(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of Fal.Con 22. I'm Dave Vellante with Dave Nicholson. This is day one of our coverage. We had the big keynotes this morning. Derek Jeter was one of the keynotes. We have a big Yankee fan here: George Kurtz is the co-founder and CEO of CrowdStrike. George, thanks for coming on The Cube. >> It's great to be here. >> Boston fan, you know, I tweeted out Derek Jeter. He broke my heart many times, but I can't hate on Jeter. You got to have respect for the guy. >> Well, I still remember I was in Japan when Boston was down you know, by three games and came back to win. So I've got my own heartbreak as well. >> It did heal some wounds, but it almost changed the rivalry, you know? I mean, >> Yeah. >> Once, it's kind of neutralized it, you know? It's just not as interesting. I mean, I'm a season ticket holder. I go to all the games and Yankee games are great. A lot of it used to be, you would never walk into Fenway park with, you know pin stripes, when today there's as many Yankee fans as there are... >> I know. >> Boston fans. Anyway, at Fenway, I mean. >> Yeah. >> Why did you start CrowdStrike? >> Biggest thing for me was to really change the game in how people were looking at security. And at my previous company, I think a lot of people were buying security and not getting the outcome that they wanted. Not- I got acquired by a company, not my first company. So, to be clear, and before I started CrowdStrike, I was in the antivirus world, and they were spending a lot of money with antivirus vendors but not getting the outcome I thought they should achieve, which is to stop the breach, not just stop malware. And for me, security should be outcome based not sort of product based. And the biggest thing for us was how could we create the sales force of security that was focused on getting the right outcome: stopping the breach. >> And the premise, I've seen it, the unstoppable breach is a myth. No CSOs don't live by that mantra, but you do. How are you doing on that journey? >> Well I think, look, there's no 100% of anything in security, but what we've done is really created a platform that's focused on identifying and stopping breaches as well as now, extending that out into helping IT identify assets and their hygiene and basically providing more visibility into IT assets. So, we talked about the convergence of that. Maybe we'll get into it, but. >> Dave Vellante: Sure. >> We're doing pretty well. And from our standpoint, we've got a lot of customers, almost 20,000, that rely on us day to day to help stop the breach. >> Well, and when you dig into the CrowdStrike architecture, what's so fascinating is, you know, Dave, we've talked about this: agent bad. Well, not necessarily, if you can have a lightweight agent that can scale and support a number of modules, then you can consolidate all these point tools out there. You talked about in your keynote, your pillars, workloads, which really end points >> Right. >> ID, which we're going to talk about. Identity data and network security. You're not a network security specialist, >> Right. >> But the other three, >> Yes. >> You're knocking down. >> Yeah. >> You guys went deep into that today. Talk about that. >> We did, most folks are going to know us for endpoint and Cloud workload protection and visibility. We did an acquisition almost two years to the day on preempt. And that was our identity play, identity threat protection and detection. And that really turned out to be a smart move, because it's the hottest topic right now. If you look at all the breaches over the last couple years, it's all identity based. Big, big talking points in our keynotes today. >> Dave Vellante: Right. >> And then the third area is on data, and data is really the you know, the new currency that people trade in. So how do you identify and protect endpoints and workloads? How do you tie that together with identity, as well as understanding how you connect the dots and the data and where data flows? And that's really been our focus and we continue to deliver on that for customers. >> And you've had a real dogma, I'll call it, about Cloud Native. I've had this conversation with Frank Slootman, "No we're not going to do a halfway house." You, I think, said it really well today. I think it was you who said it. If you've got On-Prem and Cloud, you got two code bases, >> George Kurtz: Right. >> That you got to maintain. >> That's it, yeah. >> And that means you're taking away resources from one or the other. >> That's exactly right. And what a lot of our competitors have done is they started On-Prem as an AV vendor, and then they took what they had and they basically put it in a Cloud instance called a Cloud, which doesn't really scale. And then, you know, where they need to, they basically still keep their On-Prem, and that just diffuses your engineering team. And most of the On-Prem stuff doesn't even have the features of what they're trying to offer from the Cloud. So either you're Cloud Native or you're not. You can't be halfway. >> But it doesn't mean that you can't include and ingest On-Prem data- >> Well, absolutely. >> into your platform, and that's what I think most people just some reason don't seem to understand. >> Well our agents run wherever. They certainly run On-Prem. >> Dave Vellante: Right. Right. >> And they run in the Cloud, they run wherever. But the crowd in the CrowdStrike is the fact that we can crowdsource this threat information at scale into our threat graph, which gives us unique insight, 7 trillion events per week. And you can't do that if you're not Cloud Native. And that crowd gives the, we call, community immunity. We see all kinds of attacks across 176 different countries. That benefit accrues to all of our customers. >> But how do you envision and maintain and preserve a lightweight agent that can support so many modules? As you do more acquisitions and you knock down new areas and bring in new functionality, go after things like operations technology, how is it that you're able to keep that agent lightweight? >> Well, we started as a platform company, meaning that the whole idea was we're going to build a lightweight agent. First iteration had no security capabilities. It was collect data, get it into a common data architecture or threat graph, in one spot. And then once we had the data then we applied AI to it and we created different workflows. So, the first incarnation was get data into the Cloud at scale. And that still holds true today. So if you think about why we can actually have all these different modules without an impact on the performance, it's we collect data one time. It's a threat data, you know? We're not collecting user data, but threat data collection mechanism. Once we have all that data, then we can slice and dice and create other modules. So the new modules never have to even touch the agent 'cause we've already collected the data. >> I'm going to just keep going, Dave, unless you shove your way in. >> No, no, go ahead. No, no, no. I'm waiting to pounce. >> But okay, so, I think, George, but George, I need to ask you about a comment that you made about we're not just shoving it into a data lake. But you are collecting all the data. Can you explain that nuance? >> Yeah. So there's a difference between a collect and forward agent. It means they just collect a bunch of data. They'll probably store it in a lot of space on the endpoint. It's slow and cumbersome, and then they'll forward it up into another data lake. So you have no context going into no context. Our agent is a smart agent, which actually allows us to always track the context of all these processes in what's happening on the endpoint. And it's a mini graph, meaning we keep track of the relationships. And as we ship that contextual information to the Cloud, we never lose that context. And then it goes into the bigger graph database, always with the same level of context. So, we keep the context of each individual workload or endpoint, and then across the Cloud, we have the context of all of those put together. It's massive. And that allows us to create different insights rather than a data lake, which is, you know, you're looking for, you're creating a bigger needle stack looking for needles. >> And I'm envisioning almost an index that is super, super fast. I mean, you're talking about sub, well second kind of near real time responses, correct? >> Absolutely. So a lot of what we do in terms of protection is already pushed down to the endpoint , 'cause it has intelligence and the AI model. And then again, the Cloud is always looking for different anomalies, not only on each individual endpoint or workload, but across the entire spectrum of our customer base. And that's all real time. It continually self-learns from all the data we collect. >> So when, yeah, when you've made these architectural decisions over time, there was a time when saying that you needed to run an agent could be a deal killer somewhere for people who argued against that. >> George Kurtz: Right. >> You've made the right decision there, clearly. Having everything be crowdsourced into Cloud makes perfect sense. Has that, though, posed a challenge from a sovereignty perspective? If you were deploying stuff On-Prem all over the place, you don't need to worry about that. Everything is here >> George Kurtz: Yeah. >> in a given country. How do you address the challenges of sovereignty when these agents are sending data into some sort of centralized Cloud space that crosses boundaries? >> Well, yeah, I guess what we would, let me go back to the beginning. So I started company in 2011 and I had to convince people that delivering endpoint security from the Cloud was going to be a good thing. >> Dave Vellante: Right. (chuckles) >> You know, you go into a Swiss bank and a bunch of other places and they're like, you're crazy. Right? >> Dave Nicholson: Right. >> They all became customers afterwards, right? And you have to just look at what they're doing. And the question I would have in the early days is, well, let me ask you are you using Dropbox, Box? Are you using a Microsoft? You know, what are you using? Well, they're all sending data to the Cloud. So good news! You already have a model, you've already approved that, right? So let's talk about our benefit. And you know, you can either have an adversary steal your data or you can send threat data to our Cloud, which by the way is in a lot of sovereign Clouds that are out there. And when you actually break it down to what we're sending to the Cloud, it's threat data, right? It isn't user files and documents and stuff. It's threat data. So, we work through all of that. And the Cloud is bigger than CrowdStrike. So you look at Sales Force, Service Now, Workday, et cetera. That's being used all over the place, Box, Dropbox. We just tagged onto it. Like why shouldn't security be the platform of record, and why shouldn't CrowdStrike be the platform of record and be the pillar of Cloud security? >> Explain your observability strategy, 'cause you acquired Humio for, I mean, I think it was $400 million, which is a song. >> Yeah. >> And then Reposify is the latest acquisition. I see that as an extension, 'cause it gives you visibility. Is that part of your security, of your observability play? Explain where you do play and don't play. >> Sure. Well observability is a big, you know, fluffy word. Where we play is in probably the first two areas of observability, right? There's five, kind of, pillars. We're focused on event collection. Let's get events from the endpoints. Let's get events from really anywhere in the network. And we can do that with Humio is now log scale. And then the second piece is with our agents, let's get an understanding of their, the asset itself. What is the asset? What state is it in? Does it have vulnerabilities? Does it have, you know, is it running out of disc space? Is it have, does it have a performance issue? Those are really the first two, kind of, areas of observability. We're not in application performance, we're in let's collect data from the endpoint and other sources, and let's understand if the thing is working, right? And that's a huge value for customers. And we can do that because we already have a privileged spot on the endpoint with our agent. >> Got it. Question on the TAM. Like I look at your TAMs, your charts, I love it. You know, generally do. Were you taking known data from you know, firms like IDC >> George Kurtz: Yeah. >> and saying, okay we're going to play there, now we're made this acquisition. We're new modules, now we're playing there. Awesome. I think you got a big TAM. And I guess that's, that's the point. There's no lack of market for you. >> George Kurtz: Right. >> But I do feel like there's this unknown unquantifiable piece of your TAM. IDC can't see it, 'cause they're kind of looking back >> George Kurtz: Right. >> seein' what the market do last year and we'll forecast it out. It's almost, you got to be a futurist to see it. How do you think about your total available market and the opportunity that's out there? >> Well, it's well in excess of 120 billion and we've actually updated that recently. So it's even beyond that. But if you look at all the modules each module has a discreet TAM and again, for what, you know, what we're focused on is how do you give an outcome to a customer? So a lot of the modules map back into specific TAM and product categories. When you add 'em all up and when you look at, you know, some of the new things that we're coming out with, again, it's well in excess of 120 billion. So that's why we like to say like, you know, we're not an endpoint company. We're really, truly a security platform company that was born in the Cloud. And I think if you see the growth rates, and one of the things that we've talked about, and I think you might have pointed out in prior podcasts, is we're the second fastest company to 2 billion dollars in annual recurring revenue, only behind Zoom. And you know I would argue- great company, by the way, a customer- but that was a black Swan event in a pandemic, right? >> Dave Vellante: I'll say! >> Yeah. >> So we are rarefied air when you think about the capabilities that we have and the performance and the TAM that's available to us. >> The other thing I said in my breaking analysis was 'cause you guys aspire to be a generational company. And I think you got a really good shot at being one, but to be a generational company, you have to have an ecosystem. So I'd love you to talk about the ecosystem, but where you want to see it in five years. >> Well, it really is a good point and we are a partner first company. Ecosystem is really important. Cameras probably can't see all the vendors that are here that are our partners, right? It's a big part of this show that we're at. You see a lot of, well, you see some vendors behind us. >> Yep. >> We have to realize in 2022, and I think this is something that we did well and it's my philosophy, is we are not the only game in town. We like to be, and we are, for many companies the security platform on record, but we don't do everything. We talked about network in other areas. We can't do everything. You can't be good and try to do everything. So, for customers today, what they're looking at is best of platform. And in the early days of security, I've been in it over 30 years, it used to be best of breed products, then it was best of suite, now it's best of platform. So what do I mean by that? It means that customers don't want to engineer their own solution. They, like Lego blocks, they want to pull the platforms, and they want to stitch 'em together via API. And they want to say, okay, CrowdStrike works with Okta, works with Zscaler, works with Proofpoint, et cetera. And that's what customers want. So, ecosystem is incredibly important for us. >> Explain that. You mentioned Okta, I had another question for you. I was at Reinforce, and I saw this better together presentation, CrowdStrike and Okta talking about identity. You've got an identity module. Explain to people how you're not competing with Okta. You guys complement each other, there. >> Well, an identity kind of broker, if you will, is basically what Okta does in others, right? So you log in single sign on and you get access. They broker access to all these other applications. >> Dave Vellante: Right. >> That's not what we do. What we do is we look at those endpoints and workloads and domain controllers and directory services and we figure out, are there vulnerabilities and are there threats associated with them? And we call that out. The second piece, which is critical, is we prevent lateral movement. So if credentials are stolen we can prevent those credentials from being laundered or used and moved laterally, which is a key part of how breaches happen. We then create a trust score on those endpoints and workloads. And we basically say, okay, do we think the trust on the endpoint and workload is high or low? Do we think the identity, you know, is it George on the endpoint, or not? We give that a score. And we pass that along to Okta or Ping or whoever, and they then use that as part of their calculus in how they broker access to other resources. So it really is better together. >> So your execution has been stellar. This is my competition question. You obviously have competition out there. I think architecturally, you've got some advantages. You have a great relationship with AWS. I don't know what's going on with Google, but Kevin's up on stage. >> George Kurtz: Yeah. >> They're now part of Google. >> George Kurtz: We have a great relationship with them. >> Microsoft obviously, a competitor. You obviously do some things in, >> Right. >> in Azure. Are you building the security Cloud? >> We are. We think we are, because when you look at the amount of data that we actually ingest, when you look at companies using us for critical decisions and critical protection, not only on their On-Prem, but also in their Cloud environment, and the knowledge we have, we think it is a security Cloud. You know, you had, you had Salesforce and Workday and ServiceNow and each of them had their respective Clouds. When I started the company, there was no security Cloud. You know, it wasn't any of the companies that you know. It wasn't the firewall companies, wasn't the AV companies. And I think we really defined ourselves as the security Cloud. And the level of knowledge and insights we have in our Cloud, I think, are world class. >> But you know, it's a difference of being those- 'cause you mentioned those other, you know, seminal Clouds. They, like Salesforce, Workday, they're building their own Clouds. Maybe not so much Workday, but certainly Salesforce and ServiceNow built their own >> Yeah. >> Clouds, their own data centers. You're building on top of hyperscalers, correct? >> Well, >> Well you have your own data centers, too. >> We have our own data centers, yeah. So when we first started, we started in AWS as many do, and we have a great relationship there. We continue to build out. We are a huge customer and we also have, you know, with data sovereignty and those sort of things, we've got a lot of our sort of data that sits in our private Cloud. So it's a hybrid approach and we think it's the best of both worlds. >> Okay. And you mean you can manage those costs and it's, how do you make the decision? Is it just sovereignty or is it cost as well? >> Well, there's an operational element. There's cost. There's everything. There's a lot that goes into it. >> Right. >> And at the end of the day we want to make sure that we're using the right technology in the right Clouds to solve the right problem. >> Well, George, congratulations on being back in person. That's got to feel good. >> It feels really good. >> Got a really good audience here. I don't know what the numbers are but there's many thousands here, >> Thousands, yeah. >> at the ARIA. Really appreciate your time. And thanks for having The Cube here. You guys built a great set for us. >> Well, we appreciate all you do. I enjoy your programs. And I think hopefully we've given the audience a good idea of what CrowdStrike's all about, the impact we have and certainly the growth trajectory that we're on. So thank you. >> Fantastic. All right, George Kurtz, Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson. We're going to wrap up day one. We'll be back tomorrow, first thing in the morning, live from the ARIA. We'll see you then. (calm music)

>>Welcome back to the aria in Las Vegas, Dave Valante with Dave Nicholson, Falcon 22, the Cube's continuous coverage. Sean Henry is here. He's the president of the services division and he's the chief security officer at CrowdStrike. And he's joined by Kevin mania, CEO of Mandy. Now part of Google Jens. Welcome to the cube. Thank you. Congrats on closing the Google deal. Thank you. That's great. New chapter, >>New >>Chapter coming fresh off the keynote, you and George. I really en enjoyed that. Let's start there. One of the things you talked about was the changes you've been, you've been in this business for a while. I think you were talking about, you know, doing some of these early stuff in the nineties. Wow. Things have changed a lot the queen, right? Right. You used to put the perimeter around the queen. Yeah. Build the Mo the Queen's left or castle new ballgame. But you were talking about the board level knowledge of security in the organization. Talk about that change. That's occurred in the last >>Decade. You know, boards are all about governance, right? Making sure everybody's doing the right things. And they've kind of had a haul pass on cybersecurity for a long time. Like we expect them to be great at financial diligence, they understand the financials of an organization. You're gonna see a maturity, I think in cybersecurity where I think board members all know, Hey, there's risk out there. And we're on our own to kind of defend ourselves from it, but they don't know how to quantify it. And they don't know how to express it. So bottom line boards are interested in cyber and we just have to mature as an industry to give them the tools they need to measure it appropriately. >>Sean, one of the things I wanted to ask you. So Steven Schmidt, I noticed changed his title from CISOs chief inf information security officer, the chief security officer. Your title is chief security officer. Is that a nuance that has meaning to you or is it just less acronym? >>It depends on the organization that you're in, in our organization, the chief security officer owns all risks. So I have a CISO that comes underneath me. Yep. And I've got a security folks that are handling our facilities, our personnel, those sorts of things, all, all of our offices around the globe. So it's all things security. One of the things that we've found and Kevin and I were actually talking about this earlier is this intersection between the physical world and the virtual world. And if you've got adversaries that want gain access to your organization, they might do it remotely by trying to hack into your network. But they also might try to get one of your employees to take an action on their behalf, or they might try to get somebody hired into your company to take some nefarious acts. So from a security perspective, it's about building an envelope around all things valuable and then working it in a collaborative way. So there's a lot of interface, a lot of interaction and a lot of value in putting those things together. And, >>And you're also president of the services division. Is that a P and L role or >>It is, we have a it's P P O P and L. And we have an entire organization that's doing incident response and it's a lot of the work that we're doing with, with Kevin's folks now. So I've got both of those hats today. >>Okay. So self-funded so in a way, okay. Where are companies most at risk today? >>Huh? You wanna go on that one first? Sean, you talk fast than me. So it's bigger bang for the buck. If >>You >>Talk, you know, when I, when I think about, about companies in terms of, of their risk, it's a lot of it has to do with the expansion of the network. Companies are adding new applications, new devices, they're expanding into new areas. There are new technologies that are being developed every day and that are being embraced every day. And all of those technologies, all of those applications, all of that hardware is susceptible to attack. Adversaries are looking for the vulnerabilities they can exploit. And I think just kind of that sprawl is something that is, is disconcerting to me from a security perspective, we need to know where our assets are, where the vulnerabilities lie, how do we plug the holes? And having that visibility is really critical to ensure that you're you're in, involved in mitigating that, that new architecture, >>Anything you >>Did. Yeah. I would like when I, so I can just tell you what I'm hearing from CISOs out there. They're worried about identity, the lateral movement. That's been kind of part of every impactful breach. So in identity's kind of top three of mind, I would say zero trust, whatever that means. And we all have our own definitions of migration to zero trust and supply chain risk. You know, whether they're the supplier, they wanna make sure they can prove to their customers, they have great security practices. Or if they're a consumer of a supply chain, you need to understand who's in their supply chain. What are their dependencies? How secure are they? Those are just three topics that come up all the time. >>As we extend, you know, talking about XDR the X being extend. Do you see physical security as something that's being extended into? Or is it, or is it already kind of readily accepted that physical security goes hand in hand with information security? >>I, I don't think a lot of people think that way there certainly are some and Dave mentions Amazon and Steve Schmidt as a CSO, right? There's a CSO that works for him as well. CJ's clear integration. There's an intelligence component to that. And I think that there are certain organizations that are starting to recognize and understand that when we say there's no real perimeter, it, it expands the network expands into the physical space. And if you're not protecting that, you know, if you don't protect the, the server room and somebody can actually walk in the doors unlocked, you've got a vulnerability that might be exploited. So I think to, to recognize the value of that integration from a security perspective, to be holistic and for organizations to adopt a security first philosophy that all the employees recognize they're, they're the, the first line of defense. Oftentimes not just from a fish, but by somebody catching up with them and handing 'em a thumb drive, Hey, can you take a look at this document? For me, that's a potential vulnerability as well. So those things need to be integrated. >>I thought the most interesting part of the keynote this morning is when George asked you about election security and you immediately went to the election infrastructure. I was like, yeah. Okay. Yeah. But then I was so happy to hear you. You went to the disinformation, I learned something there about your monitoring, the network effects. Sure. And, and actually there's a career stream around that. Right. The reason I had so years ago I interviewed was like, this was 2016, Robert Gates. Okay. Former defense. And I, I said, yeah, but don't we have the best cyber can't we go on the offense. He said, wait a minute, we have the most to lose. Right. But, but you gave an example where you can identify the bots. Like let's say there's disinformation out there. You could actually use bots in a positive way to disseminate the, the truth in theory. Good. Is, is that something that's actually happening >>Out there? Well, I think we're all still learning. You know, you can have deep fakes, both audible files or visual files, right. And images. And there's no question. The next generation, you do have to professionalize the news that you consume. And we're probably gonna have to professionalize the other side critical thinking because we are a marketplace of ideas in an open society. And it's hard to tell where's the line between someone's opinion and intentional deception, you know, and sometimes it could be the source, a foreign threat, trying to influence the hearts and minds of citizens, but there's gonna be an internal threat or domestic threat as well to people that have certain ideas and concepts that they're zealots about. >>Is it enough to, is it enough to simply expose where the information is coming from? Because, you know, look, I, I could make the case that the red Sox, right. Or a horrible baseball team, and you should never go to Fenway >>And your Yankees Jersey. >>Right. Right. So is that disinformation, is that misinformation? He'd say yes. Someone else would say no, but it would be good to know that a thousand bots from some troll farm, right. Are behind us. >>There's, it's helpful to know if something can be tied to identity or is totally anonymous. Start just there. Yeah. Yeah. You can still protect the identity over time. I think all of us, if you're gonna trust the source, you actually know the source. Right. So I do believe, and, and by the way, much longer conversation about anonymity versus privacy and then trust, right. And all three, you could spend this whole interview on, but we have to have a trustworthy internet as well. And that's not just in the tech and the security of it, but over time it could very well be how we're being manipulated as citizens and people. >>When you guys talk to customers and, and peers, when somebody gets breached, what's the number one thing that you hear that they wished they'd done that they didn't. >>I think we talked about this earlier, and I think identity is something that we're talking about here. How are you, how are you protecting your assets? How do you know who's authorized to have access? How do you contain the, the access that they have? And the, the area we see with, with these malware free attacks, where adversaries are using the existing capabilities, the operating system to move laterally through the network. I mean, Kevin's folks, my folks, when we respond to an incident, it's about looking at that lateral movement to try and get a full understanding of where the adversary's been, where they're going, what they're doing, and to try to, to find a root cause analysis. And it really is a, a critical part. >>So part of the reason I was asking you about, was it a P and L cuz you, you wear two hats, right? You've got revenue generation on one side and then you've got you protect, you know, the company and you've got peer relationships. So the reason I bring this up is I felt like when stucks net occurred, there was a lot of lip service around, Hey, we, as an industry are gonna work together. And then what you saw was a lot of attempts to monetize, you know, private data, sell private reports and things of that nature you were referencing today, Kevin, that you think the industry's doing a much better job of, of collaboration. Is it, can you talk about that and maybe give some examples? >>Absolutely. I mean, you know, I lived through it as a victim of a breach couple years ago. If you see something new and novel, I, I just can't imagine you getting away with keeping it a secret. I mean, I would even go, what are you doing? Harboring that if you have it, that doesn't mean you tell the whole world, you don't come on your show and say, Hey, we got something new novel, everybody panic, you start contacting the people that are most germane to fixing the problem before you tell the world. So if I see something that's new in novel, certainly con Sean and the team at CrowdStrike saying, Hey, there's because they protect so many endpoints and they defend nations and you gotta get to Microsoft. You have to talk to pan. You have to get to the companies that have a large capability to do shields up. And I think you do that immediately. You can't sit on new and novel. You get to the vendor where the vulnerability is, all these things have to happen at a great rate to speak. >>So you guys probably won't comment, but I'm betting dollars to donuts. This Uber lapses hack you guys knew about. >>I turned to you. >>No comment. I'm guessing. I'm guessing that the, that wasn't novel. My point being, let me, let me ask it in a more generic fashion that you can maybe comment you you're. I think you're my, my inference is we're com the industry is compressing the time between a zero day and a fix. Absolutely. Absolutely. Like dramatically. >>Yes. Oh, awareness of it and AIX. Yes. Yeah. >>Okay. Yeah. And a lot of the hacks that we see as lay people in the media you've known about for quite some time, is that fair or no, not necessarily. >>It's, you know, it's harder to handle an intrusion quietly and discreetly these days, especially with what you're up against and, and most CEOs, by the way, their intent isn't, let's handle it quietly and discreetly it's what do we do about it? And what's the right way to handle it. And they wanna inform their customers and they wanna inform people that might be impacted. I wouldn't say we know it all that far ahead of time >>And, and depends. And, and I, I think companies don't know it. Yeah. Companies don't know they've been breached for weeks or months or years in some cases. Right. Which talks about a couple things, first of all, some of the sophistication of the adversaries, but it also talks about the inability of companies to often detect this type of activity when we're brought in. It's typically very quickly after the company finds out because they recognize they've gotta take action. They've got liability, they've got brand protection. There, whole sorts of, of things they need to take care of. And we're brought in it may or may not be, become public, but >>CrowdStrike was founded on the premise that the unstoppable breach is a myth. Now that's a, that's a bold sort of vision. We're not there yet, obviously. And a and a, and a, a CSO can't, you know, accept that. Right. You've gotta always be vigilant, but is that something that is, that we're gonna actually see manifest, you know, in any, any time in the near term? I mean, thinking about the Falcon platform, you guys are users of that. I don't know if that is part of the answer, but part of it's technology, but without the cultural aspects, the people side of things, you're never gonna get there. >>I can tell you, I started Maning in 2004 at the premise security breaches are inevitable, far less marketable. Yeah. You know, stop breaches. >>So >>Yeah. I, I think you have to learn how to manage this, right? It's like healthcare, you're not gonna stop every disease, but there's a lot of things that you can do to mitigate the consequences of those things. The same thing with network security, there's a lot of actions that organizations can take to help protect them in a way that allows them to live and, and operate in a, in a, a strong position. If companies are lackadaisical that irresponsible, they don't care. Those are companies that are gonna suffer. But I think you can manage this if you're using the right technology, the right people, you've got the right philosophy security first >>In, in the culture. >>Well, I can tell you very quickly, three reasons why people think, why is there an intrusion? It should just go away. Well, wherever money goes, crime follows. We still have crime. So you're still gonna have intrusions, whether it has to be someone on the inside or faulty software and people being paid the right faulty software, you're gonna have war. That's gonna create war in the cyber domain. So information warriors are gonna try to have intrusions to get to command and control. So wherever you have command and control, you'll have a war fighter. And then wherever you have information, you have ESP Espino. So you're gonna have people trying to break in at all times. >>And, and to tie that up because everything Kevin said is absolutely right. And what he just said at the very end was people, there are human beings that are on the other side of every single attack. And think about this until you physically get physically get to the people that are doing it and stop them. Yes, this will go on forever because you can block them, but they're gonna move and you can block them again. They're gonna move their objectives. Don't change because the information you have, whether it's financial information, intellectual property, strategic military information, that's still there. They will always come at it, which is where that physical component comes in. If you're able to block well enough and they can't get you remotely, they might send somebody in. Well, >>I, in the keynote, I, I'm not kidding. I'm looking around the room and I'm thinking there's at least one person here that is here primarily to gather intelligence, to help them defeat. What's being talked about here. >>Well, you said it's, >>It's kind >>Of creepy. You said the adversary is, is very well equipped and motivated. Why do you Rob banks? Well, that's where the money is, but it's more than that. Now with state sponsored terrorism and, you know, exfiltration of state secrets, I mean, there's, it's high stake's games. You got, this >>Has become a tool of nation states in terms from a political perspective, from a military perspective, if you look at what happened with Ukraine and Russia, all the work that was done in advanced by the Russians to soften up the Ukrainians, not just collection of intelligence, not just denial of services, but then disruptive attacks to change the entire complexity of the battlefield. This, this is a, an area that's never going away. It's becoming ingrained in our lives. And it's gonna be utilized for nefarious acts for many, many decades to come. >>I mean, you're right, Sean, we're seeing the future of war right before us is, is there's. There is going to be, there is a cyber component now in war, >>I think it signals the cyber component signals the silent intention of nations period, the silent projection of power probably before you see kinetics. >>And this is where gates says we have a lot more to lose as a country. So it's hard for us to go on the offense. We have to be very careful about our offensive capabilities because >>Of one of the things that, that we do need to, to do though, is we need to define what the red lines are to adversaries. Because when you talk about human beings, you've gotta put a deterrent in place so that if the adversaries know that if you cross this line, this is what the response is going to be. It's the way things were done during nuclear proliferation, right? Right. During the cold war, here's what the actions are gonna be. It's gonna be, it's gonna be mutual destruction and you can't do it. And we didn't have a nuclear war. We're at a point now where adversaries are pushing the envelope constantly, where they're turning off the lights in certain countries where they're taking actions that are, are quite detrimental to the host governments and those red lines have to be very clear, very clearly defined and acted upon if they're >>Crossed as security experts. Can you always tie that signature back to say a particular country or a particular group? >>Absolutely. 100% every >>Time I know. Yeah. No, it it's. It's a great question. You, you need to get attribution right. To get to deterrence, right. And without attribution, where do you proportionate respond to whatever act you're responding to? So attribution's critical. Both our companies work hard at doing it and it, and that's why I think you're not gonna see too many false flag operations in cyberspace, but when you do and they're well crafted or one nation masquerades is another, it, it, it's one of the last rules of the playground I haven't seen broken yet. And that that'll be an unfortunate day. >>Yeah. Because that mutually assure destruction, a death spot like Putin can say, well, it wasn't wasn't me. Right. So, and ironically, >>It's human intelligence, right. That ultimately is gonna be the only way to uncover >>That human intelligence is a big component. >>For sure. Right. And, and David, like when you go back to, you were referring to Robert Gates, it's the asymmetry of cyberspace, right? One person in one nation. That's not a control by asset could still do an act. And it, it just adds to the complexity of, we have attribution it's from that nation, but was it in order? Was it done on behalf of that nation? Very complicated. >>So this is an industry of superheroes. Thank you guys for all you do and appreciate you coming on the cube. Wow. >>I love your Cape. >>Thank all right. Keep it right there. Dave Nicholson and Dave ante be right back from Falcon 22 from the area you watching the cue.

>>From Miami beach, Florida. It's the queue covering a chronics global cyber summit 2019 brought to you by Acronis. >>Okay, welcome back. Everyone's the cubes covers two days here in Miami beach. The Fontainebleau hotel for the Kronos has global cyber summit 2019. It's inaugural event around a new category emerging called cyber protection. Um, this isn't a wave that's going to be part of the modernization a week we've been calling cloud 2.0 or whatever you want to call it. A complete modernization of the it technology stack and development environment includes core data center to the edge and beyond. Our next guest is Dan havens, chief growth officer per Chronis. Dan, thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. And thank you for having me, Dan. So, uh, what does chief growth officer mean? You guys obviously are growing, so obviously we see some growth there. Yeah, numbers are there. What she, what she, we have a couple of divisions in the company where we see we can really accelerate the business. >>So we came in and we wanted to make some large investments here. One of those areas was sports. You're seeing race cars out here on the floor, you're seeing all kinds of baseball teams, soccer teams, and we're talking to everybody. We have 40 teams now that are using our technology for competitive advantage on the field. Uh, the other areas, OEM, so, uh, original equipment manufacturers, everybody from making a camera to a server somewhere, having a Cronus be embedded, that's a big angle for us and we just didn't have a lot of focus. So I came into to build those divisions. I've actually joined the CEO before in a prior life in his last company and did something similar for him on a similar, uh, back there and we had violent success. So yeah, it's been a lot of fun. I've been here a year and a half and we're killing it. >>We got triple digit growth in the sporting category and similar in the OEM. It's interesting, you know, I look at a lot of these growth companies and the kind of a formula. You see, you guys have a very efficient and strong product platform engineering group. A lot of developers, a lot of smart people in the company, and a strong customer facing for the lack of a better word, field. The group you're in, you're involved, this is not, and you got marketing supporting it in the middle. Yep. So nice, efficient organizational structure on a massive way. But cyber, because this isn't your grandfather's data projection, this is a platform. What's the pitch? So the key here for us is we have to always say, and, and it, it's, it's hard to simplify and we're easy. In fact, we're cost-effective. Sometimes I'll even say I'm cheap and I'm easy. >>And that does not go out of style for an enterprise, right? So our ability to take good old fashioned backup and these things that other people need and basically extend that across. Now I can have one window where I can control, keep 'em out. If somebody gets in or from the inside or a disaster happens. I from this one place can recover my data. I'm secure with my data. I have the ability to notarize my data. So this one, and by the way, key simple interface. Customers love simple. This one simple interface to be able to do that. Now it takes a lot of engineering that goes behind that. I have plenty of, I have fancy engineering degrees and all that, but I try forget that when I'm talking to a customer because at the end of the day it's gotta make sense. A mind that doesn't know, says no. >>And I think we do a pretty good job of simplifying the message, but as they get under the covers and they roll it out, they recognize that there's, you know, we, we, we have more engineers per employee capita than any company that would have 1600 employees. Simple, easy to use. It reduces the steps it takes to do something as a winning business model. You kind of come from that school you mentioned, you know, cheap and easy. That's what is key. Yeah. But we're in a world where complexity is increasing and costs are increasing. Yep. These are two dynamics that are facing every enterprise, cyber it everywhere. What's your story when you want to educate that person so they can get to that? Yes. I want to work with you guys. What's that? What's that getting to? Yes. Processed motion look like. So the beautiful part is is we sell software right now. >>Software can be purchased complex. You install it, you can figure, you do everything yourself. We also can sell that from a cloud standpoint. So now you consume it like a service. Just like you consume Netflix at home, right? I can now consume this protection as a service. You have bolts spectrums covered. Most enterprises are somewhere in the middle. We call that hybrid. So the idea here is that there's going to be components where this data's not leaving these four walls. It might be government agency, it might be some compliance factor, but the ability to be able to say yes anywhere on that spectrum, it makes it very easy for an executive to say, okay, but we have a very, as you leverage the cloud, the OnRamp for this can be as simple as turning on the surface and pointing it at a data source. I mean, you're a student of history, obviously even in this business for awhile, you've done been there longer than you'd think. >>Data protection was kind of like that. Afterthought, backup data recovery all based upon, yeah, we might have an outage or a flood or hurricane Sandy who knows what's going to happen. You know, some force majority out there might happen, but security is a constant disrupter of business continuity. The data's being hijacked and ransomware to malware attacks. This is a major disruption point of a world that was supposed to be a non disruptive operational value proposition. Yeah, so the world has changed. They went from a niche, well, we've got their architecture of throwing back up. You've got to think about it from day one at the beginning. This seems to be your, your story for the company. You think about security from the beginning with data protection. There's only one club in the bag, so to speak. Talk about that dynamic and how's that translating into your customer's storytelling customer engagements to show you, you used an interesting word at the beginning, disaster recovery years ago, I started my tech industry in 1992 right? >>Disaster recovery is when we're going to have a flood or a hurricane and the building's going to burn down. What we find is most of our customers, that's certainly happens, but that's not the driver. The driver now is somebody after my data because the world has changed. Not only has the amount of data we're collecting change, but the ability to illegally monetize somebody else's data has become reality and you have social media that is socializes if you get breached and so forth. So there's a number of drivers. Number one, I don't want to be turned out of business. Number two, I don't want to be ransom. Then number three, I certainly don't want to do the cover of the wall street journal tomorrow morning as a top executive who looked past data. We literally watch brands, I won't mention the brand now, but a very large fortune 1000 what's called out yesterday. >>We see it every few days and we watched the carnage of their brand get deluded because they weren't protected. So I think it's the perfect storm up. I've got a ton of data, so it's coming in from all directions. Secondly, I I'm concerned about, you know, my brand and been able to protect that data and then you know, what do I do? And the disaster in this case is not necessarily flood or fire. It's that somebody from the inside or outside got in the gym. Pretend that I'm a decision maker. I'm like, my head's exploding. I'm got all this carnage going on. I don't want to get fired yet. I know I'm exposed. Nothing's yet happened yet. Maybe I settled the ransomware thing, but I know I'm not in a good place. What's your story to any, what's your pitch to me? What's in it for me? Tell me. >>Tell me the posture and the, well, we're halfway home. If you say, I know I'm not in a good place, right? Cause oftentimes somebody has to get bit first or they have to see their neighbor get bit first and then they say, Hey come in. One of my first plays would be let's find out what place you really are. I can do that very quickly and an assessment, we can gather your systems, we can get a sense for our, where's your data? Where it's flowing from. What are you doing? What are you doing to protect it? We typically will come back and there's going to be spots where there's blind spots. Sometimes they're fully naked, right? But the good news is is now we know the problem, so let's not waste any time, but you can get onboard and baby steps or you know, we can bandaid it or we can really go into full surgery however you want to move forward. >>But the idea is recognizing this has to be addressed because it's a beast. Every single device that's out there on the floor, in any enterprise, any company is a way in and a POC are critical for your business model. You want to get them certainly candy taste, show the value quickly has a POC, gets structured unit assessment. You come in on a narrow entry nail something quick, get a win. What's the, what's the playbook? Love PLCs because we're so fast and easy meaning oftentimes you do PLCs cause you're complex software and you're trying to prove your point and so forth. I love to push a POC cause I can do it inside of days, but I get the customer to take the drive. It's just on the car lot. If I get you to drive it down the block, you're not bringing it back. You're bringing it home to the neighbors. >>Right. That is the case with our software and our hit rate is key. But again it's because it's straightforward and it's easy. So though most sales cycles don't push for pilot. I can't wait to get a pilot but we don't need 30 days to do it in a couple of days. They're going to recognize I can do this too. You have a good track record of POC. If I get, this is going to be the most conceding. You might have to edit this out. If I get an audience, I will win. That is the most conceited statement on the planet. And if I get the audience and they will look, and this is why we use the sports teams. Sports teams are the cool kids using this. And if I get an executive to say, what are you guys doing with the red Sox? If I could get him or her to look, it's game over. >>Hey being bad ass and having some swagger. It's actually a good thing if you got the goods to back it up. That's not fun. Piece here is that the product works well and it's not this massive mountain to hurdle. It is. We can get started today and take bites as we go, but you mentioned sports. Let's get into that talk track. As we have been covering sports data for now six years on the cube in San Francisco. We were briefly talking about it last night at the reception, but I think sports teams encapsulates probably the most acute use case of digital transformation because they have multiple theaters that are exploding. They got to run their business, they got a team to manage and they got fan experience and their consumers, so you've got consumerization of it. You got security of your customers either in a physical venue from a potential terrorist disaster could happen to just using analytics to competitive venture from the Moneyball model to whatever sports really encapsulates what I call the poster child of using digital into a business model that works. >>You've been successful with sports. We interviewed Brian shield yesterday. Yup. Red Sox, vice-president technology. He was very candid. He's like, look it, we use analytics. It helps us get a competitive, not going to tell you the secrets, but we have other issues that people not thinking about drone strikes while the games going on, potential terrorist attacks, gathering the people, you know, adding on East sports stadium to Fenway park. They have a digital business model integrating in real time with a very successful consumer product and business in sports. This has been a good market for you guys. What's been the secret to success? >> Explosive market? Couple things. First off, you summarized well, sports teams are looking for competitive advantage, so anything that can come in under that guys is gonna get some attention plus data, fan data, system data, ticket data. Um, in baseball, they're studying every single pitch of pictures ever thrown. >>They have video on everything. This is heavy lift data, right? So a place to put it saved money, a place to protect it, a pace to access it so that all of my Scouts that are out in the field with a mobile device have the ability to upload or evaluate a player while they're out still on them and on the field somewhere maybe in another country. And then add the added caveat in our sexiest piece. And that's artificial intelligence. You mentioned Moneyball, right? Uh, the, the entire concept of, of stat of statistics came out in the Moneyball concept and you know, we all saw the movie and we all read the book, but at the end of the day, this is the next step to that, which is not just written down statistics. Now we can analyze data with machine learning and we have very, we have unique baseball examples where there's absolutely no doubt they have the data. >>It's the ability to, how do I turn that to where I can be more competitive on our racing team. So we're actually working with teams improving, changing the car on the track during the race, using our software fact. We always look forward to opportunities where somebody says, Hey, come in and talk about that because it's incredibly sexy to see. Um, but sports are fun because first off they're the cool kids. Secondly, they're early adopters. If it's gonna give competitive advantage, uh, and third, they hit all the vectors. Tons of data have to protect it. >> It's our life in the business models digital too. So the digital transformation is in prime time. We cannot ignore the fact that people want wifi. They got Instagram, Facebook, all of these, they're all conscious of social media. There are all kinds of listening sports club, they have to be, they have to be hip, right? >>And being out front like that, think about the data they have come in at. And so not just to be smart on the field, they have to be smart with our customer. They're competing with that customer for four of their major sports or whatever. Major sports in the, in the, in the, in our case in this fashionable to be hip is cool for the product, but now you think about how they run their business. They've got suppliers, um, that have data and trusting suppliers with data's. There's a difficult protection formula. They've got national secure security issues. They have to protect, well they have to protect as a big part, but they have to protect, well first off these, these archives of data that are of 20 races ago or of this pitcher pitched three years ago and I have a thousand of his pitches and I'm looking for towels. >>That is, that's mission critical. But also, uh, to boot you have just business functions where I'm a, I'm a team and I have a huge telco sponsor and we are shifting back and forth and designing what their actual collateral is going to be in the stadium. They're actually using a Chronis to be able to do that up in the cloud where they can both collaborate on that. Not only doing it, but being able to protect it that way. It's, it's more efficient for them. It's interesting. I asked Brian shield this question, I asked her how does baseball flex and digital with the business model of digital with the success of the physical product or their actual product baseball. And he said an interesting thing. He's like the ROI models just get whacked out because what's the ROI of an investment in technology? It used to be total cost of ownership. >>The class that's right under the under the iceberg to sharpen whatever you use, you use that. We don't use that. We think about other consequences like a terrorist attack. That's right. So so the business model, ROI calculation shifting, do you have those kinds of conversations with some of these big teams and these sports teams? Because you know they win the world series, their brand franchise goes up if they win the national championship, but whatever their goal is has real franchise value. There's numbers on that. There's also the risk of say an attack or some sort of breach. >> Well, I won't mention the names, I won't mention the teams by name, but I have a half a dozen teams right now and two that are actually rolling out that are doing facial recognition just for security, a fan's entering their stadium. So they are taking the ownership of the safety of their fan to the level of doing visual or facial recognition coming into their stadium. >>Obviously the archive to measure against is important and we can archive that, but they're also using artificial intelligence for that. So you're absolutely right. They owe their fan a safe experience, not only a safe experience with good experience and so forth. And we love to be associated whenever we can with wins and losses. But to your point, how do you get, or how do you show a TCO on a disaster and nobody wants to, and by the way, we've seen enough of that to know it's looming. And there's also the supply chain too. I can buy a hotdog and a beer from Aramark, which is the red socks. They say supplier that's not owned by the red Sox. They have a relationship. But my data's in, I'm a consumer of the red Sox. I'm procuring a, you know, some food or service from a vendor. Yeah, yeah. My data's out there. >>So who protects that? Well, these are unique questions that come up all the time. Again, that's a business decision for the customer. The idea is with cloud collaboration, it's technically quite easy, but again, they have to decide where they're gonna commingle their data, how they're going to share. But the idea here is, again, back to the spectrum, fully cloud and accessible and locked down airtight government's scenario where we have a, you know, a lock bottom line is you get to pick where you want to be on there and there's going to be times where my example of talking to the, uh, the telco vendor, we're, we're actually going to share our data together and we're going to make us faster, make a quicker return and design this collateral for our stadium faster. Those are business decisions, but they're allowed because it, Coronas can be as hybrid as you need to be along the site. >>And again, that resonates with an executive. They never want to be wearing handcuffs and they don't want to pay overpay for stuff to not use our stuff. And if you decide to consume cloud, you, you just pay as you go. It's like your electricity bill. All right. So the red Sox are a customer of you guys. You have or they use your service. What other sports teams have you guys engaged with who you're talking to? Give a taste of some of the samples. So European, we have a couple of formula one teams. We have a racing point. We have the Williams team and formula E we have to cheetah the dragon team. We have a adventury, we also have Neo. So we have a good presence in the racing clubs. We have a ton of a world rally cars and, and, and motorcycle motorcross and so forth. >>Then you step over into European football. So we, we, we started in cars and recognize this is hot. So then we got our first, uh, European team, uh, and we had arsenal. As a matter of fact, we have one of the legends here signing with us today. And you know, I mean, they're rock stars, right? People follow them. Anyway, so we have arsenal and we did man city. Um, and we just landed, uh, Liverpool just did that this quarter, two weeks ago. I literally just, the ink is still drying. Um, and then you move into the United States, which I brought the, you know, I brought the circus to town on January one, 2019. First when was the Boston red Sox. We quickly followed that up. You'll see us on the home run fence at San Diego Padres. Volts bought for different reasons, but both very sexy reasons. So it's the reason. >>What were the main drivers? So in the case of the Boston red Sox, it was, it was a heavy lift on video. A lot of on the protection side. Um, the, uh, San Diego was file sync and share. So the example I was giving of, um, being able to share with your largest telco vendor or with your largest investors slash sponsor for your stadium, um, that was the driver. Now what's funny about both is as they get started, he's always expanding, right? So we have the baseball teams, we did land this quarter, the Dallas stars. So that's our first hockey club. I really want. And my goal is to try to get a couple in each of the main four categories and then some of the subs, um, just cause you get the cool kids, you get a tipping point. Everybody then wants to know what's going on. I have a hundred and play. >>And so we, we typically try to qualify regional where it makes sense. Um, uh, we're, you know, we're very close with a team here in the region. So, you know, they, in the feedback from, from the, from the successes you had implementations, why, what's uh, what's been the feedback from the customers. So here's the file in this. Sounds like I'm just tripping with sales guy and I apologize. Warning signs. Okay. If they use it, we're home free. So when you get Brian or any one of these guys that are using it, all I have to do is make sure that a new customer hears this person who has no reason to say anything else and just expose them to it. Because it's this unknown, scary thing that we're trying to protect against and being able to do that and have the freedom of how aggressive or you know, what metaphor am I going to cover that? >>And then also, uh, you know, the, obviously the economics work is you pay as you go. Um, it's, you know, it's a good story. Well, Dan, congratulations on the success. Um, great to see you guys really digging in and getting those PLCs and being successful. We watching your growth. Final question for you yes. Is all the data and the patterns that you see and all of customers. What's the number one reason why a Cronus is selected and why you women? I think that's an interesting question and I think that it's a couple of reasons. Number one, we work, we're easy. We have an enormous footprint. So there's a lot to reference from. Many people have already used us on the consumer side, so we're safe. So that's one reason I would also tell you however, that we have a great ecosystem because a Kronos is different than most software companies. >>Most software companies have a huge outside sales force that sells direct to customer a Chronis. Everybody here is a partner. We sell through a service provider to a channel member through a, through a, a, a, an ISV. Um, and then we have some direct enterprise. But the idea is there's a variety of solutions that can be baked on this foundation. And I think people like that variety. I, they, they like the, like the freedom of I'm not just trapped with this one thing. I can buy it and all options are available and I will tell you an it, nobody wants to be locked down. Everybody wants options, safety in numbers. They want their data protected with the whole cyber land lens. And they know everything's changing every six months. Something's different. And I don't want to be handcuffed in my desk. I want all options available. I think that's our best value from all right, Dan, thanks for coming on. Dan havens, chief growth officer, but Krohn is weird. The Chronis global cyber summit. I'm John Ford. Stay tuned for more cube coverage after this short break.

>> Announcer: From Miami Beach, Florida, it's The Cube, covering Acronis Global Cyber Summit 2019. Brought to you by Acronis. >> Welcome back everyone. We are here with The Cube coverage for two days. We're wrapping up, getting down on day one in the books for the Acronis Global Cyber Summit 2019. I'm John Furrier, your host of The Cube. We are in Miami Beach, the Fontainebleau Hotel. I'm personally excited for this next guest because I'm a huge Red Sox fan, even though I got moved out to California. Giants is in a different area. National League is different than American League, still my heart with the Red Sox. And we're here with an industry veteran, seasoned professional in IT and data, Brian Shield. Boston Red Sox Vice President of Technology and IT. Welcome to The Cube, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. It's great to be here. >> John: So congratulations on the rings. Since I moved out of town, Red sox win their World Series, break the curse of the Bambino. >> Hey we appreciate that. Thank you. >> My family doesn't want me back. You got to show >> Yeah, maybe I'll put this one up for the, maybe someone can zoom in on this. Which camera is the good one? This one here? So, there ya go. So, World Series champs for at least for another week. (laughter) >> Bummer about this year. Pitching just couldn't get it done. But, good team. >> Happens. >> Again, things move on, but you know. New regime, new GM going to come on board. >> Yup. >> So, but in general, Red Sox, storied franchise. Love it there. Fenway Park, the cathedral of baseball parks. >> Brian: Defnitely. >> And you're seeing that just play out now, standard. So just a great place to go. We have tickets there. So, I got to ask you. Technology, sports, really is modernized faster than I think any category. And certainly cyber security forced to modernize because of the threats. But sports, you got a business to run, not just IT and making the planes run on time. >> Sure. >> Scouts, money, whatever. >> Fans. >> You got fan experience. >> Stadium opportunities. >> Club management, scouts are out there. So you got business, team, fans. And data's a big part of it. That's part of your career. Tell us what the cutting edge innovation is at the Red Sox these days. >> I think baseball in general, as you indicated, it's a very evolving kind of environment. I mean historically I think people really sort of relish the nostalgia of sports and Fenway Park being as historic as it is, was probably the pinnacle of that, in some respects. But Red Sox have always been leaders and baseball analytics, you know. And everyone's pretty familiar with "Moneyball" and Brad Pitt. >> John: Is that a true story, he turned down the GM job? >> I'm told it is. (laughter) I don't know if I fully vetted that question. But over the last six, seven years, you know we've really turned our attention to sort of leveraging sort of technology across the businesses, right? Not just baseball and analytics and how we do scouting, which continues to evolve at a very rapid pace. But also as you pointed out, running a better business, understanding our fans, understanding fan behavior, understanding stadiums. There's a lot of challenges around running an effective stadium. First and foremost to all of us is really ensuring it's a great fan experience. Whether it's artificial intelligence, or IoT technologies or 5G or the latest Wifi, all those things are coming up at Fenway Park. You and I talked earlier about we're about to break ground for a new theater, so a live theater on the outside, beyond the bleachers type of thing. So that'll be a 5,400-seat arena, 200 live performances a year, and with e-sports, you know, complementing it. It just gives you an example of just how fast baseball is sort of transitioning. >> And the theater, is that going to be blown out from where that parking garage is, structure and going towards >> So the corner of Landsdown and Ipswich, if you think of that sort of corner back there, for those that are familiar with the Fenway area. So it's going to be a very big change and you'll see the difference too from within the ballpark. I think we'll lose a couple of rows of the bleachers. That'll be replaced with another gathering area for fans and things like that, on the back end of that theater. So build a great experience and I think it really speaks to sort of our ability to think of Fenway as more of a destination, as a venue, as a complementary experience. We want people to come to the area to enjoy sports and to enjoy entertainment and things. >> You know Brian, the consumerization of IT has been kicked around. Last decade, that was a big buzzword. Now the blending of a physical event and digital has certainly consumed the world. >> Absolutely. >> And we're starting to see that dynamic. You speak to a theater. That's a physical space. But digital is also a big part of kind of that complementary. It's not mutually exclusive for each other. They're integrated business models. >> Absolutely. >> So therefore, the technology has to be seamless. The data has to be available. >> Yup. >> And it's got to be secure. >> Well the data's got to be ubiquitous, right? I mean you don't want to, if we're going to have fans attending theater and then you're going to go to Fenway Park or they leave a game and then go to some other event or they attend a tour of Fenway Park, and beyond maybe the traditional what people might think about, is certainly when you think about baseball and Fenway Park. You know we have ten to twelve concerts a year. We'll host Spartan games, you know. This Christmas, I'm sorry, Christmas 2020 we now have sort of the Fenway Bowl. So we'll be hosting the AAC ACC championship games there with ESPN. >> John: Hockey games? >> Hockey games. Obviously we have Liverpool soccer being held there so it's much more of a destination, a venue for us. How we leverage all the wonderful things about Fenway Park and how we modernize, how we get basically the best of what makes Fenway Park as great as it is, yet as modern as we can make it, where appropriate to create a great fan experience. >> It's a tough balance between balancing the brand and having things on brand as well. >> Sure. >> Does that come into your job a lot around IT? Saying being on brand, not kind of tearing down the old. >> Yeah absolutely. I think our CEOs and leadership team, I mean it's not success for us if you pan to the audience and everyone is looking at their phone, right? That's not what we aspire to. We aspire to leverage technology to simplify people's experience of how do you get to the ballpark, how do I park, how do I get if I want to buy concessions or merchandise, how do I do it easily and simply? How do we supplement that experience with maybe additional data that you may not have had before. Things like that, so we're doing a lot of different testing right now whether it's 4D technologies or how we can understand, watch a play from different dimensions or AI and be able to perhaps see sort of the skyline of Boston since 1912, when Fenway Park launched... And so we sort of see all these technologies as supplemental materials, really kind of making it a holistic experience for fans. >> In Las Vegas, they have a section of Las Vegas where they have all their test beds. 5G, they call it 5G, it's really, you know, evolution, fake 5G but it's a sandbox. One of the challenges that you guys have in Boston, I know from a constraint standpoint physically, you don't have a lot of space. How do you sandbox new technologies and what are some of the things that are cool that people might not know about that are being sandboxed? So, one, how do you do it? >> Yeah. >> Effectively. And then what are some of the cool things that you guys are looking at or things they might not know about that would be interesting. >> Sure. Yeah so Fenway Park, we struggle as you know, a little bit with our footprint. You know, honestly, I walk into some of these large stadiums and I get instant jealousy, relative to just the amount of space that people have to work with and things. But we have a great relationship with our partners so we really partner, I think, particularly well with key partners like Verizon and others. So we now have 5G partially implemented at Fenway Park. We expect to have it sort of fully live come opening day next year. So we're really excited about that. We hope to have a new version of Wifi, the latest version of Wifi available, for the second half of the year. After the All-Star Break, probably after the season's over. But before our bowl game hopefully. We're looking at some really interesting ways that we can tease that out. That bowl game, we're really trying to use that as an opportunity, the Fenway Bowl, as an opportunity to make it kind of a high-tech bowl. So we're looking at ways of maybe doing everything from hack-a-thons to a pre-egaming sort of event to some interesting fan experiential opportunities and things like that. >> Got a lot of nerds at MIT, Northeastern, BU, Bentley, Babson, all the schools in the area. >> Yeah, so we'll be reaching out to colleges and we'll be reaching out to our, the ACC and AACs as well, and see what we can do to kind of create sort of a really fun experience and capitalize on the evolving role of e-sports and the role that technology can play in the future. >> I want to get to the e-sports in a second but I want to just get the plug in for Acronis. We're here at their Global Cyber Summit. You flew down for it, giving some keynote speeches and talks around security. It's a security company, data protection, to cyber protection. It is a data problem, not a storage appliance problem. It's a data problem holistically. You get that. >> Sure. Sure. >> You've been in the business for a long time. What is the security kind of posture that you guys have? Obviously you want to protect the data, protect privacy. But you got to business. You have people that work with you, supply chain, complex but yet dynamic, always on environment. >> That's a great question. It's evolving as you indicated. Major League Baseball, first and foremost, does an outstanding job. So the last, probably last four plus years, Major League Baseball has had a cyber security program that all the clubs partake in. So all 30 clubs are active participants in the program. They basically help build out a suite of tools as well as the ability to kind of monitor, help participate in the monitoring, sort of a lot of our cyber security assets and logs And that's really elevated significantly our posture in terms of security. We supplement that quite a bit and a good example of that is like Acronis. Acronis, for us, represents the ability for us to be able to respond to certain potential threats like ransom-ware and other things. As well as frankly, what's wonderful about a tool like this is that it allows us to also solve other problems. Making our scouts more efficient. We've got these 125 scouts scattered around the globe. These guys are the lifeblood of our, you know, the success of our business. When they have a problem, if they're in Venezuela or the Dominican or someplace else, in southeast Asia, getting them up and running as quickly as we can, being able to consume their video assets and other things as they're scouting prospects. We use Acronis for those solutions. It's great to kind of have a partner who can both double down as a cyber partner as well as someone who helps drive a more efficient business. >> People bring their phone into the stadiums too so those are end points now connecting to your network. >> Definitely. And as you pointed out before, we've got great partnerships. We've got a great concession relationship with Aramark and they operate, in the future they'll be operating off our infrastructure. So we're in the point of rolling out all new point-of-sale terminals this off-season. We're excited about that 'cause we think for the first time it really allows us to build a very comprehensive, very secure environment for both ourselves and for all the touchpoints to fans. >> You have a very stellar career. I noticed you were at Scudder Investments back in the '80s, very cutting-edge firm. FTD that set the whole standard for connecting retailers. Again, huge scale play. Can see the data kind of coming out, they way you've been a CIO, CTO. The EVP CIO at The Weather Channel and the weather.com again, first mover, kind of pioneer. And then now the Red Sox, pioneering. So I got to ask you the modernization question. Red Sox certainly have been cutting-edge, certainly under the last few owners, and the previous Henry is a good one, doing more and more, Has the business model of baseball evolved, 'cause you guys a franchise. >> Sure. >> You operate under the franchisor, Major League Baseball, and you have jurisdictions. So has digital blurred the lines between what Advanced Media unit can do. You got communities developing outside. I watch the games in California. I'm not in there but I'm present digitally. >> Sure. Sure. >> So how has the business model flexed with the innovation of baseball? >> That's a great question. So I mean, first off, the relationship between clubs like ours and MLB continue to evolve. We have a new commissioner, relatively new commissioner, and I think the whole one-baseball model that he's been promoting I think has been great. The boundaries sometimes between digital assets and how we innovate and things like that continues to evolve. Major League Baseball and technology groups and product groups that support Major League Baseball have been a fantastic partner of ours. If you look at some of the innovations with Statcast and some of the other types of things that fans are now becoming more familiar with. And when they see how fast a runner goes or how far a home run goes and all those sort of things, these kinds of capabilities are on the surface, but even like mobile applications, to make it easy for fans to come into ballparks and things like that really. What we see is really are platforms for the future touchpoints to all of our customers. But you're right, it gets complicated. Streaming videos and people hadn't thought of before. >> Latin America, huge audience for the Red Sox. Got great players down there. That's outside the jurisdiction, I think, of the franchise agreement, isn't it? (laughs) >> Well, it's complicated. As this past summer, we played two games in England, right? So we enjoy two games in London, sadly we lost to the Yankees in both of those, but amazing experience and Major League Baseball really hats off to those guys, what they did to kind of pull that together. >> You mentioned Statcast. Every year when I meet with Andy Jassy at AWS, he's a sports fan. We love to talk sports. That's a huge, kind of shows the power of data and cloud computing. >> No doubt. >> How do you guys interface with Statcast? Is that an Amazon thing? Do they come to you? Are they leveraging dimensions, camera angles? How does that all work? Are you guys involved in that or? >> Brian: Oh yeah, yeah. >> Is that separate? >> So Statcast is just one of many data feeds as you can imagine. One of the things that Major League Baseball does is all that type of data is readily available to every club. So every club has access to the data. The real competitive differentiator, if you will, is how you use it internally. Like how your analysts can consume that data. We have a baseball system we call Beacon. We retired Carmine, if you're familiar with the old days of Carmine. So we retired Carmine a few years ago with Beacon. And Beacon for us represents sort of our opportunity to effectively collapse all this information into a decision-making environment that allows us to hopefully to kind of make the best decisions to win the most games. >> I love that you're answering all these questions. I really appreciate it. The one I really want to get into is obviously the fan experience. We talked about that. No talent on the field means no World Series so you got to always be constantly replenishing the talent pool, farm system, recruiting, scouting, all these things go on. They're instrumental. Data's a key driver. What new innovations that the casual fan or IT person might be interested in what's going on around scouting and understanding the asset of a human being? >> Right. Sure. I mean some of this gets highly confidential and things, but I think at a macro level, as you start to see both in the minor leagues and in some portions of the major leagues, wearable technologies. I think beyond just sort of player performance information that you would see traditionally with you might associate it with like Billy Beane, and things like that with "Moneyball" which is evolved obviously considerably since those days. I mean understanding sort of player wellness, understanding sort of how to get the most out of a player and understanding sort of, be able to kind of predict potential injuries and accelerate recoveries and being able to use all of this technology where appropriate to really kind of help sort of maximize the value of player performance. I mean, David Ortiz, you know, I don't know where we would have been in 2018 without, you know, David. >> John: Yeah. >> But like, you know >> Longevity of a player. >> Absolutely. >> To when they're in the zone. You wear a ring now to tell you if you're sleeping well. Will managers have a visual, in-the-zone, don't pull 'em out, he can go an extra inning? >> Well, I mean they have a lot of data. We currently don't provide all that data to the clubhouse. I mean, you know, and so If you're in the dugout, that information isn't always readily available type of thing. But players know all this information. We continue to evolve it. At the end of the day though, it's finding the balancing act between data and the aptitudes of our coaching staff and our managers to really make the wise decisions. >> Brian, final question for you. What's the coolest thing you're working on right now? Besides the fan having a great experience, 'cause that's you kind of touched on that. What's the coolest thing that you're excited about that you're working on from a tech perspective that you think is going to be game-changing or interesting? >> I think our cloud strategy coming up in the future. It's still a little bit early stage, but our hope would be to kind of have clarity about that in the next couple months. I think is going to be a game-changer for us. I think having, you know, we enjoy a great relationship with Dell EMC and yet we also do work in the cloud and so being able to leverage the best of both of those to be able to kind of create sort of a compelling experience for both fans, for both player, baseball operations as well as sort of running an efficient business, I think is really what we're all about. >> I mean you guys are the poster child for hybrid cloud because you got core, data center, IoT, and >> No doubt. So it's exciting times. And we're very fortunate that with our relationship organizations like Dell and EMC, we have leading-edge technologies. So we're excited about where that can go and kind of what that can mean. It'll be a big step. >> Okay two personal questions from me as a fan. One is there really a money-counting room like in the movie "The Town"? Where they count a big stack of dollar bills. >> Well, I'm sure there is. I personally haven't visited it. (laughs) I know it's not in the room that they would tell you it is on the movie. (laughter) >> And finally, can The Cube get press passes to cover the games, next to NESN? Talk tech. >> Yeah, we'll see what we can do. >> They can talk baseball. We can talk about bandwidth. Right now, it's the level five conductivity. We're looking good on the pipes. >> Yeah we'll give you a tech tour. And you guys can sort of help us articulate all that to the fans. >> Thank you so much. Brian Shield, Vice President of Technology of the Boston Red Sox. Here talking about security and also the complications and challenges but the mega-opportunities around what digital and fan experiences are with the physical product like baseball, encapsulates kind of the digital revolution that's happening. So keep covering it. Here in Miami, I'm John Furrier. We'll be right back after this short break. (techno music)

>>From Miami beach, Florida. It's the cube covering a Cronus global cyber summit 2019. Brought to you by Acronis. >>So Ron, welcome back to the keeps coverage of kronas cyber global cyber summit 2019. I'm John furrier here in Miami beach. Our next guest is Pat Hurley, vice president, general manager of the Americas in sales and customer relationships. Get Debbie Juan. Hey, thanks for having me. Welcome to Miami beach. Lovely place to have an event. So I hear ya. You got a lot of competition going on between the U S America's in the AMIA teens and it's very competitive group. >> The European team is very confident. I think we'll show them tomorrow what we're made of. We've been recruited very hard for some players that are Latin American. I think we'll show them a finger too. You've got a big soccer story there. We do. Yeah. We've, uh, we've got a few sports partnerships that we have across the globe. Uh, some of the first partnerships we had were actually within formula one. >>And we really try to correlate the story of the importance of, uh, data protection and cyber protection in the sporting industry because a lot of people don't think about the amount of data that's actually being generated in the space. A formula one car generates between, you know, two and three terabyte through three gigabytes of data on every lap, tons of telemetry devices that are kicked, collecting information from the car, from the road service, from the, the general environment. They're taking that data and then sending it back to the headquarter, analyzing it and making very small improvements to the car to make sure that they can qualify faster, run a faster lap, make the right type of angle into a turn, uh, which can really differentiate them from being, you know, first, second, third, 10th in a qualifying session. On the soccer side. We do have some partnerships with uh, arsenal, Manchester city, inter Milan, and we just signed a partnership as well with Liverpool. >>So we are very popping in that space here in the U S we have some other sports that we're big fans of. I'm personally a big Boston red Sox fan, being a Boston native and we do have a sports partnership with the red Sox, which has been an unbelievable partnership with them. And learning more about the use cases that they solve and using our technology has been really cool. >> You know, Patty, you bring up the sports thing and we were kidding before we on camera around the trading, you know how people do sports deals and they trade, you know, merchandise for consumer benefit or customer benefits. But really what is happening is sports teams encapsulate really the digital transformation in a nutshell because most sports franchises are, have been traditionally behind. But now with the consumerization of it and digital can go back to 2007 since the mobile phone. >>Really, I mean it's iPhone. Yeah. Since that time, sports and capsulates every aspect of it, consumer business fan experience. And it really has every, every, almost every element of what we see now as a global IOT problem opportunity. So it really encapsulates the use case of an integrated and and needed solution. Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you think about the amount of data that's, that's out there today and the fast way that it's growing, you know, the explosion of, uh, of data in the, in the world today, sports have different unique challenges. So obviously they have large fan bases that need to be able to access the data and understand what's going on with their favorite sports teams. Um, for us it's really, you know, these technology partnerships that we have with these guys, it runs through all these different areas of, you know, in many cases we didn't really understand that they were using it for. >>So, you know, the red Sox for example, they've got Fenway park and iconic stadium, you know, the Mecca of baseball. If you haven't been there yet, I suggest all your viewers that they go and check it out, give me a call, we'll try and get you set up there. But, um, you know, the, the, the experience that the fans have there is all around their data experienced there. Right? And it's not just baseball games. It could be hockey games that Fenway park, it could be a concert that they're having. A phone buys a lot of different events. These stadiums are open year round and the ability to move, share access, protect the data in that stadium is really important to how they're functioning as an organization. We talked to their I-Team quite regularly about how they're using our solutions. They're talking about uh, different aspects of artificial intelligence, different ways they can use our products and machine learning. >>Obviously with the new solutions that we have in the market today around cybersecurity or helping them to address other challenges that they face. Um, as an organization, these are realtime challenges in their physical locations, national security issues, terrorist attacks could happen. There are venues, there are public gathering places too. Absolutely. We announced our partnership with them back in may and I was shocked to hear them on the main stage announcing that they had this great partnership with the Kronos was talking about their unique cyber security needs. They started talking about drone technology and I'm thinking, all right, a drone flies in the stadium. Maybe at breaks and it falls on a player and we're paying $20 million for one of these pitchers to be out there on the Hill or an interest, a fan or maybe they're collecting some video data to then share it out. >>And that's red Sox IP. No, they're talking about cybersecurity threats in the sense that a drone, a remotely controlled device could come in and lightened incendiary device in the, in the stadium and that to them as a real security server. And that's frontline for the it guys. That's what keeps them up at night. Yeah. And that's really an attack take time. Oh yeah, absolutely. What are the use cases that are coming out of some of your customers, cause you guys have a unique integrated solution with a platform as an end to end component too. You have a holistic view on data, which is interesting and unique. People are kind of figuring this out, but you guys are ahead of the game. What are some of the use cases that you've seen in the field with customers that highlight the benefits of taking a holistic view of the data? >>Yeah, absolutely. So we look at it as kind of backups dead, right? We have, we've combined the old world of backup and disaster recovery with the new world of cybersecurity and we combine that to a term we're calling cyber protection because it really requires an end to end solution and a lot of different things need to be working properly to prevent these attacks from happening. Uh, you need to be very proactive in how you're going about that. We address it with what we call 'em, the Kronos cyber platform. And what this is, is a unique, multi-tiered multi-tenant offering that's designed specifically for service providers. We have just under 6,000 servers, providers actively selling our cyber protection solutions today and they use this for are for a multiple different aspects. And usually the beachhead has something like backup. Every company needs backup. It's more of a commodity type solutions, a lot of different players in the game out there, but they take it a step further, use that same backup technology to then do disaster recovery. >>They can do files, they can share, they can do monitoring. We have notary solutions based on blockchain technologies. Now, this whole suite of cybersecurity solutions, all of this is with a single pane of glass, one platform that of a service provider can go in and work with their customers and make sure that their data is protected, make sure that their physical machines are virtual machines, they're PCs, their Macs are all protected, that data's protected, it's secure, but it's also accessible, which is an important part of you can take your data wrapping a nice bow buried a hundred feet underground, but then you can't use it, right? So you want to be able to make sure that you can actually, uh, leverage the technology there. Um, we've seen explosive growth, especially in, in my market. I think the numbers are pretty crazy. It's something like 90% of the market today in the U S has served in some capacity by a service provider. >>And this could be a small to medium size business that's served by local service fire to those really big guys that are out there. Let's on with how large your target audience, you mentioned search probably multiple times when you're out selling your target persona, your target audience, and you're trying to reach into, so we touch, everybody know, you equate it to kind of what we do with the red Sox, right? You walk into that city and the 38,000 people that, well, some of those people are just, you know, regular Joe's, right? They, they go to work every day. They have a computer at home, they have a mobile device. They probably have multiple mobile devices. We protect that for them. We call them a consumer. Slash. Prosumers. We work at a lot of very large retail organizations. If you walk into some of those shops today, you'll be able to see our software on a shelf there. >>You work with one of those tech squads where they're starting to attach services to it and you get more of a complete offering there. We then scale up a little bit further to some OEM providers. You work with companies like Honeywell and Emerson that are manufacturing devices that embed our software on there. They white label it and deliver it out. These are connected devices. You think about the, you know the, the explosion of IOT devices in the market today. We're protecting that stuff as well. We work with very large enterprises, so some of the, the major players that you see in the manufacturing space are standing up standardizing on Acronis process control process automation vendors are using our Chronis and we can deliver the solution because of the way it's so flexible in a very consumable way for them. Those enterprises can actually act as a service provider for their employees so we can actually take our technology, deploy the layer in their infrastructure where they have complete control. >>They might not want to be in an Uber cloud, they might not want to work with Chrome OS data center. They want to have and hold that data. They want to make sure it's on site. We enable that type of functionality and then the fastest growing area for us is what I hit on earlier within the service provider community. We're recruiting hundreds of service providers every quarter. We've got some great partners here. Give you an example of a service provider. You mentioned the red size, I'm assuming is that a vendor that might be working within that organization, but still it sounds like that's a supplier to the red Sox. How, how broad is that definition? It gives us many points. Yeah, it's a really good point. So we work with hosting providers. Look, can be regional hosting providers to multinational hosting providers. Some of the very big names that you've, you're probably familiar with. >>We work with, uh, we work with, uh, telco providers who work with ISV providers or sorry, ISP providers, um, kind of regional telco providers that provide a myriad of different services all the way down to your kind of local mom and pop type service providers where you've got a small business, maybe they've got 30 to 50 employees, they're servicing probably 200 to 300 customers and they want to provide a very secure, safe, easy to use complete solution to their customers. Uh, those could be focused on certain verticals so they could be focused on healthcare, financial services, construction, et cetera. Um, we have some that are very niche within like dental services or chiropractice offices, small regional doctor's offices. Uh, and the, the beauty of that, and I was getting the partners earlier, is we have partnerships with companies like ConnectWise where those are tools that service providers are using on a very daily basis. >>So essentially the platform gives you that range and that's the typical typical platform. So you have that broad horizontally scalable capability and the domain expertise either be what solution from you guys or can ISV or someone within your ecosystem is that they get that. Right? Absolutely. And that's what really differentiates us is our ability to integrate into that plat, into our platform, into their platform and make those connections. So you don't need to learn 12, 14, 15 different technologies. You've got a small suite of offerings in a single pane of glass, very easy to use, very intuitive. Um, the integrations that we have with these partners like ConnectWise, like Ingram micro, really differentiate us because what they do is they provide open API capabilities. They provide software development kits where these partners can go ahead and build it the way they want to sell it. >>You know, it's interesting when the cloud came out and as on premise has changed to a much more agile dev ops kind of mindset that forced it to think like a service provider. I think like an operating system, it's an operating environment basically. So that service provides an interesting angle and I want to get your thoughts on this because I think this is where you guys have such a unique opportunity to just integrate solution because you could get into anything and you got ISV to back that up. So I guess the question I would have is for that enterprise that's out there that's looking to refactor and replatform their entire operation, or it could be a large enterprise, it has a huge IOT opportunity or challenge or a service provider is looking at having a solution. What's the pitch that you would give me if I'm the one of those customers? >>Say, Hey Pat, what's the pitch? So you need a, you need a trusted provider that's been in the business for a number of years that understands the data protection and security markets that Kronos has that brand. We've been doing this for about 16 years. We were founded in Singapore, we're headquartered out of Switzerland and we've got a lot of really smart guys in the back room. Was building good technologies that our partners were able to use. Um, we look at it a lot of different ways. I mentioned our go to market across a lot of different verticals and a lot of different um, kind of routes for those. The way we deliver our solution. It provides the flexibility for an enterprise to a classic reseller to um, you know, a VAR or a service, right? It's delivering services. It can be delivered to those guys how they want to consume it. >>So as an example, we may work with a smaller service provider that doesn't have any colo capabilities. We provide data centers so they could have a very quick turnkey solution, allows them to get up and running with their business, selling backup within minutes to their customers. We can also work with very large enterprises where we can deliver the complete platform to them and then they have complete control over it. We sprinkle in some professional services to make sure that we're giving them the support that they need and then they're running the service for themselves. What we've really seen in terms of a trend is that a lot of these VARs, we have about 4,500 of them in North America and they're starting to look at their businesses differently. Say, I gotta adapt or die here. I gotta figure out what my next business model is. >>How am I going to be the next one that's in the news flash that says, Hey, they've been acquired, or Hey Thoma Bravo made a big investment in me. Right? They need to convert to this services business or Kronos enables that transformation to happen. I mean, I can see you guys really making money for channel partners because they want solutions. They want to touch the customer, they want to maybe add something they could bring into it or have high service gross profits around services. Absolutely. So, yeah, our solution is unique in the sense that allows partners to sell multiple offerings to, you're getting an additional layer of stickiness providing multiple solutions to a customer. You're using the same technology, so your it team is very familiar with what they're using on a daily basis. Um, you're reducing the amount of churn for your customers because you're selling so much additional there that they're really stuck with you. >>That's a good thing. Uh, and beyond that, your increasing ARPU, average revenue per user is a key metric that all of our partners are looking at. And these guys are owner operators, right? They're business owners. They're looking at the bottom line. I mean, it's interesting the operating leverage around the consistent platform just lowers, it gives them software economic model. They can get more profit over time as they make that investment look at at the end of the day, channel partners care about a couple things, money, profit and customer happiness. Absolutely. And it helps to have them want to have a lot of one offs and a lot of, you know, training, you know, anything complicated, anything confusing, anything that requires a lot of resources, they're not going to like a, it's also great to have events like this where you're able to, to press the flesh with these guys and, and being face to face and understand their real world challenges that they're dealing with on a daily basis. >>How has the sport's a solution set that you've been involved in? How has that changed the culture of Acronis? Is that, has that, has that changed as, you know, sports is fun. People love sports, they have real problems. It's a really great use case as well. How's that change the culture? It's been amazing. I, so one from a branding perspective, we are a lot more recognized, right? Um, the most important thing about these partnerships for us is that they're actually using the technology. So, you know, we've got the red Sox here with us today. We've got arsenal represented, we've got Williams, we've got Roush racing, we've got a NASCAR car back here. Um, they use our technology on a daily basis and for each one of them we solve different types of use cases. Whether it's sending them large amount of video data from an essence studio over to Fenway park, or if it's a scout out in the field that needs to send information back and their laptop crashes, how do they recover? >>A lot of these different use cases, you can call them right back to a small business owner. You don't have to be a multibillion dollar sports organization with the same challenge. Well, I'm smiling because we've been called the ESPN of tech to they bring our set. We do let the game day thing. We certainly could love to come join you in all these marquee events that you have. We'd love to have it. Yeah, so if you follow us on social, we're out there and that, that's a big part of it. You mentioned one of ours looking for what our partners looking for. They want a personal relationship too. A lot of that goes away with technology nowadays and being able to really generate that type of a, of a personal relationship. These partnerships enable that to happen and they're very anything, I don't know anything about cars. >>We started partnering with formula one. All of a sudden I know everything about 41 I go to these races. I tell everybody I don't know anything about cars and I ended up being the, the subject matter export for him over over the weekend. So we'd love to have you guys join us. We'd love all of our partners. They get more engaged in the sports aspect of it because for us, it really is something that, um, again, they're using us in real life scenarios. We're not paying to put a sticker on a car that's going 300 miles. It's not traveling as a real partnership. Exactly. Pat, congratulations on your success and good luck on people owning away the numbers. Congratulations. Thank you very much. Just the cube coverage here at the Chronis global cyber summit 2019 I'm John furry. More coverage after this short break.

(snazzy music) >> From Boston, Massachusetts, it's the CUBE, covering WTG Transform 2019, brought to you by Winslow Technology Group. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is the CUBE exclusive coverage of WTG Transform 2019. It's the Winslow Technology's Dell MC user group, and therefore, we are always thrilled when, not only do we have a user on the program, but we have a local user who's also the Chief Information Officer. Shawn Rothman, who is the Chief Information Officer, CIO, of the town of Weymouth. Coming up from the south shore, a nice easy drive when the traffic isn't too bad. Shawn, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, glad to be here. It's Boston though, so there is no such thing as the traffic being easy. >> Yeah, the traffic and the weather. Just wait a little while, it'll change greatly. We've got the mast plate right behind us with Fenway, and yeah, it is starting to get to the evening. You know, Friday commute back. But uh, you're probably going to the Sox game, so you won't have to worry about that. >> Exactly. That's my plan, is to wait it out. >> All right. So, as I mentioned, town of Weymouth about 12 miles from where we're sitting right now. You know, you're the CIO. Give us a little bit about, you know, what that means to be the CIO of a town here in the commonwealth of Massachusetts. >> Yeah, so you know, IT is so different when you get out of the corporate setting. We have a lot of high needs or requirements. There's a lot of public safety needs, things like that, that are consuming often. But the drive isn't always there to take advantage of it, so we've been continually working to grow new things, to grow new technology in Weymouth. We uh, I'm really struggling, sorry. >> Yeah, no it's great Shawn. Give us a little bit about, you know, what you can, how many people that you've served in the community, and your team itself, how many people you've managed, just to give us a little bit of a scope. >> So, in Weymouth we have about 500 full time employees within the town side and another, you know, more than 2,000 if you take in our schools. Now we have a separate IT department for our schools. We share combined networks, so we have a private dark fiber network that runs throughout the town that we share. I provide services for police, fire, DPW, emergency management, finance, all the things that you kind of do, public works. It's a lot of different areas. There's a lot of different needs and ways that we can meet the needs of the public. >> Okay, that's awesome. So underneath that, so infrastructure is a piece of what your group owns, yes? >> Yes. >> Give us a little bit, kind of scope that out for us, what that means when kind of the pieces that allow you to deliver those services to your constituents. >> Right, so it starts with lots of things people don't see, right? So, IT is often very hidden. If we're doing our job well, people don't really notice us. So, like I said, we have dark fiber all throughout the town that enables us to do everything from public safety communication, data replication, allows for DR so we have multiple sites for our data. We run Compellent SANs, based off running Dell servers, running VM ware. And, we run two different set ups. One at the town hall and another at my police department, and that provides my disaster recovery and things like that. From there, then you start looking towards facing of customers. We need to run bills for taxes, and water, and utilities, things like that, so, all those pieces start to play in. We're continually looking to grow in that area, so, one of the areas that we're actually looking at right now is increasing our presence online, as far as people's ability to apply for permits online to have inspectional services done online, to pay their bills online. You know, I think everybody wants their experience online to be Amazon, right? Go, open up your cart, buy up, put a bunch of things in there, hit pay, and be done. And, that's the direction we're trying to move, these days. >> Shawn, some of the fascinating conversations I've had in the last few years is when you talk to government agencies, municipalities, and the like, and that word gets thrown out, digital transformation, and what that means from you. Right, you know, today, you know, me? I live in a town here in Massachusetts. Yeah, gosh, why can't everything just be something that, I talk to my home assistant and it just gets done magically, and it's nice and easy? But you know, it's a journey that we all need to go on and there's some things that, you know, you don't have unlimited budget and unlimited head count to be able to manage that, so talk to us a little bit about, you know, does digital transformation mean something in your world? And, how are you helping to deliver some of those mobile enabled services? >> Yeah, so that really, I run into really two challenges there, well multiple challenges, more than two, but two really big challenges. One is getting people used to the idea of doing things in a way that they haven't done it before. You don't need to come to the town hall, go online and do it. You have to understand that billing, if you pay online, you pay with a credit card, there's charges that get assumed. With Amazon, that gets eaten by the product managers and things like that. Well, we don't have that, so those are surprise fees for people. So, those are challenges to teach people about. We also then have problems with teaching people within the town. Hey, I've always done my business x way. People come and see me, they do things, they fill out this form, they move along, and it's kind of transforming their abilities to understand and move in that technical age, also. Those are kind of the two biggest areas. Outside of that, is, you know, the up side is huge. We're talking to another community that has kind of gone to these things online, and they say they're getting like 40 to 60 percent of their building permits between midnight and 6:00 AM. That's a whole new world for the way the government has worked in the past. >> Yeah. Shawn, come on. I live in a town here in Massachusetts. We are proud of our 300 year old legacy and the way things are done here, which is a little bit different than the conversation we're generally having in IT these days. >> Yes, for sure. (chuckling) >> Great. So, you mentioned a little bit, you know, I hear Compellent SANs. You've got disaster recovery and all these pieces, so tie us into this event. What brings you to WTG Transform? Of course, I know Compellant has a long history of the team here, Scott and the team, so how long have you been working with them? And, tell us a little bit about the relationship. >> We've had a Compellent SAN actually installed by Winslow, it's got to be nine plus years ago to get started, and it's just kind of been one of those things that grew. You know, we started with Compellent, and then Dell bought Compellent, and we had HP servers, and while it was nice to have everything together, so we moved to our Dell servers, but I love to come here and see kind of where things are moving, where Winslow is going, where there's opportunities for me kind of to meet people's needs in ways that they're looking for that maybe I don't know about, ways I can protect our data, ways I can protect my constituents and my residents. Those are all concerns, and this is a great opportunity for kind of see all those different pieces, to get my hands on things once in a while, or to hear something that would get me moving in a direction maybe I hadn't previously looked at. >> Shawn, is there any initiatives you have, or technologies that you're poking at that you'd like to understand more, or things that you're looking for from kind of the vendor community that would make your world easier? >> It's hard to know what you don't know, and so there's always something new. Every time I get here, I see something that I'm like, "Man, this could really be transformative for us." It's often different to figure out how and when to implement those things. So, I don't know that I have, you know, I don't know that thing I don't know yet, I think I haven't found that key hot button for this year, I don't think. >> You bring up a really good point, a question I actually asked for years is, how do you keep up? And, of course the answer is, I don't care if you're the smartest person at the most important company in the world, no one can keep up with all of it all the time. So, the question is, who do you rely on to help you to understand and learn some of those new things? >> Yeah, so I mean, we all look at things from media, and there's Spiceworks is a great community I use, but my VARs are kind of, that's really where the rubber meets the road for me, And, you know, Winslow has just been, there are many things that I would, I'll take and leave. There's technology I use, and if I had to replace it, I get rid of it. Well, Compellent, Winslow, that combo is, I mean, it's called dead-hand technology, I mean, it doesn't leave, it's not going any place. They're crucial to me, knowing where to go, how to go. They help me figure out road maps, they've always kind of gone above and beyond in making sure that my needs are met, and that I know the direction things are going before I get jammed into a spot where I can't get out. >> Yeah, so last question I have for you, Shawn. CIO of a town here in Massachusetts, where do you find it kind of different and the same compared to the peers that you'd be talking to at an event like this? >> It's hard to find other venues like this. There's some government run programs, but they're not the same. >> So, I guess just to, what I'm asking for is when you talk to your peers here, do you have some of the same concerns and the same looking at technology, or are there opportunities or challenges you have working for a town government that maybe the average mid-sized business wouldn't? >> Sorry, yeah. Yeah, I think we share a lot of security concerns. Security, I think our concerns are very much aligned, right, we're all worried about what's happening outside our environment, we're concerned about the weakest link, which tends to be our end users ability to click a button, but outside of that, when we get to like how business really works, at times we're very different, at times we're very similar. So, my needs for disaster recovery, again, two buildings across town, that works for me. If I lose those two buildings across town, two, three, four miles, I've lost everything I care about, where a company, you lose something, you need to have backups across the country. So, there's some different needs, but the reality is we both need to protect our data, we both want to provide quality service to the people that depend on us, we both want to be moving in positive directions, we both have constraints on our budgets. So, I think there's a lot of overlap for me that I can pick up information here, even if sometimes the exact model they use isn't the same as what I would use. >> All right, last question I have for you, Shawn is, when I travel, you know, I live about 26.2 miles from downtown Boston, but I say I'm from Boston because people definitely outside this country, and even across this country, don't necessary know much of Massachusetts, so when you talk to somebody, how do we put Weymouth on the map? >> So, Weymouth is on the south shore of Boston, but generally, I would say the same thing, I'm from Boston, but we're, like you said, I mean, we're less than 10 miles really from the edges of Boston. We're right along the water, we have one, actually, one of the busiest ports in Massachusetts, outside of Boston, itself, Boston harbor, and so, you know, we're kind of right here in the middle of everything. >> Yeah, absolutely. Well it's getting close to beach season, it's actually the first day of Summer here. So, Shawn, thank you so much for sharing this story, town of Weymouth, and what's happening in your world, really appreciate you joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> All right, we'll be back with more coverage here from WTG Transform 2019. I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watching the CUBE. (snazzy music)

>> Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's The Cube, covering AWS re:Inforce 2019. Brought to you by Amazon web services and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. It's The Cube's live coverage here in Boston, Massachusetts for AWS re:Inforce. This is Amazon web services' inaugural security conference around Cloud security. I'm John Furrier. My host Dave Vellante. We've got special guest, we've got another CSO, Dan Meacham, VP of Security and Operations at Legendary Entertainment. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on The Cube. >> Oh, thank you. It's a very pleasure to be here. >> We had some fun time watching the Red Socks game the other night. It was the best night to watch baseball. They did win. >> Was it ever. >> Always good to go to Fenway Park, but we were talking when we were socializing, watching the Red Socks game at Fenway Park about your experience. You've seen a lot of waves of technology you've been involved in. >> Yes, yes. >> Gettin' dirty with your hands and gettin' coding and then, but now running VP of Security, you've seen a lot of stuff. >> Oh. >> You've seen the good, bad, and the ugly. (laughing) >> Yeah, fun business. >> It is. >> You guys did Hangover, right? >> Yes. >> Dark Knight. >> Yes. >> Some really cool videos. >> Good stuff there, yeah. And it's just amazing cause, you know, how much technology has changed over the years and starting back out in the mid-eighties and early nineties. Sometimes I'm just like, oh, if I could only go back to the IPXSX days and just get rid of botnets and things like that. (laughing) That'd be so much easier. Right? >> The big conversation we're having here, obviously, is Amazon's Security Conference. What's your take on it? Again, security's not new, but their trying to bring this vibe of shared responsibility. Makes sense because they've got half of the security equation, but you're seeing a lot of people really focusing on security. What's your take of, so far, as an attendee? >> Well, as we look and, cause I like to go to these different things. One, first to thank everybody for coming because it's a huge investment of time and money to be at these different shows, but I go to every single booth to kind of take a look to see where they are cause sometimes when we look at some of the different technology, they may have this idea of what they want the company to be and they're maybe only a couple years old, but we may see it as a totally different application and like to take those ideas and innovate them and steer them in another direction that kind of best suits our needs. But a lot of times you see a lot of replay of the same things over and over again. A lot of folks just kind of miss some of the general ideas. And, um, this particular floor that we have, there's some interesting components that are out there. There's a lot of folks that are all about configuration management and auto correction of misconfigured environments and things like that. Which is good, but I think when we look at the shared responsibility model and so forth, there's some components that a lot of folks don't really understand they really have to embrace in their environment. They think, oh it's just a configuration management, it's just a particular checklist or some other things that may fix something, but we really got to talk about the roots of some of the other things because if it's not in your data center and it's out somewhere else, doesn't mean you transfer the liability. You still have the ownership, there's still some practice you got to focus on. >> Take us through the Cloud journey with Legendary. You put some exchange service out there. Continue. >> Yes, and so as we started bringing these other different SaaS models because we didn't want to have the risk of if something went down we lost everything, but as we did that and started embracing Shadow IT, because if this worked for this particular department, we realized that there wasn't necessarily a applicable way to manage all of those environments simultaneous. What we mean after the standpoint, like we mentioned before, the MFA for each of these different components of the Cloud applications. So that naturally led us into something like single sign-on that we can work with that. But as we started looking at the single sign-on and the device management, it wasn't so much that I can't trust you devices, it's how do I trust your device? And so that's when we created this idea of a user-centric security architecture. So it's not necessarily a zero trust, it's more of a, how can I build a trust around you? So, if your phone trusts you based off of iometrics, let me create a whole world around that, that trust circle and build some pieces there. >> Okay, so, let me just interrupt and make sure we understand this. So, you decided to go Cloud-First. You had some stuff in colo and then said, okay, we need to really rethink how we secure our operations, right? So, you came up with kind of a new approach. >> Correct. >> Cloud approach. >> Absolutely. And it's Cloud and so by doing that then, trying to focus in on how we can build that trust, but also better manage the applications because, say for example, if I have a collaboration tool where all my files are, I may want to have some sort of protection on data loss prevention. Well, that Cloud application may have its own piece that I can orchestrate with, but then so does this one that's over here and this one over here and so now I've got to manage multiple policies in multiple locations, so as we were going down that piece, we had to say, how do we lasso the security around all these applications? And so, in that particular piece, we went ahead and we look forward at where is the technology is, so early on, all we had were very advanced sims where if I get reporting on user activity or anomalies, then I had limited actions and activities, which is fine, but then the CASB world ended up changing. Before, they were talking about Shallow IT, now they actually do policy enforcement, so then that allowed us to then create a lasso around our Cloud applications and say, I want to have a data loss prevention policy that says if you download 5,000 files within one minute, take this action. So, before, in our sim, we would get alert and there were some things we could do and some things we couldn't, but now in the CASB I can now take that as a piece. >> So more refined >> Exactly. >> in policy. Now, did you guys write that code? Did you build it out? Did you use Cloud? >> We work with a partner on help developing all this. >> So, when you think about where the CASBs were five years ago or so, it was all about, can we find Shadow IT? Can we find where social security numbers are? Not necessarily can I manage the environment. So, if you were take a step back to back in the old days when you had disparate in network architecture equipment, right? And you wanted to manage all your switches and firewalls, you had to do console on each and every one. Over time as it progressed, we now had players out there that can give you a single console that can get in and manage the entire network infrastructure, even if it's disparate systems. This is kind of what we're seeing right now within the Cloud, where on the cusp of it, some of then are doing really good and some of them still have a lot of things to catch up to do, but we're totally stoked about how this is working in this particular space. >> So, talk about, like, um, where you are now and the landscape that you see in front of you. Obviously, you have services. I know you. We met through McAfee, you have other, some fenders. You have a lot of people knocking on your doors, telling you stuff. You want to be efficient with your team. >> Yes. >> You want to leverage the Cloud. >> Yes. >> As you look at the landscape and a future scape as well, what're you thinking about? What's on your mind? What's your priorities? How're you going to navigate that? What're some of the things that's driving you? >> (sighing) It's a cornucopia of stuff that's out there. (laughing) Depending on how you want to look at it. And you can specialize in any particular division, but the biggest things that we really want to focus on is we have to protect out data, we have to protect our devices, and we have to protect our users. And so that's kind of that mindset that we're really focused on on how we integrate. The biggest challenges that we have right now is not so much the capability of the technology, because that is continually to evolve and it's going to keep changing. The different challenges that we have when we look in some of these different spaces is the accountability and the incorporation and cooperation because a incident's going to happen. How are you going to engage in that particular incident and how are you going to take action? Just because we put something in the Cloud doesn't mean it was a set and forget kind of thing. Because if it was in my data center, then I know I have to put perimeter around it, I know I got to do back-ups, I know I got to do patch management, but if I put it in the Cloud, I don't have to worry about it. That is not the case. So, what we're finding a lot is, some of these different vendors are trying to couch that as, hey we'll take care of that for you, but in fact, reality is is you got to stay on top of it. >> Yeah. And then you got to make sure all the same security practices are in there. So, the question I have for you is: what's the security view of the Cloud versus on premise (muttering) the data's in the perimeter, okay that's kind of an older concept, but as your thinking about security in Cloud, Cloud security versus on premise, what's the difference? What's the distinction? What's the nuances? >> Well, if we go old-school versus new-school, old-school would say, I can protect every thing that's on prem. That's not necessarily the case that we see today because you have all this smart technology that's actually coming in and is eliminating your perimeter. I mean, back in the day you could say, hey, look, we're not going to allow any connections, inbound or outbound, to only outside the United States cause we're just a U.S.-based company. Well, that's a great focus, but now when you have mobile devices and smart technology, that's not what's happening. So, in my view, there's a lot of different things that you may actually be more secure in the Cloud than you are with things that are on prem based off of the architectural design and the different components that you can put in there. So, if you think about it, if I were to get a CryptoLocker in house, my recovery time objective, recovery point objective is really what was my last back-up. Where if I look at it in the Cloud perspective, it's where was my last snapshot? (stuttering) I may have some compliance competes on there that records the revision of a file up to 40 times or 120 times, so if I hit that CryptoLocker, I have a really high probability of being able to roll back in the Cloud faster than I could if I lost something that was in prem. So, idly, there's a lot more advantages in going with the Cloud than on prem, but again, we are a Cloud-First company. >> Is bad user behavior still your biggest challenge? >> Is it ever! I get just some crazy, stupid things that just happen. >> The Cloud doesn't change that, right? >> No! (laughing) No, you can't change that with technology, but a lot of it has to be with education and awareness. And so we do have a lot of very restrictive policies in our workforce today, but we talk to our users about this, so they understand. And so when we have things that are being blocked for a particular reason, the users know to call us to understand what had happened and in many cases it's, you know, they clicked on a link and it was trying to do a binary that found inside of a picture file of all things on a web browser. Or they decided that they wanted to have the latest Shareware file to move mass files and then only find out that they downloaded it from an inappropriate site that had binaries in it that were bad and you coach them to say, no this is a trusted source, this is the repository where we want you to get these files. But my favorite though is, again, being Cloud-First, there's no reason to VPN into our offices for anything because everything is out there and how we coordinate, right? But we do have VPN set up for when we travel to different countries with regards to, as a media company, you have to stream a lot of different things and, so, if we're trying to pitch different pieces that we may have on another streaming video-on-demand service, some of those services and some of those programmings may not be accessible into other countries or regions of the world. So, doing that allows us to share that. So, then, a lot of times, what we find is we have offices and users that're in different parts of the world that will download a free VPN. (laughing) Because they want to to be able to get to certain types of content. >> Sounds good. >> And then when you're looking at that VPN and that connection, you're realizing that that VPN that they got for free is actually be routed through a country that is not necessarily friendly to the way we do business. They're like, okay, so you're pushing all of our data through that, but we have to work through that, there's still coaching. But fortunately enough, by being Cloud-First, and being how things are architected, we see all that activity, where if was all in prem, we wouldn't necessarily know that that's what they were doing, but because of how the user-centric piece is set-up, we have full visibility and we can do some coaching. >> And that's the biggest issue you've got. Bigtime, yes? Visibility. >> What's a good day for a security practitioner? >> (laughing) A good day for a security practitioner. Well, you know, it's still having people grumpy at you because if they're grumpy at you, then you know you're doing you job, right? Because if everybody loves the security guy, then somebody's slipping something somewhere and it's like, hey, wait a minute, are you really supposed to be doing that? No, not necessarily. A good day is when your users come forward and say, hey, this invoice came in and we know that this isn't out invoice, we want to make sure we have it flagged. And then we can collaborate and work with other studios and say, hey, we're seeing this type of vector of attack. So, a good day is really having our users really be a champion of the security and then sharing that security in a community perspective with the other users inside and also communicating back with IT. So, that's the kind of culture we want to have within out organization. Because we're not necessarily trying to be big brother, we want to make it be able to run fast because if it's not easy to do business with us, then you're not going to do business with us. >> And you guys have a lot of suppliers here at the re:Inforce conference. Obviously, Amazon, Cloud. What other companies you working with? That're here. >> That're here today? Well, CrowdStrike is a excellent partner and a lot of things. We'll have to talk on that a little bit. McAfee, with their MVISION, which was originally sky-high, has just been phenomenal in our security architecture as we've gone through some of the other pieces. We do have Alert Logic and also Splunk. They're here as well, so some great folks. >> McAfee, that was the sky-high acquisition. >> That is correct and now it's MVISION. >> And that's the Cloud group within McAfee. What do they do that you like? >> They brought forth the Cloud access security broker, the CASB product, and one of the things that has just been fascinating and phenomenal in working with them is when we were in evaluation mode a couple of years ago and were using the product, we're like, hey, this is good, but we'd really like to use it in this capacity. Or we want to have these artifacts of this intelligence come out of the analytics and, I kid you not, two weeks later the developers would put it out there in the next update and release. And it was like for a couple of months. And we're like, they're letting us use this product for a set period of time, they're listening to what we're asking for, we haven't even bought it, but they're very forward-thinking, very aggressive and addressing the specific needs from the practitioner's view that they integrated into the product. It was no-brainer to move forward with them. And they continue to still do that with us today. >> So that's a good experience. I always like to ask practitioners, what're some things that vendors are doing that either drive your crazy or they shouldn't be doing? Talk to them and say, hey, don't do this or do this better. >> Well, when you look at your stop-doing and your start doing list and how do you work through that? What really needs to be happening is you need your vendor and your account manager to come out on-site once a quarter to visit with you, right? You're paying for a support on an annual basis, or however it is, but if I have this Cloud application and that application gets breached in some way, how do I escalate that? I know who my account manager is and I know the support line but there needs to be an understanding and an integration into my incidents response plan as when I pick up the phone, what' the number I dial? And then how do we engage quickly? Because now where we are today, if I were to have breach, a compromised system administrator account, even just for 20 minutes, you can lose a lot of data in 20 minutes. And you think about reputation, you think about privacy, you think about databases, credit cards, financials. It can be catastrophic in 20 minutes today with the high-speed rates we can move data. So, my challenge back to the vendors is once a quarter, come out and visit me, make sure that I have that one sheet about what that incident response integration is. Also, take a look at how you've implemented Am I still on track with the artchitecture? Am I using the product I bought from you effectively and efficiently? Or is there something new that I need to be more aware of? Because a lot of times what we see is somebody bought something, but they never leveraged the training, never leveraged the support. And they're only using 10% of the capability of the product and then they just get frustrated and then they spend money and go to the next product down the road, which is good for the honeymoon period, but then you run into the same process again. So, a lot of it really comes back to vendor management more so than it is about the technology and the relationship. >> My final question is: what tech are you excited about these days? Just in general in the industry. Obviously security, you've got the Cloud, you're Cloud-First, so you're on the cutting edge, you've got some good stuff going on. You've got a historical view. What's exciting you these days from a tech perspective? >> Well, over the last couple of years, there's been two different technologies that have really started to explode that I really am excited about. One was leveraging smart cameras and facial recognition and integrating physical stock with cyber security stock. So, if you think about from another perspective, Cameras, surveillance today is, you know, we rewind to see something happen, maybe I can mark something. So, if somebody jumped over a fence, I can see cause it crossed the line. Now the smart cameras over the last three or four or five years have been like, if I lost a child in a museum, I could click on child, it tells me where it is. Great. Take that great in piece and put it in with your cyber, so now if you show up on my set or you're at one of our studios, I want the camera to be able to look at your face, scrub social media and see if we can get a facial recognition to know who you are and then from that particular piece, say okay, has he been talking trash about our movies? Is he stalking one of our talent? From those different perspectives. And then, moreover, looking at the facial expression itself. Are you starstruck? Are you angry? Are you mad? So, then that way, I know instantly in a certain period of time what the risk is and so I can dispatch appropriately to have security there or just know that this person's just been wandering around because they're a fan and they want to know something. So, maybe one of those things where we can bring them a t-shirt and they'll move on onto their way and they're happy. Versus somebody that's going to show up with a weapon and we have some sort of catastrophic event. Now, the second technology that I'm really pretty excited about. Is when we can also talk a little about with the Five G technology. So, when everybody talk about FIJI, you're like, oh, hey, this is great. This is going to be faster, so why are we all stoked about things being super, super fast on cellular? That's the technical part. You got to look at the application or the faculty of things being faster. To put it into perspective, if you think about a few years ago when the first Apple TV came out, everybody was all excited that I could copy my movies on there and then watch it on my TV. Well, when internet and things got faster, that form factor went down to where it was just constantly streaming from iTunes. Same thing with the Google Chrome Cast or the Amazon Fire Stick. There's not a lot of meat to that, but it's a lot of streaming on how it works. And so when you think about the capability from that perspective, you're going to see technology change drastically. So, you're smartphone that holds a lot of data is actually probably going to be a lot smaller because it doesn't have to have all that weight to have all that stuff local because it's going to be real-time connection, but the fascinating thing about that, though, is with all that great opportunity also comes great risk. So, think about it, if we were to have a sphere and if we had a sphere and you had the diameter of that sphere was basically technology capability. As that diameter grows, the volume of the technology that leverages that grows, so all the new things that come in, he's building. But as that sphere continue to grow, what happens is the surface is your threat. Is your threat vector. As it continue to grow, that's going to continue to grow. (stuttering) There's a little but of exponential components, but there's also a lot of mathematical things on how those things relate and so with Five G, as we get these great technologies inside of our sphere, that threat scape on the outside is also going to grow. >> Moore's law in reverse, basically. >> Yeah. >> Surface area is just balloon to be huge. That just kills the perimeter argument right there. >> It does. >> Wow. And then we heard from Steve and Schmidt on the keynote. They said 90% of IOT data, thinking about cameras, is HTTP, plain text. >> Exactly. And it's like, what're you-- >> Oh, more good news! >> Yeah. (laughing) >> At least you'll always have a job. >> Well, you know, someday-- >> It's a good day in security. Encrypt everywhere, we don't have time to get into the encrypt everywhere, but quick comment on this notion of encrypting everything, what's your thoughts? Real quick. (sighing) >> All right, so. >> Good, bad, ugly? Good idea? Hard? >> Well, if we encrypt everything, then what does it really mean? What're we getting out? So, you remember when everybody was having email and you had, back in the day, you had your door mail, netscape navigator and so forth, and thought, oh, we need to have secure email. So then they created all these encryption things in the email, so then what happens? That's built into the applications, so the email's no longer really encrypted. >> Yeah. >> Right? So I think we're going to see some things like that happening as well. Encryption is great, but then it also impedes progress when it comes to forensics, so it's only good until you need it. >> Awesome. >> Dan, thanks so much here on the insights. Great to have you on The Cube, great to get your insights and commentary. >> Well, thank you guys, I really appreciate it. >> You're welcome. >> All right, let's expecting to steal is from noise, talking to practitioner CSOs here at re:Inforce. Great crowd, great attendee list. All investing in the new Cloud security paradigm, Cloud-First security's Cube's coverage. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Stay tuned for more after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Massachusetts, it's theCUBE! Covering WTG Transform 2019. Brought to you by Winslow Technology Group. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and we're here at WTG Transform 2019, across the Mass Pike from Fenway Park where we're hoping the rain's going to stop in time for the game tonight where we have 189 users here with Winslow Technology, digging in a lot of technology, networking with their peers, and I'm thrilled to have on another one of the ED users on the program. Plamen Dimitrov is director of Information Technology at Kiawah Island Golf Resorts coming to us from South Carolina. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> All right, as I was actually telling you, I'm familiar with Kiawah, my father is retired down to John's Island right off of Charlestown, South Carolina. You have a beautiful golf course there, there've been professional events there, we actually have one of our Cubeos, does some PGA coverage, John Walls, so he and I have talked about Kiawah a few times, but for those of our audience that aren't as familiar, haven't been able to enjoy it, tell us a little bit about Kiawah. >> Kiawah is a beautiful island, over about 10 miles of oceanfront, side, where the Kiawah Golf Resort is spread out. We have different accommodations with a lot of different activities for all ages, starting with the Sanctuary Hotel, which is a Five Star by Forbes and a Five Diamond by AAA. Or you can choose any of our villas from one to eight bedroom villas. We have five beautiful golf courses, which one of them is ocean course, previously hosted Ryder Cup in 1991, and PGA in 2012, and we are also proud to be a host of the PGA 2021, very exciting. Apart of that, we are announced to be Tennis Resort #1 in the world by tennisresortonline.com. We have over 22 tennis course, different variations from car course to clay. On top of that, we have a lot of pools, swimming pools, water parks, a lot of recreation, kayaking. It can be a beautiful journey for any visitors. >> Yeah, so, Plamen I know some of the IT people listening to this are going to be like, "Boy, he's got a tough job there!" Sounds gorgeous, right on the ocean, so many things there, bring us a little bit inside the IT, your world, what that entails, and, boy, there's got to be some different challenges and opportunities that you face, versus the kind of traditional business IT. >> As every island, we have all of our friends, like salty water and all things like that. And besides that, I've mentioned that the company's spread out over 10 miles, we have a total of 23 locations, and all they share the same systems and applications. Our current challenges, from an IT standpoint, are things that not all of the vendors that can keep up with the current technology and the all new and moderns, so we have some, what we call, old school applications, they can't keep up, and then you have the new applications that can be hosted on the Cloud, for instance. In the same time, those applications need to somewhat work with each other and have some interfaces, so this is where we face the, these days a challenge, a little bit, and where our partnership with Winslow, were able to help us determine which is the best route for us. And we determined that having a data center on island, and they have another one off the island, is the best for us to go. They helped us go through the planning of what's the right set up to be used, and I think we're in the right direction. >> Okay, great, so you have two data centers and you're also using Cloud services, if I heard right? >> Correct. >> Okay. There's been a big discussion here, is like, all right, what is the Cloud's strategy and it is an ever changing world and there is no one right answer, so, when you look at yourselves, what is your Cloud strategy today and what makes you help determine where you'll be moving in the future? >> In one of the sessions, they mentioned it's all about checks and balance, and it's to be able to measure how to apply your cash in a way that it makes sense, and one day, maybe, for some applications makes sense to be on premise, another day makes sense to bring it on the Cloud. And I can give you an example, recently what we did was, we were looking into switching to Office 365, pretty much everybody knows about it, and there's a good study that, after you go over a certain threshold, it's much easier to, and much more cost effective, to have something on premise versus going to a Cloud version. Now, again, it depends on the size of the company, it depends on the... Your future projects and goals, for some people it may be different than us. But I think that the future more and more, things will be what's called colocating the Cloud, which is mainly by other providers, and we're going to have two called a key that you can get to those applications from anywhere. >> Plam, bring us inside a little bit that the data centers, you said you have two of them, what's your infrastructure stack look like today? >> We've been looking at the various solutions, hyper-converged, and hybrids, and with the help of Winslow, we determined that sticking to the 3-2-1 traditional solution is the way we go. We use their Compellent products, all flash erase, very flexible and very reliable, very nice speed it provides, performance-wise they're a great product. Then, after that story solution, you have two data switches and then a number of servers. We use, on top of that, the VMware as our hypervisor, along with their VDI environment called Horizon for some remote clients that they don't need much, but that's basically our setup. >> Great, and how long have you been using the Compellent solutions? >> The Compellent solutions, we've been using them for a year and a half, since I joined the company, but my relationship with Winslow goes far back, since 2013 where I used to work for another company here in Nantucket. And the very first person I worked with was John Cliffords from Winslow. Very great guy, and he introduced us to the Dell world. This is when we bought the first EqualLogic and afterwards, I went to Belmont, where we also bought (mumbles), and we just keep going along. >> All right, great, Plamen, last question I have for you, what brings you to an event like this, what were you hoping to get out of it, and how's it been going for you so far? >> Well, what brings me to an event like this, most of the time is on one side to see what Dell has to offer, and some people attend, they'll conference, but I think a place like this, where you have smaller scale conference, it's much more beneficial for me. A, from a learning experience and B, from creating connections, making connections with other users, which this is the best because sales rep can say, "Yeah, this is what you need." But then, from a user perspective, it's priceless to absorb experience. >> All right, well, Plamen Dimitrov, I really appreciate you sharing your journey, and everything that Kiawah Golf Resorts is doing, thank you so much. >> Thank you very much. >> All right, we'll be back with more coverage here from WTG Transform 2019, I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watching theCUBE. (funky electro music)

>> From Boston, Massachusetts, it's the Cube covering WTG Transform 2019. Brought to you by Winslow Technology Group. >> Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman, and we're here at WTG Transform 2019. Happy to welcome to the program first time guest, Marty Sanders who's the Chief Security Services Officer at Arctic Wolf. Marty, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, Stu. >> All right Arctic Wolf's a partner, but before we get there, I have to say welcome back. >> Thank you, thank you. >> Because you're familiar with this event quite well. You have a background at Compellent, which of course we were just talking to Scott Winslow. It's where his company started. Just give our audience a little bit thumbnail of your background. >> Perfect. So yeah, Scott and I go back a long time. We actually started back working together at Zylotech back in the late 90's. After we left Zylotech, we actually went to Compellent. We started building Compellent back in 2002. As a company we wanted to start a new philosophy. Really sit down with customers prior to actually releasing products. So we actually built a customer council. We started that in Minneapolis, and then what we wanted to do is take it to the next level. We wanted to replicate that out to other parts of the country, and the first person we called was Scott. We started to do it with Scott, and started back in 2004. Had the first meeting here at the Commonwealth, actually with a handful of customers, and now it's grown into this. So it's unbelievable what he's done with the company. And when I look at what he does, he provides a tremendous amount of value to the customers and just sells them exactly what they want. But what they need as well. >> Yeah we always know when certain segments of the market that degree of separation, you look on LinkedIn is like, one and a half. >> Absolutely. >> Everybody knows each other. We all run around some of the same circles. So bring us up to speed. Arctic Wolf. I believe you're the first person we've had on from the company. So give us a little bit kind of the who and the what and the why. >> Perfect. ^- [Stu] Of Arctic Wolf. >> And again thank you very much for inviting us out for this as well. Yeah Arctic Wolf has been around since 2012. Started off in the SOC as a service. Obviously, in that small-medium business, they didn't have the capabilities to do a lot of the security work. Actually, Brian NeSmith, our CEO, started the company with his other founder Kim Tremblay. They worked at Blue Coat, they understood the security world. But understood that there was a big hole in that space, in that small-medium enterprise business. So they were actually way ahead of their time. I mean you look at from 2012 to 2015, it was a little bit slow growth. But now you start to look at where we're at, and the adoption of that, having a SOC as a service 7 by 24, hasn't been adopted very well. >> Yeah, I thought it was rather telling, actually in the keynote this morning, some people were asking about security, and they're like, wait, if I do this hybrid cloud stuff, how does that work? And I'm like, yeah I go to too many events. It's like, I have ingrained in my system now security is everyone's problem. There is no such thing as a moat. You assume that they are going to get in, so therefore I need to build at every level of the stack. I need to get in. But I'm an industry watcher. ^- [Marty] Yep. >> The people that are doing, what's their mindset, what's workin' well for them? Is security heightened? How's Arctic Wolf going? >> And you want to take that premise. I mean, one of the things that we do is we actually assign a concierge security team to that customer. So we want to be that extension of their environment. I mean, in fact, as we started to talk to some of the clients that we have here, they're repeating the words, what they feel like. My team is part of their team. And it makes it so much easier. So you're not dealing with somebody fresh every time that you call in. If you have any type of event that validates that there's somebody trying to break in. You want to have that person that understands your environment. Understands exactly where you've been. Making sure that you're up to speed on their network, all their ingress/egress points that they can come into. So it makes it so much easier if you have that consistent face that you're dealing with. >> Okay. Marty, is there a typical customer of Arctic Wolf? Where do you fit in the WTG? Their customer base? >> Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. I mean, when you look at where we really fit is, the first questions that we want to ask is do you have a security team? Do you have it 7 by 24? I mean, that's where we really want to make sure that we're augmenting that. I mean, when you look at a lot of the companies they might have that office admin that became the IT person, that became the security person. What we want to do is make sure that we're providing the true level of high security for those companies 7 by 24. Because obviously the bad guys know that there's going to be a hole after hours or whatever it's going to be. So that's when they want to go in. So we want to make sure that we're covering that. So Scott and his clients are kind of in that medium to small-medium business, moving up into the small enterprise, and it fits really well with them. >> Yeah, so you're saying most of them don't have an entire security SWAT team. >> Exactly. ^- Waiting 7 by 24, to do that. Walk us through maybe if you have a customer example or kind of a genericized version that you can share. What does an engagement look like from when they first plug in to when they're fully engaged? >> Perfect. So typically what we do is we actually once the deal is closed what we want to do is sit down with the customer and understand exactly all their different applications, all their environments. Understand all their ingress/egress points that they have coming in. We want to make sure that we're maximizing coverage. And what we want to do is triangulate anything that comes into that. Understand all the attack vectors that the bad guys may try to come in. So it takes us about 30 days to go through all of that. So once we get them onboarded, we assign that concierge security team. Going to be a senior and a less-senior person dedicated to that team. And basically they're going to go through and review that environment, make sure that they understand all the different applications. Is it Office 365? Any cloud apps that we need to hook up to it? All the different servers to make sure we're getting all that information. We want to provide more quiet service. We don't want to be, anytime someone knocks on the door, we don't want to be calling, Little Red Hen-type stories. We want to make sure that anything that we actually report on is going to be actionable for those customers. So that's that trusted confidante, that's where we build that strong relationship rather than sending out a note and retracting it as a false positive or anything like that. >> Okay. And Marty, I heard you mentioned some SAS applications and their infrastructure environment. Is public cloud included in that also? >> Absolutely. And what we want to do is make sure that we understand, like you said. And like Joe and Rick went through and talked about. There's going to be that private and public cloud. We want to make sure that we're capturing everything internally, but also if you're using those SAS applications on the outside, whatever they may be, we want to make sure that we're capturing all that information so that we can help with that. >> Okay. And billing. Is there multi-year commitments? Or how does the financial piece of this work? >> It can be MRR. I mean, we're going to go through on a monthly basis and we'd like to get at least a year commitment. It can be something that they sign up for a couple of months or they sign up for a year and pay monthly whatever they need to do. But typically what we want to do is provide that level of service and when you think about it, if you were to go out and buy a security team to cover 7 by 24, it's at least a minimum of six, seven people to do that. So when you look at the price point, we want to be less than that. We want to provide that high level of value. When you think about a single team going out and trying to do something, the typical threat is it has been in their environment for at least 100 days before they notice it. What we want to do is get it down to minutes. We want to make sure that any threat that's coming in we're notifying on it immediately. We want to make sure that we're going to capture all those things. >> All right. So Marty, when I talk to the big enterprises, security it's not only top of mind it's often a board-level discussion. When you come down to kind of the mid-size to small companies, where does security fit in their overall pictures? What are some of the biggest things on their mind? >> So it's very interesting. When you start to think about it, one of the things that is challenging, you look at some of the places that were having the greatest adoption rates are those companies that have the biggest threats. You look at where the money is. You look in the healthcare environments. The smaller healthcare. Or you look at the legal side of things. I mean, people know where there's money and where they need to have that data. So when you look at it, it's becoming a higher topic and it's becoming every conversation. And we don't like to say that the conversation gets highlighted after a breach or whatever it's going to be, but it does. I mean, and we'll be in the middle of some discussions and you'll hear about somebody that just got hit in a similar environment. And that's how then it gets brought up. >> Oh, boy. Sounds almost all the discussion is data is the new oil. >> Yes. Well those bad actors out there know where the oil is. >> Absolutely >> And therefore that's a security risk for them. >> Absolutely. And I mean the thing that you look at is, you hear about where some of the Atlanta, and some of the other cities that were hit. I mean they go after the localities and the municipalities of making sure that they're going after. And they know that they're going to pay very quickly because of how incredibly important that data is to do that. And even some of the sitting talking to some of the customers here today. Manufacturing, you know? Just the ability to go in and steal the IP that they have to make their business a little bit unique. That's where the people are concentrating because they want to take that and find that uniqueness in that business. >> All right. Marty, want to give you the final word. WTG Transform 2019. Talk about the partnership, talk about the customers and final takeaways. >> So the partnership, I mean, obviously Scott and I have known each other for a long time. The entire sales team and I know Scott. Rick Gowan actually was a customer of ours at Travelers Insurance. Scott hires great people, great employees. They partner. They take care of their customers better than anybody that I know. I mean, I just love the passion. In fact, some of the customers that we started with back in 2004 are still here. Still using the same products. But they continue to look at what provides the most value for them. >> All right. Marty Sanders the CSSO of Arctic Wolf, thanks so much for joining us. ^- Thank you, Stu. >> And appreciate all the updates. >> Thank you. All right. Full day of coverage here in the shadow of Fenway Park, Boston, Massachusetts. The East Coast team's home game as we like to say. I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks so much for watching the Cube. (gentle techno music)

>> It's The Cube, covering WTG TRANSFORM 2019. Brought to you by WINSLOW Technology Group. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. We're here in Boston, Massachusets, across the Mass Pike from Fenway Park, and happy to welcome back to the program Mike Berthiaume, who's Director of Systems Engineering at Nutanix, a good partner of Winslow Technology Group. Mike, thanks for joining us. >> Well as always Stew, it's great to be here. This is number three for us I think, this has become kind a bit of a tradition. >> The third year we've done at this, I've seen you at many of the local user groups here and as I say, a nice home game after lots of travels around the globe. Talking about lots of technologies. >> For sure, looking forward to it. >> What I've always loved, diggin in, in a show like this is we've got users. Scott and the team have a 189 users, many of them are Nutanix customers. So let's start there, what's top of mind from your customers today? >> A lot, so there's a lot happening, as we know in the industry. Things are changing and our customers are trying to figure out what it means for them. But at the end of the day it's all about IT, providing the value back to the business. I think CIOs, and we were just speaking about this in our session, are really pushing their staff to look at public cloud as a potential option. So in many of the folks working on the trenches realize, "Oh yeah, public cloud does make sense "for some things but not necessarily everything." The true strategy we have to have as an organization is multi-cloud, figure out how to make that work. So that's really what we're hearing, and the good news is from our product portfolio Nutanix, and what we're doing. We're really very much in lockstep with that. >> When I think back when that whole wave of hyper-converged infrastructure aged the eye which, Nutanix to its credit never was like, HCI, HCI. It was about simplicity, it was about working on the business, and underneath it that's software that drives the company. The founders of the company came from some of the hyperscalers, some of the file system design underneath there. So when you hear, well the promise of public cloud is supposed to be simple and economic. Well public cloud, we understand is neither simple nor cheap. >> That's right. >> Hyper-converged infrastructure did simplify environments, and changes the economics of how we think if it. When I talk to Nutanix customers it's like, "Oh hey, I don't no longer need to do constant care feeding "of this stack of wires and stuff put together, "much of it is much simpler." You talk about customers, they're going to that multi-cloud, hybrid cloud environment, they're trying to figure out their strategy. Rick Gowan in his presentation said something I thought resonated with me, which is, "You don't want to end up in hybrid cloud, "just you ended up there by mistake without plans," And unfortunately that's where IT is, I've got lots of projects that I do, and I do them as I need them and I realize, "Oh wait, somebody's manage, maintain, "and pull all these things together." So help us understand where Nutanix fits in that multi-cloud story today, which is more than just where people that might not of looked in a couple a years, know the appliance. >> Yeah sure, and I think from are, and mentioned before our roots come from those big large public cloud environments like Google, and Amazon, and others. But when we talk about multi-cloud, and you also made the point that simplicity is probably one of the core values that our customers see Nutanix as being on the forefront there. So I would say that for me, hybrid cloud and I think the mantra within Nutanix, hybrid cloud is not something that many manufacturers have been able to achieve. It's a lot a separate silos, right and as soon as you create multiple silos, you're actually creating operational disruption, and you're actually creating complexity. So if you have to manage public cloud a, public cloud b, your on-prem environment, and maybe your remote offices, and even your edge with different management tools. There's not a ton of value there from a simplicity stand point. So what we strive to do? Is we strive to create that abstraction, that single consistent control plane. That goes between your on-premises, your remote offices, and now truly extend that into the public cloud. So I can manage my resources in the public cloud, in the same way I would on premises. Whether that be next generation applications that probably truly do belong in a public cloud, like cloud-native apps, or my traditional legacy applications that have been running in my data center for years. So that's really what it comes down to, is being able to provide that true seamless experience for users. And at the end a the day businesses and users shouldn't really care where their applications are, it should be whatever most cost effective for the business. And based on who you are as a user, if you're a developer? Or you are a executive? Where my application is shouldn't matter, it should be available wherever I am. >> Mike one of the things that's been interesting watching Nutanix is not the growth of the core market, but its got this three-tier architecture. You have a lot of different software pieces, some of which, at least today are not necessarily directly tied back to the original hyper-converged infrastructure. Where are you with the customers locally? Any kind a proof points? You can give us that kind a help us understand the strategy a bit more. >> I think the majority of the customers are running Nutanix here locally in New England, and probably a good majority of the world are running Nutanix, running kind of the core Nutanix, right. And the value that they're driving from that, they're seeing there is immense. They're getting the simplicity having the ability to run their operations, click one button to do their upgrades without disruption. There is a lot of value there. That's solving many of the issues. Now the higher level capabilities, and the higher level features. In order to be able to deliver those in a consistent way, you have to have a solid core foundation. All right, so that sold core foundation is our core ACI platform, or our cloud like infrastructure. One of the things I'll always say to customers is, "When you look at your Nutanix infrastructure, "your software to find data center, "it actually resembles what's running in a public cloud." So whether, if you're running applications in Amazon for example, you're running in a highly scalable distributed architecture. That's the exact same thing you're doing with Nutanix, and the reason they've been able to deliver those higher value services is because they have that solid foundation underneath it. So if you want to run your environment in a similar way, and true hybrid cloud? You've got to follow their playbook, and the technology that you're choosing, and we believe Nutanix is that right choice. >> Yeah and in many ways we're seeing the blurring the lines between them. I've interviewed people from Nutanix that's on the Cooper Netty Show, that experience that I have and Nutanix has partnerships with some of the public cloud environments. So we're seeing that location matters a little bit less. >> Absolutely, I think the nirvana again if we can imagine, what is this all going to look like five years from now? It's a single portal, single interface where I'm requesting some sort of a business service, or an application. And when I deploy it, it's not going to ask me where it's going to go? It's going to out it where it belongs based on the cost and business logic that I've actually defined in the system. And if it needs to go on Amazon? Or it needs to go on Azure? The decision is going to be made based on business logic, as opposed to technology decision, which I think is what matters. >> So Mike, I can't let you go without talking about, Winslow Technology's here, is a big Dell partner. >> %100. And they sell the Dell XE solution here. They're people out there, there is well the Dell relationship. Yes, they are one Nutanix biggest partners, but they are also, if you look out into the market and you look at market share? The biggest alternative to a Nutanix agency I-Option is the Dell EMC VxRail. So help us understand that dynamic, and how that's playing out in your world? >> Yeah that's a great question, and I kind of expected the controversial questions, as always on theCube, so thanks Stu. In terms a that I would say that when you look at Nutanix, the first thing I'll say is all HCI is not created equal. There is pretty significant differences between the two platforms. Yeah combining and storage, we could loosely define as HCI, but we really can't look at competing solutions as true cloud like infrastructure. Running our controller virtual machine in the user space, and having mobility of applications across hypervisors, and across clouds on a single platform is something very unique to Nutanix. So we're absolutely seeing competitive pressure for sure, but when we have the opportunity to talk to customers about what their multi-cloud journey really means to them? The discussion usually moves forward in a positive way. So I think our view, our perspective. You mention simplicity, we're all about choice, freedom of choice, we don't want to lock our customers into anymore particular technology. Let's do what makes most sense for the business, whether it's alternative public cloud, alternative hardware, or even alternative hypervisors. We give customers choice, we don't have a religion around any one particular technology. We talk about containerization for example, and kubernetes. We give customers the ability to deploy kubernetes on crime, leveraging the source version in kubernetes. All of the capabilities within the Nutanix platform will run on of the hypervisors we support. Right, so that's an important distinction too, it's not like we're telling you have to run one particular hyupervisor to get x feature. So an important distinction point there is we truly do believe in giving our customers the freedom to choose. >> Yeah that's great, just last thing Mike I got to imagine your customers are asking a lot a questions. There's all these new things coming out there that look, sound, or feel a little like what Nutanix is doing. So from the big ones like AWS Outposts, Azure, had Azure stacked, now is the new Azure HCI. So what do you tell your customers when the start calling and asking about these technologies? >> Well, if you look at the history? We've been doing this for a long time now, I've been here for over five years, and Nutanix has been doing this sense two, we've released our product back in 2011, after a couple a years of development. So we've been doing it longer than anybody else, and we also really built our platform around a mantra, that we are highly scalable distributed architecture, along enabling choice, and providing a level of simplicity that customers won't see in any other platform. So just the amount of development and engineering and focus around our customers and the needs of our customers really makes us sustain that. And if you look at just the overall growth of Nutanix, and the transition we're making now to more of a subscription base business model. It makes sense for customers and we've given them the ability to consume in a way that is even more incremental than it was in the past, and certainly more differentiated than what our competitors do. >> All right, Mike Berthiaume always a pleasure to catch up with you on camera, as well as off. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you very much appreciate it Stu. >> All right, more coverage here from WTG Transform 2019. I'm Stu Miniman and thanks for watching theCube. (upbeat music)

(music) >> From Boston, Massachusetts, it's The Cube. Covering WTG Transform 2019. Brought to you by Winslow Technology Group. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and we are in the shadow of Fenway Park. It's the third year we've had The Cube at The Winslow Technology Groups user evert, which is now called WTG Transform and it's 2019. Joining me is the president and founder of Winslow Technology Group, Scott Winslow. Thanks so much for joining me and for the second year of Scott, I say do, thank you for making the name of the show simpler for me to say. WTG Transform rolls off the tongue. >> Our marketing folks were happy to accommodate you, Stu. But we're delighted to have The Cube back. You guys do such a great job watching the industry, observing the industry, asking the great questions. So delighted to have you here. >> Well, and thank you, we always love talking to the users and you've got 189 users here. The company, itself, is now 50 employees, 35% growth last year. So congratulations and give us a little bit about what's happening at a macro level that are driving some of that, the growth in your business. >> Yeah, thank you, it's been, it's been a fun ride. I mean, we're in the right industry first of all, right? The server storage, hyperconverged infrastructure, networking, hybrid cloud solutions it all continues to grow. Data growth is explosive, so I think we happen to be in the right industry. That's certainly driving the growth. Our partnership with some of the key partners here. Partners like Dell, VMware, Nutanix, Arctic Wolf, Aerohive. You know, I think we've saddled up with the right horses there. And we've really got really a great team, on the sales side, but pre-sales engineering, post-sales engineering. So when you combine all of those factors together, it's led to some nice growth. I put some numbers up. Privately held companies don't usually share those numbers. We do like to share'em with our customers. And, you know, we're a $37 million company last year. We're going to be 47 plus this year and we feel like on our way to be a $100 million reseller by 2022. So it's real exciting. >> Well once again, congratulations on that and what's really interesting to watch is, you know, you started out selling Compellent. And Compellent got bought by Dell a few years back. Dell bought EMC. Those are some of the big inflection points in your business. And you've had some great insight on, you know, especially the things I've talked to you the last few years when we first met you at Dell World and through this transition of, you know, Dell going from just being Dell to being, you know, a bigger player in the enterprise market. They've now gone, as you said, VMware, all the hyperconverge, all of these tail winds for their growth have been part of what's been accelerating your growth. So give us the state of the state when it comes to Dell. How are they doing with the channel? How are they doing with the product, the solution, the innovation that Joe Batista talked about this morning? From Dell, how is that trickling down to you as a partner and, ultimately, your customers? >> Yeah, I mean, we first got involved with Dell back in 2011, as you referenced, when they acquired Compellent. We were concerned about it, at the time. We wondered how we could fit into the ecosystem of this, at the time, $60 billion company. Little did we know, it would be the best thing that ever happened to us, cause we were really, kind of, a boutique shop selling storage and now we've got the full line. And they've got the widest portfolio in the industry, you know, servers, storage, networking, hyperconverged solutions, obviously VMware. And so it's been a great relationship for us. You know, I think their relationship with the channel is good. I wouldn't call it simple. It is at times complex. They do about 40% of their business through the channel. You've got direct sellers out there that are very good that sometimes want to take the business direct, but you looked at the growth numbers that we have and we've accomplished that as a Dell-centric partner. So at the end of the day, and I think this is Michael's argument kind of to the partner community, is that we've been able to grow our business. Some companies will have a ceiling and say, okay all this business below a certain amount is partner business. You know, Dell doesn't have that. You have to kind of navigate your way through the system, but if you develop the kind of relationship that we have with them where there's some trust, they see our capabilities to, you know when you're driving 200 end users to an event like this, you know even large OEMs like Dell, take notice cause it's the ability to drive new logos for their business. So we think the relationship has been really good. I'd give'em, you know an A-. I'd say in terms of their portfolio, I'd give'em an A. In terms of the channel relationships, you know we have squabbles now and then, but in general, I think the relationship is very good. >> Well the thing we know in the industry is that there is no thing as perfect. >> Right. >> And that there needs to be change and growth along time and sounds like they're listening and working with you know, you, your peers in the industry to work that. I know there was a little bit of concern, you know when EMC came into the picture. You're in EMC's backyard here. >> Right. >> And there was some really big EMC channel partners and what would that mean to the companies that had been with Dell and it seems like you're navigating that quite well. >> Yeah, we've been able to find our niche in that ecosystem. You know it's, I'm not saying it's always been easy, but you know we're really starting to sell the PowerMaxes and Unitys and IBPAs and Isilon and getting away from just being that sort of, Compellent-centric partner. I think a couple of the benefits that came out of the merger, one is if you look at Dell's server business and I referenced this in my opening comments, over the last eight quarters they've taken six or seven points a share in the server market from their competitors, HP and Cisco. And that's really the result of the merger and having that additional sales bandwidth. So that's been fantastic for our business and for theirs. I think if you look, like at Dell end user compute, that was never a big part of our business. We kind of got into that over the last four or five years, really at the behest of the Dell sales team. And that's been a big win for us, surprisingly enough, particularly with the Windows 7 to 10 migration. Our end user compute business it through the roof. I gave our sales team too low of numbers on that, they're all about 160% of quota. (laughs) So going to have to fix that next year. >> All right well always tip to the sales rep, if you have a good plan (laughs) max it out because they will adjust it later. >> Exactly. Exactly, pay back is a you know what. (laughs) >> So Scott, one of the biggest changes I've seen in your business, in the last year is, you know you've been deep with Dell for many years. And with the Dell XC, which is the Nutanix OEM, is something that you were on early. You were a strong partner there, Nutanix. Still a strong partner, but today it is a mix of both the Dell XC and the VxRail from Dell EMC. So talk a little bit about, you know why that changed. How that's going, you know, how customers are seeing things these days? >> Yeah, I mean absolutely, we were on very early with Nutanix and we very much believe in their product and the software solution set that they've put together. I can remember Alan Atkinson, from Dell, standing up and saying, "This is our HCI solutions, could be Nutanix on Dell compute." And you know, we've got, you know 55+ really happy customers out there and we continue to sell that solution. And we've got a lot, very good customer satisfaction. That relationship's not going away. Despite what some people may say in the industry. The fact is they've got 35,000 units out there. There's a billion dollar pipeline of XC series. And there's a gentleman that runs the server business at Dell that wants to make sure that doesn't go away cause that's one of the reasons that Dell is doing so well in the server business. Now having said that, you know our take on it has been, hey let's have two of the best products in the industry in our quiver. That being XC series Nutanix and VxRail. You know initially when VxRail first came out, we didn't think that it had some of the capabilities that it needed and as it's evolved, we think that VxRail's gotten a lot better and it's a lot more competitive. Certainly in a VMware environment, a very strong player. And if you look at the numbers, they're doing very well with VxRail and so are we. So right now, we've got the one and two horse in the industry. We think it's great for us to be able to go our customers. We give our AEs and our SAs in the field the ability to evaluate the opportunity. What are the requirements of the customer and do we think that either XC series Nutanix or VxRail will be the better fit? And we feel like either way, it's a win for us and a win for the customer. >> So Scott, feedback we heard at Dell World is that, you know the Dell team is really trying to put their thumb on the scale. To really incent the field to sell VxRail. The XC is there, as you said. You know, Ashley and the server team, you know, they want to sell servers, but you know all things being equal, they're not equal. They want to sell the full Dell stack. So is there any of that that impacts what you're doing or you know pretty much from your standpoint, it's customer choice. We understand there's never one best solution out there and it is often differentiation in there. Obviously, one is only VMware. One has multi-hypervisor including a you know, built in hypervisor, there. There's definitely, it's tough to line these up and compare them. There are differences there, but what's the impact of kind of Dell's positioning and you know, what customers, how do they determine what to use? >> At the end of the day, the rubber meets the road at the customer. I mean we've got to, we always say within our company, we have to be aligned first with the customer. What do they want? What's the best fit for the customer? Now internally, inside the inside baseball, within of our what we say is we've got to grow both businesses. We've got to grow our Nutanix business, which we did significantly last year. And we have to grow our VxRail business, which we did. And that way we keep both groups happy. And we're able to offer a nice portfolio. So I think that's the best way to approach it. >> All right Scott, why don't I give you the final word, is this the 16th year of your event here? >> It's 16th year of the company, 15th year of the event. >> Okay. All right, so give us the final takeaway. I know you've got a lot of meetings. Got a lot of activity. >> Yeah. >> Give everybody the final takeaway from Transform. >> Well it's been a great event, thus far. We've got, you know more breakout sessions to go. We got the ballgame tonight. Chris Sales is on the mound, so that's always exciting. We got a lot of winning ball teams here in Boston, but for us it's just growth. More customers are here, more partners. We've got more going on in the hands on lab. Our expo hallway, there's more product there. More subject matter experts. You know we have a lot more going on in terms of security this year. With Arctic Wolf being here, our VP of PS, Matt Kozlowski's going to walk through a little cyber security case study. And so I think we're doing more on security. And certainly we've just got kind of more of all the solutions that we offer. And we're delighted to have an even bigger group here this year. So onward and upward, I guess, is the final word. >> All right, onward and upward. Scott, thank you so much again for sharing the updates on your company, as well as what's happening with all your users. And we always love those user stories. So, I've got a full day of coverage here at WTG Transform 2019. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching The Cube. (electronic music)

>> Boston, Massachusetts. It's the queue covering W T G transformed 2019 Accio by Winslow Technology Group. >> Hi, I'm Stew Minutemen And this is the Cubes. Third year at W. T. G. Transform 2019 which is the Window Technologies Group, Their user conference. Longtime compelling customer, of course. Compelling, bought by Del del Body M. C. So it's now the deli emcee user event and to help me kick off a day of content where we're gonna be talking. Toa some of the W T G executive some of their customers and some of their partners is first time guests on the program. Joe Batista, Who's a Creek and easy chief creative, apologised at Del Technologies. Joe Appreciate you making it all the way in from the suburbs to come here to downtown Boston in the shadow of Fenway. >> It was a long haul this morning with no traffic of 5 30 35 minutes in. >> Yeah, a Zeiss safe for the people. Adele. It's about the distant from Boston Towe where we live as it is to go from Austin to Round Rock. So >> there we go, >> you know, similar types of things. So I have to start create apologised. A song. You know, I did a little bit of reading and, you know, having watched Aquino, it's, you know, sparking that creativity. So I love the idea of it. You've had this title for quite a while since before you Riddell just give us a little bit about background of you know what you do, and you know why you're qualified to do it. >> Well, it was quite a fight. It's a fun brand, but literally. It sits at the nexus of business and technology, and my job's simply is to help it re image the business, because now every company's a technology company. So what does that look like? So I get involved Also, it's a really cool problems, opportunities that customers are facing by re imaging it >> well, it's funny that you say re image, because when I did my history, the oldest thing I found some article from the nineties talking about somebody from Polaroid that that title and I was actually talking to some of the young people in the office there, like everybody's using Polaroids. There's these days, it's cool. It's true. They're doing it. So what's old is new again. You know everything come back together. So luckily, you know our industry. I mean, nothing changes, right? You know, it's the same now as it was 10 years ago, 100 years ago. You know, I'll just go into the factory and pumping things out now. >> Still, you know, I've been a referee a long time, and in the old days we had swim lengths, right? You know, you thought about certain vendors. They were in swim lanes. Now, today, with the influx of cash, as I was talking about, and the level of it of even innovation cycle time and how the industry's become more fragmented with lots of products, the complexity index has increased exponentially, and the velocity around that complexity is even more accelerate. So, no, it hasn't gotten easier. It's gotten more difficult. >> Yeah, fascinating. Actually. I just heard a segment on our national public radio station here in Boston talking about that. One of the biggest changes and how people think over the last few decades is we're better at recognizing patterns. Used to be, we could be an expert on something and do our thing, you know. We know the old trope is well, you know. My grandfather, you know, worked at a company for 30 years and did his same thing today. Things are changing constantly. You know, we didn't have, you know, the power of a supercomputer in our pocket, you know, 10 years ago, you know, let alone even older. So, you know, this is a user conference. So you know what air they did do. I mean, if if I understand, if I'm, you know, making a decision today for my business. And oftentimes that decision is something I need to live with for a while. How do I make sure that I'm making the right decisions That's going to keep me, you know, you know, keeping up with the competition and keeping my business moving forward as things constantly change. >> Yeah. So there is no easy answer to that question. There's a couple of thoughts and hasn't said in the presentation. You gotta look at these vectors that impacted trajectory of the thinking. And I love the Peter Drucker coat. Right. If he using yesterday's logic probably gonna get in trouble, you have to rethink the logic. In the example I gave you was the high jumper and how we did high jumping before and after 1960. So? So the question becomes one of those vectors, and I went through some of those vectors to help people think about, Okay, I do. My analysis on technology, that's all good. And, uh, tell technology you got a huge portfolio of technology. But how do you think about the perimeter? About how those things change over depreciation cycle. So is trying to add a little bit more color in there, thought processes. And I got a lot of post questions afterwards and a lot of engagements. So it seemed to resonate with the field. And I'll tell you what. The thing that they like the most was the business conversation off. They're like, you know, we don't do that enough. >> Yeah, right. I mean, you know, when we look at the successful companies today, it is not, You know, we've been talking for years, you know? Does it matter? Is it just a cost center? And it needs to be if it isn't helping the business drive forward and responding to what the business needs, uh, you know, could be replaced. That's where we got. Shadow it. It's It can't be the nowhere the slow needs to be. When the business says we need to go, you know, get on board and drive. I love one of the analogies you used is, you know, in this world of complexity, there's so many things out there, You know, when I've worked with, you know, enterprises and small cos you look at their environments and it's like, Oh my God, it's this Hedorah genius mess, you know? How do we standardize things? How do we make things easier? You had a fun little analogy talking about space. Maybe, maybe. >> Okay, that was good. I always try to use visuals as much as possible. So high, high, high light with challenges. So the challenge was, Oh, actually have it in my pocket. So they pulled this out and basically what it is. If you look at the international space shuttle, that's the only thing that they need to fix anything on Specialist 7/16 inch socket or the millimeter version of it. I can't read. Excited my glasses on to fix anything. So imagine if I had one tool to fix anything that's Nirvana. That's not reality. I have to fatigue. So I need to get to that simplicity. Its glasses law remember, every 25% increase in function shin is 100% increase in complexity. And that's public enemy number one for us. >> All right, so So you hopped on board the Dell family relatively recently, when most people think, Adele, it's well, you know, Delpy sees, you know, talk to my you know, my parents. They're like they know Dell computers. They've used them forever. You're talking most people, you know, Del servant. Like you talked a lot about your presentation software is eating the world. Give give us how you know where Del fits in that software was eating the world picture. >> Well, what I can tell you, though, is I was absolutely amazed when I did my due diligence about all the innovation that happens in this company. Phenomenal not only about the hardware but the soft. And I think actually, Jeff said it best. I think we have more software engineers now that we have heart hardware engineers. So the pivots there, we're pivoting our talent, the software, but it's the innovation that's in this company. And I think I kind of rattled off a couple of statistics by how much we spend the quantity of I p that we have. And I think customers are amazed at that innovation. But the supercharger on is okay. How does the innovation apply to the business mechanics of the company? And what value do you extract from it? And that's where the whole language and conversation usually happens with us. I will tell you, though, I'm really excited that Del Technologies kind of doubling down on business outcomes. They're really trying to change the culture and helping customers understand what the technology >> means. Yeah, one of things that struck me. I've been to this event now for a couple of years, and, you know, there's a lot of product discussion here, you know, when you get down to the channel, it's like, Okay, great. You know, I'm doing a server refresh. I'm looking to things like hyper convert, you know? What am I doing in my network? You know, when you up level things a little bit, You know, when I went to del World, it's like, you know, we hear about the venture, you know, activity that's happening around and things like coyote coming down the pipe. But How does that trickle down to the customers? That talking event here? It's great to talk about innovation, but, you know, I got to run my business. You know what? You know. Where does Del fit in that picture >> for you? Got it? Well, it's a custom you got to do both, right? So this has got to be a shift, because now I have to think differently, right? I know how to do feature analysis and benefit analysis of a point in time product, but what's the periphery of activities that inspecting, impacting that decision? Does that architectures scale? What are the economics around that? So you need to think about all those things. And I think it's just a journey for not only us as a vendor, but also for customers as well. >> Okay, so you're relatively new in today. L I want to ask you You gave a great quote in your presentation from from Jack Welch. Er said if the rate of change outside the company is greater than inside the company, the end is near. >> I would say the post. >> So, you know, explain to us the pace of change inside of del technologies. >> Well, you know, that's That's a That's a big question. I mean, piece of change varies by organization by business unit I really can't comment on your individual business units, but I will say, though there's a definite desire toe. Understand? We're customers interested. He is there. So what's the customer trying to dio? And then how do we satisfy the customer request? It's a matter of fact. I don't know if you know this and it was amazing because that's what the customer the other day, you know, Stevie Awards. Which a customer satisfaction, which we double down on customer satisfaction. We have a customer chief customer officer was Karen, and we just won 15 Stevie Awards, which is about customer satisfaction. So I think there's a slow shift, but there's a real focus on customer Central City. For us, the velocity will get there. But if you put the customer at the center like we do, that's a winning strategy. >> Yeah, well, yeah, we know Karen Kim does quite well, you know, culture and working with customers. You know, quite dio you talked about the portfolio of companies and l We know Del Bhumi quite well. We've done their event in the team were well, and you know, VM wears no slouch in the industry. I've had one of the pleasures of my careers. You know, I started working with him. Where when they were, like, 100 person company. No, watch them grow and pack. El Singer, I think was just named like the number one number two, you know, CEO work for employees by employees from glass doors. So, you know No, no slouch on the the venture family. So congratulations, toe Dale family on all that. >> Thank you very much are exciting. >> Joe Batista. Thank you so much for joining me here at the W T. G. Transformed 2019. Pleasure to catch up with you. Appreciate the opportunity. All right, so we're here with customers, the executives, and digging into all the industry trends. Of course. Check out the cute dot net for where we will be. And, uh, I think it was always for watching the cube

>> live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering del Technologies. World twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Del Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone to the Cubes. Live coverage of Del Technologies World Here at the Sands Expo at the Venetian. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co host Stew Minutemen. We have Sean Kinney joining the program. He is a senior director primary storage marketing at Delhi emcee Thank you so much. Thrilled to redirect from Boston, >> the home of the universe, >> it's indeed well, we would say so so and so lots of news coming out this morning yesterday. Talk about some of the mean. If you want to start with talking about the storage platform, the mid range storage market in general sort of lay the foundation What you're seeing, what you're hearing, and then how the new the new products fit in with what with what customers air needing. We'LL >> break that a couple pieces. I believe that the mid range of the storage market is the most competitive. They're the most players. There are different architectures and implementations, and it's the biggest part of the market. About fifty eight percent or so so that attracts a lot of investments in competition. So what we announced today, it was the deli emcee Unity X t Siri's and that built on all the momentous on the success we had with Unity, which we actually announce basically the same conference three years ago. So we've sold forty thousand systems Good nowhere market leader, and the first part is the external storage market. It's declined, continues to be exaggerated. One of the Ellis firms predicted it wasn't gonna grow it all last year. Well, crew sixteen percent actually grew three billion dollars. It's with unity. Its original design points like the sort of Day one engineering principles were really around a couple of things. One was a true, unified architecture being told to do. Block storage, file storage and VM. Where've evils that was built in, not bolted on like no gateways, no extra window licensing, no limitations on file system size. The second was around operational simplicity and making it easy for a customer to install easier for custom manage. He was a customer of use remotely manage, and then we took that forward by adding all inclusive software, making it easy to own like not him to worry about software contracts. So all of that goodness is rolling forward in the engineering challenge that we took on with E x t wass. You know, a lot of mid range systems switch of those that have an active, passive architectural design. It's hard to do everything at once. Process, application data run, data reduction, run data services like snapshots of replications, all without significantly impacting performance. And a lot of cases, our competitors and other platforms have to make compromises. They say. Okay, if you want performance turned this function off. What was that challenge that our engineers took on? And that's what we came up with. No compromise for midrange storage. That's unity. Extinct. >> Yeah, Shawn, it's it's really interesting you could I could probably do a history lesson on some of the space thing back to, you know, early days when you know we were first to DMC. It was like, Oh, the data general product line. You know, getting merged in very competitive landscape is, as you said, most companies had multiple solutions, you know, unity in the name of it was to talk about Dell and AMC coming together, but what I want you coming on is there was often, you know, okay, somebody came out with, like, a new a new idea, and they sold that as a product. And then it got baked into a feature, and we saw that happened again and again and again. And the storage market, what are some of those key drivers is toe. You know what customers look for? How you differentiate yourself. Are we past that? You know, product feature churn way in the platform phase. Now, you know, we always say it would be great if software was just independent of some of these. But there's a reason why we still have storage raise. Despite the fact that, you know, it's been, you know, it's been nibbled at by some of the other, you know, cloud and hyper converge. You know, talk applications. >> Yeah. Uh, let's say that a couple ways in that, especially in the mid range. Our customers expect the system to do everything you know. It has to do everything Well, it doesn't get to be specialized for a lot of our customers. It is thie infrastructure. It is that data capital, which is the lifeblood of their business. So the first thing is it has to do everything. The second thing I would say is that because it has to do everything and one feature isn't really gonna break through anymore. The architecture's the intelligence, the reliability, the resiliency that takes years of hardening. Okay, the new competitors has to start a ground zero all over again. So I would say that that's part of the second thing I would say is, it's about the experience inside the box from the feature function and outside the box. How do we get a better experience? And for us, that starts with Cloud I. Q. It's a storage, monitoring and analytics platform that you can really you have infrastructure insight in the palm of your hand. You're not tied to a terminal, and if you want to be, of course you can. But you can now remotely monitor your entire storage environment. Unity, Power Max SC Extreme Io. Today we announce connect trick support for sandwiches in VM support. So we're going broader and deeper, you know, as well as making its water. So it's hard to have one feature breakthrough when you need the first ten to even get in the game. >> Well, as you said, for for these customers, this infrastructure has to do it all. And and so how do you manage expectations? And how do you How do you work with your customers? Maybe who have unrealistic expectations about what it can do. >> Our customers are the best. I mean, everybody says it, but because they push us and they push the product and they want to see how far it can go and they want to test it. So I love them. I love because they push us to be better. They push us to think in new ways. Uh, but yeah, there are different architectures. Have differences. Thumbs Power Max is an enterprise. High end, resilient architecture. It's never going to hit a ten thousand dollar price point like the architecture wasn't designed. And so for our customers that wants all these high end features like an end to end envy me implementation. Well, that's actually why we have power, Max. So you don't want to build another Power Macs with unity. So while the new unit e x t, it is envy Emmy ready and that'LL give us a performance boost We're balancing the benefits of envy. Emmy with the economics, the price point that come with it. >> All right, So, Sean, talk about Get front from the user standpoint, you know, we've We've talked about simplicity for a long time. I remember used to be contest. It's like All right, well, you know, bring in the kids and has he how fast they can go through the wizard Or, you know, he had a hyper converts infrastructure. It should just be a button you press and I mean had clouded. Just kind of does it. When we look at the mid range, you know, where are we in that? You know, management. You talked about Cloud like you, you know, how do we measure and how to customers look at you know how invisible their infrastructure is? >> I think every I don't think any marketing person worth his salt would say, My product is hard to use. It's easy to use the word simplicity, but I think it's we're evolving. And again, it's that outside the box experience now, the element manager Unisphere for um, for unity is very easy to use with tons of tests and research. But it's going beyond that is how do we plug into the VM? Where tools. How do we plug? How do we support containers? How do we support playbooks with Ansel? Forget it. It's moving the storage. Management's out of storage. Still remember, twenty years ago, we helped create the concept of a storage admin. You know, things that coming full circle. And except for the biggest companies, you know that it's becoming of'em where admin that wants to manage the whole environment. >> Okay, I wonder if you could walk us up the stack a little bit. You know, when you talk about these environments at the keynote this morning, we're talking about a lot of new application. You're talking about a I and M l. What's the applications, Stace? That's the sweet spot for unity. And, you know, you know, you mentioned kind of container ization in there, you know, Cloud native. How much does that tie into the mid range today? >> Yeah, I think it goes back to that. All of the above. Its some database, some file sharing, some management and movement of work loads to the cloud. Whether be cloud tearing. What? Running disaster recovery As a service where you know you need the replication You just don't want to pay for and manage and owned that second sight in the cloud. We'Ll do that as a service. So I, uh I think it's again. It goes back to that being able to do everything and with the rise of the Internet of things with the rise of new workloads, new workload types, they're just more uses for data and data continues to be the light flooding of business. But it you need the foundation. You need the performance. And with X t now twice as fast as the previous generation, you need the data reduction with compression. Indeed, implication with extra that's now up to five to one. You need the overall system efficiency so the system doesn't have a ton of overhead, and you need multiple paths to the cloud For those customers that already ofwork loads in the cloud. No, they're going to go there in the next twelve months or know that they have to at least think about it and so that we future proof them across all boys. So you need those sort of foundational aspects and we believe we're basically best in class across all of them. But then you get more >> advanced. I want to get your thoughts on where this market is going. As you said that analysts that the news of its demise has been greatly exaggerated, analysts are just not getting it right. I mean, they said it wasn't gonna grow a gross. Sixty grew sixteen percent. Why are they getting it wrong? Are there and also do? What do you see as sort of the growth trajectory of this market? I'm not >> sure they're getting it wrong. And they may be underestimating the new use cases and the new ways customers using data What I think we should probably do a better job of as an industry is realize that there is a lot of space for both best of breed infrastructure and converged infrastructure and things like Piper converge. It's not an or conversation, it's an and conversation, and no one thinks that I love working about Del Technologies is we have the aunt, you know, for us, it's not one or the other, and that's all we could sell. We have the aunt, and that allows us to really better serve our customers because over eighty percent of our customers have both. >> So, Sean, you mentioned working for Del Technologies. There are a couple people that have been at this show for a while there. Like boy, they didn't spend a lot of time in the keynotes talking about storage. Bring us in a little bit. And inside there, you know, still a deli emcee. You got still a storage company. >> Still, you've seen the name isn't there very much. So you know that we wouldn't be spending all this time and R and D and you've heard about the investments we've made in our stores sales organization and our partner organization. You don't do those investments. If you're not committed to storage it, you know, way struggled for a while. We're losing share for awhile, but that ship has turned for the last four quarters. We've grown market share in revenue, but we're pretty good trajectory. I like our chances. >> I want to ask you about something else that was brought up in the keynote. And that is this idea of a very changing workforce. The workforce is now has five generations in it. Uh, it is a much younger workforce in a in a work first that wants to work in different ways. Collaborate in different ways. Uh, how are you personally dealing with that with your team, Maybe a dispersed team. How are you managing new forms of creativity and collaboration and innovation in the workforce? And then how are you helping your customers think about these challenges? >> You know, I, uh, maybe I can't write for the Harvard Business Review. For me personally, this is my approach that is one guy's opinion for me. It's about people like you want to manage the project, not the people I expected. I trust my staff, and they range from twenty two to sixty two to be adults in to get the job done and whether they do it in the office or at home, whether they do it Tuesday at two o'Clock or Tuesday at nine o'Clock. If it's due Wednesday, I'm gonna trust them to get it done. So it's, uh, there's a little of professionals. It does require sometimes more empathy and some understanding of flexibility. But I participate in that change to I don't want to miss my kid's game, and I wanna make sure I bring my daughter to the dentist, So I, uh, I think it's for the best, because we're blurring the lines of on and off. I could see again. I don't write for our business, really a time in the next few years where vacation time is no longer tracked. I don't think that far away >> a lot of companies don't even have it at all. I mean, it's >> just you >> get your work done, do what you need to do. >> So I love it because then we come back to being more of it. It's even more about, um, a meritocracy and performance and delivery and execution. So, uh, I think it's only the better and more productive employees, happier employees. It's actually reinforcing cycle. What I found, >> and that's good for business. That's a bottom line. >> Employees. You good >> for Harvard Business Review. >> So, Sean, last thing I wanted to get is for people that didn't make it to show. Give them a beginning of flavor about what's happening from a mid range to orange around the environment here and tell us, how much time have you been spending at the Fenway and, you know, pro Basketball Hall of Fame sex mons you know, in the Expo Hall there because I know what a big sports got. You >> are not enough is the first question, quite simply, the best mid range storage just got better now the market leader, when all the advantages, we have immunity. We just rolled them forward to a new, more efficient, better performing platform. So it's, ah, our customers are gonna love over bringing forward, and I think it's our sales. Guys will find it much easier to sell. So we're, uh, we're thrilled with today's announcements. Were thrilled with where the marketplaces were thrilled with our market position and best is yet to come. >> Well, we were thrilled to have you on the cute. So thank you so much for coming on. >> It's always a pleasure. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stew Minutemen. We will have much more of the cubes Live coverage from Del Technologies World coming up in just a little bit