not a huge amount. It has, I agree, there has been some friction there. It's not always an easy journey, there's a whole mindset change of what people used to do before and the types of activity that they'll do tomorrow. And it's something that our customers are still on a journey on. And so we're quite early on in that process. >> But I would say to folks in the IT community of your expertise's of managing storage arase, there's probably a better future for you if you can move up the stack and learn more about applications , data, machine intelligence. >> Absolutely, higher up the value chain and getting closer to the user, closer to the customer. >> I mean, that's where the difference is. And it's particularly in healthcare right? You try to balance the cost of healthcare, everybody's aware of the rising cost of healthcare with the patient outcomes. And technology is a way to address that problem. Isn't it? >> Absolutely, and I think never before. I think it's just a great time to work in health IT. We've now got access to some fantastic services the rise of artificial intelligence, the machine learning has never before been so available. And really having organizations such as ourselves to really solve those problems that our customers have and introduce those efficiencies and ultimately better patient outcomes. >> So how are you using the data that lives in Evolve, I presume you're looking at applying artificial intelligence and the like, talk about that. But also, how do you ensure security, privacy, etcetera? >> So, a couple things on data, I think one of the things we've done recently is the adoption of the FHIR standard within healthcare and all the data that we aggregate from the various clinical systems, we normalize that down into a single FHIR data profile and that really helps us then have a common data model that our application can use. But that's only the start, that creates the potential then to use that for secondary usage, such as publishing health data analytics and ultimately machine learning. And we're looking at a number of errors in machine learning, I think there are some ethical challenges there to be aware of and we've started with a recent examples of understanding how we can use machine learning to try and get that structured data out of the documents, that's something that we're working on with data with the AWS team at the minute, to leverage a lot of that scanned content that we have and evolve and be able to create the structured outcome. Really to make it easier for clinicians to find information within the medical record. >> So the AWS reinvent last fall, you know Sage Maker was of course buzzing. Is that something that you're looking at? >> It's something, so we haven't used it in Evolve so far but within Kainos we have an AI practice and we have a group of guys that are focused on the AI capability. Evaluating those tools, working with AWS and helping us understand how we can use that technology to solve the problems of our customers. >> Yeah, it's early days. So you talk about helping solve the problems of the customers. Summarize for us the key problems that you see machine intelligence, AI solving. >> I think there's probably different categories of how you could use it. There's the diagnostic sort of use case where you could use AI to help process imagery, to help with the diagnostic process. There's being able to add personalization to whether that be to patients or to clinicians, helping to provide insight into whatever the use case may be and all the use cases similar to that. >> Last words, so you're addressing the pre-day healthcare reform that's going on here at AWS. What's that like, what's going on downstairs, what did you tell the audience? >> Yeah, great day. So we had a group of healthcare professionals across the NHS in Ireland, very interesting group. We spoke this morning, I spoke with our customer Gloucester CC chief and we talked about the shared care record solution that we've delivered into Gloucester. So that's bringing information together for over 600,000 patients across the region and providing information in a single joined up view that was not available before. So great feedback, great interaction, lots of questions afterwards so looking forward to going back down and chatting some more to the group. >> Excellent. Hard to do that without the cloud I would imagine , accommodating all of the 600,000 customers right. >> Not possible. >> Alastair thanks so much for coming to The Cube. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Appreciate having you. Alright, thanks for watching everybody. Keep it right there, we'll be back with our next guest. You're watching The Cube from AWS headquarter in London. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)