>> theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies: "Creating technologies that drive human progress." >> Good late afternoon from Barcelona, Spain at the Theater of Barcelona. It's Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson of "theCUBE" covering MWC23. This is our third day of continuous wall-to-wall coverage on theCUBE. And you know we're going to be here tomorrow as well. We've been having some amazing conversations about the ecosystem. And we're going to continue those conversations next. Honore Labourdette is here, the VP global partner, Ecosystem Success Team, Telco Media and Entertainment at Red Hat. And Tony Jeffries joins us as well, a Senior Director of Product Management, Telecom Systems Business at Dell. Welcome to the theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Great to have both of you here. So we're going to be talking about the evolution of the telecom stack. We've been talking a lot about disaggregation the last couple of days. Honore, starting with you, talk about the evolution of the telecom stock. You were saying before we went live this is your 15th at least MWC. So you've seen a lot of evolution, but what are some of the things you're seeing right now? >> Well, I think the interesting thing about disaggregation, which is a key topic, right? 'Cause it's so relative to 5G and the 5G core and the benefits and the features of 5G core around disaggregation. But one thing we have to remember, when you disaggregate, you separate things. You have to bring those things back together again in a different way. And that's predominantly what we're doing in our partnership with Dell, is we're bringing those disaggregated components back together in a cohesive way that takes advantage of the new technology, at the same time taking out the complexity and making it easier for our Telco customers to deploy and to scale and to get much more, accelerate the time to revenue. So the trend now is, what we're seeing is two things I would say. One is how do we solve for the complexity with the disaggregation? And how do we leverage the ecosystem as a partner in order to help solve for some of those challenges? >> Tony, jump on in, talk about what you guys announced last week, Dell and Red Hat, and how it's addressing the complexities that Honore was saying, "Hey, they're there." >> Yeah. You know, our customers, our operators are saying, "Hey, I want disaggregation." "I want competition in the market." But at the same time who's going to support all this disaggregation, right? And so at the end of the day, there's going to be an operator that's going to have to figure this out. They're going to have an SLA that they're going to have to meet. And so they're going to want to go with a best-in-class partner with Red Hat and Dell, in terms of our infrastructure and their software together as one combined engineered system. And that's what we call a Dell Telecom infrastructure block for Red Hat. And so at the end of the day, things may go wrong, and if they do, who are they going to call for that support? And that's also really a key element of an engineered system, is this experience that they get both with Red Hat and with Dell together supporting the customer as one. Which is really important to solve this disaggregated problem that can arise from a disaggregated open network situation, yeah. >> So what is the market, the go to market motion look like? People have loyalties in the IT space to technologies that they've embraced and been successful with for years and years. So you have folks in the marketplace who are diehard, you know, dyed red, Red Hat folks. Is it primarily a pull from them? How does that work? How do you approach that to your, what are your end user joint customers? What does that look like from your perspective? >> Sure, well, interestingly enough both Red Hat and Dell have been in the marketplace for a very long time, right? So we do have the brand with those Telco customers for these solutions. What we're seeing with this solution is, it's an emerging market. It's an emerging market for a new technology. So there's an opportunity for both Red Hat and Dell together to leverage our brands with those customers with no friction in the marketplace as we go to market together. So our field sales teams will be motivated to, you know, take advantage of the solution for their customers, as will the Dell team. And I'll let Tony speak to the Dell, go to market. >> Yeah. You know, so we really co-sell together, right? We're the key partners. Dell will end up fulfilling that order, right? We send these engineered systems through our factories and we send that out either directly to a customer or to a OTEL lab, like an intermediate lab where we can further refine and customize that offer for that particular customer. And so we got a lot of options there, but we're essentially co-selling. And Dell is fulfilling that from an infrastructure perspective, putting Red Hat software on top and the licensing for that support. So it's a really good mix. >> And I think, if I may, one of the key differentiators is the actual capabilities that we're bringing together inside of this pre-integrated solution. So it includes the Red Hat OpenShift which is the container software, but we also add our advanced cluster management as well as our Ansible automation. And then Dell adds their orchestration capability along with the features and functionalities of the platform. And we put that together and we offer capability, remote automation orchestration and management capabilities that again reduces the operating expense, reduces the complexity, allows for easy scale. So it's, you know, certainly it's all about the partnership but it's also the capabilities of the combined technology. >> I was just going to ask about some of the numbers, and you mentioned some of them. Reduction of TCO I imagine is also a big capability that this solution enables besides reducing OpEx. Talk about the TCO reduction. 'Cause I know there's some numbers there that Dell and Red Hat have already delivered to the market. >> Yeah. You know, so these infrastructure blocks are designed specifically for Core, or for RAN, or for the Edge. We're starting out initially in the Core, but we've done some market research with a company called ACG. And ACG has looked at day zero, day one and day two TCO, FTE hours saved. And we're looking at over 40 to 50% TCO savings over you know, five year period, which is quite significant in terms of cost savings at a TCO level. But also we have a lot of numbers around power consumption and savings around power consumption. But also just that experience for our operator that says, hey, I'm going to go to one company to get the best in class from Red Hat and Dell together. That saves a lot of time in procurement and that entire ordering process as well. So you get a lot of savings that aren't exactly seen in the FTE hours around TCO, but just in that overall experience by talking to one company to get the best of both from both Red Hat and Dell together. >> I think the comic book character Charlie Brown once said, "The most discouraging thing in the world is having a lot of potential." (laughing) >> Right. >> And so when we talk about disaggregating and then reaggregating or reintegrating, that means choice. >> Tony: Yeah. >> How does an operator approach making that choice? Because, yeah, it sounds great. We have this integration lab and you have all these choices. Well, how do I decide, how does a person decide? This is a question for Honore from a Red Hat perspective, what's the secret sauce that you believe differentiates the Red Hat-infused stack versus some other assemblage of gear? >> Well, there's a couple of key characteristics, and the one that I think is most prevalent is that we're open, right? So "open" is in Red Hat's DNA because we're an open source technology company, and with that open source technology and that open platform, our customers can now add workloads. They have options to choose the workloads that they want to run on that open source platform. As they choose those workloads, they can be confident that those workloads have been certified and validated on our platform because we have a very robust ecosystem of ISVs that have already completed that process with open source, with Red Hat OpenShift. So then we take the Red Hat OpenShift and we put it on the Dell platform, which is market leader platform, right? Combine those two things, the customers can be confident that they can put those workloads on the combined platform that we're offering and that those workloads would run. So again, it goes back to making it simpler, making it easy to procure, easy to run workloads, easy to deploy, easy to operate. And all of that of course equates to saving time always equates to saving money. >> Yeah. Absolutely. >> Oh, I thought you wanted to continue. >> No, I think Honore sort of, she nailed it. You know, Red Hat is so dominant in 5G, and what they're doing in the market, especially in the Core and where we're going into the RAN, you know, next steps are to validate those workloads, those workload vendors on top of a stack. And the Red Hat leader in the Core is key, right? It's instant credibility in the core market. And so that's one of the reasons why we, Dell, want to partner with with Red Hat for the core market and beyond. We're going to be looking at not only Core but moving into RAN very soon. But then we do, we take that validated workload on top of that to optimize that workload and then be able to instantiate that in the core and the RAN. It's just a really streamlined, good experience for our operators. At the end of the day, we want happy customers in between our mutual customer base. And that's what you get whenever you do that combined stack together. >> Were operators, any operators, and you don't have to mention them by name, involved in the evolution of the infra blocks? I'm just curious how involved they were in helping to co-develop this. I imagine they were to some degree. >> Yeah, I could take that one. So, in doing so, yeah, we can't be myopic and just assume that we nailed it the first time, right? So yeah, we do work with partners all the way up and down the stack. A lot of our engineering work with Red Hat also brings in customer experience that is key to ensure that you're building and designing the right architecture for the Core. I would like to use the names, I don't know if I should, but a lot of those names are big names that are leaders in our industry. But yeah, their footprints, their fingerprints are all over those design best practices, those architectural designs that we build together. And then we further that by doing those validated workloads on top of that. So just to really prove the point that it's optimized for the Core, RAN, Edge kind of workload. >> And it's a huge added value for Red Hat to have a partner like Dell who can take all of those components, take the workload, take the Red Hat software, put it on the platform, and deliver that out to the customers. That's really, you know, a key part of the partnership and the value of the partnership because nobody really does that better than Dell. That center of excellence around delivery and support. >> Can you share any feedback from any of those nameless operators in terms of... I'm even kind of wondering what the catalyst was for the infra block. Was it operators saying, "Ah, we have these challenges here"? Was it the evolution of the Telco stack and Dell said, "We can come in with Red Hat and solve this problem"? And what's been some of their feedback? >> Yeah, it really comes down to what Honore said about, okay, you know, when we are looking at day zero, which is primarily your design, how much time savings can we do by creating that stack for them, right? We have industry experts designing that Core stack that's optimized for different levels of spectrum. When we do that we save a lot of time in terms of FTE hours for our architects, our operators, and then it goes into day one, right? Which is the deployment aspect for saving tons of hours for our operators by being able to deploy this. Speed to market is key. That ultimately ends up in, you know, faster time to revenue for our customers, right? So it's, when they see that we've already done the pre-work that they don't have to, that's what really resonates for them in terms of that, yeah. >> Honore, Lisa and I happen to be veterans of the Cloud native space, and what we heard from a lot of the folks in that ecosystem is that there is a massive hunger for developers to be able to deploy and manage and orchestrate environments that consist of Cloud native application infrastructure, microservices. >> Right. >> What we've heard here is that 5G equals Cloud native application stacks. Is that a fair assessment of the environment? And what are you seeing from a supply and demand for that kind of labor perspective? Is there still a hunger for those folks who develop in that space? >> Well, there is, because the very nature of an open source, Kubernetes-based container platform, which is what OpenShift is, the very nature of it is to open up that code so that developers can have access to the code to develop the workloads to the platform, right? And so, again, the combination of bringing together the Dell infrastructure with the Red Hat software, it doesn't change anything. The developer, the development community still has access to that same container platform to develop to, you know, Cloud native types of application. And you know, OpenShift is Red Hat's hybrid Cloud platform. So it runs on-prem, it runs in the public Cloud, it runs at the edge, it runs at the far edge. So any of the development community that's trying to develop Cloud native applications can develop it on this platform as they would if they were developing on an OpenShift platform in the public Cloud. >> So in "The Graduate", the advice to the graduate was, "Plastics." Plastics. As someone who has more children than I can remember, I forget how many kids I have. >> Four. >> That's right, I have four. That's right. (laughing) Three in college and grad school already at this point. Cloud native, I don't know. Kubernetes definitely a field that's going to, it's got some legs? >> Yes. >> Okay. So I can get 'em off my payroll quickly. >> Honore: Yes, yes. (laughing) >> Okay, good to know. Good to know. Any thoughts on that open Cloud native world? >> You know, there's so many changes that's going to happen in Kubernetes and services that you got to be able to update quickly. CICD, obviously the topic is huge. How quickly can we keep these systems up to date with new releases, changes? That's a great thing about an engineered system is that we do provide that lifecycle management for three to five years through this engagement with our customers. So we're constantly keeping them up with the latest and the greatest. >> David: Well do those customers have that expertise in-house, though? Do they have that now? Or is this a seismic cultural shift in those environments? >> Well, you know, they do have a lot of that experience, but it takes a lot of that time, and we're taking that off of their plate and putting that within us on our system, within our engineered system, and doing that automatically for them. And so they don't have to check in and try to understand what the release certification matrix is. Every quarter we're providing that to them. We're communicating out to the operator, telling them what's coming up latest and greatest, not only in terms of the software but the hardware and how to optimize it all together. That's the beauty of these systems. These are five year relationships with our operators that we're providing that lifecycle management end to end, for years to come. >> Lisa: So last question. You talked about joint GTM availability. When can operators get their hands on this? >> Yes. Yes. It's currently slated for early September release. >> Lisa: Awesome. So sometime this year? >> Yes. >> Well guys, thank you so much for talking with us today about Dell, Red Hat, what you're doing to really help evolve the telecom stack. We appreciate it. Next time come back with a customer, we can dig into it. That'd be fun. >> We sure will, absolutely. That may happen today actually, a little bit later. Not to let the cat out the bag, but good news. >> All right, well, geez, you're going to want to stick around. Thank you so much for your time. For our guests and for Dave Nicholson. This is Lisa Martin of theCUBE at MWC23 from Barcelona, Spain. We'll be back after a short break. (calm music)

foreign welcome to thecube's coverage of AWS re invent 2022. this is a part of our AWS executive Summit AT AWS re invent sponsored by Accenture I'm your host Lisa Martin I've got three guests here with me Christoph schulteis head of devops and infrastructure at Vodafone Germany joins us as well as IMAP baldasare the Accenture AWS business group Europe delivery lead attic Center and Philip schmuckel senior manager at Accenture technology we're going to be talking about what Vodafone Germany is doing in terms of its agile transformation the business and I.T gentlemen it's great to have you on thecube Welcome to the program thank you thanks for having us my pleasure Kristoff let's go ahead and start with you talk to us about what Vodafone Germany is doing in its transformation project with Accenture and with AWS certainly these are but let me first start with explaining what Vodafone does in general so Vodafone is one of the leading telephone and Technology service providers in Germany half of all German citizens are Vodafone customers using Vodafone technology to access the internet make calls and watch TV in the economic sector we provide connectivity for office farms and factories so this is vodafone's largest business and I.T transformation and we're happy to have several Partners on this journey with more than a thousand people working in scaled agile framework with eight Agile Release strings and one of the largest safe implementations in Europe why are we doing this transformation well not only since the recent uncertainties the Telco Market is highly volatile and there are a few challenges that Vodafone was facing in the last years as there are Market changes caused by disruptions from technological advances in competitors or changing customer customer expectations who for example use more of the top services like Netflix or Amazon Prime video what is coming up in the next wave is unknown so Technologies evolve continual disruption from non-tel causes to be expected and being able to innovate fast is the key Focus for everyone in order to be able to react to that we need to cope with that and do so in different aspects to become the leading digital technology company therefore Vodafone Germany is highly simplifying its products as well as processes for example introducing free product upgrades for customers we're driving the change from a business perspective and modernize the it landscape which we call the technology transformation so simply business-led but it driven for that Accenture is our integration partner and AWS provides the services for our platforms got it thank you for the background on the Vodafone the impact that it's making you mentioned the volatility in the Telecom market and also setting the context for what Vodafone Germany is doing with Accenture and AWS email I want to bring you into the conversation now talk to us about the partnership between Accenture and Vodafone in AWS and how is it set up to provide maximum value for customers yeah that's a great question actually well I mean working in Partnership allows obviously to bring in transparency and trust and these are key starting points for a program of this magnitude and a program like this comes out of strong willingness to change the game both internally and on the market so as you can imagine particular attention is required that's top level alignment in general when you implement a program like this you also need to couple the long-term vision of how you want to manage your customers what are the new products that you want to bring to the market with the long-term technology roadmap because the thing that you don't want to happen is that you invest many years and a lot of efforts and then when it comes the end of the journey you figure out that you have to restart a New Journey and then you enter in the NeverEnding Loop so obviously all these things must come together and they come together in what we call the power of three and it consists in AWS Vodafone and Accenture having a strategic Vision alignment and constant updates and most importantly the best of breed in terms of technology and also people so what we do in practice is uh we bring together Market understanding business Vision technical expertise energy collaboration and what is even more important we work as a unique team everybody succeeds here and this is a true win-win partnership more specifically Vodafone leads the Strategic Direction obviously they understand the market they are close to their customers AWS provides all the expertise around the cloud infrastructure insights on the roadmap and this is a key element elasticity both technical but also Financial and the then Accenture comes with its ability to deliver with the strong industry expertise flexibility and when you combine all these ingredients together obviously you understand it's easy to succeed together the power of three it sounds quite compelling it sounds like a very partnership that has a lot of flexibility elasticity as you mentioned and obviously the customer at the end of the day benefits tremendously from that Kristoff I'd like to bring you back into the conversation talk to us about the unified unified platform approach how is walk us through how Vodafone is implementing it with AWS and with Accenture so the applications that form the basis for the transformation program were originally pursuing all kinds of approaches for deployment and use of AWS services in order to support faster adoption and optimize the usage that I mentioned before and we have provided the Vodafone Cloud framework that has been The Trusted platform for several projects within the it in Germany as a side effect the framework facilitates the compliance with Vodafone security requirements and the unified approach also has the benefit that someone who is moving from one team to another will find a structure that looks familiar the best part of the framework though is the operative rights deployment process that helps us reducing the time from implementing for example a new stage from a few weeks to me hours and that together with improvements of the cicd pipeline greatly helped us reducing the time to speed up something and deploy the software on it in order to reach our Target kpis the unified platform provides all kinds of setups like AWS eks and the ecosystem that is commonly used with coping dentists like service mesh monitoring logging and tracing but it can also be used for non-continental erased applications that we have and provide the integration with security monitoring and other tools at the moment we are in contact with other markets of Vodafone to globally share our experience in our code which makes introducing a similar system into other markets straightforward we are also continuously improving our approach and the completely new version of the framework is currently being introduced into the program Germany is doing is really kind of setting the stage as you mentioned Christopher other parts of the business who want to learn from so that's a great thing there that that what you're building is really going to spread throughout the organization and make a positive impact Philip let's bring you into the conversation now let's talk about how you're using AWS specifically to build the new Vodafone Cloud integration platform talk to us about that as part of this overall transformation program sure and let's make it even more specific let's talk API management so looking at the program and from a technology point of view what it really is it is a bold step for Vodafone it's rebuilding huge parts of the infrastructure of their business ID infrastructure on AWS it's Greenfield it's new it's a bold step I would say and then if you put the perspective of API management or integration architecture what I call it it's a unique opportunity at the same time so what it what it gives you is the the opportunity to build the API management layer or an API platform with standardized apis right from the get-go so from the beginning you can build the API platform on top which is in contrast what we see throughout the industry where we see huge problems at our clients at other engagements that try to build these layers as well but they're building them on Legacy so that really makes it unique here for Vodafone and a unique opportunity to we have this API first platform built as part of the transformation program so what we have been built is exactly this platform and as of today there is more than 50 standardized apis throughout the application landscape already available to give you a few examples there is an API where I can change customer data for instance I can change the payment method of a customer straight from an API or I can reboot a customer equipment right from it from an API to fix a network issue other than that of course I can submit an order to order one of vodafone's gigabit internet offerings so on top of the platform there's a developer portal which gives me the option to explore all of the apis yeah in a convenient way in a portal and that's yeah that's developer experience meaning I can log into this portal look through the apis understand what I what I need and just try it out directly from the portal I see the response of an API live in the portal and this is it is really in contrast to what what we've seen before where you would have a long word document a cumbersome spreadsheet a long lasting process to get your hands on and this really gives you the opportunity to just go in try out an API and see how it works so it's really developer experience and a big step forward here then yeah how have we built this platform of course it's running on AWS it's Cloud native it's using eks but what I want to point out here is three principles that that we applied where the first one is of course the cloud native principle meaning we using AKs we are using containers we have infrastructure scales so we aim for every component being Cloud native being meant to be run in the cloud so our infrastructure will sleep at night to save Vodafone cost and it will wake up for the Christmas business where Vodafone intends to do the biggest business and scale of its platform second there is the uh the aim for open API specifications what we aim for is event non-vendor-specific apis so it should not matter whether there's an mdocs backend there's a net tracker back end or an sap Behind These apis it is really meant to decouple the different Business Systems of of a Vodafone by these apis that can be applied by a new custom front-end or by a new business to business application to integrate these apis last but not least there's the automate everything so there's infrastructure as code all around our platform where where I would say the biggest magic of cloud is if we were to lose our production environment lose all apis today it will take us just a few minutes to get everything back and whatever everything I mean redeploy the platform redeploy all apis all services do the configuration again and it will be back in a few minutes that's impressive as downtime is so costly for so many different reasons I think we're gonna know when the vision of this transformation project when it's been achieved how are you going to know that okay so it's kind of flipping the perspective a bit uh maybe uh when I joined Vodafone in in late 2019 I would say the vision for Vodafone was already set and it was really well well put out there it was lived in in the organization it was for Vodafone to become a digital company to become a digital service provider to to get the engineering culture into the company and I would say this Vision has not changed until today maybe now call it a North star and maybe pointing out two big Milestones that have been achieved with this transformation program so we've talked about the safe framework already so with this program we wrote out the one of the biggest safe implementations in the industry which is a big step for Vodafone in its agile Journey as of today there's the safe framework supporting more than 1 000 FTE or 1000 colleagues working and providing value in the transformation program second example or second big milestone was the first go-life of the program so moving stuff to production really proving it works showcasing to the business that it it is actually working there is actually a value provided or constant value provided with a platform and then of course you're asking for next steps right uh talking next steps there is a renewed focus on value and A Renewed focus on value between Accenture and Vodafone means focus on what really provides the most value to Vodafone and I would like to point out two things here the first being migrate more customers scale the platform really prove the the the the the cloud native platform by migrating more customers to it and then second it enables you to decommission the Legacy Stacks decommissioning Legacy Stacks is why we are doing it right so it's migrating to the new migrating to the new platform so last but not least maybe you can hear it we will continue this journey together with with Vodafone to become a digital company or to say that their own words from Telco to TECO I love that from Telco to technology gentlemen thank you so much for joining us on thecube today talking about the power of three Accenture AWS Vodafone how you're really enabling Vodafone to transform into that digital technology company that consumers at the end of the day that demanding consumers want we appreciate your insights and your time thank you so much thank you for having us my pleasure for my guests I'm Lisa Martin you're watching thecube's coverage of the AWS executive Summit AT AWS re invent sponsored by Accenture thanks for watching

>>Hey, everyone, welcome back to the cubes on the ground. Coverage of Pedro Duty Summit 22. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I'm very excited to be joined by Manjula Toleration, the S VP and chief customer officer at page duty. Welcome to the programme. >>Thank you, Lisa. It's great to have chatted with you this morning as well, >>isn't it? I have had the great fortune of watching her fireside chat. That Mandela did, um, with is the logic monitor that was >>she of logic. >>And I thought, She's got great energy. We're gonna have a great conversation. So let's talk about the customer experience these days. One of the things I think that's been very, very short supply in the pandemic is patience. I know it's been in short supply with me and, of course, in our consumer lives in our business lives. The customer experience, though, has been something that every company needs to really pin their businesses on. Because if it's not a good customer experience, that customer goes right to social media. They churn. They leave, but they take others down with them. Talk to me about how the customer experience fits into this year's summit. Especially for this, we have to be ready for everything in a digital world environment. >>I love this question, and I reason I love this question is I even look at my own behaviour. But before we get into that, let's talk about data. I'm just reading an article. Mackenzie did a survey. Did you know that from pre covid to today customer interactions that have moved to digital are from 41% to 65%? That's exponential. That's huge. And guess what? We've all got impatient. You become like our kids, and I think about myself as an individual. If I need tied right now to do my laundry, I need it right now. So if I go to Costco website to order it so that it can get delivered in the next hour, and even if there's a second glitch on it, I'll swap over to Amazon and I'll swap over to target. That's what's happening in real world, whether it be to see or it's b to B, and why is it important to the points we are making in terms of ready for anything in the world of digital everything. It's important because customers are impatient. It's a digital world. I don't walk into the store to do any interactions anymore. And the reality of all of this is it's grounded on trust. Customers have to trust you and the window of choice not only in the B two b, but a lot in the enterprise and the B to B world. It's about trust, right? And what does pager duty do? Pager duty is at the heart of this pager. Duty is at the heart of making every second matter, and every second is equal to money. Absolutely. And it's about customer experience. And it isn't about just the experience where of an employee who may not sleep at night because they got a disruption due to an incident which is also super important during the mass resignation. But it is also about the CEO agenda and the boardroom, because how our CEO s driving customer trust in order to keep customers and drive this new era of digital everything as digital transformation is occurring. Well, >>I know patriarchy was doing that. I had the chance to watch um, CEO Jennifer to, uh, fireside chat, her keynote, and then her fireside chat with the CEO of Doc, You Sign And you. The Storey was very bidirectional, very symbiotic in terms of the trust that he has in Houston and Austin has and Pedro duty. But talk to me as the chief customer officer. What is it that's unique about how patriarchy works with its customers? 21,000 plus now to build and maintain that trust, especially in such volatile times? >>You know what is really cool? I joined page duty a little less than two years ago. In the next few days, it'll be two years now. What do I find exciting as a chief customer officer and the go to market teams differentiation versus other customers? We had a born SAS company and what do we have access to form our customers? We have access to their operations data and that combination of our core values that is championing the customer and the data science that we have about how customers are using our data is a differentiation. That's the magic. So if you think about why pager duty is bringing this level of trust to the customers, it's because we know how many and let's take an example. Employee retention, mass resignation. We know which employee was called. How many times at night during an outage. Can we give that guidance to managers and leaders in order to drive that trust? Absolutely. And on the other hand, we are driving amazing return on investment at the executive levels for the customer experience that they are driving. So Peter Duty is becoming the trusted advisor all the way from practitioners, where we are improving their work life balance to the executive levels, >>improving work. Life balance is so critical. There was a stat that Sean Scott shared this morning that that was looking at the amount of work volume from 2020 compared to 2021 42% of people said, I am working more hours. I don't think I've ever heard anyone say, Can I work more? Please? No. That work life balance is critical, but also the ability to deliver that seamless digital customer experience that we all expect, Um, and and to get it right the first time is critical. But using that customer data as you're saying, empowering the organisations, not just the customer support folks or the SRS or the develops folks but all the way up to the C suite to ensure that their brand reputation is valuable, it's maintained, and that trust is really bidirectional. That's the secret sauce. >>You're absolutely right. You know, there's a different dimension to this as well. We think about how we're using customer data in order to achieve the results. We want three vectors here. Number one is we'll use customer data to really understand what is best in class on up time. What is the best in class to reduce noise during alert, what is best in best in class for customer service operations? And because we have customer data, we can benchmark we can benchmark. What industry? What's happening in the financial services industry? What's happening in the technology industry? What's happening in the retail industry. Our customers love that, so we will share with them. The customer success organisation, especially the customer success managers, will go in and meet with the customers and say This is where you stand in reference to your peers and customers love here about that. This is the differentiated value proposition, right? The second thing that our customer success managers do is share with the customers This is where you are in reference to your peers in your vertical other vertical. But let me tell you how you can improve your deployment, the performance of our technology and you're all operating model. As a result of the data we've got, >>there's the proactive nous. That's another differentiator of of what I was hearing today from pager duty. That you're enabling those CSM is to be proactive when so often many are reactive, and it's the customer that's found the problem first. >>Yes, I'll even talk more about the reactive to proactive. We build a methodology, and I'm sure Shaun Scott covered it as well, which is a maturity curve moving from reactive to proactive because so many of our customers are saying we are reacting when we have a disruption on our digital platform, but 30% of the times we are hearing from customers before we are hearing from ourselves. So how do we become proactive? And how does that data signs actually start showing the signs when a potential disruption could occur? And that is about moving reactive to overall proactive. I'd also like to add one more dimension to this, you know, when customers are doing really well. They're optimised on our platform. They don't want to hear from our post sales organisation all the time. They want a human touch when they need it. They want a digital touch when they need it. By using our data and our data science, we are becoming one of the best world class customer success organisations in the world and you ask why? The reason is because we are using data science in order to build and we have built the early warning system. The early warning system tells us how every single of our customers is doing in terms of both their growth as well as the risk that they may leave us. So if a customer is very healthy on a scale of 1 200 if we have a healthy customer, we will engage with them potentially just digitally and engage with them with our services are customer success team and our entire post sales organisation, when there is an optimisation and when they really need us. So data scientists being used not only in terms of giving customer the right information to grow them, but how we interact with them as well, >>that's brilliant. And there's so many organisations that I talked to across industries that cannot get that right. >>And >>so customers are being contacted too frequently. They may have said. I opted out, I don't want and then suddenly that that the first responders, the incident responders, is marketing. But that happens so frequently, you think. But there's an opportunity there. It's not rocket science, but it's about leveraging that data in an optimal, smart way. But you guys are light years ahead of a lot of other companies that haven't figured that >>out. No, we are leading edge and we are leading edge because we had a born SAS company and we've got effective operations data of the customer, and we have some of the best data scientists and the analysts within my organisation. Looking at this, engaging with the customer and only optimising the magic is data science and humans coming together to engage with customers and drive customer success for the customer and ultimately building their customer experience for their customers. >>Let's talk about some of the numbers Mandela, because they are really impressive. I was looking at some stats. You're paid your duties renewal rates are over 95%. Your growth is incredible, just coming off the biggest quarter ever, but also the gross annual benefit from customers. Talk to me about that alone. That can be up to $10 million. These read these tangible business outcomes that pager duty is delivering to customers are significant, >>and again, it's based on data science. This is not making you know what traditional companies do. Traditional companies will go to the customer and say, Tell me your business imperatives. Tell me your what are the business problems you're solving are because we have the data science. We have our oi arranging from 309 100% very impressive within a couple of months. We think about it if we are able to drive incidents that are very, very significant. And I know you've got the numbers in terms of growing our reducing the workload on very expensive engineering. Uh, individuals within the organisation from, I believe, 3200 and 25,000, and I know you have those numbers think about If 30% of your organisation focuses just on innovation and product development, worse is on an incident, and they work, life balance, the quality of life increases, the retention of the employees, and yet the company's only driving their growth. That is why our customers love us. That is why our renewal rates are greater than 95%. That's why a net retention scores are greater than 100 and 2020% over five quarters. And that is why we have more than 30% growth year over year, quarter over quarter. >>When I saw that stat Manville about you know, the number of incidents reduced, >>that >>translates to employee productivity and and looking at it in terms of FTE. From a quantity perspective, that's the first time I've seen a company and I interview a lot of companies actually put it in that perspective, and I thought, That is huge. That's how organisations should be talking about that rather than reducing feeds are going. We are victims of the great resignation is look at the impact that can be made here by using data science by using the right mix of human and automation together. It's that's the first time. So congratulations to you and Pedro duty for the first time I've seen that and I think everybody needs to be working to be able to explain it that way, especially the fact that we're still in a volatile environment. >>Absolutely. It's about customer experience, but it is just as much employee experience. There is so much that the industry is talking about. That's top of mind for board levels. That's top of mind from CEO S. How do I retain my employees and drive greater operational efficiency? And now, with the macro economic challenges that are occurring in terms of inflation and in and the cost to serve and increasing the profits are customers are making. Operational efficiency is becoming even more important so that the employees are focusing more on innovation rather than downtime or disruptions. And it's actually about growing the business rather than just running the business. And if we can optimise running the business growth is what our customers are looking >>for, right? I always think, and we're almost out of time here. But I always think the employee experience and the customer experience are like this, and they should be. But it's critical to optimise both. How do you when you talk to some of those big and our price customers. We have Doc Watson on the main stage this morning, but I was looking at the website and three that jumped out to me that I use peloton, salesforce and slack. How do you advise them? You have this wealthiest gold of information on customers. This is how you need to leverage it in the right way to grow your business. What are some of the top three things you recommend those customers do, for example, >>that so let me talk about a couple of customers as an example. There are some customers of ours in the retail business, or it is a telecommunication company that is trying to increase their, um, up time from 98.7% to 3 nines as an example, or a tech company that doesn't even know that they were down for six hours in one small part of their business. And we're trying to figure out how do we solve for that as customers are overall complaining. So for us as a organisation, the magic is again bringing data together employee engagement, and what we do is we use the data to engage with their customers to ultimately understand what is their business value proposition. If you don't do it in isolation, you do it in. What is the customer trying to achieve? Are they trying to achieve the best in class website? Are they trying to achieve increased operational efficiency? What are their metrics? What are their numbers? And we take our data, our people, to marry all of that together. And that's the magic. >>I love it. I wish we had more time. Angela. We are out of time but talking about the value of the customer experience, the impact that is possible to be made leveraging technologies like pager duty. It's It's revolutionising operations. It's revolutionising customers 21,000 plus one million plus users at a time. It's awesome. You have to come back so we can talk more because I can. No, we're just scratching the surface here. >>Yes, we are. This is a very, very exciting area right now, and it is a great opportunities for chief customer officers on really rallying the whole company on championing the customers because whether it's a product, our capabilities, it's really a major transformation happening in the in the industry, and we need to stay very close to it? >>Absolutely. Thank you so much for joining me today. It's been such a pleasure talking to you. I look forward to seeing you again. >>Real pleasure, Lisa, To get to know you. And the gun was she was awesome. >>Good. Thank you for Manjula. Televisa. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes on the ground. Coverage of pager duty. Summit 22 from San Francisco. Thanks for watching. And bye for now. Mm mm. Mm mm.

>>Hello, and welcome to the cubes. Special showcase with unstoppable domains. I'm John furrier, your host of the cube here in Palo Alto, California and Matt Gould, who is the founder and CEO of unstoppable domains. Matt, great to come on. Congratulations on the success of your company on stumbled domains. Thanks for kicking off this showcase. >>Thank you. Happy to be here. So >>Love, first of all, love the story you got going on here. Love the approach, very innovative, but you're also on the big web three wave, which we know where that leads into. Metaverse unlimited new ways. People are consuming information, content applications are being built differently. This is a major wave and it's happening. Some people are trying to squint through the hype versus reality, but you don't have to be a rocket science to realize that it's a cultural shift and a technical shift going on with web three. So this is kind of the what's happening in the market. So give us your take. What's your reaction? You're in the middle of it. You're on this wave. >>Yeah. Well, I would say it's a torrent of change and the get unleashed just over a decade ago with Bitcoin coming out and giving people the ability to have a digital items that they could actually own themselves online. And this is a new thing. And people coming, especially from my generation of millennials, they spend their time online in these digital spaces and they've wanted to be able to own these items. Do you see it from, you know, gaming and Fortnite and skins and Warcraft and all these other places, but this is really being enabled by this new crypto technology to just extend a whole lot more, uh, applications for money, which everyone's familiar with, uh, to, uh, NFT projects, uh, like boarding school. >>You know, I was listening to your podcast. You guys got a great pot. I think you're on a 117 episodes now and growing, you guys do a deep dive. So people watching check out the unstoppable podcast, but in the last podcast, man, you mentioned, you know, some of the older generations like me, I grew up with IP addresses and before the web, they called it information super highway. It wasn't even called the web yet. Um, but IP was, was generated by the United States department of commerce and R and D that became the internet. The internet became the web back then it was just get some webpages up and find what you're looking for. Right. Very analog compared to what's. Now, today, now you mentioned gaming, you mentioned, uh, how people are changing. Can you talk about your view of this cultural shift? And we've been talking about in the queue for many, many years now, but it's actually happening now where the expectation of the audience and the users and the people consuming and communicating and bonding and groups, whether it's gaming or communities are expecting new behaviors, new applications, and it's a forcing function. >>This shift is having now, what's your reaction to that? What's your explanation? >>Yeah, well, I think, uh, it just goes back to the shift of peoples, where are they spending their time? And if you look today, most people spend 50% plus of their time in front of a screen. And that's just a tremendous amount of effort. But if you look at how much, how much of assets are digital, it's like less than 1% of their portfolio would be some sort of digital asset, uh, compared to, you know, literally 50% of every day sitting in front of a screen and simultaneously what's happening is these new technologies are emerging around, uh, cryptocurrencies, blockchain systems, uh, ways for you to track the digital ownership of things, and then kind of bring that into, uh, your different applications. So one of the big things that's happening with web three is this concept of data portability, meaning that I can own something on one application. >>And I could potentially take that with me to several other applications across the internet. And so this is like the emerging digital property rights that are happening right now. As we transitioned from a model in web to where you're on a hosted service, like Facebook, it's a walled garden, they own and control everything. You are the product, you know, they're mining you for data and they're just selling ads, right? So to assist them where it's much more open, you can go into these worlds and experiences. You can take things with you, uh, and you can, you can leave with them. And most people are doing this with cryptocurrency. Maybe you earn an in-game currency, you can leave and take that to a different game and you can spend it somewhere else. Uh, so the user is now enabled to bring their data to the party. Whereas before now you couldn't really do that. And that data includes their money or that includes their digital items. And so I think that's the big shift that we're seeing and that changes a lot and how applications, uh, serve up to user. So it's going to change their user experiences. For instance, >>The flip, the script has flipped and you're right on. I agree with you. I think you guys are smart to see it. And I think everyone who's on this wave will see it. Let's get into that because this is happening. People are saying I'm done with being mined and being manipulated by the big Facebooks and the LinkedIns of the world who were using the user. Now, the contract was a free product and you gave it your data, but then it got too far. Now people want to be in charge of their data. They want to broker their data. They want to collect their digital exhaust, maybe collect some things in a game, or maybe do some commerce in an application or a marketplace. So these are the new use cases. How does the digital identity architecture work with unstoppable? How are you guys enabling that? Could you take us through the vision of where you guys came on this because it's unique in an NFT and kind of the domain name concept coming together? Can you explain? >>Yeah. So, uh, we think we approach the problem for if we're going to rebuild the way that people interact online, uh, what are kind of the first primitives that they're going to need in order to make that possible? And we thought that one of the things that you have on every network, like when you log on Twitter, you have a Twitter handle. When you log on, uh, you know, Instagram, you have an Instagram handle, it's your name, right? You have that name that's that's on those applications. And right now what happens is if users get kicked off the platform, they lose a hundred percent of their followers, right? And theirs. And they also, in some cases, they can't even directly contact their followers on some of these platforms. There's no way for them to retain this social network. So you have all these influencers who are, today's small businesses who build up these large, you know, profitable, small businesses online, uh, you know, being key opinion leaders to their demographic. >>Uh, and then they could be D platform, or they're unable to take this data and move to another platform. If that platform raised their fees, you've seen several platforms, increase their take rates. You have 10, 20, 30, 40%, and they're getting locked in and they're getting squeezed. Right. Uh, so we just said, you know what, the first thing you're going to want to own that this is going to be your piece of digital property. It's going to be your name across these applications. And if you look at every computer network in the history of computing networks, the end up with a naming system, and when we've looked back at DDA desk, which came out in the nineties, uh, it was just a way for people to find these webpages much easier, you know, instead of mapping these IP addresses. Uh, and then we said to ourselves, you know, uh, what's going to happen in the future is just like everyone has an email address that they use in their web two world in order to, uh, identify themselves as they log into all these applications. >>They're going to have an NFT domain in the web three world in order to authenticate and, and, uh, bring their data with them across these applications. So we saw a direct correlation there between DNS and what we're doing with NFT domain name systems. Um, and the bigger breakthrough here is at NMT domain systems or these NFT assets that live on a blockchain. They are owned by users to build on these open systems so that multiple applications could read data off of them. And that makes them portable. So we were looking for an infrastructure play like a picks and shovels play for the emerging web three metaverse. Uh, and we thought that names were just something that if we wanted a future to happen, where all 3.5 billion people, you know, with cell phones are sending crypto and digital assets back and forth, they're gonna need to have a name to make this a lot easier instead of, you know, these long IP addresses or a hex addresses in the case of Porto. >>So people have multiple wallets too. It's not like there's all kinds of wallet, variations, name, verification, you see link trees everywhere. You know, that's essentially just an app and it doesn't really do anything. I mean, so you're seeing people kind of trying to figure it out. I mean, you've got to get up, Angela got a LinkedIn handle. I mean, what do you do with it? >>Yeah. And, and then specific to crypto, there was a very hair on fire use case for people who buy their first Bitcoin. And for those in the audience who haven't done this yet, when you go in and you go into an app, you buy your first Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever cryptocurrency. And then the first time you try to send it, there's this, there's this field where you want to send it. And it's this very long text address. And it looks like an IP address from the 1980s, right? And it's, it's like a bank number and no one's going to use that to send money back and forth to each other. And so just like domain names and the DNS system replace IP addresses in Ft domains, uh, on blockchain systems, replace hex addresses for sending and receiving, you know, cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, Ethereum, whatever. And that's its first use case is it really plugs in there. So when you want to send money to someone, you can just, instead of sending money to a large hex address that you have to copy and paste, you can have an error or you can send it to the wrong place. It's pretty scary. You could send it to John furrier dot, uh, NFT. And uh, so we thought that you're just not going to get global adoption without better UX, same thing. It worked with the.com domains. And this is the same thing for the coin and other >>Crypto. It's interesting to look at the web two or trend one to two web one went to two. It was all about user ease of use, right? And making things simpler. Clutter, you have more pages. You can't find things that was search that was Google since then. Has there actually been an advancement? Facebook certainly is not an advancement. They're hoarding all the data. So I think we're broken between that step of, you know, a free search to all the resources in the world, to which, by the way, they're mining a lot of data too, with the toolbar and Chrome. But now where's that web three crossover. So take us through your vision on digital identity on web to Google searching, Facebook's broken democracy is broken users. Aren't in charge to web three. >>Got it. Well, we can start at web one. So the way that I think about it is if you go to web one, it was very simple, just text web pages. So it was just a way for someone to like put up a billboard and here's a piece of information and here's some things that you could read about it. Right. Uh, and then what happened with web two was you started having applications being built that had backend infrastructure to provide services. So if you think about web two, these are all, you know, these are websites or web portals that have services attached to them, whether that's a social network service or search engine or whatever. And then as we moved to web three, the new thing that's happening here is the user is coming on to that experience. And they're able to connect in their wallet or their web three identity, uh, to that app and they can bring their data to the party. >>So it's kind of like web one, you just have a static web page whip, two, you have a static web page with a service, like a server back here. And then with three, the user can come in and bring their database with them, uh, in order to have much better app experiences. So how does that change things? Well, for one, that means that the, you want data to be portable across apps. So we've touched on gaming earlier and maybe if I have an end game item for one, a game that I'm playing for a certain company, I can take it across two or three different games. Uh, it also impacts money. Money is just digital information. So now I can connect to a bunch of different apps and I can just use cryptocurrency to make those payments across those things instead of having to use a credit card. >>Uh, but then another thing that happens is I can bring in from, you know, an unlimited amount of additional information about myself. When I plug in my wallet, uh, as an example, when I plug in to Google search, for instance, they could take a look at my wallet that I've connected and they could pull information about me that I enabled that I share with them. And this means that I'm going to get a much more personalized experience on these websites. And I'm also going to have much more control over my data. There's a lot of people out there right now who are worried about data privacy, especially in places like Europe. And one of the ways to solve that is simply to not store the data and instead have the user bring it with them. >>I always thought about this and I always debated it with David laundry. My cohost does top down governance, privacy laws outweigh the organic bottoms up innovation. So what you're getting at here is, Hey, if you can actually have that solved before it even starts, it was almost as if those services were built for the problem of web two. Yes, not three. Write your reaction to that. >>I think that is, uh, right on the money. And, uh, if you look at it as a security, like if I put my security researcher hat on, I think the biggest problem we have with security and privacy on the web today is that we have these large organizations that are collecting so much data on us and they just become these honeypots. And there have been huge, uh, breaches like Equifax, you know, a few years back is a big one and just all your credit card data got leaked, right? And all your, uh, credit information got leaked. And we just have this model where these big companies silo your data. They create a giant database, which is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, if not, billions, to be attacked. And then someone eventually is going to hack that in order to pull that information. Well, if instead, and you can look at this at web three. >>So for those of the audience who have used the web three application, one of these depths, um, you know, trade cryptocurrencies or something, you'll know that when you go there, you actually connect to your wall. So when you're working with these web, you connect, you, you know, you bring your information with you and you connect it. That means that the app has none of that storage, right? So these apps that people are using for crypto trading cryptocurrency on depths or whatever, they have no stored information. So if someone hacks one of these DFI exchanges, for instance, uh, there's nothing to steal. And that's because the only time the information is being accessed is when the users actively using the site. And so as someone who cares about security and privacy, I go, wow, that's a much better data model. And that give so much more control of user because the user just permissions access to the data only during the time period in which they're interacting with the application. Um, and so I think you're right. And like, we are very excited to be building these tools, right? Because I see, like, if you look at Europe, they basically pass GDPR. And then all the companies are going, we can't comply with that and they keep postponing it or like changing a little bit and trying to make it easier to comply with. But honestly we just need to switch the data models. So the companies aren't even taking the data and then they're gonna be in a much better spot. >>The GDPR is again, a nightmare. I think it's the wrong approach. Oh, I said it was screwed up because most companies don't even know where stuff is stored. Nevermind how they delete someone's entering a database. They don't even know what they're collecting. Some at some level it becomes so complicated. So right on the money are good. Good call out there. Question for you. Is this then? Okay. So do you decouple the wallet from the ID or are they together? Uh, and is it going to be a universal wallet? Do you guys see yourselves as universal domains? Take me through the thinking around how you're looking at the wallet and the actual identity of the user, which obviously is super important on the identity side while it, is that just universal or is that going to be coming together? >>Well, I think so. The way that we kind of think about it is that wallets are where people have their financial interactions online. Right. And then identity is much more about, it's kind of like being your passport. So it's like your driver's license for the internet. So these are two kind of separate products we see longer term, uh, and they actually work together. So, you know, like if you have a domain name, it actually is easier to make deposits into your wallet because it's easier to remember to send money to, you know, method, rules dot crypto. And that way it's easier for me to receive payments or whatever. And then inside my wallet, I'm going to be doing defy trades or whatever. And doesn't really have an interaction with names necessarily in order to do those transactions. But then if I want to, uh, you know, sign into a website or something, I could connect that with my NFT domain. >>And I do think that these two things are kind of separate. I think there's, we're gonna still early. So figuring out exactly how the industry is gonna shake out over like a five to 10 year time horizon. And it may be a little bit more difficult and we could see some other emerging, uh, what you would consider like cornerstones of the crypto ecosystem. But I do think identity and reputation is one of those. Uh, and I also think that your financial applications of defy are going to be another. So those are the two areas where I see it. Um, and just to, you know, a note on this, when you have a wallet, it usually has multiple cryptocurrency address. So you're going to have like 50 cryptocurrency addresses in a wallet. Uh, you're going to want to have one domain name that links back to all those, because you're just not going to remember those 50 different addresses. So that's how I think that they collaborate. And we collaborate with several large wallets as well, uh, like blockchain.com, uh, and you know, another 30 plus of these, uh, to make it easier for sending out and receiving cryptocurrency. >>So the wallet, basically as a D app, the way you look at it, you integrate whatever you want, just integrate in. How do I log into decentralized applications with my NFT domain name? Because this becomes okay, I got to love the idea, love my identity. I'm in my own NFT. I mean, hell, this video is going to be an NFT. Soon. We get on board with the program here. Uh, but I do, I log into my app, I'm going to have a D app and I got my domain name. Do I have to submit, is there benchmarking, is there approval process? Is there API APIs and a SDK kind of thinking around it? How do you thinking about dealing with the apps? >>Yeah, so all of the above and what we're trying to, what we're trying to do here is build like an SSO solution. Uh, but that it's consumer based. So, uh, what we've done is adapted some SSL protocols that other people have used the standard ones, uh, in order to connect that back to an NFT domain in this case. And that way you keep the best of both worlds. So you can use these authorization protocols for data permissioning that are standard web to API APIs. Uh, but then the permissioning system is actually based on the user controlled in FTE. So they're assigning that with their private public key pair order to make those updates. Um, so that, that allows you to connect into both of these systems. Uh, we think that that's how technology typically impacts the world is it's not like you have something that just replaces something overnight. >>You have an integration of these technologies over time. Uh, and we really see these three components in MTU domains integrating nicely into regular apps. So as an example in the future, when you log in right now, you see Google or Facebook, or you can type in an email address, you can see not ensemble domains or NFT, uh, authorization, and you can SSO in with that, to that website. When you go to a website like an e-commerce website, you could share information about yourself because you've connected your wallet now. So you could say, yes, I am a unique individual. I do live in New York, uh, and I just bought a new house. Right. And then when you permission all that information about yourself to that application, you can serve up a new user experience for you. Um, and we think it's going to be very interesting for doing rewards and discounts, um, online for e-commerce specifically, uh, in the future, because that opens up a whole new market because they can ask you questions about yourself and you can deliver that information. >>Yeah. I really think that the gaming market has totally nailed the future use case, which is in game currency in game to engagement in game data. And now bringing that, so kind of a horizontally scalable, like surface areas is huge, right? So, you know, I think you're, that's huge success on the concept. The question I have to ask you is, um, you getting any pushback from ICANN, the international corporates have name and numbers. They got dot everything now.club, cause the clubhouse, they got dot, you know, party.live. I mean, so the real domain name people are over here, web too. You guys are coming out with the web three where's that connect for people who are not following along the web three trend. How do they, how do you rationalize the, the domain angle here? >>Yeah, well, uh, so I would say that NFTE domains or what domains on DNS were always meant to be 30 plus years ago and they just didn't have blockchain systems back in the nineties when they were building these things. So there's no way to make them for individuals. So what happened was for DNS, it actually ended up being the business. So if you look at DNS names, there's about 350 million registrations. They're basically all small business. And it's like, you know, 20 to 50 million small businesses, uh, who, uh, own the majority of these, uh, these.com or these regular DNS domain names. And that's their focus NFTE domains because all of a sudden you have the, uh, the Walton, if you have them in your wallet and your crypto wallet, they're actually for individuals. So that market, instead of being for small businesses is actually end-users. So, and instead of being for, you know, 20 to 50 million small businesses, we're talking about being useful for three to 4 billion people who have an internet connection. >>Uh, and so we actually think that the market size we're in a few domains and somewhere 50 to 100 X, the market size for traditional domain names. And then the use cases are going to be much more for, uh, individuals on a day-to-day basis. So it's like people are gonna want you on to use them for receiving cryptocurrency versus receiving dollars or payments or USCC point where they're going to want to use them as identifiers on social networks, where they're going to want to use them for SSO. Uh, and they're not gonna want to use them as much for things like websites, which is what web is. And if I'm being perfectly honest, if I'm looking out 10 years from now, I think that these traditional domain name systems are gonna want to work with and adopt this new NFC technology. Cause they're going to want to have these features for the domain next. So like in short, I think NMT domain names or domain names with superpowers, this is the next generation of, uh, naming systems and naming systems were always meant to be identity networks. >>Yeah. They hit a car, they hit a glass ceiling. I mean, they just can't, they're not built for that. Right. So I mean, and, and having people, having their own names is essentially what decentralization is all about. Cause what does a company, it's a collection of humans that aren't working in one place they're decentralized. So, and then you decentralize the identity and everything's can been changed so completely love it. I think you guys are onto something really huge here. Um, you pretty much laid out what's next for web three, but you guys are in this state of, of growth. You've seen people signing up for names. That's great. What are the, what are the, um, best practices? What are the steps are people taking? What's the common, uh, use case for folks we're putting this to work right now for you guys? Why do you see what's the progression? >>Yeah. So the, the thing that we want to solve for people most immediately is, uh, we want to make it easier for sending and receiving crypto payments. And I, and I know that sounds like a niche market, but there's over 200 million people right now who have some form of cryptocurrency, right? And 99.9% of them are still sending crypto using these really long hex addresses. And that market is growing at 60 to a hundred percent year over year. So, uh, first we need to get crypto into everybody's pocket and that's going to happen over the next three to five years. Let's call it if it doubles every year for the next five years, we'll be there. Uh, and then we want to make it easier for all those people to sit encrypted back and forth. And I, and I will admit I'm a big fan of these stable coins and these like, you know, I would say utility focused, uh, tokens that are coming out just to make it easier for, you know, transferring money from here to Turkey and back or whatever. >>Uh, and that's the really the first step freight FTE domain names. But what happens is when you have an NFTE domain and that's what you're using to receive payments, um, and then you realize, oh, I can also use this to log into my favorite apps. It starts building that identity piece. And so we're also building products and services to make it more like your identity. And we think that it's going to build up over time. So instead of like doing an identity network, top-down where you're like a government or a corporation say, oh, you have to have ID. Here's your password. You have to have it. We're going to do a bottoms up. We're going to give everyone on the planet, NFTE domain name, it's going to give them to the utility to make it easier to send, receive cryptocurrency. They're going to say, Hey, do you want to verify your Twitter profile? Yes. Okay, great. You test that back. Hey, you want to verify your Reddit? Yes. Instagram. Yes. Tik TOK. Yes. You want to verify your driver's license? Okay. Yeah, we can attach that back. Uh, and then what happens is you end up building up organically, uh, digital identifiers for people using these blockchain, uh, naming systems. And once they have that, they're gonna just, they're going to be able to share that information. Uh, and that's gonna lead to better experiences online for, uh, both commerce, but also just better user experiences. >>You know, every company when they web came along, first of all, everyone, poo-pooed the web ones. That was terrible, bad idea. Oh. And so unreliable. So slow, hard to find things. Web two, everyone bought a domain name for their company, but then as they added webpages, these permalinks became so long. The web page address fully qualified, you know, permalink string, they bought keywords. And then that's another layer on top. So you started to see that evolution in the web. Now it's kind of hit a ceiling here. Everyone gets their NFT. They, they started doing more things. Then it becomes much more of a use case where it's more usable, not just for one thing. Um, so we saw that movie before, so it's like a permalink permanent. Yeah. >>Yes. I mean, if we're lucky, it will be a decentralized bottoms up global identity, uh, that appreciates user privacy and allows people to opt in. And that's what we want to build. >>And the gas prices thing that's always coming. That's always an objection here that, I mean, blockchain is perfect for this because it's immutable, it's written on the chain. All good, totally secure. What about the efficiency? How do you see that evolving real quick? >>Well, so a couple of comments on efficiency. Uh, first of all, we picked domains as a first product to market because, you know, as you need to take a look and see if the technology is capable of handling what you're trying to do, uh, and for domain names, you're not updating that every day. Right? So like, if you look at traditional domain names, you only update it a couple of times per year. So, so the usage for that to set this up and configure it, you know, most people set up and configure it and then it'll have a few changes for years. First of all, the overall it's not like a game problem. Right, right, right. So, so that, that part's good. We picked a good place to start for going to market. And then the second piece is like, you're really just asking our computer, system's going to get more efficient over time. >>And if you know, the history of that has always been yes. Uh, and you know, I remember the nineties, I had a modem and it was, you know, whatever, 14 kilobits and then it was 28 and then 56, then 100. And now I have a hundred megabits up and down. Uh, and I look at blockchain systems and I don't know if anyone has a law for this yet, but throughput of blockchains is going up over time. And you know, there's, there's going to be continued improvements over this over the next decade. We need them. We're going to use all of it. Uh, and you just need to make sure you're planning a business makes sense for the current environment. Just as an example, if you had tried to launch Netflix for online streaming in 1990, you would have had a bad time because no one had bandwidth. So yeah. Some applications are going to wait to be a little bit later on in the cycle, but I actually think identity is perfectly fine to go ahead and get off the ground now. >>Yeah. The motivated parties for innovations here, I mean, a point cast failed miserably that was like the, they try to stream video over T1 lines, but back in the days, nothing. So again, we've seen those speeds double, triple on homes right now, Matt. Congratulations. Great stuff. Final tick, tock moment here. How would you summarize short in a short clip? The difference between digital identity in web two and web three, >>Uh, in, in web too, you don't get to own your own online presidents and in web three, you do get to own it. So I think if you were gonna simplify it really web three is about ownership and we're excited to give everyone on the planet a chance to own their name and choose when and where and how they want to share information about themselves. >>So now users are in charge. >>Exactly. >>They're not the product anymore. Going to be the product might as well monetize the product. And that's the data. Um, real quick thoughts just to close out the role of data in all this, your view. >>We haven't enabled users to own their data online since the beginning of the internet. And we're now starting to do that. It's going to have profound changes for how every application on the planet interacts with >>Awesome stuff, man, I take a minute to give a plug for the company. How many employees you got? What do you guys looking for for hiring, um, fundraising, give a quick, a quick commercial for what's going on, on unstoppable domains. Yeah. >>So if you haven't already check us out@ensembledomains.com, we're also on Twitter at unstoppable web, and we have a wonderful podcast as well that you should check out if you haven't already. And, uh, we are just crossed a hundred people. We've, we're growing, you know, three to five, a hundred percent year over year. Uh, we're basically hiring every position across the company right now. So if you're interested in getting into web three, even if you're coming from a traditional web two background, please reach out. Uh, we love teaching people about this new world and how you can be a part of it. >>And you're a virtual company. Do you have a little headquarters or is it all virtual? What's the situation there? >>Yeah, I actually just assumed we were a hundred percent remote and asynchronous and we're currently in five countries across the planet. Uh, mostly concentrated in the U S and EU areas, >>Rumor to maybe you can confirm or admit or deny this rumor. I heard a rumor that you have mandatory vacation policy. >>Uh, this is true. Uh, and that's because we are a team of people who like to get things done. And, but we also know that recovery is an important part of any organizations. So if you push too hard, uh, we want to remind people we're on a marathon, right? This is not a sprint. Uh, and so we want people to be with us term. Uh, we do think that this is a ten-year move. And so yeah. Do force people. We'll unplug you at the end of the year, if you have >>To ask me, so what's the consequence of, I don't think vacation. >>Yeah. We literally unplug it. You won't be able to get it. You won't be able to get into slack. Right. And that's a, that's how we regulate. >>Well, when people start having their avatars be their bot and you don't even know what you're unplugging at some point, that's where you guys come in with the NFD saying that that's not the real person. It's not the real human And FTS. Great innovation, great use case, Matt. Congratulations. Thanks for coming on and sharing the story to kick off this showcase with the cube. Thanks for sharing all that great insight. Appreciate it. >>John had a wonderful time. All right. Just the >>Cube unstoppable domains showcasing. We got great 10 great pieces of content we're dropping all today. Check them out. Stay with us for more coverage on John furrier with cube. Thanks for watching.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. >>Hello and welcome to the Cube virtual here with coverage of aws reinvent 2020. I'm your host, Justin Warren. And today I'm joined by J. Snyder, who is the chief chief customer officer at New Relic J. Welcome to the Cube. >>It is fantastic. Me back with the Cube. One of my favorite things to do has been for years. So I appreciate you having me. >>Yes, a bit of a cube veteran. Been on many times. So it's great to have you with us here again. Eso you've got some news about new relic and and Amazon away W s strategic collaboration agreement. I believe so. Maybe tell us a bit more about what that actually is and what it means. >>Yes. So we've been partners with AWS for years, but most recently in the last two weeks, we've just announced a five year strategic partnership that really expands on the relationship that we already had. We had a number of integrations and competencies already in place, but this is a big deal to us. and and we believe a big deal. Teoh A W s Aziz Well, so really takes all the work we've done to what I'll call the next level. It's joint technology development where were initially gonna be embedding new relic one right into the AWS management console for ease of use and really agility for anyone who's developing and implementing Ah cloud strategy, uh, big news as well from an adoption relative to purchase power so you can purchase straight through the AWS marketplace and leverage your existing AWS spend. And then we're gonna really be able to tap into the AWS premier partner ecosystem. So we get more skills, more scale as we look to drive consulting and skills development in any implementation for faster value realization and overall success in the cloud. So that's the high level. Happy to get into a more detailed level if you're interested around what I think it means to companies but just setting the stage, we're really excited about it as a company. In fact, I just left a call with a W S to join this call as we start to build out the execution plan for the next five years look like >>fantastic. So for those who might be new to new relic and aren't particularly across the sort of field of observe ability, could you just give us a quick overview of what new relic does? And and then maybe talk about what the strategic partnership means for for the nature of new relics business? >>Yes, so when I think about observe ability and what it means to us as opposed to the market at large, I would say our vision around observe ability is around one word, and that word is simplification. So, you know, I talked to a lot of customers. That's what I do all the time. And every time I do, I would say that there's three themes that come up over and over. It's the need to deliver a customer experience with improved up time and ever improving importance. It's the need to move more quickly to public cloud to embrace the scale and efficiency public cloud services have to offer. And then it's the need to improve the efficiency and speed of their own engineering teams so they can deliver innovation through software more quickly. And if you think about all those challenges And what observe ability is it's the one common thread that cuts across all those right. It's taking all of the operational data that your system admits it helps you measure improve the customer, experience your ability to move to public cloud and compare that experience before you start to after you get there. The effectiveness of your team before you deploy toe after you get there. And it's all the processes around that right, it helps you be almost able to be there before your there there. I mean, if that makes sense right, you'll be able to troubleshoot before the event actually happens or occurs. So our vision for this is like I talked about earlier is all about simply simplification. And we've broken this down into literally three piece parts, right? Three products. That's all we are. The first is about having a much data as you possibly can. I talked about admitting that transactional telemetry data, so we've created a telemetry data platform which rides on the world's most powerful database, and we believe that if we can take all of that data, all that infrastructure and application data and bring it into that database, including open source data and allow you to query it, analyze it and take action against it. Um, that's incredibly powerful, but that's only part one. Further, we have a really strong point of view that anybody who has the ability to break production should have the ability to fix production. And for us, that's giving them full stack observe ability. So it's the ability to action against all of that data that sits in the data platform. And then finally, we believe that you need to have applied intelligence because there's so many things that are happening in these complex environments. You wanna be able to cut through the noise and reduce it to find those insights and take action in a way that leverages machine learning. And that, for us, is a i ops. So really for us. Observe ability. When I talked about simplification, we've simplified what is a pretty large market with a whole bunch of products, just down to three simple things. A data platform, the ability to operationalize in action against that data and then layer on top in the third layer, that cake machine learning so it could be smarter than you can be so it sees problems before they occur. And that And that's what that's what I would say observe, ability is to us, and it's the ability to do that horizontally and vertically across your entire infrastructure in your entire stack. I hope that makes sense. >>Yeah, there's a lot of dig into there, So let's let's start with some of that operational side of things because I've long been a big believer in the idea of cloud is being a state of mind rather than a particular location on. A lot of people have been embracing Cloud Way Know that for we're about 10 or so years. And the and the size of reinvent is proven out how popular cloud could be. Eso some of those operational aspects that you were talking about there about the ability to react are particularly like that. You you were saying that anyone who could break production should be able to fix production. That's a very different way of working than what many organizations would be used to. So how is new relic helping customers to understand what they need to change about how they operate their business as they adopt some of these methods. >>Well, it's a great question. There's a couple of things we do. So we have an observe ability, maturity framework by which we employ deploy and that, and I don't want to bore the audience here. But needless to say, it's been built over the last year, year and a half by using hundreds of customers as a test case to determine effectively that there is a process that most companies go through to get to benefits realization. And we break those benefit categories into two different areas, one around operational efficiency and agility. The other is around innovation and digital experience. So you were talking about operational efficiency, and in there we have effectively three or four different ways and what I call boxes on how we would double, click and triple click into a set of actions that would lead you to an operational outcome. So we have learned over time and apply to methodology and approach to measure that. So depending on what you're trying to do, whether it's meantime to recover or meantime, to detect, or if you've got hundreds of developers and you're finding that they're ineffective or inefficient and you want to figure out how to deploy those resource is to different parts of the environment so you can get them to better use their time. It all depends on what your business outcome and business objective is. We have a way to measure that current state your effectiveness ply rigor to it and the design a process by using new relic one to fill in those gaps. And it can take on the burden of a lot of those people. E hate to say it because I'm not looking to replace any individual. It's really about freeing up their time to allow them to go do something in a more effective and more effective, efficient manner. So I don't know if that's answering the question perfectly, but >>e don't think there is a perfect answer to its. Every customer is a bit different. >>S So this is exactly why we developed the methodology because every customer is a little different. The rationale, though, is yeah, So the rationale there's a lot of common I was gonna say there's a lot of common themes, So what we've been able to develop over time with this framework is that we've built a catalog of use cases and experiences that we can apply against you. So depending on what your business objectives are and what you're trying to achieve, were able to determine and really auger in there and assess you. What is your maturity level of being able to deliver against these? Are you even using the platform to the level of maturity that would allow you to gain this benefit realization? And that's where we're adding a massive amount of value. And we see that every single day with our customers who are actually quite surprised by the power of the platform. I mean, if you think traditionally back not too far, two or even three years. People thought of new relic as an a P M. Company. And I think with the launch this summer, this past July with new relic one, we've really pivoted to a platform company. So while a lot of companies love new relic for a PM, they're now starting to see the power of the platform and what we can do for them by operationally operationalize ing. Those use cases around agility and effectiveness to drive cost and make people b'more useful and purposeful with their time so they can create better software. >>Yeah, I think that's something that people are realizing a lot more lately than they were previously. I think that there was a lot of TC analysis that was done on a replacement of FTE basis, but I think many organizations have realized that well, actually, that doesn't mean that those people go away. They get re tasked to do new things. So any of these efficiency, you start with efficiency. And it turns out actually being about business agility about doing new things with the same sort with the same people that you have who now don't have to do some of these more manual and fairly boring tasks. >>Yeah, just e Justin. If this if this cube interview thing doesn't work out for you were hiring some value engineers Right now it sounds like you've got the talk track down perfectly, because that's exactly what we're seeing in the market place. So I agree. >>So give us some examples, if you can, of maybe one or two off things that you've seen that customers have have used new relic where they've stripped out some of that make work or the things that they don't really need to be doing. And then they're turning that into new agility and have created something new, something more individual. Have you got an example you could share with us? >>You know, it's it's funny way were just I just finished doing our global customer advisory boards, which is, you know, rough and tough about 100 customers around the world. So we break it into the three theaters, and we just we were just talking with a particular customer. I don't want to give their name, but the session was called way broke the sessions into two different buckets, and I think every customer buys products like New Relic for two reasons. One is to either help them save money or to help them make money. So we actually split the sessions into those two areas and e think you're talking about how do we help them? How do we help them save money? And this particular company that was in the media industry talked at great length about the fact that they are a massive news conglomerate. They have a whole bunch of individual business units. They were decentralized and non standardized as it related to understanding how their software was getting created, how they were defining and, um, determining meantime to recover performance metrics. All these things were happening around them in a highly complex environment, just like we see with a lot of our customers, right? The complexity of the environments today are really driving the need for observe ability. So one of the things we did with them is we came in and we apply the same type of approach that we just discussed. We did a maturity assessment for them, and we find a found a variety of areas where they were very immature and using capabilities that existed within the platform. So we're able to light up a variety of things around. Insights were able to take more data in from a logging perspective. And again, I'm probably getting a little bit into the weeds for this particular session. But needless to say, way looked at the full gamut of metrics, events, logs and traces which was wasn't really being done in observe, ability, strategy, manner, and deploy that across the entire enterprise so created a standard platform for all the data in this particular environment. Across 5th, 14 different business units and as a byproduct, they were able to do a variety of things. One, the up time for a lot of their customer facing media applications improved greatly. We actually started to pivot from actually driving cost to showing how they could quote unquote make money, because the digital experience they were creating for a lot of their customers reduced the time to glass, if you will, for clicking the button and how quickly they could see the next page, the next page or whatever online app they were looking to get dramatically. So as a byproduct of this, they were about the repurpose to the point you made Justin. Dozens of resource is off of what was traditionally maintenance mode and fighting fires in a reactive capability towards building new code and driving new innovation in the marketplace. And they gave a couple of examples of new applications that they were able to bring to market without actually having to hire any net New resource is so again, I don't want to give away the name, the company, it maybe it was a little too high level, but it actually plays perfectly into exactly what what you're describing, Um, >>that is a good example of one of those that one of the it's always nice to have a specific concrete customer doing one of these kinds of things that you you describe in generic terms. Okay. No, this is this is being applied very specifically to one customer. So we're seeing those sorts of things more and more. >>Yeah, and I was gonna give you, you know, I thought about in advance of this session. You know, what is a really good example of what's happening in the world around us today? And I thought of particular company that we just recently worked with, which is check. I don't know if you're familiar with keg, if you've heard of them. But their education technology company based in California and they do digital and physical textbook rentals. They do online tutoring an online customer services. So, Justin, if you're like me or the rest of the world and you have kids who are learning at home right now, think about the amount of pressure and strain that's now being put on this poor company Check to keep their platform operational 24 77 days a week. So that students can learn at pace and keep up right. And it's an unbelievable success story for us and one that I love, because it touches me personally because I have three kids all doing online, learning in a variety of different manners right now. And, you know, we talked about it earlier. The complexity of some of the environments today, this is a company that you would never gas, but they run 500 micro services and highly complex, uh, technical architectural right. So we had to come in and help these folks, and we're able to produce their meantime to recover because they were having a lot of issues with their ability to provide a seamless performance experience. Because you could imagine the volume of folks hitting them these days on. Reduce that meantime to recover by five X. So it's just another example we're able to say, you know, it's a real world example. Were you able to actually reduce the time to recover, to provide a better experience and whether or not you want to say that saving money or making money? What I know for sure is is giving an incredible experience so that folks in the next generation of great minds aren't focused on learning instead of waiting to learn right, So very cool. >>That is very cool. And yes, and I have gone through the whole teaching kids >>about on >>which is, uh, which it was. It was disruptive, not necessarily in a good way, but we all we adapted and learned how to do it in a new way, which is, uh, it was a lot easier towards the end than it was at the beginning. >>I'd say we're still getting there at the Snyder household. Justin, we're still getting >>was practice makes perfect eso for organizations like check that who might be looking at JAG and thinking that that sounds like a bit of a success story. I want to learn more about how new relic might be able to help me. How should they start? >>Well, there's a lot of ways they can start. I mean, one of the most exciting things about our launch in July was that we have a new free tier. So for anybody who's interested in understanding the power of observe ability, you could go right to our website and you can sign up for free and you can start to play with new relic one. I think once you start playing for, we're gonna find the same thing that happens to most of the folks to do that. They're gonna play more and more and more, and they're gonna start Thio really embrace the power. And there's an incredible new relic university that has fantastic training online. So as you start to dabble in that free tier, start to see with the power and the potential is you'll probably sign up for some classes. Next thing you know, you're often running, so that is one of the easiest ways to get exposed to it. So certainly check us out at our website and you can find out all about that free tier. And what observe ability could potentially mean to you or your business. >>And as part of the AWS reinvent experience, are they able to engage with you in some way? >>It could definitely come by our booth, check us out, virtually see what we have to say. We'd love to talk to them, and we'd be happy to talk to you about all the powerful things we're doing with A. W. S. in the marketplace to help meet you wherever you are in your cloud journey, whether it's pre migration during migration, post migration or even optimization. We've got some incredible statistics on how we can help you maximize and leverage your investment in AWS. And we're really excited to be a strategic partner with them. And, you know, it's funny. It's, uh, for me to see how observe ability this platform can really touch every single facet of that cloud migration journey. And, you know, I was thinking originally, as I got exposed to this, it would be really useful for identity Met entity relationship management at the pre migration phase and then possibly at the post migration flays is you try to baseline and measure results. But what I've come to learn through our own process, of moving our own business to the AWS cloud, that there's tremendous value everywhere along that journey. That's incredibly exciting. So not only are we a great partner, but I'm excited that we will be what I call first and best customer of AWS ourselves new relic as we make our own journey to the cloud >>or fantastic and I'm I encourage any customers who might be interested in new relic Thio definitely gone and check you out as part of the show. Thank you. J. J. Snyder from New Relic. You've been watching the Cube virtual and our coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. Make sure that you check out all the rest of the cube coverage of AWS reinvent on your desktop laptop your phone wherever you are. I've been your host, Justin Warren, and I look forward to seeing you again soon.

>> From Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE, covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2019, brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We are in Austin, Texas for Pure Accelerate '19. And we're excited to be talking with another one of Pure's happy successful customers. We've got Scott Pedram, the storage architect from One Gas. Scott, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me. >> So One Gas. Give our audience a little bit of an overview of what One Gas is, what regions you serve, and then dig into your role as a storage architect. >> Of course. So One Gas, we're a natural gas utility company. So we're the downstream, the inline. So we actually deliver the natural gas to our customers, residential and commercial. We operate across Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, and various regions including Austin. In my role as storage architect, I help, I mean, basically a one-man show. So design the storage, implement the storage, run the storage. And I also help out in other areas such as the servers, the DBAs, networking, kind of a little bit of everything. >> So you've been a Pure customer for about three years. We were talking before we went live. Give us an overview of your storage infrastructure, your IT environment three years ago, and what the impetus was to evaluate Pure. >> Sure. So we were previously an IBM storage shop. I had IBM SAN volume controller backed by DS 8000, FlashSystem 820s, Storwize V7000s, so different tiers of storage all being managed by VSPC. As is common, the warranty runs out on the DS 8000. So it's time to look at a forklift upgrade or whatever the case may be. I had a plan all in place to replace it with IBM, but we are a fully regulated utility company. So I did my due diligence and brought in some competitors. EMT and Pure Storage. Heard Pure's story, especially the Evergreen storage model, and the five and six year total cost of ownership was actually pretty close, but once you went beyond that, there was no contest. Pure won hands down. And again, as a utility company, we like predictable, flat costs. So the fact that we could do that and not have to have this multi-million dollar expense again in just another three or four years. >> So I got to ask you, so TCO, done a lot of TCO studies, and the biggest component of total cost of ownership is labor, humans. So presumably, you did a full TCO, you looked at it. I'm surprised to hear you say that the five-year TCO was about comparable because Pure is, the Kool-Aid injection says it's simpler. It's more modern. Wouldn't that save head count or at least FTE? >> It could if we were a more complex environment, but as it stood, there's me and one other guy kind of as my backup. So, you still have to have somebody to run it, right? >> So that's what I asked so sometimes CFO's will go, Wait a minute. If we're not going to reduce head count, I'm not going to accept that as part of the cost reduction. Is that what's going on here? Because we're going to shift labor to more high value activity so, oftentimes the CFO doesn't count that in his or her business case. Was that the case or did you find that because you're so small it really didn't matter in terms of the management complexity? I'm interested in your thoughts on that. >> We didn't background management complexity when we were calculating TCO. It was purely the cost to acquire the storage and then the maintenance. >> Oh, so there was no management cost? No human capital, okay. >> No. >> And so it's you and somebody else. >> Scott: Correct. >> Have you now spent less time managing the Pure than you did previously with the IBM? >> Oh, for sure. >> Okay. >> And when I first got it I was afraid, am I going to work myself out of a job? >> The Pure? >> 'Cause it was so easy. >> Okay, so, you had two FTE's managing storage. >> Scott: Yeah. >> What percent of your time, prior to Pure, did you spend managing storage versus doing other stuff? (Scott sighs) I mean a rough ballpark. >> Yeah, rough ballpark. >> Dave: Was it 50/50? >> I would say, I was maybe doing 60 to 70% doing just Pure storage before. And now it's 20? >> So you've gone from 60 to 70, let's call it 65% of your time was spent managing storage tuning, troubleshooting, provisioning LANs, provisioning more capacity, planning, all those things that, we love it. Down to 20%. >> Probably. >> Roughly. I'm not going to hold you to it, but. Well I guess we're live TV, so I will hold you to it. (Scott laughing) But that's a significant savings. You can calculate that over five years, right? Take your fully loaded costs and boom, that adds up. What have you done with that time? What are you now doing? I presume you're not just hanging out. >> No, my boss is watching. >> Publicly traded, regulated utility, somebody's watching right? >> No, of course not. No I've been able to be a lot more proactive. So helping out, like I said, with the server teams, the inward teams. Consulting them on looking further. What is our longterm goal or strategy? What's the five year plan, type of thing. Instead of just fighting fires all day. Or, you know, next week we have to deal with this performance issue that's going to be coming up. >> Dave: So you've been able to be more strategic. >> For sure. >> And one more question on this whole, there's intangibles there that everybody always overlooks, but actually when you live them they make a big difference. Has there been a quality effect? In other words, instead of putting out fires you're doing thing that are more strategic. Do you feel like you have better quality infrastructure? And does that affect your business? >> I would say better quality in the fact that it's more consistent. So we ended up sweeping the entire floor with all Pure Storage. So all of production and non-production, in our case, is all on Pure. So the consistency of the latency and the response times and the performance that you get out of the storage. There is no more performance problems. It doesn't exist. >> And in terms of workloads, I know you're running Splunk on FlashArray. Give us some picture of that infrastructure, the workloads that you're running on it. And the stakeholders I can imagine them in different departments and different functions within One Gas that are using this system and not even realizing it because it's just available, it's there. >> Before Splunk, real quick, we had one application, we went to Flash. They thought their processing was broken because it completed so quickly. (Lisa laughing) >> That's a good thought to have. >> Yeah. So they finished so fast they came back to us, it's broken, I'm like, no it's not. (he laughs) >> What's your use case with Splunk? >> With Splunk it started out as cybersecurity and that's kind of what brought it in, but it has since expanded to monitoring, analytics. We actually use it when we roll out our trucks to the field to ensure that we're meeting the SLAs. There's so many different areas where we use Splunk, I'd have to refer to my notes. >> So infrastructure ops has become this big thing, right? And automation and things of that nature? Or not quite there? >> Not so much automation yet. But we do have a plan, a project to start doing more automation. >> And other analytics, I presume? I mean, they're all about analytics, right? >> A lot of our application teams, like our web development team, they use Splunk a lot for their application monitoring and trying to be proactive on that. >> Thinking about the security use case. Security practitioners often tell us, well, we get inundated with incidents. We don't have the time to sort through them all. Does having Splunk on an all FlashArray, high performance all FlashArray, does it affect the response of the security team? Or how does it affect the business, the security side of the business? >> I'm not able to answer that directly, but I can say that I have seen them do a lot of select all type queries, where they're just searching for a needle in a haystack, type of thing. And previously when we had multi-tiered storage those queries took forever, but now that it's all Flash, it's really quick. >> So they spent more time waiting than they do now. I mean that could be a two edge sword. Maybe they more stuff to sift through now. (he laughs) That's somebody else's problem. >> Well the data security is critical because your dealing with customers' data, right? And almost every month we hear about data breaches in the public. Whether it's a bank, or it's a social media platform. Unfortunately they're becoming quite common. But when you're dealing with personal customer data that's a big concern. Some of the things we're hearing Pure talk about is what they're doing with data protection and data security. And also kind of this sift from not looking at data protection as an insurance policy as much as it's an asset because you have so much information, you're storing it for longer, more and more customers, more data. How is that that being reflected up the chain, even up your chain of command and to the executive folks in terms of being confident that what they have your customers data running on in those three states that you talked about, is on a very solid secure platform? >> Well, security, it requires multiple layers. So Pure having always-on encryption is a big help. So if we do have, you know, a failed module that has to be replaced. I don't have to worry about making sure that it's securely erased, destroyed, and all that. 'Cause without the encryption key it's virtually crypto erased. And then of course we have all the security agents on the servers and the applications and our security cyber team managers, all of that. >> And what about cloud? What do you do in cloud? What's the strategy? >> We do cloud where it makes sense. For instance ServiceNow and O365 we're customers to both of those. >> Dave: So SaaS stuff. >> And mostly SaaS. In my opinion doing cloud is doing a lift and shift. And using cloud as infrastructure as a service doesn't make a whole lot of sense. For us anyway. As a utility company we're very pro-capital. So if we just shift that to another provider that's all operational. >> Whereas, take ServiceNow for example and change the operational model. Right? And you had a clear business impact where it wasn't a lift an shift. It was a transformation really. >> Exactly. >> Where do you want to go with Pure and storage infrastructure? It's just like, I just want it to work. I want it to be rock solid, dirt cheap, highly available, you know, high performance, or are there things that you would like to see Pure do that can help drive your business? >> Well I think the announcement today of the FlashArray//C is what I'm probably most exited about, in that I've already asked my business partners to get me some pricing, some quotes on, can I use that for my backups as a back up target? Instead of, you know, the underlying SaaS datadisks. So that's exciting for me. The fact that it's going to be the same software that I'm used to, that's all a plus. >> How are you protecting your Flash arrays today? >> We're implementing Commvault right now So we do leverage Commvault. It's called IntelliSnap. So basically it does a Pure level snapshot and then we can mount that on our media agents. >> Okay, so, using FlashArray//C, that's the right model number, I think. So obviously you want to use Flash, if it's cost effective, for everything. If it's cheaper than spinning Disk why not use it? Do you see any advantage, in theory, for recovery speed? For sure, yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you need to do a fast recovery, I mean, it's on Flash. But with what I'm looking most forward to though is even the ingest of the data, the initial backups. If there's a lot of, you know querying and trying to figure out what's changed and what's not, that can be a lot of disk thrashing on traditional spindle drives. >> So let's look into the future a little bit before we wrap here. You've been a Pure customer for three years now. Presuming you've done some upgrades and swap outs of controllers in that time? >> Not quite yet. In the coming months we will have our first ever green controller swap. I've actually had a failed controller. So effectively the same process. Where one controller's down and didn't have any issues with performance or, >> No downtime, no disruption. >> No downtime. Absolutely not. Even upgrades where they, you know, take one controller down and upgrade it. I'll do those during business hours. >> Are you comfortable with the, go ahead, sorry. >> Just because there's no performance degradation whatsoever. >> So you're obviously comfortable with the architecture. You seem like a pretty happy customer. Some of the critics will say, it's a duel controller architecture, that doesn't bother you? >> No, not at all. (he laughs) >> I had to ask with a straight face. What would you like to see Pure do? If Charlie G. and Carl are sitting right here, what's the one thing that I could do to make your life easier, what would it be? Besides cutting price, you can't say cut price. >> Yeah. You know what, that's a great question. I think what I would have been asking for, top of mind, would have been the lower tier, what they came out with today, the C. >> You know, another criticism from some of the competitors is they don't have tiering. And when you talk to Pure about it they go, oh, we don't need tiering, we don't believe in tiering. What are your thoughts as a practitioner? Would you want to have a tiered array, like high performance Flash, lower in the same array? Or is this not something that is necessary? >> I don't think so. I go back to the consistency. You know we have all of production on Flash now and it's, I don't have to worry about performance. Whereas before I was constantly having to monitor and manage you know, is all the right stuff on the right tier, and it was a headache. >> So automated tiering wasn't so automated? Is that a fair statement? >> It worked fairly well, but there were some cases where it didn't. >> Yeah. So you're better just throwing it at Flash and it'll take care of itself. >> Yeah. >> Dave: Cool. >> So you've got a foundation now that's going to allow One Gas to evolve continually and we look forward to hearing in the next year or so when you go through that first big evergreen upgrade, how that goes. But it sounds like you've made the right choice and the foundation that you've got is pretty strong. And so many other layers of the business are benefiting and they don't even know it. Because as you said before, on of the constituents thought something was broken, it was that fast. >> Correct. >> So well done on your decision. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much, Scott, for stopping by theCUBE and talking with Dave and me about what One Gas has been doing how you're succeeding and we look forward to hearing more of your success. >> Thank you. >> Dave: Great to have you, thanks. >> Scott: Appreciate it. >> For Dave Vellante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, from Pure Accelerate '19. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage. Day two of Cisco Live from San Diego. I'm Lisa Martin. Dave Vellante is my esteemed cohost. And we're pleased to welcome one of Cisco and Cohesity's customers from Quantium, Craig Tayler, Executive Manager at Business Technology and Platforms. Craig, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. It's great to be here. >> Great seeing you. >> So, we love talking with customers. We love talking about data. Tell our audience a little bit about Quantium. I know you guys have expertise in two core domains, data science, AI, two really sexy topics that we talk about on theCUBE at every event. But give our audience a little bit of the flavor of who you guys are. >> Yeah, so Quantium's been around for 16 years, founded and headquartered in Sydney, Australia. And really, they are like you mentioned, the two main aspects of our business. So when you think of data science more as human intelligence, and then the AI side is how we can augment that with computers as much as possible. So, on the human intelligence side, we're looking at things like data curation, how can we work with a company to understand their data, perhaps monetize their data. And then on the AI side, we're more looking at things like, how do we do predictive modeling or predictive analytics, and how can we get that in front of maybe say a supply chain solution, or working with grocery stores around actually predicting how much fresh food they need. So we think of these things like, wouldn't it be great if we had a better idea of how much we needed? Less waste, less cost, everything else. So that's really how we kind of split the two sides of the company. >> You guys provide this as a service, is that right? >> Yeah, that's correct. So, with those two arms we focus on, whether it be a consulting engagement with a company, where that's a one-off, or an ongoing thing, and we have a range of products that we sell as well, with the idea that any of these companies, whether it be a bank or a retailer, can plug these tools into their existing solutions to give them some real data, some real impact, as opposed to the thoughts, or the feels, or the gut instincts, that we've been working on for so long, all right. >> So paint a picture of your environment. I mean, what does it look like? Cloud, not cloud, apps. >> Yeah. It's certainly a variety. So, if we think, on-premise is really where we do a lot of our work. And this is around, a lot of companies still feel a little bit sensitive around where their data is going, and they like that security of knowing physically where it's located. So on-premise stack we have a bit over 300 servers running a Hadoop cluster, that's where we do the majority of our AI work. And then what we augment that with is, and what we use the cloud a lot for, as we're doing work globally, we're doing a lot of work in North America, it's not feasible to bring all that data back to Sydney, process it, and send it all back, so then really, what we use the cloud for is to take our technology, take our analytics, to the data. So if we're working with a customer, West Coast, East Coast, and they're in Azure we'll deploy in Azure. If they're in GCP, we can deploy in GCP. And that's really how we use cloud is to offer our service, as much as we can, around the world. >> So you said, you got 300 servers, did I hear you right, in a Hadoop cluster, right? >> Yeah, correct. >> What's your distribution? >> We use MapR at the moment. I know there's certainly been a bit of news about them. >> I was going to ask you, well, all three of them. (Craig laughs) Well I guess Hortonworks now folded in, but-- >> Yeah, correct. Cloud has certainly shaken up that marketplace quite a bit. >> Dave: I'm sure, yeah. >> It's been something that we've been keeping a close eye on for quite a while. What's the future there? Is it another distribution? Will someone pick up MapR? Will they get through it? So it is interesting, it's certainly a challenge, but when you're playing in a more emerging space, these are some of the risks you take, but we've always felt that they're worth it. We've had many great years of that and we don't really see any reason that we're not going to get more great years out of that Hadoop environment. >> Yeah, I mean, the IP's going to survive, and it sounds like you guys were early on into it, you got a lot of value out of it. If you had to do it again, you'd probably do the same thing. >> Yeah, that's certainly true. I think, what we've built, there are cloud options on the hyperscale providers that you can use, but look, out of the box, they're not really capable of what we were trying to do. So if we had our time again, we probably would still build the same solution. We'd build it a little bit quicker, obviously, because it's a little bit more in the marketplace, it's not such an emerging technology, but I think we would do the same thing again. >> Dave: Right, and MapR was always ahead of the game with their approach. >> Correct. >> So, obvious question is, how do you protect that data? You're a Cohesity customer, but talk about the data protection aspect of that. >> Yeah, so this is where Cohesity really had a lot of synergies with us, was centralizing a whole raft of datasets into one location. And that's what we do with Hadoop. We take a lot of different datasets and we put it all there. We aggregate it there. So on the secondary data side we had the same problem. Silo datasets all over the environment. Things like, the protection aspect, the compliance aspect, it's not impossible, but it's very hard to manage. So what we really wanted to do was, what do we do with the data when we're not using it anymore? So we might still want to use it in the future, we have to hold onto it. And we needed a better solution for how we manage that. So, having Cohesity, which, to us, being a hyper-converged solution, it's very similar to how Hadoop works. It's a lot of data, a lot of compute, and that's how you deploy it. So we found that actually having all of that, the secondary kind of data that we still needed to keep, combined into one location, for us, it matched on a technology level. And then being able to have all that data in one space, you can do some analytics on it. How often are we using it? What is the data? How many copies of it do we have? So there are a lot of synergies from the data science aspect, and also the technology aspect, which has worked really well for us. >> So what was profound about Hadoop was the idea of bringing five megabytes of code to a petabyte of data, leaving the data where it is, highly distributed environment, obviously challenge protecting that. Help us understand. You're saying that Cohesity architecture is well-suited for that type of environment? >> Yeah, it certainly is. I mean, it augments it quite well, is how I'd say. So at the moment we keep the environments quite separate, but the way we manage them is very similar. So there's great audit login, great security controls that you can place on both environments. So the way that we structure Hadoop with role-based access, who can perform what action, the same thing applies in Cohesity. So now we sort of see that the way that we manage primary is the same way that we can manage secondary. So, it's easier for the staff, when we come to things like compliance or legislation, or, we value data, it's our lifeblood, so we have to be very careful with it. So if we want to do any audit reports or anything like this, we can do 'em the same way. Who has access, what they've done. >> So, Hadoop's been around a lot longer than Cohesity. So, what were you doing before Cohesity, and what were some of those challenges? >> Yeah, what we were doing was a lot. And that was really the only option we had. So we had four or five different solutions that had kind of organically grown over time, whether that was some secondary storage, multiple different backup products, throw a couple of NASes in there, just for good measure. >> Just in case. >> Yeah, just in case. And then really, what we were doing, and how we managed that, is we had close to one FTE dedicated to that environment. It's not great for that person, it's not really the funnest of jobs. And then obviously, the management of it becomes quite difficult. And so that was how we did it. We got by. But it certainly could have been a lot better. >> So that was one FTE dedicated to the backup? >> Just dedicated to the backup. >> Dedicated to data protection? >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Okay. So then you bring in Cohesity, you do the business case, say oh wow, and part of that was we can free up this person to do other things, I presume, right? >> Yeah, yeah, definitely. That was actually certainly one of the key business cases. So, IT is a cost center. We certainly, we work for the business, we support the business, there's no doubt about that. But we are, at the end of the day, a cost center. So getting extra headcount or getting equipment, there has to be a really good business case behind this. And so we found that, so we freed up about 80% of time that we're spending on this, and so actually the two biggest things that we've seen as a benefit of that, staff engagement is actually a lot higher, right, because we don't have someone just dedicated to turning the screws on this old solution all the time. So they get to spend more time on newer tech, which is great, and obviously, if their time's freed-up, value-added activities. What can they be focusing on. >> So how's it work? Is it a self-service platform now? Or somebody, this individual, sets the overall policy, and then people apply it as they see fit, the application guys? >> Yeah, so we have a range. So our infrastructure team holds the overall management of it, and we have that one person who kind of, say rules it, so to speak, but the way we've done with this role-based access, we can give the service desk permission to search backups, so if someone needs a restore, or maybe legal and the compliance team want to know who was accessing what, we can give a lot more self-service to these teams. So the service desk, if they're dealing with an end-user that wants a restore, within 30 seconds, we can tell them, okay, here is the backup we have. Here are the dates that we have it. Which one do you want? Previously, that's a week-and-a-half turnaround. Escalate a ticket, spend three days doing restores and searching through it-- >> Dave: Working weekends. >> Right. Working weekends, and if you even do have the data. Typically what happens, by the time you've restored it, the customer has said, "Look, well I don't need it anymore." It's too late. >> So let's talk about some of the customer benefits. You've only deployed this about six months ago. >> Yeah, correct. >> You talked about a number of the benefits from a time perspective, allowing valuable FTEs to not only be reallocated for other projects, but also from a job satisfaction perspective-- >> Yeah definitely. >> Which is all the way up to the top end of the business. But in terms of helping customers extract more value from their data, monetizing their data, that example that you just gave of where it took too long to recover data before and the customer, the time has passed, what are some of the impacts that your customers are achieving so far? >> Yeah, so I think the biggest area of this that I think we actually look at the most, is that, like I mentioned earlier, we will do, say a piece of work with a customer, and then we'll keep that data. We might need it in the future, but there's not an ongoing engagement. What are we going to do with that? And so we tend to sort of put it aside. If a customer wants any further work done, or perhaps they want to come back with clarification, or anything like this, it then takes us quite a bit of time to find that data, get it back into production, get it back to the state that we were previously using it in. So, one of the biggest things that we've seen is actually now having all of that data always available on Cohesity, and being a hyper-converged platform, it has a lot of compute on it as well, so we can actually run some simple analytics on that data. So if a customer comes back and wants to query just a couple of small items, or perhaps we want to recheck a couple of things, super easy now for us to do that. And so we talk about time to market, or anything like this, is really big for us, and customer responsiveness. So if a customer is asking us a question and the answer is a five-minute answer, they don't want it in four days. So if we can turn that answer around a lot quicker, then obviously everyone's happier. >> And you've already been able to start achieving that? >> Yeah, we have been able to start achieving that already. Whether that be from a customer perspective, and certainly from a compliance perspective, if we have a customer that actually wants to know, where is our data, who has accessed it, everything else, we can turn that around straightaway. So obviously, when we talk about customer satisfaction, or that relationship, they feel a lot more comfortable that we're doing the right thing with their data, and that is obviously hugely invaluable for us as a business. >> And just another infrastructure question. These 300 servers, it's mostly UCS, is that right? Or a lot of UCS? >> Yeah, so we use Cisco for pretty much everything. We certainly are heavy, heavy users of UCS, and so, when we are looking at, I mean, implementing anything to the environment, you don't want it to be a lengthy process, because your return on investment is going to be hit. If you're spending three months installing something, you've already paid, you're getting no benefit out if it, it's now three months old before it's even implemented. So having this kit on Cisco UCS has been great for us, and we were having issues with our previous backup solution and we actually managed to implement the Cohesity solution on UCS and start using it before repairing our existing solution. So it's phenomenal how quickly, through UCS, we were able to bring it in. >> Dave: What kind of issues were you having? Just integration issues, or? >> Yeah, so with our previous backup solution, being a fragmented solution that we had stitched together, we had something as simple as a RAID controller failure caused a whole bunch of data corruption across multiple areas, and so, how the NAS saw the data corruption was different to how the SANDS saw it, and trying to re-index everything, we were struggling to understand what was going on. And whilst we were working through that, we actually had some other members of the team implement Cohesity and get it into the environment quicker than we could repair our existing solution. That's the power of Cisco UCS, really. >> Looking at this massive transformation that Cisco has been undergoing for a while, from a traditional network appliance vendor to now hardware, software, what are your thoughts on how that transformation, which is, in part, you could say, accelerated by DevNet, how is it going to enable businesses like yours to be able to start getting value even faster from the technology? >> Yeah, that's a very good question, and that's something, I think, a few of us in the industry, if we go back two, three, four, five years, was Cisco going to reinvent itself? What was that place? With hyperscale cloud, all these kind of things. I think quite a few people had some questions around what was going to happen in that space. They weren't always the quickest to market. They had great products, but there was a bit of speed issues there. And what we've seen as they've reinvented themselves is, Cisco has this great name for really being ahead of the curve, or leading industry, and this is, I think, what they were built on, really. And so it's been great from our perspective to see them, say, almost getting back to their roots a little bit, in this regard, and so for us, we are a technology business, we are fast-moving, our customers want things to be fast-moving, and so being able to rely on a technology partner like Cisco, and knowing that they're looking for the latest and greatest even quicker than ourselves, I think that's probably where we start to see the biggest impact. In the past, we might have a challenge that we need to solve, you talk to some vendors, and you might hear something like, oh, we're working on that. Maybe in 12 to 18 months we'll have it in the marketplace. Well we need it now. We don't need it in 18 months, it's a today problem. And that's not what we're seeing anymore with Cisco. Typically, any conversation we have with our account reps around here are some of the challenges, here are what our customers want to do, more frequently than not, our Cisco account reps will say, I think we have a solution for that. And that really, being able to partner with players like that in the industry, that makes some of the biggest differences for us as a company, because we need to partner with all these people to do what we do. >> Exactly. So, with all the momentum that you guys have achieved in just six short months, what's next? >> Yeah, Quantium is certainly a fast-moving company, like I mentioned, and what we wanted, we always like to run close to the leading edge, we're similar with Hadoop, we like to be early adopters. We like technology to grow with us. And this is what we saw in Cohesity. So, they haven't been around for long, and they're already doing everything we need. So we think, well this is a great mix. If we've got someone who's already solving everything that we need, this question of what next is great. And so as we move more towards your hyperscale cloud, being able to run Cohesity across all those environments to manage all of that data across all of it, that's certainly a big one that we're investigating. Like I mentioned, we keep pretty much all of our data, and so actually being able to use cloud as an archive solution, it sounds great, but then it's another silo to manage, it's another solution that you need to implement, but Cohesity will manage all that for us. So, the what next, I think, is we'll see the scale out of the solution as our data requirement grows, we will see it expand into the cloud environments that we're going to start building, so we really see it growing with us from that aspect. And then we see a great idea of being able to repurpose a lot of our on-premise hardware by archiving out to the cloud as well. >> What about SaaS? Do you see a need to use a Cohesity to protect your SaaS data, or are you kind of not there yet? >> Yeah, I think it certainly has a play there, it's still something that I think we're exploring a little bit more to make sure that it's a right fit. But certainly, there is an opportunity there to be explored, yeah. >> Always opportunities. Well Craig, we appreciate you stopping by theCUBE-- >> Thank you for having me. >> And sharing how Quantium is leveraging your partnerships with Cisco, with Cohesity, to drive those core business drivers of data science and AI. >> Thank you. >> Our pleasure. For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE Live from Cisco Live, in San Diego. (light music)

from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host David on tape hi everybody this is Dave lotta a and this is the cube the leader in live tech coverage this cube conversation I'm really excited Craig Hibbert is here he's a vice president of infinite at and he focuses on strategic accounts he's been in the storage business for a long time he's got great perspectives correct good to see you again thanks for coming on good to say that good to be back so there's a there's a saying don't fight fashion well you guys fight fashion all the time you got these patents you got this thing called neuro cache you're your founder and chairman mo che has always been - cutting against the grain and doing things his own way but I'd love for you to talk about some of those things the patents that you have some architecture the neuro cache fill us in on all that sure so when we go in we talk to customers and we say we have a hundred and thirty-eight patents a lot of them say well that's great but you know how does that relate to me a lot of these are and or gates and certain things that they don't know how it fits into the day to day life so I think this is a good opportunity to talk about several of those that do and so obviously the neural cache is something that is is dynamic instead of having a key in a hash which all the other vendors have just our position in that table allows us to determine all the values and things we need from it but it also monitors this is an astounding statement but from the moment that array is powered on every i/o that flows through it we track data for the life of the reins for some of these customers it's five and six years so you know those blocks of data are they random are they sequential are they hot are they cold when was the last time was accessed and this is key information because we bring intelligence to the lower level block layer where everybody else has just done they just ship things things come into acutely moving they have no idea what they are we do and the value around that is that we can then predict when workloads are aging out today you have manual people writing things in in things like easy tier or faster or competing products or two stories right and all these things that that manage all these problems are the human intervention we do it dynamically and that feeds information back into the Ray and helps to determine which virtual ray group it should reside on and where on the discipline Dalls based upon the age of the the application how it's trending the these are very powerful things in a day where we need eminent information send in to a consumer in a store I'd it's all all this dynamic processing and the ability to bring that in so that's that's one of the things we do another one is that the catalyst for our fast rebuilds we can rebuild two failed full 12 terabyte drives in under 80 minutes if those drives are half full then it's nine minutes and this is by understanding where all the data is and sharing the rebuild process from the drives that's another one of our patterns perhaps one of the most challenging that we have is that storage vendors tend to do error correction at the fibre channel layer once that data enters into the storage array there is no mechanism to check the integrity of that data and a couple of vendors have an option to do this but they can only do it for the first right and they also recommend you to turn that feature off because it slows down the box so we're infinite out is unique and I think this is for me one of the the most important paths that we have is that every time we ride a 64k slice in the system we assign some metadata to that and obviously it has a CRC check sum but more importantly it has the locality of reference so if we subsequently go back and do a reread and the CRC matches but the location has changed we know that corruption has happened sometimes a bit flipped on right all of these things that constitute sound data corruption that's not just the impressive part what we do at that point is we dynamically deduce that the data has been corrupt and using the parity in the quorum where it were a raid 6 like a dual parity configuration we rebuild that data on the fly without the application or the end-user knowing that there was a problem and that way served back the data that was actually written we guarantee that were the only array that does that today there's massive for our customers I mean the time to rebuild you said 12 terabyte drive I mean I yeah I would have thought I mean they always joke how long do you think it takes to rebuild a 30 terabyte drive because eventually you know sure you know it's like a month with us it's the same so if you look at our three terabyte drives it was 18 minutes the four terabyte drives 18 minutes the 618 minutes 812 will be good all the way up to 20 terabyte drives figuration we have no what I came back to a conversation we've had many many times we've shown you guys we were early on in the flash storage trend and we saw the prices coming down we done like high-speed spinning disks were there days were numbered and sure correct in that prediction but then you know disk drives have kept that distance yeah you guys have a skewed going all flash because the economics but help us understand this because you've got this mechanical device and you yet you guys are able to claim performance that's equal to or oftentimes much much better than a lot of your all flash competitors and I want to understand that a little bit it suggests to me that there's so much other overhead going on and other ball necks in the system that you guys are dealing with both architectural II and through your intelligence software can you talk about that absolutely absolutely the software is the key right we are a software company and we have some phenomenal guys that do the software piece so as far as the performance goes the the backend spinning discs are really obfuscated by two layers of virtualization and we ensure that because we have massive amounts of DRAM that all of that data flows into DRAM it will sit in DRAM for an astonishing five minutes I say astonishing because most of our vendors try to evict cache straight away so they've got room for the next one and that does not facilitate a mechanism by which you can inspect those dumb pieces of data and if you get enough dumb data you can start to make him intelligent right you can go get discarded data from cell phone towers and find out we know where people go to work and what time they worker because of that what demographic at the end and you know now you're predicting the election based upon discarding itself on talladega so so if you can take dumb data and put patterns around it and make it sequential which we do we write out a log structured right so we're really really fast at the front-end and some customers say well how do you manage that on the backend here's something that our designers and architects did very very well the the speed of the of ddr3 is about 15k per second which is what Cindy REM right now we have 480 spindles on the backend if you say each one of them can do a hundred 100 mics per second which they can do more than that 200 that gives us a forty eight gigabit gigabyte sorry per second backplane D stage ability which is three times faster than the DRAM so when you look at it the box has been designed all the way so there is no bottleneck through flowing through the DRAM anything that still been access that comes out of that five minute window once it's D stays to all the spindles incidentally analog structured right so right now it over 480 spindles all the time and then you've got the random still on the SSD which will help to keep that response time around about 2 milliseconds and just one last point on there I have a customer that has 1.2 petabytes written on a 1.3 a petabyte box and is still achieving a 2 millisecond response time and that's unheard of because most block arrays as you fill them up to 60 70 % that the performance starts going in the tank so I go down memory lane here so the most successful you know storage array in the history of the industry my opinion probably fact it was symmetric sand mosha a designed that he eschewed raid5 everybody was on the crazy about raid 5 is dead no no just mirror it yeah and that's gonna give us the performance that we need and he would write they would write 2d ran and then then of course you'd think that the D stage bandwidth was the bottleneck because they had such a back high a large number of back-end spindles the bandwidth coming out of that DRAM was enormous you just described something actually quite similar so that I was going to ask you is it the D stage bandwidth the bottleneck and you're saying no because your D stage being what there's actually three tighter than the D rate up it is so with the symmetric some typical platforms you would have a certain amount of disk in a disk group and you would assign a phase and Fiber Channel ports to that and there'd be certain segments in cash that would dedicated those discs we have done away with that we have so many well with two layers of the virtualization at the front as we talked about but because nothing is a bottleneck and because we've optimized each component the DRAM and I talked about the SSDs we don't write heavily over those we write in a sequential pattern to the SSD so that the wear rate is elongated and so because of that and we have all the virtualized raid groups configured in cache so what happens is as we get to that five-minute window we're about 2 D state all of the raid groups the al telling the cash how to lay out the virtual raid structure based on how busy or the raid groups are at the time so if you were to pause it and ask us where it's going we can tell you it's the Machine line it's the artificial intelligence of saying this raid group just took a D stage you know or there's a lot of data in the cache that's heading for these but based upon the the prediction of the heart the cold that I talked about a few months ago and so it will make a determination to use a different virtual rater and that's all done in memory as opposed to to rely on the disk so we're not we don't have the concept of spare disk we have the concept of spare capacity it's all shared and because it's all shared it's this very powerful pool that just doesn't get bogged down and continues to operate all the way up to the full capacity so I'm struggling with this there is no bottleneck because there's always a problem that can assure them so where is the bottleneck the ball net for us is when the erase fault so if you overwrite the maximum bandwidth and that historically you know in in 2016-2017 was a roughly 12 cube per second we got that in the fall 2018 to roundabout 15 and we're about to make the announcement that we've made tectonic increases in that where will now have right bandwidth approach in 16 gig per second and also read bandwidth about 25 K per second that 16 is going to move up to 20 remember what I said we release a number and we gradually grow into it and and and maximize and tweak that software when you think that most or flash arrays can do maybe one and a half gig per second sustained writes that gives us a massive leg up over our competition instead of buying an all flash array for this and another mid-tier array for this and coal social this you can just buy one platform that services at all all the protocols and they're all access the same way so you write an API one way mark should almost as big fan of this about writing code obviously was spinnaker and some of those other things that he's been involved in and we do the same thing so our API is the same for the block as it is for the NAS as it is for the ice cozy so it's it's very consistent you write it once and you can adapt multiple products well I think you bring about customers for short bit everybody talks about digital transformation and it's this big buzzword but when you talk to customers they're all going through some kind of digital transformation oh they want to get digital right let's put it that way yeah I don't want to get disrupted they see Amazon buying grocers and while getting into the financial services and content and it's all about the data so there's a real disruption scenario going on for every business and and the innovation engine seems to be data okay but data just sitting there and a data swamp is no good so you got to apply machine intelligence for that to that data and you got to have scale mm-hmm do you guys make a big deal about about petabyte scale yeah what are your customers telling you about the importance of that and how does it fit into that innovation sandwich that I just laid out sure no it's great question so we have some very because we're so have 70 petabytes of production over those 70 yep we have a couple of those both financial institutions very very good at what they do we worked with them previously with a with another product that really kind of introduced another one of most Shea's products that was XIV that introduced the concepts of self-healing and no tuning and things like we don't even talked about that there's no tuning knobs on the infinite I probably should mention that but our customers said have said to us we couldn't scale you know we had a couple hundred terabyte boxes before there were okay you know you've brought you've raised the game by bringing in a much higher level of availability and much higher capacity we can take one of our but I'm in this process right now the customer we can take one of our boxes and collapse three vmax 20 of VMAX 40s on it we have numerous occassions gone into establishments that have 11 12 23 inch cabinets two and a half thousand spindles of the old DMC VMO station we've replaced it with one 19-inch rack of arts right that's a phenomenal state when you think about it and that was paid for you think some of these v-max 47 it's 192 ports on them Fiber Channel ports we have 24 so the fibre channel port reduction the power heating and cooling over an entire row down to one eight kilowatt consumption by the way our power is the same whether it's three four terabytes six eight twelve they all use the same power plan so as we increase the geometry capacity of the drives we decrease the cost per usable well we're actually far more efficient than all fly sharing with the most environmentally friendly hybrids been in this planet on the array so asking about cloud so miss gray on the planet that would be yeah so when cloud first sort of came out of the division Financial Services guys are like no clouds that's a bad word they're definitely you know leaning into that adopting it more but still there's a lot of workloads that they're gonna leave on Prem they want to that cloud experience to the data what are you hearing from the financial services customers in particular and I and I've single them out because they're they're very advanced they're very demanding they are they a lot of dough and so what do you see in terms of them building cloud hybrid cloud and and what it means for for them and specifically the storage industry yeah so I'm actually surprised that they've adopted it as much as they have to be honest with you and I think the the economics are driving that but having said that whenever they want to get the data back or they want to bring it back home prime for various reasons that's when they're running into problems right it's it's like how do I get my own data back well you've got to open up the checkbook and write big checks so I think infini debt has a nice strategy there where we have the same capabilities that you have on prime you having the cloud don't forget nobody else has that one of the encumbrances to people move into the cloud has been that it lacks the enterprise functionality that people are used to in the data center but because our cost point is so affordable we become not only very attractive or four on Prem but for cloud solutions as well of course we have our own new tricks cloud offering which allows people to use as dr or replications and so however you want to do it where you can use the same api's and code that your own dis and extrapolate that out to the cloud I was there which is which is very helpful and so we have the ability if you take a snapshot on Amazon it may take four hours and it's been copied over to an s3 device that's the only way they can make it affordable to do it and then if you need that data back it's it's not it's not imminent you've got to rehydrate from s3 and then copy it back over your snapshot with infinite data its instantaneous we do not stop i/o when we do snapshots and another one the patterns we use the time synchronous mechanism every every AO the rise has a timestamp and we when we take a snapshot we just do a point in time and in a timestamp that's greater than that instantiation point is for the volume and previous is for the snapshot we can do that in the cloud we can instantly recover hundreds of terabytes worth of databases and make them instantly available so our story again with the innovation our innovation wasn't just for for on pram it was to be facilitated anyway you are and that same price point carries forward from here into the cloud when Amazon and Microsoft wake up and realized that we have this phenomenal story here I think they'll be buying from us in leaps and bounds it's it's the only way to make the cloud affordable for storage vendors so these are the things you talk about you know bringing bringing data back and bringing workloads back and and there are tool chains that are now on Prem the kubernetes is a great example that our cloud like and so when you bring data back you want to have that cloud experience so automated operations plays into that you know automation used to be something that people are afraid of and they want to do do manual tearing member they wanted their own knobs to turn those days are gone because people want to drive digital transformations they don't want to spend time doing all this heavy lifting I'm talk about that a little bit and where you guys fit yeah I mean you know I say to my customers to not to knock our competition but you can't have a service processor as the inter communication point between what the customer wants and it deciding where it's going to talk to the Iranian configure it's going to be instantaneous and so we all we have we don't have any Java we don't have any flash we don't have any hosts we don't have massive servers around the data center collecting information we just have an html5 interface and so our time to deployment is very very quick when we land on the customer's dark the box goes in we hook up the power we put the drives in we're Haiti's the word V talk because it brings back memories for a lot of course I am now we're going back in time right knowing that main here and so we're very dynamic both in how we forward face the customers but also on the backend for ourselves we eat our own dog food in the sense that we are we have an automation team we've automated our migration from non infinite out platforms towards that uses some level of artificial intelligence we've also built a lot of parameters around things like going with ServiceNow and custom sites because well you can do with our API what other people take you know page and page of code I'll give you an example one of our customers said I need OC i the the let-up management product we called met up and they said hey listen you know it usually takes six months to get an appointment and that it takes at least six months to do the comb we said no no we're not like any other storage render we don't have all these silly raid groups and spare disk capacity you know this weave three commands we can show in the API and we showed them the light Wow can you send us an array we said no we can do something better we were designed SDS right when when infinite out was coded there was no hardware and the reason we did that is because software developers will always code to the level of resilience of the hardware so if you take away that Hardware the software developers have to code to make something to withstand any type of hardware that comes in and at the end of the coding process that's when we started bringing in the hardware pieces so we were written STS we can send vendors and customers a an OVA a virtual appliance of our box they were able to the in a week they told the custom we have to go through full QA no reason why it wouldn't work and they did it for us and got it was a massive customer of theirs and ours that's a powerful story the time to deployment for your homegrown apps as well as things like ServiceNow an MCI incredible infinite out three API calls we were done so you guys had a little share our partnership with met up in the field we did yeah I mean was great they had a massive license with this particular customer they wanted our storage on the platform and we worked very very quickly with them they were very accommodating and we'd love to get our storage qualified behind their behind their heads right now for another customer as well so yeah there's definitely some sooner people realize what we have a Splunk massive for us what we're able to do was plunk in one box where people the competitors can't do in a row so it so it's very compelling what we actually bring in how we do it and that API level is incredibly powerful and we're utilizing that ourselves I would like to see some integration with canonical Marshall what these guys have done a great job with SDS plays we'd like to bring that here do spinnaker do collect if I could do some of those things as well that we're working on the automation we just added another employee another FTE to the automation team and infinite out so we do these and we engage with customers and we help you get out of that trench that is antiquity and move forward into the you know into the vision of how you do one thing well and it permeates the cloud on primary and hybrid all those guys well that API philosophy that you have in the infrastructure is code model that you just described allows you to build out your ecosystem in a really fast way so Greg thanks so much for coming on thank you and doing that double click with this really I'd love to have you back great thanks a lot Dave all right thank you welcome thank you for watching you're watching the cube and this is Dave Volante we'll see you next time

>> Announcer: Live from Chicago, Illinois it's the CUBE, covering Veeamon 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. >> We're back in Chicago, Veeamon 2018, you're watching the CUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my co-host Stu Miniman. Day one of our two day coverage of Veeamon, On our second year. Vaughn Stewart is here who is the vice president of Technology at Pure Storage, Cube alum, good friend. Great to see you man. >> Good to see you Dave, Stu. >> Dave: Thanks so much for coming on. >> Vaughn: Great to be back. >> So Pure, you know, I remember when you joined Pure and you were like, "Dave, this is going to be the rocket ship of a lifetime." it's turned out to be the case. First company since NetApp to hit a billion dollars in the storage business. It's like independent storage companies are back. >> Yeah. (laughs) >> So give us the update, what's happening at Pure? >> So fantastic year. Wrapped up end of January, right. So first independent storage company to hit a billion dollars. Actually, we're kind of on the cusp of maybe being the the fastest infrastructure company, if not the fastest tied with being the fastest to hit a billion dollars. So the growth rates been great, the products, obviously, have been off the charts. Whether you're looking at it from an analyst's perspective, you know, the gardener reports, the IDC market scape, so if you look at from the customers perspective with the NPS scores, right. Just crushing in terms of the products, the customers stating that we're not overstating the capabilities, and we make some pretty bold statements. But when you kind of boil it back to where we're at now, I think our focus is helping customers adopt a data centric architecture as a part of their IT or data center modernization plans, right. This is, we've kind of gone through this phase of like virtualizing everything, now everything's in the cloud and now we're starting to mature a little bit and we're always looking at this tsunami of data that's being created and it's more around, where's your data going to reside? Because there's going to be some gravity around it and bring the compute to where the data should reside. And so our products and our strategy is to help customers again, this data-centric architecture, adopt new technologies that are going to help them radically shift how they operate, changing the cost of operations, changing the complexity to either let an existing storage team scale to a larger capacity per full-time, you know, FTE or to allow actually the application teams or the private cloud teams to just manage their infrastructure stack, right. We're seeing we're seeing kind of growth in both areas. I think beyond that, our technology with our evergreen storage as a subscription model has also been able to be transformative for Enterprise about how do they acquire, refresh, and introduce new technologies within the storage space. And so it's been pretty exciting. >> So let's talk about some of that. I remember, I've I've been around a long time Stu, as you know, so Al Shughart, the legend, once told me when I was just a pup trying to understand the business. He said, "Dave, the storage business is simple. The customers want it to be dirt cheap, rock solid, and lightning fast." >> Vaughn: Yeah. >> This is the days of spinning discs, which we're kind of dirt cheap, but they really weren't that rock solid and they really weren't that lightning fast. So you guys actually delivered on that promise but you added some other things. Simplicity, the business model of reduced friction. You mentioned Evergreen, so it's not, obviously, not just about flash, where we say, "oh, flash, Pure storage flash, we have flash too." It's so much more than that. The way you positioned it just now the company in terms of data centricity. And, as they say, the business model innovations have really worked well for you. You've been able to stay ahead of the competition. I wonder if you could comment. >> Sure. So I, for your audience, I think it's important to maybe back up a bit. Pure was born in in the the wave of a number of all flash arrays. >> Dave: Yeah. Right? And a fair amount of them were acquired by large existing storage vendors. And I think now that the dust has settled a bit, you know, we were kind of the phoenixes that rose through those ashes, if you will, within the storage space and I think, really, the key driver there was, it wasn't about performance. Flash makes everything faster. >> Dave: Right. It was about a combination of the business model, the operational simplicity, but also, what I would call, the Tier One Feature Sets, right. You had to deliver on six nines of greater availability. You had to have all the data management capabilities to plug into a large partner ecosystem like veeam, which, you know, we're at Veeam live and that was kind of what I would call Act one of Pure, which was, you know, flash ray based, you know, storage for your traditional enterprise apps. Last year we introduced flash blade, right. This was a radically different architecture. It was to scale out a scale out blade-based storage platform that scaled capacity and performance linearly. And the adoption in that space has been this next-generation apps, which... Are just..the sets are growing, you know, out of control and beyond what we would have ever expected with an Enterprise app. So whether it's AI, machine learning, deep learning, analytics, or this new use case we're seeing, which is rapid data recovery. The flash blade, because of the combination of its low latency and massive parallel throughput, has really been a big growth vector for us and it's kind of act two, if you will, of Pure Storage. >> Dave: Go ahead Stu. >> Yeah, Vaughn I'd love to hear more your thoughts on, kind of, an application proliferation. so I think back, you know, you and I lived through that wave of virtualization. While I love virtualization, one of the challenges I had with it was I could take my old application that was probably already too long in the tooth and stick it in a VM and then keep it for another five to ten years because it didn't care about the hardware, their OS, and all that standpoint. Today, talk about cloud native apps, talk about IOT and analytics and all of these micro services and everything like that. It's a huge impact on infrastructure and how we build things. It brings up to speed how we bridge from, kind of, the old world and the new world. >> Yeah, I'm glad that you asked this question. I wish you would be coming to our conference next week - >> Stu: Well, Dave will be there. >> because we'll have a session discussing this and it'll include an internal case study. And so that's all the details I can give right now. For a long time I think a lot of IT vendors, particularly, those who made hardware products, try to position this on-prem versus the cloud, right. and it was really the wrong mindset. Cloud is just one more deployment model for an organization to look at. The question that I think organizations have is, what fits where? And I think, to your point, if you're looking to build a new application or re-platform an existing, what you have today versus in the past was, you had a contained set of APIs and interfaces to work with, right. If you were building on, say, you know, a database vendor's enterprise business suite that was the tools that you got to use. Today you look at what's available, an open source or in the public cloud space, and you get to build a massively disaggregated application that's comprised of functions and and microservices, right. And it gets to leverage these notions of scaling on demand and being being very elastic. What I would share with you and what we discussed with customers is, your development team will want to go as fast as they can and leverage all these new tools and they're iterating very quickly, and the cloud is an ideal platform for that. But you need to plan and look forward to, around what's the the volume of data that you may be dealing with? What's the access requirements of that data over time? And where's it going to be a better position? Should it sit in the cloud? Should it sit on Prem? Should it sit in a private to public cloud hybrid type of architecture model and leverage, say, the compute and all the software agility within the cloud and yet still have stewardship over your data and not have to deal with with maybe unforeseen things like charges per, you know, API call or egress charges things of that nature. >> And Edge as the whole, >> And so I'm grossly simplifying a lot this. but these are the conversations that you get within the enterprise, which is where the sweet spot is. These are real considerations that that they have right there past the is cloud secure or, you know? They're past the data sovereignty type of concerns. They're more around how is this going to scale long-term because, for example, I'll give you an example. So we rolled out meta, which is our AI as part of our support for our products. This all getting ahead of the customers and predicting faults, getting them... This is what helps us achieve greater than six nines availability across the entire fleet for the last two and a half years, right. It's, it's getting ahead of the problems. When we work on looking at some of the AI that we create around meta and we want to test it, we have to download a year's worth of phone home data from the cloud. That takes 45 days to download today and it's not going to get any faster as the install base gets larger, right. And so those are challenges that you have to look at and say, maybe I started in the cloud but maybe I need to look at something in a hybrid model because it's going to impact my business agility. And so these are conversations that we can have and our architects have with customers based on whatever their criteria or forecast look like. >> So just about a year ago Scott Dietzen stepped down as CEO, brought in Charlie - >> Vaughn: Yeah >> new leader. It was kind of, kind of interesting, it was right on the heels of Frank Slootman doing something similar. Frank Slootman just stepped down as chairman and so how's the new leadership going? What, what has Charlie brought? I can't wait to interview him next week on the CUBE but give us your take as somebody who's been an industry observer and, obviously, a long-time Pure employee. >> So ,so a great question. So just for the audience to know, so Dietzen is still with us, right. He stepped down from being the CEO and is now the chairman of the board. and I owe a large gratitude of debt to Scott. Scott brought me into Pure and I'm always encouraged when, you know, every now and then you get that that direct email from him, you know, you know, keep, you know, keep being a thorn in someone's side and push this forward. That was a little self-serving, so I apologize. But what I like about Charlie is, and, and understand I was, I was with Ned F for 13 years, right. And so we did this large growth cycle, not as early as with Pure, but going through a lot of the same growth pains and and whatnot that we have today. But we did all that growth under Worman Joven before they changed over. What was nice about Scott is, he told me on day one that he didn't know how far he would take Pure but it was apparent to him that he had taken it as far as he could, he would find his, his, his heir and obviously Charlie was the choice. And what Charlie's brought in has been a lot of structure, right. The formation of business units, a lot of accountability, a lot of, what I would say, that maturation phase from startup, right. That's kind of grown to the, to the the maximum output of your current organizational structures, to looking forward into a structure that that is going to allow us to scale better over time, right. Continue to grow as well as.. I think Charlie be the first to tell ya, you know, Pure's on a trajectory to hit two billion dollars and can do that on inertia in the current products, right. Charlie's focus or one of Charlie's focuses over the last handful of months is, is, what are we going to become two years from now and what investments do we need to start making in the near term to get prepared for two years from now? >> So I, I brought up Frank Slootman who's in the service now because I know, I know Frank and Scott were close, right? There's some board action going on there over the years, they're part of the Silicon Valley mafia with the Mai Bucherii. But but I, and we can joke about that but there's a there's a culture of succession that has really taken hold in in certain parts of the valley and, and again, very similar to what we saw as service now, where was the new guy was brought in to take them to the next level. And the existing CEO, you know, mature enough, you know, maybe, maybe worked so hard for all these years too, maybe felt like they need a little break. but still mature enough to say, okay, I know my limitations and I want to bring somebody else in. So it's been sort of this new thing and I want to tie it back to something we were talking to before on the CUBE. I mean, you guys hit escape velocity. When you look back at the sort of the virtualization craze with Three Par and Isilon, Data Domain, Compelling. Yeah, they kind of hit a billion-dollar status you know, they hit unicorn, but they never hit billion dollar revenue. And, and so now, and then the other thing you talked about was some of the bigger players decided to buy up flash companies. >> Vaughn: Yeah. >> And they said, you know, rather than pay 2.5 billion dollars for a data domain or Three Par, we'll spend a billion dollars or, in some cases, hundreds of millions of dollars and then we'll organically grow that internally. Did it work? Yeah, maybe yeah, you know. Maybe some of it, maybe not. But, but you guys stayed the course and are now on track to do two billion. >> Vaughn: Yeah >> So here's my question, long-winded sort of narrative babble, sorry about that. I used to question Worman Joven all the time Tucci, even. Can you stay independent? Right? That was the big question. You know, because Converged is coming. But now it looks like being an independent is actually in vogue. Best-of-breed is actually still a viable business model. >> So obviously I'm not in on the inside of whatever the board decisions may be. >> Yeah, but you're an observer who know this business. We're kind of talking about Vaughn the prognosticator, analyst, if you will. >> What I think is different today, and Stu and I were talking about this because we ran into each other over in the corner with Duncan. You know, the emergence of all the flash vendors and them getting acquired and really what's happened by and large is just the same old products just got flash injected into them and, you know, got, you know, the the vendors hope to get another decade out of them. But okay, they're faster, but it doesn't fundamentally change your business model or your operations and sometimes that's a good thing, right. For some customers, right, their change averse. >> Right, they don't want that disruption. >> Yeah. For us, right, we're trying to usher in now this this next wave of shared accelerated storage and it's a disaggregated model, right. Start to look up it at what, you know, in a commercial sense, if you will. What are the enter.. what are the the hyper scalars, you know, delivering, you know? They're not running data direct attached storage. They're not doing HCI, right? They've got pools of compute and pools of storage and it's either disk and cold or it's flash flash and hot and, you know, they've got network and it's all over Ethernet, so it's greatly simplified. We're trying to help our customers with, with that type of architecture. Whether they're looking at simplifying their private cloud or extending the private cloud to the public cloud, or what's even more interesting, as they look at like their data pipelines, you know, a lot of, you know.. There's, there's AI and analytics in every organization of every size. They may or may not sit inside the IT department but they tend to follow that model of eighths and software. So I'm just going to do it on DAS and I'm going to build this siloed cluster. And, you know, it must be cheap regardless of whatever the efficiency I get out of it. And what we're trying to help large organizations look at is data pipelines and flow and the flexibility that you gain by separating compute from storage and not having to worry about the performance issues or constraints of disk-based systems from a decade ago because technologies like flash and now with non-volatile memory Express and non-volatile memory expressed over fabrics, right. You're getting direct memory to memory communications from the servers to the storage. So you're getting all the benefits of pooling and sharing your storage with all the benefits of it without a local bus in terms of speed and performance. And so it can change, particularly, a large volume of data. You can change your agility. >> So that that is certainly a tailwind for you but it was a tailwind for a lot of companies and you have the product. Let's assume best product just for sake of argument. I'm sure you would agree. But best product doesn't always win, right? So what I'm hearing is there was business model innovation. >> Vaughn: Yeah. >> Obviously very strong go to market. You guys knew where all the skeletons were buried with all the reps that you guys hired. But there were other factors involved in your ascendancy, which maybe is independent of the structure of the industry because the industry structure is changing. It's going from, you know, now remote cloud services into these digital, this digital matrix and somehow you have to fit into that digital matrix and participate in that. >> Yeah, it's.. I think you brought up two points,\. So I think if you if you're going to be a start-up, to be successful, it's not just technology. You've hit the head on the nail there. Pure had.. the technology had to deliver, Pure had that. The business model was innovative, the marketing was off the hook, right? For a start-up, you know, we were punching above our weight but you also have sales, have sales force execution and, you know, you never know what you get when you walk into a start-up. But you've got to.. If you don't hit on all four of those dimensions then you don't achieve escape velocity. In terms of shifting from startup to, you know, becoming mainstream. Not only did we achieve a billion dollars last year, we were cashflow positive for the year and we were profitable for Q4, right? So that puts a lot of wind in ourselves as we go forward. You know, with, at the end of last year, a half a billion dollars in the bank and now a billion dollars in the bank. You know, for us to go you know figure out what we're going to grow and go into. I think moving forward and being independent, I think we'll see, right? I think there's always a tick-tock in our industry, right? Things are distributed, they're centralized, their distributed, I want one throat to choke, I want best-of-breed. I think with all the distributed apps and all the analytics platforms that are going to start to become more important than what we're used to in the X83 space. I think best-of-breed is starting to rise up right now and so I think the runway for Pure to stay independent is there. Don't get me wrong, we're going to have to do our works with plugging into clouds, right? And all those those ecosystems because customers want a transparent experience. But we'll be sharing some news on that, I think next week. >> Well and excited to here that. The cartel will continue to suck up startups, no question about it. But, you know, we love companies like Pure, put Nutanix in that mix and it was sad to us to see all their run of the virtualization comers, they just disappeared. Because if it's just the cartel building new products, you're not going to have the level of innovation that you get with VC funded startups in the valley. you just, you're just not. >> Well, in the US you're seeing, I mean, you're, in the US you're seeing VC investment starting to diversify a bit, right? >> Dave: Yeah >> Colorado's getting hot, the Boston area is, it has been there for a while but it's getting hot. >> IOT and security. >> And, you know, that's been the great thing about, you know, about IT in the US, right, is we've been an innovative landscape. I think the barrier has probably forced some innovators out based on just the cost of living. So, you know, who knows what the mix will look like a decade from now, but yeah, we're still going to be Silicon Valley centric for the near-term. >> So I love talking you because we can have these conversations. We were joking off-camera, we could go for 90 minutes, which we easily could. We got to, we got to go soon but let's talk about Veeam, relationship with Veeam. You guys are kind of birds of a feather in a lot of ways but, but take us through that. >> Yeah, so the opportunity to partner with Veeam was a no-brainer. There were synergies there, right? Pure and Veeam both trying to just disrupt legacy markets, doing it through simplicity, right? Riding the wave of, you know, virtualization as a primary business focus but not exclusive. our Net Promoter scores with both companies are off the charts, right. Customers love it and, you know, we're multiples higher than any of our competitors. And so bringing the technologies together were real simple. So last month we announced, four or five weeks ago we announced and released a new set of solutions and integrations. It was comprised around three areas of benefit, right? Accelerating backups, increasing the speed at which you could recover data, and adding a new level of agility within your ecosystem. So delivering those three value props were based on us supporting their Universal API adapters. So now that they can offload some of the backup process to array-based snapshots and that preserves the performance, makes the window collapse faster. That's where when production data sits on the flash array. We've also certified putting the flash blade behind the Veeam servers as a backup data repository and the benefits of that from a backup window are faster data ingestion times across your real estate. Obviously, smaller footprint, lower cost within the data center. The bigger impact on both of these is on rapid data recovery. So with Veeam, through their explorer integrations, you can pull files, disks, VMs, applications, right out of the array snapshots. If the array is still online but someone's just munched the data, if the array is no longer there and you need to pull from the flash blade, flash blade gives them a capability that they never had with disk, which is they can start because, you know, how Veeam recovers, right? They actually start the data services and recover them from the backup repository and then live migrate it back to the production environment. With the live, with the back and the data repository being all flash, now they can bring up a significant, if not all of your data back online and then trickle restore it back to the production data sets. We had a customer with a large distributed database that was on a more traditional disk backup system that was really focused on ingest, right? Make the backup window not so much focused on the restore times. It took them in excess of 36 hours to put back their database and this was the mission critical database to the organization. We've come in and replaced that. 36 hours is now 30 minutes. So is all flashes as repository for your backup for everyone? Maybe not for every organization but we're seeing a big growth ramp on that in the enterprise. The last piece that we've brought to market together in integrations is, integrating with their data labs. That's their environment to be able to on-demand create, test, and DEV infrastructures for you and that pairs really well with all flash arrays and snapshots because it's instantaneous, consumes no new storage, and our automatic QOS preserves that, preserves the resources for the production environment from the lab. And so those are our three areas: accelerate backups, rapid restores, and give you some agility with your test DEV. >> Okay and the agility in the ecosystem is oftentimes underappreciated, right? >> I'm amazed at the customers that I.. Large enterprise customers, right? Revenues in the tens of billions of dollars that you still meet with today, where they've half staffs that their job is to restore, you know, an Oracle database to an Oracle developer and that's all the guy does 40, guy or gal, does 40 hours a week, it's amazing. >> Right, Vaughn, great to see you again. >> Dave, awesome. >> Thanks so much for coming to the CUBE. We'll see you next week Pure Accelerate at San Francisco. We're there Wednesday, I believe, we're broadcasting. So look for all the things that Vaughn teased. He showed a little leg on some stuff, so we'll be covering that next week. We're back here tomorrow. Stu and I will be kicking off at 9:30 with Peter MacKay, so don't miss that. We're out for today, Veeamon 2018 the CUBE. See you tomorrow (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back. We are live here in Las Vegas at the Sands, along with Stu Miniman. I'm John Walls. You're watching theCUBE, of course, Dell Technologies World 2018. It's now a pleasure to welcome to the set, we have Bryan Bond, director of IT Infrastructure at Siemens eMeter. Bryan, thank you for being with us. >> Thank you for having me. >> John: And Andre Leibovici, who is the Vice President of Solutions and Alliances at Datrium. Andre, good afternoon to you. Good to see you. >> Great to see you. >> Alright, Bryan, tell us about Siemens eMeter, first, just for viewers who might not be familiar with the company and your mission. >> eMeter, basically, is a software development company. We do enterprise-level software for utilities, so gas, power, water, just about anything that has a meter. We do not make meters, but we deal with all the data that comes from those meters. So, data acquisition, meter data management, loss prevention, all those types of things that come from that data that's leaving your house or your business. We deal with that for the utilities. So, back-in billing systems, longterm data analytics, all of those types of things, that's what we do. >> Yeah, so, Bryan, most companies I talk to, it's like your industry's changing so fast, digital transformation, software, everything. Utilities are considered by most to be one of the slower moving pieces, so what's the reality in your world? >> It's like selling to a rock. (Stu laughs) A rock, right? It's tough, historically, it is very tough. Especially in the United States, with PUC regulations, with the way you can charge customers and can't, it makes it very hard. And I wish I was a real expert at that type of stuff, but... It's a slow-moving process. The good news is most countries in the planet have decided that they need to go full-on smart grid and they need to do it fast. So, in a lot of countries in Europe, there's an edict out, we're going to do this and that has helped move this along. So it's very helpful to us, as a business. I also think it's very helpful to us in general, you know, on the planet, being able to manage grids better and more efficiently. >> Okay, so we're not going to be talking about power grids and all the things on the utility. You're an IT guy. And that's what we love talking about on theCUBE here. So, give us a thumbnail sketch of your environment, your purview. What's going on? >> All right. So, like I said, so we're a software development house. It's all developers: dev test QA, sales, support, you know, all that type of stuff. I'm fortunate to be part of a very large company, so I don't have to worry about e-mail, SharePoint sites, or any of that stuff. I get to deal with the real fun stuff, which is our product, how it's deployed, how it's developed and tested. We're a pretty much a 100% virtualized. VMware shop. We use VMware-based cloud services for the appropriate things for that. And we do all of that work ourself with our own team. So we have a small team in the U.S., we have a small team in India, and we handle all of that ourselves, we don't really outsource any of that. >> Alright, so Andre, I want to pull you in here. You're software development in VMware environment. Brings me back; I remember early days of VMware was always only for test dev. Today, I hear developers, I hear this stuff, and it's like, "Oh, isn't that kind of public cloud "and some of those things?" So, give us your viewpoint on customers like Bryan and what kind of things Datrium brings to that environment, obviously virtualized and all that. >> Yeah, no, that's a good point. So... All types of customers know suddenly looking at how they can leverage private cloud, but also public cloud. Create the ideal, hybrid cloud. What does that mean, right? So we have Fortune 100 companies like Siemens who are leveraging our technology to deploy the private cloud, run the VMware infrastructure on us. At the same time, create, you know, DR strategies to their secondary sites. But there is also those customers who are looking to, "How can I actually push workloads to the cloud? "How can I create a strategy around disaster recovery "to the cloud?" And I believe that, as part of our journey as a company, embracing private data centers, we got to embrace, also, the cloud. And this is the next big thing for us at Datrium. Where are we going to help customers on the journey to take their workloads running on-premise to the cloud, but at the same time enabling them to use as as DR and also move back when needed. I may as well just spill the beans here. I'm not sure if I'm getting trouble with marketing or not. >> John: I'm sure you're not. >> So we actually releasing very soon a fully orchestrated DR from our platform to the VMware cloud, to VMC. Fully orchestrated and enables you to fire over environment to the cloud and back, once your DR site or your primary site is actually back. There's a lot of promise on this market. There's a lot of companies doing, saying that they would do, but, you know, I see that's something that customers are really excited... >> You know, how does it work when you're dealing with a customer who is dealing with a customer, who's dealing with customers who... You know, privacy's essential, right? And there's a lot of concern... They have to be the customer of a utility. So how do you treat them, you know, because they have very unique needs, I would assume and that's a major consideration, because of their position with their customer. I mean, that's got to create a new dynamic, or an interesting dynamic, for both of you to handle. >> Yeah, it does. You know, from a development standpoint, you know, you may not be actually dealing with that particular customer's data, but you're helping that customer deal with that data. So, we're having to go through and make sure that our software doesn't have any holes in it and it's patchable, and that it follows, you know, simple guidelines. But, at the same time, we make recommendations to customers all the time, you know. "Well, how are you guys doing X, Y, Z in-house, "because you seem to be doing okay." And we say, "Well, we're using this particular platform." And, their encryption is probably the best there is right now out there. De-duped encryption, it's just fantastic. And across different storage arrays. And being able to that to the cloud and be encrypted there, and not have to worry about that is a big bonus. And that's definitely something that we look at. Obviously, we don't encrypt all of our data, because a lot of it's just nonsense. But, we do have stuff that we do that with. And we do it both for testing purposes and to prove that this meets the requirements of the customer. Because those requirements are different, not just in different countries, but in every state you go to. So, being able to provide that level of assurance of yeah you can meet your requirements with our software regardless of what platform you're running on. >> Bryan, you mentioned a couple of features there. But I wonder if you could back us up a second. You've got a virtualized environment. There's, you know, so many options that you can choose on there. Walk us a little bit through the problems that you were having, the decision process, and ultimately what led to Datrium. >> So... The set of primary goals for us was the typical thing you see in IT is you're doing the same thing for a long period of time. You're buying the same stuff, you buy more of it, you renew, and then they tell you that the price is going to go way up on support. So you buy a new one and start over again, right? The hockey stick approach. And so that's the time I like to actually stop and say, "Hey, am I doing this right, still?" Because what I did five years ago may not be right, you know, going forward, knowing what the changes are in the business. We were looking for great cost to capacity. Right? And ease of management and overall cost of the deployment. And when we started looking at all the different players in the space... For us, the big thing was going to NFS. So, single file system for management. Prior to that, we were either fibre channel on or iSCSCI. So, mini management points. Hundreds of LUNs. Hundreds of LUNs. We're managing storage, right? A small group of people, three, four guys? You're spending 20 hours a week managing storage? That's nuts, right? So, day one, we put these guys in in a POC. And my guys are like, "This stuff's never leaving." Because now I'm down to one management point, right? Six months, seven months later, I'm down six hundred LUNs from where I was with three management points. I don't manage storage anymore. None of my guys manage storage anymore. That's a hidden cost, you know? And I'm not suggesting reduction in FTE or anything like that. I'm saying, "Oh, now those guys can go work "on operating system patching." You know, the other paying points that you've got in the business, rather than managing, you know, that platform. So, all of those things rolled in together. And when we tried to compare them to other vendors, we couldn't get an apples to apples comparison. We had to go with multiple vendors to get the same performance, to get the same capacity, and we could never get the pricing. The best-case scenario we got for capacity and performance was three times the cost. Best-case scenario. And I still had to manage LUNs. >> Yeah, Andre, I used to always joke simplicity in the enterprise was an oxymoron, because there's so much happening. You hear, "Okay, get rid of one thing, I got to patch the other thing." There's no such thing as eliminating bottlenecks, you just move them. But, you know, sounds like some common problems we've been hearing out there. What's typical about his environment? What are you hearing from customers in general that Datrium's helping? >> So, I think the first point is simplicity. And it's something that I know we've been evolving, it's a journey not only for Datrium, but the whole data center industry, right? Went through ACI and now it's open conversions. So the whole simplification of the data center and make sure that most of the task can be automated. So some of the things that we do, that we simplify from a management perspective: we have no knobs, you don't decide if it's compression, the de-duplication enable, the erasure codings. Everything is owned by default and that's the way it's going to be because it doesn't make sense for an organization with thousands of virtual machines and applications to start tweaking every single knob to make sure they're going to get the best possible performance. Across the board, once we've actually verified, you might get like one or 2% CPU back. So, simplicity's a big point. Also, the other point that we mitigate in the organization, especially compared to ACI's solutions, is the data resiliency. So we actually offer enterprise-grade data resiliency that for ACI... And when talking about evolution with data center, you know, taking like putting SSDs into the servers, ACI clusters, and moving forward. So we actually make all the management of this SSDs much simpler. I forgot the line, where I was going to, but I... (laughs) I think the message is simplicity, skill ability, back data resiliency. Making sure you get enterprise-greater data resiliency in the data center. And you don't compromise on that. You get capacity, data resiliency, simplicity at the same time. >> Keep it simple, make it work. >> Andre: Exactly. >> Right. Faster. Gentleman, thanks for joining us. We appreciate the time. Thanks for telling the Siemens eMeter story. We look forward to seeing you down the road. And good luck, continue success at Datrium, as well. Thanks, Andre. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Alright, thanks for having us. >> Back with more. You're watching Dell Technologies World 2018 right here on theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. This is VMworld 2017, and this is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm with my co-host, Peter Burr. Colin Gallagher is back. He's the senior director of hyper-converged infrastructure marketing at Dell EMC and he's joined by Josh Holst, who's the vice president of information services at Hills Bank and Trust Gentlemen, welcome to The Cube. Good to see you. >> Thanks for having me back. >> So Colin, give us the update from when we last talked. What's happening at the show, a bunch of parties last night. How's the vibe? >> Colin: Huh, were there? >> Responses from customers to your announcements, give us the update. >> Nah, I couldn't go to any parties because I knew I had to be with you guys today. Had to keep my voice. Shame. >> Dave: I went, I just didn't talk. >> Smart man. No, I mean, I've been talking to a lot of customers, talking to customers about what they think of the show, and what the messages are and how they're resonating with them. I think so far, you know, most of the keynotes and topics have been really on point with what customers' concerns are. Also been talking to a lot of people about hyper-converge, because that's what I do for a living. You know, and I brought Josh along to talk about his experiences with hyper-converged. But I've been having a really great time at the show, hearing what people are concerned about, and hearing how a lot of what we're delivering at the show is really resonating with them. >> So Josh, tell us about Hills Bank and Trust. What are they all about, what's your role? >> Sure. Hills Bank and Trust was founded in 1904. We're still headquartered in Hills, Iowa, if anybody's familiar with that. We're a full services bank. We provide all the services we can to our customers. And we primarily serve those out of eastern Iowa, but we have customers throughout the U.S. as well. >> And your role? >> I'm a VP of information systems, so I oversee IT infrastructure. >> Okay. So maybe paint a picture, well, let me start here. What do you think about the business challenges and the drivers of your business, and how they ripple through to IT? What are those drivers and how are you responding? >> Yeah, what we're seeing a lot is a big shift within the financial services world, with the FinTechs, the brick and mortarless banking, robo-advisories, digital currencies, and just an increased demand of what our customers want. So what we're trying to do from an IT infrastructure standpoint is build that solid foundation, where we can quickly adapt and move where our industry's taking us. >> Yeah, so things like Blockchain and Crypto, and you guys launching your own currency any time soon? >> Josh: Nope. We are monitoring it, but nothing like that. >> So how do those, I mean somebody said to me one time, it was a banking executive, you know, we think about, we know our customers need banking, but do they need banks? I was like wow, that's a pretty radical statement. And everybody talks about digital transformation. How does that affect your decisions in IT? Is it requiring you to speed things up, change your skill profile, maybe paint a picture there. >> Yeah, what we're seeing from the digital space within banking is that we definitely have to speed things up. We need to be more nimble and quicker within the IT infrastructure side, and be able to, again, address those customer demands and needs as they arise. And plus also we've got an increase government's regulations and compliance we have to deal with, so staying on top of that, and then cybersecurity is huge within the banking field. >> So maybe paint a picture of your infrastructure for us if you could. >> Sure. You know, prior to VxRail, we were traditional IT stack, server, storage, dedicated networking specific for that. As we were going through a review of Refresh, hyper-converged came out and it just really made a lot of sense. The simplified infrastructure to allow us to run our business and be able to operate in the way we need to. >> So can you talk a little bit more about that? Maybe the before and the after. What did things look like before in terms of maybe the complexity, and how many of these and those, or whatever detail you're comfortable with. >> Josh: Sure. >> And what happened afterwards? >> Yeah, before the VxRail platform, I mean, we just had racks of servers and storage. We co-located our data center facilities, so that was becoming a pretty hefty expense as we continued to grow within that type of simplified, or that traditional environment. By moving to the VxRail platform, we've been able to reduce rack space. I think at my last calculation, we went from about 34 to 40 U of rack space down to four, and we're running the exact same work load at a higher performance. >> How hard was it to get the business to buy into what you wanted to do? >> It was a lengthy process to kind of go through the review, the discussions, the expense associated with it. But I think being able to sell the concept of a simpler IT infrastructure, meaning that IT can provide quicker services, and not always be the in the weeds, or the break fix type group. We want to be able to provide more services back to our business. >> So you went to somebody, CFO, business, whoever, to ask for money, because you had a new project. But you would have had to do that anyway, correct? >> Josh: Yes, yes. >> Okay, so... >> Was it easier? >> Was it easier with the business case or were you nervous about that, because you were sticking your neck out? >> No, I think it was easier from the business line. That executive team does trust kind of my judgment with it, so what I brought forward was well-vetted, definitely had our partners involved, the relationship we have with Dell EMC, and they just really were there the entire step of the way. >> And what was the business impact? Or the IT impact, from your standpoint? >> Well, the IT impact is we are performing at a faster pace right now. You know, we're getting things done quicker within that environment. Our data protection has gotten a lot better with the addition of data domain, and the data protection software. >> Peter: Is that important in banking? >> (laughs) You want to make sure that people check your data, right? >> If it's my bank, yeah. >> So it's very important to how we operate and how we do things. >> So one of the things we've heard from our other CIO clients who like the idea of hyper-converged or converged, is that, yeah, I can see how the technology can be converged, but how do I converge the people? That it's not easy for them that they launch little range wars inside. Who's going to win? How did that play out at Hills Bank and Trust? >> You know, it wasn't that big of a shift within our environment. We're a very small IT team. I've got a systems group, a networking group, and a security group, so transforming or doing things differently within that IT space with the help of VxRail just wasn't a large impact. The knowledge transfer and the ramp-up time to get VxRail up and running was very minimal. >> You still have a systems group, a network group and a security group? >> At this point, we're still kind of evaluating that, and what's the right approach, right structure for IT within the bank? But at this point we're still operating within that. >> Did the move to VxRail affect in any way your allocation of labor? Whether it's FTE's, or how they spent their time? >> We're spending a little less time actually managing that infrastructure, and more focusing in on our critical line of business applications. And that's kind of been my whole goal with this, is to be able to introduce an infrastructure set that allows IT to become more of a service provider, and not just an operational group that fixes servers and storage. >> So you're saying a little less? >> A little less. >> It wasn't a dramatic change? >> We're still transforming though, so we still have this traditional IT structure within our group, so I do expect as we start to transform IT more, we'll get there, but I had to start with that hardware layer first. >> What do you think is achievable and what do you want to do in terms of freeing up resource, and what do you want to do with that resource? >> Again, I just want to be able to provide those services back to the bank. We have a lot of applications owned within the line of businesses. I'd like to be able to free up resources on my team to bring those back into IT. Again, more for the control and the structure around it, change management, compliance, making sure we're patching systems appropriately, things along those lines. >> And any desire to get more of your weekends back, or spend more time with your family, or maybe golf a little bit more? >> Exactly. Golf is always good. You know, we've actually seen a reduction in the amount of time we do have to spend managing these platforms, or at least the hardware standpoint, firmware upgrades, and doing the VxRail platform upgrades have gone really well with this, compared to upgrading our server firmware, making sure it matches the storage firmware, and then we've got to appropriately match the storage side or the networking side of it. >> And the backup comment. Easier to back up, more integrated? >> It's definitely more integrated and a lot easier. We've seen tremendous improvements in backup performance by implementing data domain with the data protection software, and it's just really simplified it, so backup is just a service that runs. It's not something we really manage anymore. >> Are you guys getting excited about being able to target their talents and attentions to some other problems that might serve the business? >> Exactly. You know, one of the themes I've picked up here at VMworld has been the digital workspace transformation. That's huge within our realm. We're very traditional banking, but there is a lot of demand internally and from our customers to be more mobile and provide more services in a channel they prefer. >> We're out of time, but two quick questions. Why Dell EMC? Why that choice? >> You know, we had an existing relationship with EMC pre-merger, and it was a solid relationship. They'd been there the entire way during the merger, every question was answered. It wasn't anything that was, oh, let me go check on this. They had everything down. We felt very comfortable with it. And again, it's the entire ecosystem within our data center. >> So trust, really. >> Josh: Absolutely. >> And then if you had to do it over again, anything you'd do differently, any advice you'd give your fellow peers? >> You know, I don't think so. Again, it's just the entire relationship, the process we went through was very well done. The engagement we had from the management team with Dell EMC was just spot on. >> Why do you think that was, sorry, third question. Why do you think that was so successful, then? What did you do up front that led to that success? >> You know, it was just a lot of relationship-building. In Iowa, we're all about building relationships and trust. We do that with our customers at the bank as well. We want to build long-lasting, trusting relationships, and Dell EMC does that exact same thing. >> All right, gents. Thanks very much for coming back to The Cube. >> Josh: Thanks, guys. Good to be here. >> Thanks, Josh, take care. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> All right, you're welcome. Keep it right there, buddy. We'll be right back with our next guest at The Cube. We're live from Vmworld 2017. Be right back.