>>from around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of Docker Con Live 2020 brought to you by Docker and its ecosystem partners. Everyone welcome back to Docker Con 2020 Docker Con 20. I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube. We're here for virtual event docker con docker, con dot com, and check out all the great footage. And also great guests were talking to all the major thought leaders and people in the industry making it happen as we have this new reality, a great guest and a great segment here from Engine. It's now part of F five, Robb said. Who's the vice president? Product management Sydney, thanks for coming on this segment. Appreciate you taking the time to chat with us. >>No problem. Happy to be here >>so and UNIX Everyone that does development knows about you. Guys have been very popular product with developers. Number one in the Docker hub will get to that later on this segment. So it's known really in the industry is really easy, easy to use and very reliable component of cloud native and cloud, if you will Anything that working So So I got I got to ask you with the new reality we're living with Covert 19 we now see the new reality that's now apparent to everyone in the world that with new work style, working at home VPNs are under provision now. People working from home, more service area with security. The at scale problems are surface for the executives and business, saying, We need to figure this new reality out because this is not going to change. It's going to move to hybrid when it comes back. But ultimately it exposes and highlights the opportunities around cloud native and kind of shows the operating model of how applications are going to be using. So I think this is going to be mainstream trend for what used to be an inside baseball kind of industry. Conversation around micro services, containers, docker containers, kubernetes. This is all now a tailwind for what will be a massive surge in new APS. I want to get your thoughts and reaction to that as you guys are in the middle of it with your product and the developers would have to build new value on top of it. What's your reaction? >>Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. We're also dealing with our own version of this new way of working right. We're also working from home and working remotely and seeing how that impacts us. But as we think about our customers and the folks that leverage in genetics, we started with scaling applications. We have 10 X solution that made it easier to deploy an application, have it scale in a very efficient way. And so it's folks are moving online more and more, relying more on staying connected, no matter where they're working from. Providing that capability is something that's going to continue to be core and will increase in importance. And these folks are looking to build more modern applications or modernize what they already have. Leveraging our technologies is just a natural extension. It's the technology they're already familiar with. They've been relying on it for many years and, you know, as they look to the future, has the capabilities they need to continue to rely on it going forward. >>What are some of the new things that you're working on? You can share with the audience because you're known for tried and true, very reliable. Okay, now you got micro services, which is emerging and very dynamic, literally, figuratively. So what's the new stuff? What do you guys focused on? Can you share some insights into how you're thinking about it and some things that you're doing? >>Yeah, a big part of what we're focusing on is really taking with headaches that come with scaling up applications, especially in the modern world. Now, those headaches are all about understanding the complexity of these new applications, being in the confidence needed to be able to deploy them at scale and understand not only what they're doing, but make sure that if something were to go wrong, they could figure out what was happening. And so, as we think about the investments we're making at the help folks modernize versus just making it easier to employ at modern applications of scale, which is one category of things, second is making sure that you have a really strong understanding of how the application is really working, so that, you know, with if it breaks, it could be fixed quickly. But there opportunities to improve it. We can quickly see the impact of it, and, you know, there's a lot of capabilities we're building in on those two dimensions. And in the third dimension, I would say is around security. I think there's a lot of new surface area. It's being exposed as folks start to build more micro services based applications. And you know, with the technology we have way allow people to buy both rich security capabilities as well as very surgical capabilities, depending on where they need the right functionality. >>And the container business has been really great ride to watch the rise of containers that really someone who has been in software engineering since I was 17. You know, the old way of systems thinking is modernized with containers, and you saw that the beginning of a surge of a sea change Now, actually, with micro services, you just pointed out it's gonna create a whole nother level level of head room. But containers really brought in this notion of making systems work better together, and I think that's really been a great boon for developers. So I got to ask you, you know, Docker containers and now kubernetes on this trend, you guys have been very popular, if not the most popular downloaded container in the hub, and so you've been super popular developers. So what happens next? First? Well, why is that the case and talk to the developers? Why will you continue to be popular? What do you guys have got to keep that that satisfaction going. Why so popular? And how are you going to keep that rolling? >>Yeah, I think. Why so popular? I think we've been fortunate to ride the wave of trusted solutions, right? So folks were already leveraging us for their critical applications. I've been very critical location. It's natural to look to that same text technology as you move to new environments. And, yeah, we've been very fortunate. Teoh have folks continue to trust us with their applications as they move to new environments as a containerized things. And we appreciate that. And we continue to invest in making sure that our feature set is just as capable in those environments as it is anywhere else. And in addition to that, we do invest heavily in making sure that our capabilities and those in the container, space and micro services space specifically, are you staying ahead of where there's a lot of work we're doing to support the next generation capabilities that folks want to be able to leverage but aren't necessarily yet. And that scales from kind of near term things like like G rpc all the way out to HDP three. That's on the horizon. So as we look at the space, we're privileged to have the footprint already. But at the same time, we're not resting on our laurels. We're absolutely investing and making sure that we allow folks to continue to deliver that high quality, high performance application experience no matter what environment they choose to use. >>You know, you know, this whole covert crisis brings up the glass is half full or half empty, depending on your view is you know that due to the two worlds are certainly getting more collision oriented when it come together. The CSO level size of sides of the business and the developer side. We've always said for years other developers on the front lines and it's true, have been cloud native and cloud has been great for developers, but now more than ever, the conversation having on the business side would CSO CIO, CIO, CSO, or whatever have been Hey, my house is on fire after I don't have worry about I don't need to worry about the appliances and what's going on in my kitchen. I need to save my business. And so they're then gonna call the developers to the table. And you're seeing this this kind of formation of critical path thinking around OK, we need to come out of this crisis on a reinvention growth trajectory, which brings the developers into the mix even faster. So I want to get your thoughts on that because, you know, what does that actually mean? Are they gonna be called in for projects? I mean, what's the media's look like? Because you have a zoom meeting or whatever this is going to be now a new dynamic, A new psychology of the business models of these companies with developers are going to be very active leaders in that new role. Because the virtualized world, now that we live in, is going to be different. The applications have more demands and more more needs more capabilities. So take us through your thinking on this and what what should developers expect when they get called to those meetings? >>Yeah, I think you know the trend that we're seeing that's going to accelerate. I believe as a result of this is the internal transformation. So there's a lot of technologies that developers already leverage be able to deliver that absent. There's technologies that they'd like to be able to leverage more and more, especially if they're using more modern environments. And that tends to come into sharp relief against the legacy infrastructure that exists in the legend legacy tooling that oftentimes exists in large organizations. And so, as organizations start to see, not only about the in the world has changed prior to code, and they need to modernize and transform. I think you know this. This crisis will also spur folks toe really put more thought into how they operate. We're already looking at from the remote work perspective, but also the agility that businesses really want to be able to have but traditionally have been prevented from having. And so I think that the developers are really gonna have an opportunity here to really drive that agile change they want to see in an organization so they can get the capabilities they want help to market quickly. That's going to require new tools, new processes within the organization and those types of things that we're fully supported about. We work in legacy environments, work in modern environments. We allow companies to be as agile as they like to be. I think developers have a really good opportunity here to really be leaders of that change. >>That's awesome. Great insight. So let's talk about the developer side. I'll put my developer hat on for a second here. Sydney. OK, The business guys came to me. We're gonna We're gonna do more cool stuff. I get that. That's totally relevant. Very good insight there. But now in the developer and I have been working with engineers, and I know of Engine X. What's in it for me? What's in it for me? The developer? What do I need to know about Engine X now for me, as a developer, going forward? >>Look, I mean, way come from a really strong, open source tradition. And you know the main reason folks use our solutions. Because if we take headaches away right, I mean, we're a tool that allows folks to deliver their applications, deploy their applications without having to worry about the mechanics. And so for the developers, you know what's in it for you is you build, the application will take care of. The rest will make sure it gets delivered with the controls that are required with security and authentication is required. We operate as an extension of your application. We provide a lot of nice things in the front door. All the way back to you know, into the bedroom is technically a spark, as the application infrastructure is concerned. But, you know, we take care of that common infrastructure. They keep infrastructure set of capabilities needed. That application. Developers can simply focus on building the best applications they can, and we'll make sure that they were >>awesome. Now let's get into the F five acquisition combination with Engine X. What does that do for you guys? As a change of capabilities as it increased more head room for solutions? Is there a new joint tech take us through some of the impacts of that combination? >>Yeah, so it's been a good right. It's been just over a year since the deal closed, and we've been aggressively investing in scaling up the vision that we had previously have. We really want to bring applications to life. You make it so that your application not only scalable and highly available, but it's able to adapt over time. And that, of course, would require input from operations teams, of course, but you know, we're trying to make sure that folks have the ability to operate their applications under any circumstances, whether they're being attacked, whether they're under high demand, whether people are moving all over the place, and we're really trying to make it so that the application is essentially bullet proof. So with that five, we have the ability to invest more in that road map in that vision, in addition to bringing on some pretty cool, complimentary capabilities. One of the things that we're really happy to see is the rich security capabilities that five have has that we're now able todo leverage with the Internet solutions side by side, providing no again new ways to get really advanced security capabilities into the right places in your application greeting. Yeah, >>great insights. I really appreciate that That commentary love to get your thoughts on just something that's always been near and dear to my heart, being cloud world since the early days and trying stuff. Now it's fully enterprise ready and doing all sorts of new things that multi cloud hybrid. But remember the days back when Dev Ops was kind of debated? All that is the day of is it ops? And it always had that Dev ops kind of. I'm an operations person or a devil developer. That's kind of generally been resolved in the sense that infrastructure is code is kind of resolve that. But now, with the Covad crisis, you're seeing operations clearly front and center again, right? So you got security ops now coming online, networking up. So I think the new reality and the edge exploding people are home. That's technically an edge. Perimeter security is now the edge point. More and more edge is more and more network traffic is getting more and more complicated. This >>is >>put bring up a lot of conversation around. What is the new formula As you navigate this, how do you attack the problem? Space is how do you create solutions? Is there a playbook? Is there anything that you could share in terms of this new thinking? Because it's gonna be a new trajectory. I think this is an inflection point came from explosions coming of APS. I believe we've been reporting on that. But the thinking has to change. It's going to be pretty crazy. What's your what's your thoughts on this? >>Yeah, I think folks are getting more and more experience with this new way of working on infrastructure of code is absolutely here. Um, automation is absolutely your orchestrations. Absolutely here. And so I see no more and more of these capabilities will get stitched together. And as I said earlier, you know this this organizational transformation It's all about taking the human more and more out of the loop for certain things to be ableto benefit or to the benefit of being able to move more quickly, but in a predictable way. So you're living failures that come with moving quickly. But you're getting that elasticity that you really want. And so, yeah, I think there's more, more adoption of practices. It's not gonna be overnight for folks. But I do think again, this this crisis is gonna give folks an opportunity to really take a deeper look at how they've been operating and where they want to get to, and it's gonna provide an opportunity to accelerate that move, >>you know, from a developer's perspective. The tried and true form of making something complex, easy with us through abstractions making highly performing and highly available. Always a good formula, right? I mean, as the world gets more complex, you still got to move packets around. You still got to run applications. It's just gonna be that tried and true formula of reduce the complexity, make things easier but makes things run faster, make things runs higher scale. This seems to be the play book. What's your thoughts? >>Yeah, absolutely. You know, things that once were hard to becoming easy. And I think we look back three years. Five years from now, we'll see a world that's that's even more automated, moving much more quickly. And some of the things that look difficult now are gonna become commoditized, right? So, you know, as I talked about bringing applications of life and making applications more resilience, more able to protect themselves more ableto, he'll defend all that kind of stuff. The things that the advanced things that we're doing now that folks are playing with will become the easy things, and we'll have new challenges to focus on, especially as we look at things like Ai. We're really starting to get a sense for some of the capabilities we can apply Teoh impact application behaviors and performance. But once you get to the point where you build up a good library of capabilities now, you really have a nice playbook that can become a foundation for even more advanced things. >>Yeah, build that foundation. Scale it up. It's beautiful scales and new competitive Advantage. Lovett Final question. Just take a minute to give the plug for Engine X. Really appreciate your insights here in this segment on this new reality, this new new developer environments going to be huge. Give the plug for engines. What are you guys working on? What should people know about share? What's happened? >>Yeah, so Internet spent, you know, the last decade plus making applications work at scale. I'm really focused now on making applications easy and bringing them to life. And so, you know, the laser focus we have is on taking away the headaches that folks might have, you know, as they try to scale up on their applications. So we're focused on that space we're focused on taking with headaches that folks have is they're trying to make sure that the applications more secure we're taking away the headaches of folks have is they're dealing with complexity of applications. Um, and 80 eyes. You know, that's that's the hottest thing. Right now, people are talking about applications, but they're actually talking about AP eyes that needs to be leveraged, to be able to make their applications really saying so, you know, in all of those spaces, our focus is on making modernization much easier And taking where the headaches associated with doing so. >>Sidney, wrap side with VP of product management at engine X now part of F five. Great conversation. Um, him up on Twitter. He's out there. Great conversation with the community. Really appreciate you taking the time. Thank you. >>Thank you. >>Okay. Him up on Twitter? If any questions jump into the event, this is Docker con 2020. I'm John Furrier here in the Palo Alto studios. Getting all the moat interviews as fast as we can get them to you. Here is Docker con segment. Thanks for watching. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube Conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to this Cube Conversation. I'm coming to you from our Boston area studio, and we always love when we get to talk to practitioners, and not just any practitioner. CIOs, obviously under huge pressures in general, but in today's day and age, lots of pressures on the CIO. So, I'm happy to welcome to the program Rich Gagnon. He is the CIO from the city of Amarillo in Texas. Rich, thank you so much for joining us. >> Glad to be here. Thanks for inviting me. >> All right, so, you know, CIO in a city in Texas, why don't you give us a little bit of what your role entails, a little bit of your background, and looking forward to the conversation. >> So, my background is actually more from the private sector side of the house. Previous to coming to the city of Amarillo, I was the Vice President of Systems Engineering for Palo Alto Networks, for the Americas. Before that, the Global Vice President of Systems Engineering for F5 Networks, and before that, the Director of Global Infrastructure for GameStop. So I stepped into government with a very private-sector, profit-centered mindset, if you will, coming from very high-growth companies. My role with the city is really to be an enabler for local government, to drive not only IT direction, but as a smaller community, I also have to wear the CSO hat, and the Data Privacy Officer hat. Pretty much anything when it comes to leadership of IT and technology, as an enabler to the government, that role falls on me. >> Wow, so a pretty broad mandate that you have there. Rich, give us a little bit, how does that span? How many constituents do you have in your infrastructure, your IT? Maybe you can sketch that out a little bit for us, too. >> Sure, so, I've had peers from the private sector ask me, "What's it like to actually lead in local government?" And the best comparison I can come up with is someone like GE. I have 49 different subsidiaries, different departments that operate as individual business units, only I don't have GE's money or their staff. We have 200,000 people and the departments we support span everything, from the obvious, like public safety, police, fire. We have an airport, a public clinic, water treatment plants, public health. There are streets, all the infrastructure departments. It's very diverse. >> Wow. And with all of those constituents that you have, why don't you give us the pre-COVID-19 discussion first, which is, what are some of those pressures there, from a budgeting standpoint? Are there specific initiatives you've been driving? And how are you responding to all those variables? >> Sure. Well, coming in, it was a little jarring. City leadership was very transparent that the city had sort of stood still for about a decade. I come from a high-growth environment where money was not the precious resource, really. It was always time. It was about speed to market. How do we get competitive advantage and move fast enough to maintain it? That was not the case here. I stepped into an environment where the limitations were Cat 3 cable and switches that still ran CatOS. The year before I came in, the big IT accomplishment was finally completing the migration to Windows 7 and Office 2007. That's where we started. So, for the past three years, I guess I'm starting my fourth year, we have undergone massive transformation. I think my staff thinks I'm a bit of a maniac, because we've run like we were being chased by a rabid dog. We have updated, obviously, the Layer 1 infrastructure, replaced the entire network. We've rolled out a new data center that's all hyper-converged. That enabled us to move our security model from the traditional Layer 3 firewall at the edge to a contextually-based data center with regulation on east-west traffic and segregation. We have rolled out VDI and Office 2016 and Windows 10. It's been a lot. >> Yeah, it really sounds like you went through multiple generations of change there. It's almost like going a decade forward, not just one step forward. Bring us through a little bit, that transformation. Obviously, there should be some clear efficiencies you had, but give us kind of the before and after as you started to deploy some of these technologies. Was there some reskilling? Did you hire some new people? How did that all go? >> Very much so. And like everything, it starts with financials, right? All of the resources at the city within IT were focused on operations, so there was literally no capital budget. As where typically you would update as you go, and update infrastructure, what happened was, as the infrastructure aged, the approach was to hire more staff to try to keep aging infrastructure up and running. That's a failing strategy. So, by moving to HCI, we've actually recovered about 26% of our operating budget, which allowed us to move that money into innovation and infrastructure updating. It took a tremendous amount of reskilling. Fortunately, the one thing that's been, I think, most surprising to me coming to local government, is the creativity of the staff. They were hungry for change. They were excited by the opportunity to move things forward. So, we spent an entire year doing nothing but training. We had a massive amount of budget poured into, "Let's bring the staff up to speed. "Let's get as many vendors in front of them as possible. "Let's get them educated on where the trends are going. "What is hyper-converged architecture "and why does it matter? "What is DevOps and why is the industry heading that way?" So as I said, we started, really, Layer 2-3, established that, built out the new data center, and now our focus is now, we built that platform, and our focus is starting to shift onto business relationship management. We've met with all 49 departments. We do that every six months. We're building 49 different roadmaps for every department, on "What applications are you using? "How do we help you modernize? "How do we help you serve the citizens better?" Because that's how IT serves the community. We serve the community by serving the departments that serve them directly, and being an innovation engine, if you will, for local government, to drive through new applications and ways to serve. So the transition has really started to happen is we've gotten that base platform out of the way and the things that were blocking us from saying, "Yes, and we can do more." >> Wow, so Rich, it's been an interesting discussion as the global pandemic has hit, so many people have talked about, "Boy, when I think about working from home "or managing in this environment, if I was using "10- or 15-year-old technology, "I don't know how, "or if I'd be able to do any of what I had." So, I know Dell brought you over, you're talking HCIs, so I believe you're talking about VxRail as your HCI platform. Talk to us about what HCI enabled as you needed to shift to remote workforce and support, that overall urgent need. >> It's been massive. And it's been interesting to see the IT team absorb it. As we matured, I think they embraced the ability to be innovative and to work with our departments, but this instance really justified why I was driving progress so fervently, why it was so urgent to me. Three years ago, the answer would have been no. We wouldn't have been in a place where we could adapt. With VxRail in place, in a week, we spun up hundreds of instant clones. We spun up a 75-person call center in a day and a half for our public health. We rolled out multiple applications for public health so they could do remote clinics. It's given us the flexibility to be able to roll out new solutions very quickly and be very adaptive. And it's not only been apparent to my team, but it's really made an impact on the business, and now what I'm seeing is those of my customers that were a little lagging or a little conservative are understanding the impact of modernizing the way they do business because it makes them adaptable as well. >> All right, so, Rich, you talked a bunch about the efficiencies that HCI put in place. How about that overall management? You talked about how fast you spun up these new VDI instances. You need to be able to do things much simpler. How does the overall lifecycle management fit into this discussion? >> It makes it so much easier. In the old environment, one, it took a lot of man hours to make change. It was very disruptive when we did make change. It overburdened, I guess that's the word I'm looking for. It really overburdened our staff to cause disruption to business. It wasn't cost-efficient. And then, simple things, like, I've worked for multi-billion dollar companies where we had massive QA environments that replicated production. You simply can't afford that at local government. Having this sort of environment lets me do a scaled-down QA environment, and still get the benefit of rolling out non-disruptive change. As I said earlier, it's allowed us to take all of those cycles that we were spending on lifecycle management, because it's greatly simplified, and move those resources and reskill them in other areas where we can actually have more impact on the business. It's hard to be innovative when 100% of your cycles are just keeping the ship afloat. >> Well, it's definitely a great proof point. So often, you deploy a solution, and when push comes to shove, will it deliver on that value that we're hoping for? HCI has been around for quite a while, but a crisis like this, how can you move past, how can your team respond? Congratulations to your team on that. The Dell team has recently done a number of updates on the VxRail platform. I'm curious, as someone who's been using the platform, what particularly is interesting to you, and what pieces of that have the most relevance to your organization? >> There are a few. So we're starting to look at our SCADA environments, industrial controls. And we're looking at some processing at the edge in those environments. So the new organized D series are interesting. There's some plant environments where that might really make sense to us. We've also partnered with our local counties and we have a DR site where being able to extend the network out to that DR site is going to be very powerful for us. And then there's just some improvements in vSphere that will allow us to do a little QA-ing, if you will, on new code before we roll it out, that I think will have a pretty huge impact for us as well. >> Excellent. So, Rich, when you think about the services that you need to deliver to all of your constituencies, walk us through how the pandemic has affected the team, how you're making sure that your employees are taken care of, but that you can still deliver all of those services. >> So from an internal perspective, not running a legacy architecture has made that a whole lot easier. We've remoted most of the IT team. Our entire development team is at home. Most of our support team is at home. Most of the city is still at home. So being able to do that, one, just having the capability has been huge for us. But also, from a business perspective, it's allowed most of our city functions just to keep running. So, modified services, for sure, but we're still functioning, and I just don't think that would have been capable, we wouldn't have been capable of supporting that, even two and a half years ago. >> So, Rich, we've talked a bit about your infrastructure. I'm curious, is the city, are you leveraging any public cloud environments, or any specific SaaS solutions that are enabling some of what you're doing today also? >> Yes, and we could probably have a 30-minute discussion on what is hybrid cloud and what is multicloud. In our instance, we are leveraging quite a bit of SaaS. We've migrated a lot of our services to SaaS offerings. We have spun up several applications in the cloud. I wouldn't call them truly hybrid. In my mind, hybrid is, I am able to take the workload and very seamlessly move it between my private infrastructure and one or more clouds. This is more, workloads specifically assigned to a public cloud. But yes, we've leveraged that. Simple things like Office365 and Outlook, but just as powerful for us has been VDI and being able to offer Horizon to our employees at home. And, with my other hat on, still maintain the contextual-based security, right? So I didn't have to open up the kingdom. I can still maintain the control that I need to to be able to sleep at night. >> Yeah, it's interesting. One of the questions I love to ask someone in your position is the role of data, how you think of security, how you think of the technology and put those together. Does it help that you wear both the CSO hat and the CIO hat? How do you think about leveraging data? Is there anything that you're sharing with other municipalities, without giving up, of course, personal information? >> Sure. It causes a lot of internal arguments, right? Because there's the two halves of my brain: the CIO half that wants to roll out as much service as I can and be innovative, and the CSO half of my brain that thinks about the exposure of the service that I'm about to roll out. That's part of where we're migrating now as we start to look into our whole approach to data. We've got the platform in place. We're now really migrating our thinking into revamping the way we look at data. I have seven sources for the same data. How do I consolidate and have one source of truth, and where does that reside? My development team is really starting to migrate out of classic development and more into the automation side of the house. How are we interfacing with all of our vendors? That's in review now. And how are we tying to third-party apps? Yeah, that's really the point we're at in our maturity that, now that the infrastructure is in place, we're now migrating to, "what is our data plan?" >> Excellent. Final question I have for you, Rich. I'd love your thoughts on the changing role of CIO. I loved the discussion you had at the beginning going from, really, the private sector to the public sector. Obviously, unique pressures on all businesses right now dealing with the global pandemic, but how do you see the role of the CIO today and how has it been changing? >> I think there's an expectation that you bring value to the business, whether that's local government, or retail, or banking. I think the expectation is that you're not just managing an infrastructure or managing a team, and providing service, but how do you bring actual value to the organization that you serve? And that means that you have to understand the business and all aspects of the business. I think you have to, at least I do as a CIO, I have to spend a tremendous amount of time understanding my internal customer and what are they trying to accomplish, and often, to show them a new way that they just may not be aware of. So I think there's a little more expectation as a CIO that you're going to drive value to whatever business that you're serving. >> Well, Rich, thank you so much. Really enjoyed the conversation. Congratulations on being able to react fast. So glad that you were able to get the transformation project done ahead of this hitting, because otherwise, it would have been a very different conversation. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> All right, I'm Stu Miniman. Stay safe and thank you for watching theCUBE.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re:Invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel along with its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to the eighth year of AWS re:Invent. It's 2019. There's over 60,000 in attendance. Seventh year of theCUBE. Wall-to-wall coverage, covering all the angles of this broad and massively-growing ecosystem. I am Stu Miniman. My co-host is Justin Warren, and one of our Cube alumni are back on the program. Ramin Sayar, who is the president and CEO of Sumo Logic. >> Stu: Booth always at the front of the expo hall. I think anybody that's come to this show has one of the Sumo-- >> Squishies. >> Stu: Squish dolls there. I remember a number of years you actually had live sumos-- >> Again this year. >> At the event, so you know, bring us, the sixth year you've been at the show, give us a little bit of the vibe and your experience so far. >> Yeah, I mean, naturally when you've been here so many times, it's interesting to be back, not only as a practitioner who's attended this many years ago, but now as a partner of AWS, and seeing not only our own community growth in terms of Sumo Logic, but also the community in general that we're here to see. You know, it's a good mix of practitioners and business folks from DevOps to security and much, much more, and as we were talking right before the show, the vendors here are so different now then it was three years go, let alone six years ago. So, it's nice to see. >> All right, a lot of news from Amazon. Anything specific jump out from you from their side, or I know Sumo Logic has had some announcements this week. >> Yeah, I mean, like, true to Amazon, there's always a lot of announcements, and, you know, what we see is customers need time to understand and digest that. There's a lot of confusion, but, you know, selfishly speaking from the Sumo side, you know, we continue to be a strong AWS partner. We announced another set of services along with AWS at this event. We've got some new competencies for container, because that's a big aspect of what customers are doing today with microservices, and obviously we announced some new capabilities around our security intelligence capabilities, specifically for CloudTrail, because that's becoming a really important aspect of a lot of customers maturation of cloud and also operating in the cloud in this new world. >> Justin: So walk us through what customers are using CloudTrail to do, and how the Sumo Logic connection to CloudTrail actually helps them with what they're trying to do. >> Well, first and foremost, it's important to understand what Sumo does and then the context of CloudTrail and other services. You know, we started roughly a decade ago with AWS, and we built and intelligence platform on top of AWS that allows us to deal with the vast amount of unstructured data in specific use cases. So one very common use case, very applicable to the users here, is around the DevOps teams. And so, the DevOps teams are having a much more complicated and difficult time today understanding, ascertaining, where trouble, where problems reside, and how to go troubleshoot those. It's not just about a siloed monitoring tool. That's just not enough. It doesn't the analytics or intelligence. It's about understanding all the data, from CloudTrail, from EC2, and non-AWS services, so you can appropriately understand these new modern apps that are dependent on these microservices and architectures, and what's really causing the performance issue, the availability issue, and, God forbid, a security or breach issue, and that's a unique thing that Sumo provides unlike others here. >> Justin: Yeah, now I believe you've actually extended the Sumo support beyond CloudTrail and into some of the Kubernetes services that Amazon offers like AKS, and you also, I believe it's ESC FireLens support? >> Ramin: Yeah, so, and that's just a continuation of a lot of stuff we've done with respect to our analytics platform, and, you know, we introduced some things earlier this year at re:Inforce with AWS as well so, around VPC Flow Logs and the like, and this is a continuation now for CloudTrail. And really what it helps our customers and end users do is better better and more proactively be able to detect potential issues, respond to those security issues, and more importantly, automate the resolution process, and that's what's really key for our users, because they're inundated with false positives all the time whether it's on the ops side let alone the security side. So Sumo Logic is very unique back to our value prop, but providing a horizontal platform across all these different use cases. One being ops, two being cybersecurity and threat, and three being line-of-business users who are trying to understand what their own users on their digital apps are doing with their services and how to better deliver value. >> Justin: Now, automation is so important when you've got this scope and scale of cloud and the pace of innovation that's happening with all the technology that's around us here at the show, so the automation side of things I think is a little bit underappreciated this year. We're talking about transformation and we're talking about AI and ML. I think, with the automation piece, is one thing that's a little bit underestimated from this year's show. What do you think about that? >> Yeah, I mean, our philosophy all along has been, you can't automate without AI and ML, and it's proven fact that, you know, by next year the machine data growth is going to be 16 zettabytes. By 2025, it's going to be 75 zettabytes of data. Okay, while that's really impressive in terms of volume of data, the challenge is, the tsunami of data that's being generated, how to go decipher what's an important aspect and what's not an important aspect, so you first have to understand from the streaming data services, how to be able to dynamically and schema on read, be able to analyze that data, and then be able to put in context to those use cases I talked about, and then to drive automation remediation, so it's a multifaceted problem that we've been solving for nearly a decade. In a given day, we're analyzing several hundred petabytes of data, right? And we're trying to distill it down to the most important aspects for you, for your particular role and your responsibility. >> Stu: Yeah, um, we've talked a lot about transformation at this show, and one of the big challenges for customers is, they're going through that application modernization journey. I wonder if you could bring us inside some of your customers, you know, where are they having success, where are some of the bottlenecks slowing them down from moving along on this transformation journey? >> Yeah, so, it's interesting because, whether you're a cloud-native company like Sumo Logic or you're aspiring to be a cloud-native company or a cloud-first project going through migration, you have similar problems. It's now become a machine-scale problem, not a human-scale problem, back to the data growth, right? And so, some of our customers, regardless of their maturation, are really trying to understand, you know, as they embark on these digital transformations, how do they solve, what we call, the intelligence gap? And that is, because there's so much silos across the enterprise organizations today, across development, operations, IT, security, lines of business, in its context, in its completeness, it's creating more complexity for our customers. So, what Sumo tries to help solve, do, is, solve that intelligence gap in this new intelligence economy by providing an intelligence platform we call "continuous intelligence". So what do customers do? So, some of our customers use Sumo to monitor and troubleshoot their cloud workloads. So whether it's, you know, the Netflix team themselves, right, because they're born and bred in the cloud or it's Hudl, who's trying to provide, you know, analytics and intelligence for players and coaches, right, to insurance companies that are going through the migration journey to the cloud, Hartford Insurance, New York Life, to sports and media companies, Major League Baseball, with the whole cyber SOC, and what they're trying to do there on the backs of Sumo, to even trucking companies like Packard, who's trying to do driverless, autonomous cars. It doesn't matter what industry you're in, everyone is trying to do through the digital transformation or be disrupted. Everyone's trying to gain that intelligence or not just be left behind but be lapped, and so what Sumo really helps them do is provide one single intelligence platform across dev, sec, and ops, bringing these teams together to be able to collaborate much more efficiently and effectively through the true multi-tenant SaaS platform that we've optimized for 10 years on AWS. >> Justin: So we heard from Andy yesterday that one of the important ways to drive that transformational change is to actually have the top-down support for that. So you mentioned that you're able to provide that one layer across multiple different teams who traditionally haven't worked that well together, so what are you seeing with customers around, when they put in Sumo Logic, where does that transformational change come from? Are we seeing the top-down driven change? Is that were customers come from, or is it a little bit more bottom-up, were you have developers and operations and security all trying to work together, and then that bubbles up to the rest of the organization? >> Ramin: Well, it's interesting, it's both for us because a lot of times, it depends on the size of the organization, where the responsibilities reside, so naturally, in a larger enterprise where there's a lot of forces of mass because of the different siloed organizations, you have to, often times, start with the CISO, and we make sure the CISO is a transformation agent, and if they are the transformation agent, then we partner with them to really help get a handle and control on their cybersecurity and threat, and then he or she typically sponsors us into other parts of the line of business, the DevOps teams, like, for example, we've seen with Hartford Insurance, right, or that we saw with F5 Networks and many more. But then, there's a flip side of that where we actually start in, let's use another example, uh, you know, with, for example, Hearst Media, right. They actually started because they were doing a lift-and-shift to the cloud and their DevOps team, in one line of business, started with Sumo, and expanded the usage and growth. They migrated 32 applications over to AWS, and then suddenly the security teams got wind of it and then we went top-down. Great example of starting, you know, bottom-up in the case of Hearst or top-down in the case of other examples. So, the trick here is, as we look at embarking upon these journeys with our customers, we try to figure out which technology partners are they using. It's not only in the cloud provider, but it's also which traditional on-premise tools versus potentially cloud-native services and SaaS applications they're adopting. Second is, which sort of organizational models are they adopting? So, a lot of people talk about DevOps. They don't practice DevOps, and then you can understand that very quickly by asking them, "What tools are you using?" "Are you using GitHub, Jenkins, Artifactory?" "Are you using all these other tools, "and how are you actually getting visibility "into your pipeline, and is that actually speeding "the delivery of services and digital applications, "yes or no?" It's a very binary answer, and if they can't answer that, you know they're aspiring to be. So therefore, it's a consultative sale for us in that mode. If they're already embarking upon that, however, then we use a different approach, where we're trying to understand how they're challenged, what they're challenged with, and show other customers, and then it's really more of a partnership. Does that makes sense? >> Justin: Yeah, makes perfect sense to me. >> So, one of the debates we had coming into this show is, a lot of discussion at multicloud around the industry. Of course, Amazon doesn't talk specifically about multicloud all that well. If you look historically, attempts to manage lots of different environments under a single pane of glass, we always say, "pane is spelled P-I-A-N", when you try to do that. There's been great success. If you look at VMware in the data center, VMware didn't cover the entire environment, but vCenter was the center of your, you know, admin's world, and you would edge cases to manage some of the other environments here. Feels that AWS is extending their footprint with thing like Outposts and the environments, but there are lots of things that won't be on Amazon, whether it be a second cloud provider, my legacy data center pieces, or anything else there. Sounds like you touch many of the pieces, so I'm curious if you, just, weigh in on what you hear from customers, how they get their arms around the heterogeneous mess that IT traditionally is, and what we need to do as an industry to make things better. >> You know, for a long time, many companies have been bi-modal, and now they're tri-modal, right, meaning that, you know, they have their traditional and their new aspects of IT. Now they're tri-modal in the sense of, now they have a third leg of that complexity in stool, which is public cloud, and so, it's a reality regardless of Amazon or GCP or Azure, that customers want flexibility and choice, and if fact, we see that with our own data. Every year, as you guys well know, we put out an intelligence report that actually shows year-over-year, the adoption of not only various technologies, but adoption of technologies used across one cloud provider versus multicloud providers, and earlier this year in September when we put the new release of the report out, we saw that year-over-year, there was more than 2x growth in the user of Kubernetes in production, and it was almost three times growth year-over-year in use of Kubernetes across multiple cloud providers. That tells you something. That tells you that they don't want lock-in. That tells you that they also want choice. That tells you that they're trying to abstract away from the IaaS layer, infrastructure-as-a-service layer, so they have portability, so to speak, across different types of providers for the different types of workload needs as well as the data sovereignty needs they have to constantly manage because of regulatory requirements, compliance requirements and the like. And so, this is actually it benefits someone like Sumo to provide that agnostic platform to customers so they can have the choice, but also most importantly, the value, and this is something that we announced also at this event where we introduced editions to our Cloud Flex licensing model that allows you to not only address multi-tiers of data, but also allows you to have choice of where you run those workloads and have choice for different types of data for different types of use cases at different cost models. So again, delivering on that need for customers to have flexibility and choice, as well as, you know, the promise of options to move workloads from provider to provider without having to worry about the headache of compliance and audit and security requirements, 'cause that's what Sumo uniquely does versus point tools. >> Well, Ramin, I think that's a perfect point to end on. Thank you so much for joining us again. >> Thanks for having me. >> Stu: And looking forward to catching up with Sumo in the future. >> Great to be here. >> All right, we're at the midway point of three days, wall-to-wall coverage here in Las Vegas. AWS re:Invent 2019. He's Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Nice, France, it's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference 2017 Europe, brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE SiliconeANGLE Media's independent live broadcast of Nutanix .NEXT here in Nice, France. Happy to have join with me a first-time guest, John McAdam, who is the former CEO of F5 and an independent board member for a number of companies including F5, Tableau, and Nutanix. The show that we're at. So John, thanks so much for joining us. No, thank you, thanks for having me. All right, so let's start, just for people who aren't familiar, I said, you know, you were CEO of F5 for quite a few years, just give us a little bit about your background in business and what brings you here. I graduated from Glasgow University, you probably can tell from the accent, I'm Scottish. >> Stu: Yes. I moved over to the States when I joined a company called Sequent in 1994, and I became president of Sequent in 1995, and I've actually been in the States since then, up until I retired in April this year. So I spent 11 years at Sequent, president and chief operating officer, big server company is what we did at the time. Mainly selling Oracle type databases running on the servers. We were purchased, we were acquired by IBM in '99. I stayed with IBM for a year. I was running the AIX business globally for IBM, and then I was headhunted by F5 Networks, and I joined them in 2000, just as the .com bust was about to happen, and we'll talk about that later maybe. And I was the CEO at F5 for 17 years, and during the last few years I joined the board of Tableau, as you mentioned, and a company called Apptio as well based in Seattle, and of course Nutanix. Yeah, so a lot of our audience are everything from CIOs to people that someday might want to be a CIO, but very much kind of a blend of business and technology, can you tell people, some people are like, I don't understand how somebody becomes an independent board member. You're not the former CEO of that company or you're not one of the people... What does it mean to be an independent board member? You know, it's an interesting story because the independent board members at F5 actually kept encouraging me to join the board, and I kept saying, no I don't need to do that, I'm really busy, focused on the company. And also I've been a board member since 1995 as an executive, as a board member of Sequent and a board member of F5, so why would I want to join a board. And then eventually, I actually got approached, first of all by Tableau, the CEO of Tableau at the time, and seemed a very interesting conversation. So I decided to join the board. It was pre-IPO. And I thought I could add some value there, in terms of growing the company, etc. So I went along to the first board meeting and I went to the second, and I came back to the F5 board and I said, I apologize. I should have done this earlier. I didn't appreciate how much I would realize and learn being at the other side of the table as an independent board member. Because remember, you're turning up once every three months or two months. You don't know the day-to-day what's going on, but you have a very different perspective. And I wish I had done it earlier, but really it's all about trying to give consultancy, support, advice, obviously there's governance things you do as well. And I've really enjoyed being on the boards and especially Nutanix. Okay, your career, you know we've had, I think since about the time you joined F5, there was the .com crash, there was the downturn in '07/'08, so you've seen some boom times, you've seen some down times. What do you take away for those and how do you help advise the companies that you're working with? You're absolutely right. It's been an interesting experience. When I joined, as I mentioned earlier, it was a .com about to crash happening, and the big issue for F5 was it was actually 90% .com business, so the revenue collapsed completely, the stock price dropped, from today's price, from $21 to $1.50. We've run out of cash in certain areas. We ended up selling off 10% of the company to actually Nokia, they took ownership. So it was very much a survival phase. And in that phase you really have to, you need to make quick decisions. There's no time for the coaching that you would normally do. It's not as inspirational. But once you're out of it, once you get the P and L, you know, the profit and loss, and the balance sheet in good shape. Then we moved into, I would call, the stability phase, and the deal there was that we really were building a new architecture of product. We knew it was going to take a couple years. So that's all about making sure that you're in a good environment, you're going to deliver the goods from a market perspective, and we did that. I remember this well, in September 2004, we announced a new version, a new architecture, boom, we jumped into the growth (mumbles). Fifty percent growth, not quite as much as Nutanix today, but 50, 55, 40%. That's different, that's an inspirational world, you know, where you're really trying to inspire the company, it's all about hiring, and it's fun. How much do companies, when you advise them, worry about kind of what's happening to them versus what's happening locally and globally from an economics standpoint? I talked to Dheeraj many times kind of leading up to the IPO, and it was like, well, we have no control over kind of the global economical pieces, so we're building for the long term, and we will just eventually have to be like, okay, we'll go out in the public market. You know, you can't, just like buying and selling stocks, you can't necessarily time it. So, how does that impact, you know, kind of balance some of those things? I mean the best example is 2008, 2009, where we had the financial crisis, and, as I mentioned, we were very much in growth phase in 2004, '05, '06, '07. Interesting enough, as we were moving into 2008, the timing wasn't great because we were doing a product transition, and then along came the financial crisis, and it was pretty mind boggling, And the end of 2008, December 2008, customers stopped buying. And at first we thought oh my God, is this just us? And then of course, pretty soon moving into January 2009 you realize it's not you. So we didn't ignore it, to be honest, we didn't ignore it. But what we did do was we kept hiring. We cut back a little bit on the hiring, and in fact, I wish we hadn't have done that. I wish we would have completely ignored it, and of course this is me now looking back, so I can say that. The reason I'm saying I wish we had ignored it and kept growing was six months after, moving into the second half of 2009, not only did we see our business starting to grow again, but it accelerated because a demand had built up during that time. So bottom line is I don't think you can ignore global issues going on. You certainly can't ignore big global issues like 2008, but you still have to focus on what you know as your business, especially if you know you've got a good market, you know there's a demand, and just see yourself through it. Yeah, you mentioned one of the companies you joined was pre-IPO from an advisor standpoint. Have you been a Nutanix advisor just before the IPO (mumbles)? I have, I've actually had the unique experience of being on Tableau pre-IPO, Nutanix pre-IPO, and also Apptio, all pre-IPO. So I've watched the three of them going through the IPO process. So of course, Dheeraj tries to say, look, you know, I'm not going to let Wall Street kind of dictate anything, but, you know, it has to be a little bit different when you've got kind of the financial people looking at things from the outside, always trying to second guess strategy and the like. How do you give advice through that? Yeah, my advice on this, and it is somewhat different, to say it's not different wouldn't be completely correct, however, you can't let Wall Street run your business, you can't, especially if you've got conviction in terms of what you're doing. The one area where you do need to be a bit careful is that, the thing I've always said when I was CEO of F5 was our business was all about, when I was asked, do you think you could be acquired? The answer has always been from me the following: We're focused on the business, we're focused on growing a company. When you do that you become more strategic and attractive to other companies. But as long as you keep growing, your market cap keeps high, and you keep going. Right. If your market cap drops as well as the stock price there is always a danger that you could become an acquisition target. So you can't ignore it completely. But frankly, both of those messages are win-wins for investors. Absolutely, what can you say about Nutanix? You know, a year after an IPO, 2800 employees, pushing globally, you know, this show's doubled in attendance from last year. Without getting into closed-doors things, what's your take on (mumbles). Yeah, and as an independent director, I have to be more generic, but clearly, fast-growing company in a great market, a leader in the hyperconvergent market. I love their concept of simplicity, invisible infrastructure. I think that's a place that customers want to be right now, so I think they're in really good position. What in the market is interesting you these days? I look across kind of the companies you work with, you know, data is becoming more and more valuable. I spent many years working for a large storage company, used to be it wasn't really about the data, it was about the storing, and now, data from the big data companies, everything else, it's about how do I leverage and get information out, you know, we're hearing Nutanix play into that message. Yeah, and really it's the three main areas, data, you know data in particular, the Cloud, I'm not going to give you anything new here, and security. They're the three hot topics today. And the three of those are twisted in a knot are they not? They're all linked together. We just interviewed a gentleman from a bank, and he said basically, all of our budget gets put on security these days. Yeah, I mean, what concerns you, is it kind of the geopolitical, the hackers and ransomware, security? I think back early in my career, security always got lip service as being important, but today, it absolutely comes to the front of mind and you know most companies I talk to are concern would probably be understating it as to kind of the state of security. No absolutely, I mean, it's touching everybody now, boards, independent board members, it's high up on the list of discussion topics at board meetings. You know, every company is vulnerable, and if you're a technology company that's got customer data and you're in the security business as well, you really have to make sure that you're well protected. How often is security a board-level discussion these days? Most board members, most board discussions, and certainly in the audit committee, it's almost every one now. What has to happen there? Making sure that it's being looked at properly by the executives, that they take it seriously, there's enough investment, making sure that all the tools are in place if there is an attack, all of the above. Do you touch on GDPR at all? I'm curious if that comes up in your conversations. No I haven't been involved in that. I know there's a breakout session on it today, but I've not been involved in that. It just reminds me of a similar thing is that people have said, you need to make sure you're doing your due diligence and doing as much as you can, which feels like the same for security, because nobody's going to say, yes, I'm 100% secure because there's no such thing anymore. There's no such thing and there's so many different attacks, and frankly, most companies have got security solutions from so many different vendors, even sometimes from your competitor. All right, so the last thing I have to say is I don't think we've ever done theCUBE in Scotland, and it's a beautiful country, so we've got to figure out how to do some small event there. I'll help you. (laugh) All right, John, I want to give you the final word, your take, you come, why do you attend? Obviously you're an independent board, you probably have some meetings, talk to us about a show like this, what brings you. Yeah, and this is the first one I've attended. I've actually attended one similar with Tableau and similar with Apptio as well. It's good for an independent board member to see some of the presentations, how the executives and management are talking to customers, so it's actually good to get more of a feel for the business. All right, well John McAdam, appreciate you bringing a different perspective to our programming. We always want to help give a taste of what's happening at these shows out to our audience. So thank you so much for joining us. I'm Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE.