>> Announcer: Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering AnsibleFest 2019, brought to you by Red Hat. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone, it's CUBE's live coverage here in Atlanta, Georgia, for AnsibleFest 2019, and I'm John Furrier, with Stu Miniman, my co-host. Our next guest is Massimo Ferrari, product manager with Ansible Security. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks very much. Thank you for having me. >> So, security, obviously, big part of the conversation in automation. >> Obviously. >> Making things more efficient, making security, driving a lot of automation, obviously, job performance, among other things. Red Hat's done a lot of automation in other areas outside of just configuration, network automation, now security looking kind of like the same thing, but security's certainly different and more critical. >> Massimo: It is, it's more time-sensitive-- >> Talk us through the security automation angle, what's going on? >> Well, basically, there are several things going on, right? I believe the main thing is that IT organizations are changing, well, honestly, IT organizations have been changing for the last, probably five years, 10 years, and as a consequence, the infrastructures to be protected are changing as well. And there are a couple of challenges that are kind of common to other areas. As you said, automation is all over the place, so clearly, there are some challenges that are common to IT operations, or network operations, something that is peculiar for the security space. What we are seeing, basically, is that if you think about, there's a major problem of scale, right? If you think about the adoption of technologies like containers, or private and public cloud, if you are a large organization, you are introducing those technologies side by side with, for example, your legacy applications on bare metal or your fantastic digital machines, but what they do actually is introducing a problem of size, a problem of scale, and a problem of complexity connected to that, and a problem of distribution which is just unmanageable without automation. And the other problem is just complexity, that I mentioned before, is, I wasn't specifically referring to the complexity of the infrastructure per se. If we think about adopting best practices or practices like microservices or adopting functions of service, we can easily imagine how an old-school three-tiers application can be re-engineered to become something like with made of 10 hundred components, and those are microcomponents, very focused on single things, but from a security perspective, those are ingress points. And what automation did, what automation proved to be able to do, is to manage complexity for other areas. So you can be successful in IT operations, in network, and clearly, it can be successful in security, but what is unique to security is that professionals are facing a problem of speed, which means different things, but to give you an example, what we are seeing is that more and more cyberattacks are using automation and artificial intelligence, and the result of that is that the velocity and impact of those attacks is so big that you can't cope with human operators, so we are in a classic situation of fighting fire with fire. >> So, this is a great example. We had the service guys on earlier talking about the Automation Platform, and one comment was, "You don't want to boil the ocean over. "Focus on some things you can break down "and show some wins." Security professionals have that same problem, they want to throw automation and AI at the problem, "It's going to solve everything." >> Of course. >> And so, it's certainly very valuable, managing configurations, open ports, S3 buckets, there's a variety of things that are entry points for hackers and adversaries to come in, take down networks. What's the best practice? How would you see customers applying automation? What's the playbook, if you will? What's the formula for a customer to look at security and say, "Okay, how do I direct Ansible "at my security problems, or opportunities, "to manage that?" >> Well, when you discuss security automation with customers, it really depends on the kind of audience that you have. As you know, security organizations tend to be fairly structured, right? And depending on the person you are talking to, they may have a slightly different meaning for security automation. It's a broader practice in general. What we are trying to do with Ansible Security Automation is we are targeting a very specific problem. There is a well-known issue in the security world, which is the lack of integration. What we know is that if you are any large organization, you buy tens, hundred sometime, of security solutions, and those are great, they protect whatever they have to protect, but there is little to no integration between them, and the result of that is that security teams have an incredible amount of manual work to do just to correlate data coming from different dashboards, or to perform an investigation across different perimeters, or at some point, they have to remediate something that is going on and they have to apply this remediation across groups of devices that are sparse. And what we are trying to do with Ansible Security Automation is to propose Ansible as an integrational layer, as a glue, between all those different technologies. On one hand it's a matter of become more efficient, streamline the process. On the other hand is an idea of having, truly, a way to plan, use the automation as your action plan, because security is obiously is time-critical, and so, automation becomes, in this context, become even more important. >> Massimo, with the launch of the Ansible Automation Platform, we see a real enhancement of how the ecosystem's participating here. Where does security fit into the collections that are coming from the partner ecosystem of Ansible? >> Well, in one way, we have been building over the shoulders of our friends in Network Automation. They did an amazing job over four years. They did two major things. The first one is that they expanded for the first time the footprint of Ansible outside the traditional IT operations space. That was amazing. And we did kind of the same thing, and we started working with some vendors that were already working with us for slightly different use cases, and we helped them to identify the right use cases for security, and expand even more what they were capable of doing through Ansible. And what we are doing now is basically working with customers, we have lighthouse customers, we call them, that guide us to understand which is the next step that we are supposed to perform, and we are gathering together a security community around Ansible. Because surprisingly, we all know that the security community has always been there, always been super vocal, but open-sourcing security's a fairly new thing, right? And so we have this ability, the important thing is that we all know that Red Hat is not a security vendor, right? We don't want to be a security vendor. That's not the ambition that we have. We are automation experts, in the case of Ansible, and we are open-source experts across the board. So what we are doing with them, we are helping them to get there, to cooperate in the open-source world. And for security, proven to be very interesting the adoption of collection, because in some way allows them to deliver the content that they want to deliver in a very, I would say, focused way, and since security relies on, again, is a matter of time to market or time to solve the problem, through collection, they have more independence, they are capable to deliver whatever they want to deliver, when they want to deliver, according to their staff needs. >> You know, one of the things you mentioned, glue layer, integration layer, and open source, your expertise on automation. It's interesting, and I want to get your reaction to this, 'cause we did a survey of CISOs in our community prior to the Amazon Web Services re:Inforce conference this past summer. It was their first, inaugural, cloud security, so, yeah, cloud security was a big part of it. But with on-premise and hybrid and multi-cloud here, being discussed, this notion of what cloud and role of enterprise is interesting to the CISOs, chief information security officer. And the trend on the survey was is that CISOs are re-hiring internal development teams to build stacks onsite in their own organizations, investing in their stack, and they're picking a cloud, and then a secondary cloud. So as that development team picks up, that seems to be a trend, one, do you agree with that? And if people want to have their own developers in-house, for security purposes, how does Ansible fit into that glue layer? Because if it's configuring all the gear and all the pipes and plumbing, it makes sense to kind of think about that. So this might be a trend that's helping you? >> So, the trend, there is a general trend in the corporate enterprise world hat more technical people are coming into traditionally, in areas that are traditionally under the purview of other people or domains, right? So, more technical people coming into business lines. We are seeing more developers coming into security, that's certainly a trend. It is a matter of managing scale and complexity. You need to have technical people there. So, in one hand, that help us to create a more efficient and more pervasive community around security. You have developers there, which means that you need to serve that corner case that you are not targeted at the moment, you have talented people that can cooperate with us and build those kinds of things. >> John: And use the open-source software. (laughs) >> Exactly, but that's the entire purpose, right? You want to drive people to contribute. They get the value back, we get the value back, they get the value back, that's the entire purpose. >> So you do see the trend of more developers being hired by enterprises in-house? >> It certainly is, and it's been going on for about, probably three to five years I've seen that, in other areas, mainly in the business area, because they want to gain that agility and want to be self-contained, in some way. Business want to be self-contained, and security, in some sense, is going the same direction. That fits clearly one angle of Ansible, so you have more contribution in the community. On the other hand, what we are trying to make sure is that we support the traditional security teams. Traditional security teams are not super developmental yet, so they want to consume the content. >> Well, DevOps is always, as infrastructure as code implies that the infrastructure has been coded, and if you look at all of the security breaches that have been big, a lot of them have been basic stuff. An exposed S3 bucket, is that Amazon's fault, or is that the operator's fault? Or patches that aren't deployed. You guys are winning with Ansible in these area. This seems to be a nice spot for you guys to come in. I mean, can you elaborate on those points, and is that true, you guys winning in those areas? 'Cause, I mean, I could see automation just solving a lot of those problems. >> Well, I will say something that's not super popular, but as a security community, we've always been horrible at the basics, right? Like any other technical people, we're chasing the latest and greatest, the fun stuff, the basics, we always been bad at that. Automation is a fairly new thing in security, And what we all know that automation does is providing you consistency and reduce human error. Most of this stuff is because somebody forgot to configure something, someone forgot to rotate a secret or something like that. >> They didn't bring their playbook to the game. (laughs) >> So, I'm not trying to guide the priorities here, but the point is that the same benefits that we get from automation-- >> There's just no excuse. If you have automation, you can basically-- >> Exactly. >> Load that patch, or configure that port properly, because a playbook exists. This only helps. >> Absolutely, but those are the basic values of automation. You're communicating a slightly different way to security, because they use different language, and for them, automation is still a new thing. But what you heard during the keynote, so, the entire purpose of the platform is to help different areas in the IT organization to cooperate with each other. As we know, security is not a problem of IT security anymore. It's a broader problem and needs to have a common tool to be solved. >> In the demo in the keynote this morning, I thought that they did a good job showing how the various stakeholders in the organization can all collaborate and work together. I want you to explain how security fits into that discussion, and also, they hadn't added the hardening piece in there, but I would expect for many companies that, I want to flag when I'm creating this image, that it's going to say, "Hey, "have you put the right security policies on top of it," not something that they just, "Oh, it's one of the steps that I do." How do we make sure that everybody follows those corporate edicts that we have? >> Well, it's mainly a matter, I don't want to play the usual card of cultural change, but the fact is that in security, especially, we are looking at two major shifts, and one of these shifts is that pretty much everyone, I would say private organization and government, kind of acknowledge that security, cybersecurity, is not an IT problem anymore, it's a business problem, right? Being a business problem, that means that the stakeholders involved are in all different parts of the organization, and that requires a different level of collaboration. Collaboration starts with training, and enablement of people to understand where the problems are, and understand that they are part of the same process. We used to have security as an highly specialized function of IT, right now, what happens is that, if you think about a data breach, a data breach could be caused by an IT problem, but most of the impact is on the business, right? So right now, a lot of security processes are shifting to give responsibility to the business owners, and if the government is involved, I live in London, and in Europe, for another month, I guess, we have this fantastic thing that you know, it's called GDPR. GDPR forces you to have what is called a data breach notification process, which means that now, if you're investigating a cyberthreat, you want to have legal there to make sure that everything is fine, and if this data breach could become a media thing, you want to have PR there, because you want to have a plan to mitigate whatever kind of impact you may have on your corporate image. You may also want to have there, I don't know, customer care, just to handle the calls from the customer worried for the data. So the point is that this is becoming a process that need to involve people. People needs to be aware that they are part of this process, and what we can do, as an automation provider, we are trying to enable, through the platform, the IT organizations to cooperate with each other. Having workflows, having the ability to contribute to the same process allows you to be responsible for your piece. >> Massimo, the new security track here at the show this year, for those that didn't get to come, or maybe that didn't get to see all of it, some of the highlights you want to share with the audience? >> So, this year, the general message this year is that it's the first time that we have this fantastic security track, and this is not a security conference, it is never going to be a security conference. So what we are trying to do is to enable security teams to talk with the automation experts to introduce automation in that space. So the general message that we have this year is, well, the desire is to create a bridge between the Ansible practitioners, the Ansible heroes, whatever you want to call them, to understand what the problem is, what the problem could be, and have a sort of a common language they can use to communicate. So the message that we have this year is, go back home, and sit down at the same table with your security folks, and make sure that they are aware that there's a new possibility, and you can help them, that you now have a common tool together. We had a couple of very interesting tracks. We have partners, a lot of partners are contributing to security space, we mentioned that before, and most of them have tracks here, and they are showing what they built with us, what are the possibilities of those tools. We have a couple of customer stories that are extremely interesting. I just came out from a session presenting one of our customer stories. And in general, we are trying to show also how you can integrate security in all the broader processes, like the mythical DevSecOps process. >> What's been the feedback from customers specifically around the talk, and the security conversations here at AnsibleFest? >> It wasn't unexpected, but it's going particularly well. We have very good feedbacks. And we have, we kind of-- >> John: What are they saying? >> Well, they are saying some, okay, the best quote that I can give you, the customer told me, "Oh, this year, I learned something new. "I learned that we can do something "in this space that we never thought about." Which is a good feedback to have at a conference. And a lot of people are attending these sessions. We have quite a lot of security professionals, that was kind of unexpected, so all the sessions are pretty full, but we also are seeing people that are just, they're just curious, they're coming in, and they are staying, they are paying attention. So there is the real opportunity, they see the same opportunity that we see, and hopefully, they will bring the message home. >> Massimo, thank you for coming on theCUBE and sharing your insights. Certainly, security is a main driver for automation, one of the key four bullet points that we outlined in our opening. Thanks for coming on, and sharing your insights. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> It's theCUBE coverage here at AnsibleFest 2019, where Red Hat's announced their Ansible Automation Platform. I'm John Furrier, with Stu Miniman. Stay with us for more after this short break. (upbeat music)

>>Welcome to the Cube's Continuing coverage of AMD's fourth generation Epic launch. I'm Dave Nicholson and I'm joining you here in our Palo Alto Studios. We have two very interesting guests to dive into some of the announcements that have been made and maybe take a look at this from an AI and ML perspective. Our first guest is Milland Doley. He's a senior director for software and solutions at amd, and we're also joined by Shamus Jones, who's a director of server engineering at Dell Technologies. Welcome gentlemen. How are you? >>Very good, thank >>You. Welcome to the Cube. So let's start out really quickly, Shamus, what, give us a thumbnail sketch of what you do at Dell. >>Yeah, so I'm the director of technical marketing engineering here at Dell, and our team really takes a look at the technical server portfolio and solutions and ensures that we can look at, you know, the performance metrics, benchmarks, and performance characteristics, so that way we can give customers a good idea of what they can expect from the server portfolio when they're looking to buy Power Edge from Dell. >>Milland, how about you? What's, what's new at a M D? What do you do there? >>Great to be here. Thank you for having me at amd, I'm the senior director of performance engineering and ISV ecosystem enablement, which is a long winter way of saying we do a lot of benchmarks, improved performance and demonstrate with wonderful partners such as Shamus and Dell, the combined leverage that AMD four generation processes and Dell systems can bring to bear on a multitude of applications across the industry spectrum. >>Shamus, talk about that relationship a little bit more. The relationship between a M D and Dell. How far back does it go? What does it look like in practical terms? >>Absolutely. So, you know, ever since AM MD reentered the server space, we've had a very close relationship. You know, it's one of those things where we are offering solutions that are out there to our customers no matter what generation A portfolio, if they're, if they're demanding either from their competitor or a m d, we offer a portfolio solutions that are out there. What we're finding is that within their generational improvements, they're just getting better and better and better. Really exciting things happening from a m D at the moment, and we're seeing that as we engineer those CPU stacks into our, our server portfolio, you know, we're really seeing unprecedented performance across the board. So excited about the, the history, you know, my team and Lin's team work very closely together, so much so that we were communicating almost on a daily basis around portfolio platforms and updates around the, the, the benchmarks testing and, and validation efforts. >>So Melind, are you happy with these PowerEdge boxes that Seamus is building to, to house, to house your baby? >>We are delighted, you know, it's hard to find stronger partners than Shamus and Dell with AMD's, second generation epic service CPUs. We already had undisputable industry performance leadership, and then with the third and now the fourth generation CPUs, we've just increased our lead with competition. We've got so many outstanding features at the platform, at the CPU level, everybody focuses on the high core counts, but there's also the DDR five, the memory, the io, and the storage subsystem. So we believe we have a fantastic performance and performance per dollar performance per what edge over competition, and we look to partners such as Dell to help us showcase that leadership. >>Well. So Shay Yeah, through Yeah, go ahead >>Dave. What, what I'd add, Dave, is that through the, the partnership that we've had, you know, we've been able to develop subsystems and platform features that historically we couldn't have really things around thermals power efficiency and, and efficiency within the platform. That means that customers can get the most out of their compute infrastructure. >>So this is gonna be a big question moving forward as next generation platforms are rolled out, there's the potential for people to have sticker shock. You talk about something that has eight or 12 cores in a, in a physical enclosure versus 96 cores, and, and I guess the, the question is, do the ROI and TCO numbers look good for someone to make that upgrade? Shamus, you wanna, you wanna hit that first or you guys are integrated? >>Absolutely, yeah, sorry. Absolutely. So we, I'll tell you what, at the moment, customers really can't afford not to upgrade at the moment, right? We've taken a look at the cost basis of keeping older infrastructure in place, let's say five or seven year old infrastructure servers that are, that are drawing more power maybe are, are poorly utilized within the infrastructure and take more and more effort and time to manage, maintain and, and really keep in production. So as customers look to upgrade or refresh their platforms, what we're finding right is that they can take a dynamic consolidation sometimes 5, 7, 8 to one consolidation depending on which platform they have as a historical and which one they're looking to upgrade to. Within AI specifically and machine learning frameworks, we're seeing really unprecedented performance. Lin's team partnered with us to deliver multiple benchmarks for the launch, some of which we're still continuing to see the goodness from things like TP C X AI as a framework, and I'm talking about here specifically the CPU U based performance. >>Even though in a lot of those AI frameworks, you would also expect to have GPUs, which all of the four platforms that we're offering on the AM MD portfolio today offer multiple G P U offerings. So we're seeing a balance between a huge amount of C P U gain and performance, as well as more and more GPU offerings within the platform. That was real, that was a real challenge for us because of the thermal challenges. I mean, you think GPUs are going up 300, 400 watt, these CPUs at 96 core are, are quite demanding thermally, but what we're able to do is through some, some unique smart cooling engineering within the, the PowerEdge portfolio, we can take a look at those platforms and make the most efficient use case by having things like telemetry within the platform so that way we can dynamically change fan speeds to get customers the best performance without throttling based on their need. >>Melin the cube was at the Supercomputing conference in Dallas this year, supercomputing conference 2022, and a lot of the discussion was around not only advances in microprocessor technology, but also advances in interconnect technology. How do you manage that sort of research partnership with Dell when you aren't strictly just focusing on the piece that you are bringing to the party? It's kind of a potluck, you know, we, we, we, we mentioned P C I E Gen five or 5.0, whatever you want to call it, new DDR storage cards, Nicks, accelerators, all of those, all of those things. How do you keep that straight when those aren't things that you actually build? >>Well, excellent question, Dave. And you know, as we are developing the next platform, obviously the, the ongoing relationship is there with Dell, but we start way before launch, right? Sometimes it's multiple years before launch. So we are not just focusing on the super high core counts at the CPU level and the platform configurations, whether it's single socket or dual socket, we are looking at it from the memory subsystem from the IO subsystem, P c i lanes for storage is a big deal, for example, in this generation. So it's really a holistic approach. And look, core counts are, you know, more important at the higher end for some customers h HPC space, some of the AI applications. But on the lower end you have database applications or some other is s v applications that care a lot about those. So it's, I guess different things matter to different folks across verticals. >>So we partnered with Dell very early in the cycle, and it's really a joint co-engineering. Shamus talked about the focus on AI with TP C X xci, I, so we set five world records in that space just on that one benchmark with AD and Dell. So fantastic kick kick off to that across a multitude of scale factors. But PPP c Xci is not just the only thing we are focusing on. We are also collaborating with Dell and des e i on some of the transformer based natural language processing models that we worked on, for example. So it's not just a steep CPU story, it's CPU platform, es subsystem software and the whole thing delivering goodness across the board to solve end user problems in AI and and other verticals. >>Yeah, the two of you are at the tip of the spear from a performance perspective. So I know it's easy to get excited about world records and, and they're, they're fantastic. I know Shamus, you know, that, you know, end user customers might, might immediately have the reaction, well, I don't need a Ferrari in my data center, or, you know, what I need is to be able to do more with less. Well, aren't we delivering that also? And you know, you imagine you milland you mentioned natural, natural language processing. Shamus, are you thinking in 2023 that a lot more enterprises are gonna be able to afford to do things like that? I mean, what are you hearing from customers on this front? >>I mean, while the adoption of the top bin CPU stack is, is definitely the exception, not the rule today we are seeing marked performance, even when we look at the mid bin CPU offerings from from a m d, those are, you know, the most common sold SKUs. And when we look at customers implementations, really what we're seeing is the fact that they're trying to make the most, not just of dollar spend, but also the whole subsystem that Melin was talking about. You know, the fact that balanced memory configs can give you marked performance improvements, not just at the CPU level, but as actually all the way through to the, to the application performance. So it's, it's trying to find the correct balance between the application needs, your budget, power draw and infrastructure within the, the data center, right? Because not only could you, you could be purchasing and, and look to deploy the most powerful systems, but if you don't have an infrastructure that's, that's got the right power, right, that's a large challenge that's happening right now and the right cooling to deal with the thermal differences of the systems, might you wanna ensure that, that you can accommodate those for not just today but in the future, right? >>So it's, it's planning that balance. >>If I may just add onto that, right? So when we launched, not just the fourth generation, but any generation in the past, there's a natural tendency to zero in on the top bin and say, wow, we've got so many cores. But as Shamus correctly said, it's not just that one core count opn, it's, it's the whole stack. And we believe with our four gen CPU processor stack, we've simplified things so much. We don't have, you know, dozens and dozens of offerings. We have a fairly simple skew stack, but we also have a very efficient skew stack. So even, even though at the top end we've got 96 scores, the thermal budget that we require is fairly reasonable. And look, with all the energy crisis going around, especially in Europe, this is a big deal. Not only do customers want performance, but they're also super focused on performance per want. And so we believe with this generation, we really delivered not just on raw performance, but also on performance per dollar and performance per one. >>Yeah. And it's not just Europe, I'm, we're, we are here in Palo Alto right now, which is in California where we all know the cost of an individual kilowatt hour of electricity because it's quite, because it's quite high. So, so thermals, power cooling, all of that, all of that goes together and that, and that drives cost. So it's a question of how much can you get done per dollar shame as you made the point that you, you're not, you don't just have a one size fits all solution that it's, that it's fit for function. I, I'm, I'm curious to hear from you from the two of you what your thoughts are from a, from a general AI and ML perspective. We're starting to see right now, if you hang out on any kind of social media, the rise of these experimental AI programs that are being presented to the public, some will write stories for you based on prom, some will create images for you. One of the more popular ones will create sort of a, your superhero alter ego for, I, I can't wait to do it, I just got the app on my phone. So those are all fun and they're trivial, but they sort of get us used to this idea that, wow, these systems can do things. They can think on their own in a certain way. W what do, what do you see the future of that looking like over the next year in terms of enterprises, what they're going to do for it with it >>Melan? Yeah, I can go first. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, >>Sure. Yeah. Good. >>So the couple of examples, Dave, that you mentioned are, I, I guess it's a blend of novelty and curiosity. You know, people using AI to write stories or poems or, you know, even carve out little jokes, check grammar and spelling very useful, but still, you know, kind of in the realm of novelty in the mainstream, in the enterprise. Look, in my opinion, AI is not just gonna be a vertical, it's gonna be a horizontal capability. We are seeing AI deployed across the board once the models have been suitably trained for disparate functions ranging from fraud detection or anomaly detection, both in the financial markets in manufacturing to things like image classification or object detection that you talked about in, in the sort of a core AI space itself, right? So we don't think of AI necessarily as a vertical, although we are showcasing it with a specific benchmark for launch, but we really look at AI emerging as a horizontal capability and frankly, companies that don't adopt AI on a massive scale run the risk of being left behind. >>Yeah, absolutely. There's an, an AI as an outcome is really something that companies, I, I think of it in the fact that they're adopting that and the frameworks that you're now seeing as the novelty pieces that Melin was talking about is, is really indicative of the under the covers activity that's been happening within infrastructures and within enterprises for the past, let's say 5, 6, 7 years, right? The fact that you have object detection within manufacturing to be able to, to be able to do defect detection within manufacturing lines. Now that can be done on edge platforms all the way at the device. So you're no longer only having to have things be done, you know, in the data center, you can bring it right out to the edge and have that high performance, you know, inferencing training models. Now, not necessarily training at the edge, but the inferencing models especially, so that way you can, you know, have more and, and better use cases for some of these, these instances things like, you know, smart cities with, with video detection. >>So that way they can see, especially during covid, we saw a lot of hospitals and a lot of customers that were using using image and, and spatial detection within their, their video feeds to be able to determine who and what employees were at risk during covid. So there's a lot of different use cases that have been coming around. I think the novelty aspect of it is really interesting and I, I know my kids, my daughters love that, that portion of it, but really what's been happening has been exciting for quite a, quite a period of time in the enterprise space. We're just now starting to actually see those come to light in more of a, a consumer relevant kind of use case. So the technology that's been developed in the data center around all of these different use cases is now starting to feed in because we do have more powerful compute at our fingertips. We do have the ability to talk more about the framework and infrastructure that's that's right out at the edge. You know, I know Dave in the past you've said things like the data center of, you know, 20 years ago is now in my hand as, as my cell phone. That's right. And, and that's, that's a fact and I'm, it's exciting to think where it's gonna be in the next 10 or 20 years. >>One terabyte baby. Yeah. One terabyte. Yeah. It's mind bo. Exactly. It's mind boggling. Yeah. And it makes me feel old. >>Yeah, >>Me too. And, and that and, and Shamus, that all sounded great. A all I want is a picture of me as a superhero though, so you guys are already way ahead of the curve, you know, with, with, with that on that note, Seamus wrap us up with, with a, with kind of a summary of the, the highlights of what we just went through in terms of the performance you're seeing out of this latest gen architecture from a md. >>Absolutely. So within the TPC xai frameworks that Melin and my team have worked together to do, you know, we're seeing unprecedented price performance. So the fact that you can get 220% uplift gen on gen for some of these benchmarks and, you know, you can have a five to one consolidation means that if you're looking to refresh platforms that are historically legacy, you can get a, a huge amount of benefit, both in reduction in the number of units that you need to deploy and the, the amount of performance that you can get per unit. You know, Melinda had mentioned earlier around CPU performance and performance per wat, specifically on the Tu socket two U platform using the fourth generation a m d Epic, you know, we're seeing a 55% higher C P U performance per wat that is that, you know, when for people who aren't necessarily looking at these statistics, every generation of servers, that that's, that is a huge jump leap forward. >>That combined with 121% higher spec scores, you know, as a benchmark, those are huge. Normally we see, let's say a 40 to 60% performance improvement on the spec benchmarks, we're seeing 121%. So while that's really impressive at the top bin, we're actually seeing, you know, large percentile improvements across the mid bins as well, you know, things in the range of like 70 to 90% performance improvements in those standard bins. So it, it's a, it's a huge performance improvement, a power efficiency, which means customers are able to save energy, space and time based on, on their deployment size. >>Thanks for that Shamus, sadly, gentlemen, our time has expired. With that, I want to thank both of you. It's a very interesting conversation. Thanks for, thanks for being with us, both of you. Thanks for joining us here on the Cube for our coverage of AMD's fourth generation Epic launch. Additional information, including white papers and benchmarks plus editorial coverage can be found on does hardware matter.com.

>> Hello, wonderful humans and welcome back to theCUBE. We are live from Las Vegas, Nevada, this week at AWS Reinvent. I am joined by analyst and 10 year reinvent veteran John Furrier. John, pleasure to join you today. >> Great to see you, great event. This is 10 years. We've got great guests coming on the Q3 days of after this wall to wall, we'll lose our voice every year, Thursday >> Host: I can feel the energy. Can you feel the volume already? >> Yes. Everyone's getting bigger, stronger, in the marketplace seeing a lot more activity new players coming into the cloud. Ones that have been around for 10 years or growing up and turning into platforms and just the growth of software in the industry is phenomenal. Our next guest is going to be great to chat about. >> I know it's funny you mentioned marketplace. We're going to be talking marketplace, in our next segment. We're bringing back a Cube alumni Chris Casey welcome back to the show. How, how you Feeling today? >> Thank you for having me. Yeah, I mean this week is the most exciting week of the year for us at AWS and you know, it's just a fantastic energy. You mentioned it before, to be here in Las Vegas at Reinvent and thank you very much for having me back. It's great to talk to John last year and lovely to meet you and talk to you this year. >> It is, it is our pleasure. It is definitely the biggest event of the year. It's wild that Amazon would do this on the biggest online shopping day of the year as well. It goes to show about the boldness and the bravery of the team, which is very impressive. So you cover a few different things at AWS So you cover a few different things at AWS you're talking about and across industries as well. Can you talk to me a little bit about why the software alliances and the data exchange are so important to the partner organization at AWS? >> Yeah, it really comes back to the importance to, to the AWS customer. As we've been working with customers over the, you know the past few years especially, and they've been embarking on their enterprise transformation and their digital transformation moving workloads to to the cloud, they've really been asking us for more and more support from the AWS ecosystem, and that includes native AWS services as well as partners to really help them start to solve some of the industry specific use cases and challenges that they're facing and really incorporate those as part of the enterprise transformation journey that they're embarking on with AWS. What, how that translates back to the AWS marketplace and the partner organization is customers have told us they're really looking for us to have the breadth and depth of the ecosystem of partners available to them that have the intellectual property that solves very niche use cases and workloads that they're looking to migrate to the cloud. A lot of the time that furnishes itself as an independent software vendor and they have software that the customer is trying to use to solve, you know an insurance workflow or an analytics workflow for your utility company as well as third party data that they need to feed into that software. And so my team's responsibility is helping work backwards from the customer need there and making sure that we have the partners available to them. Ideally in the AWS marketplace so they can go and procure those products and make them part of solutions that they're trying to build or migrate to AWS. >> A lot of success in marketplace over the past couple years especially during the pandemic people were buying and procuring through the marketplace. You guys have changed some of the operational things, data exchange enterprise sellers or your sales reps can sell in there. The partners have been glowingly saying great things about how it's just raining money for them if they do it right. And some are like, well, I don't get the marketplace. So there's a, there's kind of a new game in town and the marketplace with some of the successes. What, what is this new momentum that's happening? Is it just people are getting more comfortable they're doing it right? How does the marketplace work effectively? >> Yeah, I mean, marketplace has been around for for 10 years as well as the AWS partner organization. >> Host: It's like our coverage. >> Yes, just like. >> Host: What a nice coincidence. Decades all around happy anniversary everyone. >> Yeah, everyone's selling, celebrating the 10 year birthday, but I think to your point, John, you know, we we've continued iterate on features and functionality that have made the partner experience a much more welcoming digital experience for them to go to market with AWS. So that certainly helped and we've seen more and more customers start to adopt marketplace especially for, for some of their larger applications that they're trying to transform on the cloud. And that extends into industry verticals as well as horizontal sort of business applications whether they be ERP systems like Infor the customers are trying to procure through the marketplace. And I think even for our partners, it's customer driven. You know, we, we've, we've heard from our customers that the, the streamlining the payments and procurement process is a really key benefit for them procuring by the marketplace and also the extra governance and control and visibility they get on their third party licensing contracts is a really material benefit for them which is helping our partners lean in to marketplace as a as a digital channel for them to go to market with us. >> And also you guys have this program it's what's it called enterprise buying or something where clients can just take their spend and move it over into other products like MongoDB more Mongo gimme some more Splunk, gimme some more influence. I mean all these things are possible now, right. For some of the partners. Isn't that, that's like that's like found money for the, for the partners. >> Yeah, going back to what I said before about the AWS ecosystem, we're really looking to help customers holistically with regard to that, and certainly when customers are looking to make commitments to AWS and and move a a large swath of workloads to AWS we want to make sure they can benefit from that commitment not only from native AWS services but also third party data and software applications that they might be procuring through the marketplace. So certainly for the procurement teams not only is there technical benefits for them on the marketplace and you know foresters total economic impact study really helped quantify that for us more recently. You know, 66% of time saving for procurement professionals. >> Host: Wow. >> Which is when you calculate that in hours in person weeks or a year, that's a lot of time on undifferentiated heavy lifting that they can now be doing on value added activities. >> Host: That's a massive shift for >> Yeah, massive shift. So that in addition, you know, to, you know, some of the more contractual and commercial benefits is really helping customers look holistically at how AWS is helping them transform with third party applications and data. >> I want to stick on customers for a second 'cause in my show notes are some pretty well known customers and you mentioned in for a moment ago can you tell us a little bit about what's going on with Ferrari? >> Chris: Sure. So in four is one of our horizontal business application partners and sellers in the AWS marketplace and they sell ERP systems so helping enterprises with resource planning and Ferrari is obviously a very well known brand and you know, the oldest and most successful >> May have heard of them. >> Chris: Yes. Right. The most successful formula one racing team and Ferrari, you know a really meaningful customer for AWS from multiple angles whether they're using AWS to enhance their car design, as well as their fan engagement, as well as their actual end car consumer experience. But as it specifically relates to marketplace as part of Ferrari's technical transformation they were looking to upgrade their ERP system. And so they went through a whole swath of vendors that they wanted to assess and they actually chose Infor as their ERP system. And one of the reasons was >> Nice. >> Chris: because Infor actually have an automotive specific instance of their SaaS application. So when we're talking about really solving for some of those niche challenges for customers who operate in an industry, that was one of the key benefits. And then as an added bonus for Ferrari being able to procure that software through the AWS marketplace gave them all the procurement benefits that we just talked about. So it's super exciting that we're able to play a, you know a part in accelerating that digital transformation with Ferrari and also help Infor in terms of getting a really meaningful customer using their software services on AWS. >> Yeah. Putting a new meaning to turn key your push start. (laughing) >> You mentioned horizontal services earlier. What is it all about there? What's new there? We're hearing, I'm expecting to see that in the keynote tomorrow. Horizontal and vertical solutions and let's get the CEOs. What, what's the focus there? What's this horizontal focus for you? >> Yeah, I, I think the, the big thing is is really helping line of business users. So people in operations or marketing functions, that our customers, see the the partners and the solutions that they use on a daily basis today and how they can actually help accelerate their overall enterprise transformation. With those partners, now on AWS. Historically, you know, those line of business users might not have cared where an application historically ran whether it was on-prem or on AWS but now just the depth of those transformation journeys their enterprises are on that's really the next frontier of applications and use cases that many of our customers are saying they want to move to AWS. >> John: And what are some of those horizontal examples that you see emerging? >> So Salesforce is, is probably one, one of the best ones to call out there. And really the two meaningful things Salesforce have done there is a deep integration with our ML and AI services like SageMaker so people can actually perform some of those activities without leaving the Salesforce application. And then AWS and Salesforce have worked on a unified developer experience, which really helps remove friction in terms of data flows for anyone that's trying to build on both of those services. So the partnership with horizontal business applications like Salesforce is much deeper than just to go to market. It's also on the build side to help make it much more seamless for customers as they're trying to migrate to Salesforce on AWS as an example there. >> It's like having too many tabs open at once, everybody wants it all in one place all at one time. >> Chris: Yeah. >> And it makes sense that you're doing so much in, in the partner marketplace. Let's talk a little bit more about the data exchange. How, how is this intertwined with your vertical and horizontal efforts that the team's striving as well as with another big name example that folks know probably only because of the last few, few years, excuse me, with Moderna? Can you tell us a little more about that? >> Sure. I think when we're, when we're talking to customers about their needs when they're operating in a specific industry, but it probably goes for all customers and enterprise customers especially when they're thinking about software. Almost always that software also needs data to actually be analyzed or processed through it for really the end business outcome to be achieved. And so we're really making a conscious effort to really help our partners integrate with solutions that the AWS field teams and business development teams are talking to customers about and help tie those solutions to customer use cases, rather than it being an engagement with a specific customer on a product by product basis. And certainly software and and data going together is a really nice combination that many customers are looking for us to solve for and for looking for us to create pairings based on other customer needs or use cases that we've historically solved for in the past. >> I mean, with over a million customers, it's hard to imagine anyone could have more use cases to pull from when we're talking about these different instances >> Right. The challenge actually is identifying which are the key ones for each of the industries and which are the ones that are going to help move the needle the most for customers in there, it's, it's not an absence of selection in that case. >> Host: Right. (laughter) I can imagine. I can imagine that's actually the challenge. >> Chris: Yeah. >> Yeah. >> But it's really important. And then more specifically on the data exchange, you know I think it goes back to one of the leadership principles that we launched last year. The two new leadership principles, success and scale bring broad responsibility. You know, we take that very seriously at AWS and we think about that in our actions with our native services, but also in terms of, you know, the availability of partner solutions and then ultimately the end customer outcomes that we can help achieve. And I think Moderna's a great example of that. Moderna have been using the mRNA technology and they're using it to develop a a new vaccine for the RSV virus. And they're actually using the data exchange to procure and then analyze real world evidence data. And what that, what that helps them do is identify and and analyze in almost real time using data on Redshift who are the best vaccine candidates for the trials based on geography and demographics. So it's really helping them save costs, but not only cost really help optimize and be much more efficient in terms of how they're going about their trials from time to market.. >> Host: Time to market. >> vaccine perspective. Yeah. And more importantly, getting the analysis and the results back from those trials as fast as they possibly can. >> Yeah. >> And data exchange, great with the trend that we're going to hear and the keynote tomorrow. More data exchanging more data being more fluid addressable shows those advantages. That's a great example. Great call out there. Chris, I got to get your thoughts on the ecosystem. You know, Ruba Borno is the new head of partners, APN, Amazon Partner Network and marketplace comes together. How you guys serve your partners is also growing and evolving. What's the biggest thing going on in the ecosystem that you see from your perspective? You can put your Amazon hat on or take your your Amazon hat off a personal hat on what's going on. There's a real growth, I mean seeing people getting bigger and stronger as partners. There's more learning, there's more platforms developing. It's, it's kind of the next gen wave coming. What's going on there? What's the, what's the keynote going to be like, what's the what's this reinvent going to be for partners? Give us a share your, share your thoughts. >> Yeah, certainly. I, I think, you know, we are really trying to make sure that we're simplifying the partner experience as much as we possibly can to really help our partners become you know, more profitable or the most profitable they can be with AWS. And so, you know, certainly in Ruba's keynote on Wednesday you're going to hear a little bit about what we've done there from a programs perspective, what we're doing there from feature and capability perspectives to help, you know really push the digital custom, the digital partner experience, sorry, I should say as much as possible. And really looking holistically at that partner experience and listening to our partners as much as we possibly can to adapt partner pathways to ultimately simplify how they're going to market with AWS. Not only on the co-sell side of things and how we interact with our field teams and actually interact with the end customer, but also on how we, we build and help coil with them on AWS to make their solutions whether that be software, whether that be machine learning models, whether that be data sets most optimized to operate in the AWS ecosystem. So you're going to hear a lot of that in Ruba's keynote on Wednesday. There's certainly some really fantastic partner stories and partner launches that'll be featured. Also some customer outcomes that have been realized as a result of partners. So make sure you don't miss it >> John: More action than ever before, right now. >> It's jam-packed, certainly and throughout the week you're going to see multiple launches and releases related to what we're doing with partners on marketplace, but also more generally to help achieve those customer outcomes. >> Well said Brian. So your heart take, what is the future of partnerships the future of the cloud, if you want throw it in, what what are you going to be saying to us? Hopefully the next time you get to sit down with John and I here on theCUBE at reinvent next year. >> Chris: Yeah, I think Adam, Adam was quoted today, as you know, saying that the, the partner ecosystem is going to be around and a foundation for decades. I think is a hundred percent right for me in terms of the industry verticals, the partner ecosystem we have and the availability of these niche solutions that really are solving very specific but mission critical use cases for our customers in each of the industries is super important and it's going to be a a foundation for AWS's growth strategy across all the industry segments for many years to come. So we're super excited about the opportunity ahead of us and we're ready to get after it. >> John: If you, if you could do an Instagram reel right now, what would you say is the most important >> The Insta challenge by go >> The Insta challenge, real >> Host: Chris's Insta challenge >> Insta challenge here, what would be the the real you'd say to the audience about why this year's reinvent is so important? >> I think this year's reinvent is going to give you a clear sense of the breadth and depth of partners that are available to you across the AWS ecosystem. And there's really no industry or use case that we can't solve with partners that we have available within the partner organization. >> Anything is possible. What a note to close on. Chris Casey, thank you so much for joining us for the second time here on theCUBE. John >> He nailed Instagram challenge. >> Yeah, he did. Did he pass the John test? >> I'd say, I'd say so. >> I'd say so. And and and he certainly teased us all with the content to come this week. I want to see all the keynotes here about some of those partners. You tease them in the gaming space with us earlier. It's going to be a very exciting week. Thank you John, for your commentary. Thank you Chris, one more time. >> Thanks for having me. >> And thank you all for tuning in here at theCUBE where we are the leader in high tech coverage. My name is Savannah Peterson, joined by John Furrier with Cube Team live from Las Vegas, Nevada. AWS Reinvent will be here all week and we hope you stay tuned.

>>Hey guys. Welcome back to the Cubes coverage of Ansible Fast 2022. This is day two of our wall to wall coverage. Lisa Martin here with John Ferer. John, we're seeing this world where companies are saying if we can't automate it, we need to, The automation market is transforming. There's been a lot of buzz about that. A lot of technical chops here at Ansible Fest. >>Yeah, I mean, we've got a great guest here coming on Cuba alumni, Dean Newman, future room. He travels every event he's got. He's got his nose to the grindstone ear to the ground. Great analysis. I mean, we're gonna get into why it's important. How does Ansible fit into the big picture? It's really gonna be a great segment. The >>Board do it well, John just did my job for me about, I'll introduce him again. Daniel Newman, one of our alumni is Back Principal Analyst at Future and Research. Great to have you back on the cube. >>Yeah, it's good to join you. Excited to be back in Chicago. I don't know if you guys knew this, but for 40 years, this was my hometown. Now I don't necessarily brag about that anymore. I'm, I live in Austin now. I'm a proud Texan, but I did grow up here actually out in the west suburbs. I got off the plane, I felt the cold air, and I almost turned around and said, Does this thing go back? Yeah. Cause I'm, I've, I've grown thin skin. It did not take me long. I, I like the warm, Come on, >>I'm the saying, I'm from California and I got off the plane Monday. I went, Whoa, I need a coat. And I was in Miami a week ago and it was 85. >>Oh goodness. >>Crazy. So you just flew in. Talk about what's going on, your take on, on Ansible. We've talked a lot with the community, with partners, with customers, a lot of momentum. The flywheel of the community is going around and round and round. What are some of your perspectives that you see? >>Yeah, absolutely. Well, let's you know, I'm gonna take a quick step back. We're entering an era where companies are gonna have to figure out how to do more with less. Okay? We've got exponential data growth, we've got more architectural complexity than ever before. Companies are trying to discern how to deal with many different environments. And just at a macro level, Red Hat is one of the companies that is almost certainly gonna be part of this multi-cloud hybrid cloud era. So that should initially give a lot of confidence to the buying group that are looking at how to automate their environments. You're automating workflows, but really with, with Ansible, we're focused on automating it, automating the network. So as companies are kind of dig out, we're entering this recessionary period, Okay, we're gonna call it what it is. The first thing that they're gonna look at is how do we tech our way out of it? >>I had a wonderful one-on-one conversation with ServiceNow ceo, Bill McDermott, and we saw ServiceNow was in focus this morning in the initial opening session. This is the integration, right? Ansible integrating with ServiceNow. What we need to see is infrastructure automation, layers and applications working in concert to basically enable enterprises to be up and running all the time. Let's first fix the problems that are most common. Let's, let's automate 'em, let's script them. And then at some point, let's have them self resolving, which we saw at the end with Project Wisdom. So as I see it, automation is that layer that enterprises, boards, technologists, all can agree upon are basically here's something that can make our business more efficient, more profitable, and it's gonna deal with this short term downturn in a way that tech is actually gonna be the answer. Just like Bill and I said, let's tech our way out of it. >>If you look at the Red Hat being bought by ibm, you see Project Wisdom Project, not a product, it's a project. Project Wisdom is the confluence of research and practitioners kind of coming together with ai. So bringing AI power to the Ansible is interesting. Red Hat, Linux, Rel OpenShift, I mean, Red Hat's kind of position, isn't it? Kind of be in that right spot where a puck might be coming maybe. I mean, what do you think? >>Yeah, as analysts, we're really good at predicting the, the recent past. It's a joke I always like to make, but Red Hat's been building toward the future. I think for some time. Project Wisdom, first of all, I was very encouraged with it. One of the things that many people in the market probably have commented on is how close is IBM in Red Hat? Now, again, it's a $34 billion acquisition that was made, but boy, the cultures of these two companies couldn't be more different. And of course, Red Hat kind of carries this, this sort of middle ground layer where they provide a lot of value in services to companies that maybe don't use IBM at, at, for the public cloud especially. This was a great indication of how you can take the power of IBM's research, which of course has some of the world's most prolific data scientists, engineers, building things for the future. >>You know, you see things like yesterday they launched a, you know, an AI solution. You know, they're building chips, semiconductors, and technologies that are gonna power the future. They're building quantum. Long story short, they have these really brilliant technologists here that could be adding value to Red Hat. And I don't know that the, the world has fully been able to appreciate that. So when, when they got on stage and they kind of say, Here's how IBM is gonna help power the next generation, I was immediately very encouraged by the fact that the two companies are starting to show signs of how they can collaborate to offer value to their customers. Because of course, as John kind of started off with, his question is, they've kind of been where the puck is going. Open source, Linux hybrid cloud, This is the future. In the future. Every company's multi-cloud. And I said in a one-on-one meeting this morning, every company is going to probably have workloads on every cloud, especially large enterprises. >>Yeah. And I think that the secret's gonna be how do you make that evolve? And one of the things that's coming out of the industry over the years, and looking back as historians, we would say, gotta have standards. Well, with cloud, now people standards might slow things down. So you're gonna start to figure out how does the community and the developers are thinking it'll be the canary in the coal mine. And I'd love to get your reaction on that, because we got Cuban next week. You're seeing people kind of align and try to win the developers, which, you know, I always laugh cuz like, you don't wanna win, you want, you want them on your team, but you don't wanna win them. It's like a, it's like, so developers will decide, >>Well, I, I think what's happening is there are multiple forces that are driving product adoption. And John, getting the developers to support the utilization and adoption of any sort of stack goes a long way. We've seen how sticky it can be, how sticky it is with many of the public cloud pro providers, how sticky it is with certain applications. And it's gonna be sticky here in these interim layers like open source automation. And Red Hat does have a very compelling developer ecosystem. I mean, if you sat in the keynote this morning, I said, you know, if you're not a developer, some of this stuff would've been fairly difficult to understand. But as a developer you saw them laughing at jokes because, you know, what was it the whole part about, you know, it didn't actually, the ping wasn't a success, right? And everybody started laughing and you know, I, I was sitting next to someone who wasn't technical and, and you know, she kinda goes, What, what was so funny? >>I'm like, well, he said it worked. Do you see that? It said zero data trans or whatever that was. So, but if I may just really quickly, one, one other thing I did wanna say about Project Wisdom, John, that the low code and no code to the full stack developer is a continuum that every technology company is gonna have to think deeply about as we go to the future. Because the people that tend to know the process that needs to be automated tend to not be able to code it. And so we've seen every automation company on the planet sort of figuring out and how to address this low code, no code environment. I think the power of this partnership between IBM Research and Red Hat is that they have an incredibly deep bench of capabilities to do things like, like self-training. Okay, you've got so much data, such significant size models and accuracy is a problem, but we need systems that can self teach. They need to be able self-teach, self learn, self-heal so that we can actually get to the crux of what automation is supposed to do for us. And that's supposed to take the mundane out and enable those humans that know how to code to work on the really difficult and hard stuff because the automation's not gonna replace any of that stuff anytime soon. >>So where do you think looking at, at the partnership and the evolution of it between IBM research and Red Hat, and you're saying, you know, they're, they're, they're finally getting this synergy together. How is it gonna affect the future of automation and how is it poised to give them a competitive advantage in the market? >>Yeah, I think the future or the, the competitive space is that, that is, is ecosystems and integration. So yesterday you heard, you know, Red Hat Ansible focusing on a partnership with aws. You know, this week I was at Oracle Cloud world and they're talking about running their database in aws. And, and so I'm kind of going around to get to the answer to your question, but I think collaboration is sort of the future of growth and innovation. You need multiple companies working towards the same goal to put gobs of resources, that's the technical term, gobs of resources towards doing really hard things. And so Ansible has been very successful in automating and securing and focusing on very certain specific workloads that need to be automated, but we need more and there's gonna be more data created. The proliferation, especially the edge. So you saw all this stuff about Rockwell, How do you really automate the edge at scale? You need large models that are able to look and consume a ton of data that are gonna be continuously learning, and then eventually they're gonna be able to deliver value to these companies at scale. IBM plus Red Hat have really great resources to drive this kind of automation. Having said that, I see those partnerships with aws, with Microsoft, with ibm, with ServiceNow. It's not one player coming to the table. It's a lot of players. They >>Gotta be Switzerland. I mean they have the Switzerland. I mean, but the thing about the Amazon deal is like that marketplace integration essentially puts Ansible once a client's in on, on marketplace and you get the central on the same bill. I mean, that's gonna be a money maker for Ansible. I >>Couldn't agree more, John. I think being part of these public cloud marketplaces is gonna be so critical and having Ansible land and of course AWS largest public cloud by volume, largest marketplace today. And my opinion is that partnership will be extensible to the other public clouds over time. That just makes sense. And so you start, you know, I think we've learned this, John, you've done enough of these interviews that, you know, you start with the biggest, with the highest distribution and probability rates, which in this case right now is aws, but it'll land on in Azure, it'll land in Google and it'll continue to, to grow. And that kind of adoption, streamlining make it consumption more consumable. That's >>Always, I think, Red Hat and Ansible, you nailed it on that whole point about multicloud, because what happens then is why would I want to alienate a marketplace audience to use my product when it could span multiple environments, right? So you saw, you heard that Stephanie yesterday talk about they, they didn't say multiple clouds, multiple environments. And I think that is where I think I see this layer coming in because some companies just have to work on all clouds. That's the way it has to be. Why wouldn't you? >>Yeah. Well every, every company will probably end up with some workloads in every cloud. I just think that is the fate. Whether it's how we consume our SaaS, which a lot of people don't think about, but it always tends to be running on another hyperscale public cloud. Most companies tend to be consuming some workloads from every cloud. It's not always direct. So they might have a single control plane that they tend to lead the way with, but that is only gonna continue to change. And every public cloud company seems to be working on figuring out what their niche is. What is the one thing that sort of drives whether, you know, it is, you know, traditional, we know the commoditization of traditional storage network compute. So now you're seeing things like ai, things like automation, things like the edge collaboration tools, software being put into the, to the forefront because it's a different consumption model, it's a different margin and economic model. And then of course it gives competitive advantages. And we've seen that, you know, I came back from Google Cloud next and at Google Cloud next, you know, you can see they're leaning into the data AI cloud. I mean, that is their focus, like data ai. This is how we get people to come in and start using Google, who in most cases, they're probably using AWS or Microsoft today. >>It's a great specialty cloud right there. That's a big use case. I can run data on Google and run something on aws. >>And then of course you've got all kinds of, and this is a little off topic, but you got sovereignty, compliance, regulatory that tends to drive different clouds over, you know, global clouds like Tencent and Alibaba. You know, if your workloads are in China, >>Well, this comes back down at least to the whole complexity issue. I mean, it has to get complex before it gets easier. And I think that's what we're seeing companies opportunities like Ansible to be like, Okay, tame, tame the complexity. >>Yeah. Yeah, I totally agree with you. I mean, look, when I was watching the demonstrations today, my take is there's so many kind of simple, repeatable and mundane tasks in everyday life that enterprises need to, to automate. Do that first, you know? Then the second thing is working on how do you create self-healing, self-teaching, self-learning, You know, and, and I realize I'm a little broken of a broken record at this, but these are those first things to fix. You know, I know we want to jump to the future where we automate every task and we have multi-term conversational AI that is booking our calendars and driving our cars for us. But in the first place, we just need to say, Hey, the network's down. Like, let's make sure that we can quickly get access back to that network again. Let's make sure that we're able to reach our different zones and locations. Let's make sure that robotic arm is continually doing the thing it's supposed to be doing on the schedule that it's been committed to. That's first. And then we can get to some of these really intensive deep metaverse state of automation that we talk about. Self-learning, data replication, synthetic data. I'm just gonna throw terms around. So I sound super smart. >>In your customer conversations though, from an looking at the automation journey, are you finding most of them, or some percentage is, is wanting to go directly into those really complex projects rather than starting with the basics? >>I don't know that you're, you're finding that the customers want to do that? I think it's the architecture that often ends up being a problem is we as, as the vendor side, will tend to talk about the most complex problems that they're able to solve before companies have really started solving the, the immediate problems that are before them. You know, it's, we talk about, you know, the metaphor of the cloud is a great one, but we talk about the cloud, like it's ubiquitous. Yeah. But less than 30% of our workloads are in the public cloud. Automation is still in very early days and in many industries it's fairly nascent. And doing things like self-healing networks is still something that hasn't even been able to be deployed on an enterprise-wide basis, let alone at the industrial layer. Maybe at the company's on manufacturing PLAs or in oil fields. Like these are places that have difficult to reach infrastructure that needs to be running all the time. We need to build systems and leverage the power of automation to keep that stuff up and running. That's, that's just business value, which by the way is what makes the world go running. Yeah. Awesome. >>A lot of customers and users are struggling to find what's the value in automating certain process, What's the ROI in it? How do you help them get there so that they understand how to start, but truly to make it a journey that is a success. >>ROI tends to be a little bit nebulous. It's one of those things I think a lot of analysts do. Things like TCO analysis Yeah. Is an ROI analysis. I think the businesses actually tend to know what the ROI is gonna be because they can basically look at something like, you know, when you have an msa, here's the downtime, right? Business can typically tell you, you know, I guarantee you Amazon could say, Look for every second of downtime, this is how much commerce it costs us. Yeah. A company can generally say, if it was, you know, we had the energy, the windmills company, like they could say every minute that windmill isn't running, we're creating, you know, X amount less energy. So there's a, there's a time value proposition that companies can determine. Now the question is, is about the deployment. You know, we, I've seen it more nascent, like cybersecurity can tend to be nascent. >>Like what does a breach cost us? Well there's, you know, specific costs of actually getting the breach cured or paying for the cybersecurity services. And then there's the actual, you know, ephemeral costs of brand damage and of risks and customer, you know, negative customer sentiment that potentially comes out of it. With automation, I think it's actually pretty well understood. They can look at, hey, if we can do this many more cycles, if we can keep our uptime at this rate, if we can reduce specific workforce, and I'm always very careful about this because I don't believe automation is about replacement or displacement, but I do think it is about up-leveling and it is about helping people work on things that are complex problems that machines can't solve. I mean, said that if you don't need to put as many bodies on something that can be immediately returned to the organization's bottom line, or those resources can be used for something more innovative. So all those things are pretty well understood. Getting the automation to full deployment at scale, though, I think what often, it's not that roi, it's the timeline that gets misunderstood. Like all it projects, they tend to take longer. And even when things are made really easy, like with what Project Wisdom is trying to do, semantically enable through low code, no code and the ability to get more accuracy, it just never tends to happen quite as fast. So, but that's not an automation problem, That's just the crux of it. >>Okay. What are some of the, the next things on your plate? You're quite a, a busy guy. We, you, you were at Google, you were at Oracle, you're here today. What are some of the next things that we can expect from Daniel Newman? >>Oh boy, I moved Really, I do move really quickly and thank you for that. Well, I'm very excited. I'm taking a couple of work personal days. I don't know if you're a fan, but F1 is this weekend. I'm the US Grand Prix. Oh, you're gonna Austin. So I will be, I live in Austin. Oh. So I will be in Austin. I will be at the Grand Prix. It is work because it, you know, I'm going with a number of our clients that have, have sponsorships there. So I'll be spending time figuring out how the data that comes off of these really fun cars is meaningfully gonna change the world. I'll actually be talking to Splunk CEO at the, at the race on Saturday morning. But yeah, I got a lot of great things. I got a, a conversation coming up with the CEO of Twilio next week. We got a huge week of earnings ahead and so I do a lot of work on that. So I'll be on Bloomberg next week with Emily Chang talking about Microsoft and Google. Love talking to Emily, but just as much love being here on, on the queue with you >>Guys. Well we like to hear that. Who you're rooting for F one's your favorite driver. I, >>I, I like Lando. Do you? I'm Norris. I know it's not necessarily a fan favorite, but I'm a bit of a McLaren guy. I mean obviously I have clients with Oracle and Red Bull with Ball Common Ferrari. I've got Cly Splunk and so I have clients in all. So I'm cheering for all of 'em. And on Sunday I'm actually gonna be in the Williams Paddock. So I don't, I don't know if that's gonna gimme me a chance to really root for anything, but I'm always, always a big fan of the underdog. So maybe Latifi. >>There you go. And the data that comes off the how many central unbeliev, the car, it's crazy's. Such a scientific sport. Believable. >>We could have Christian, I was with Christian Horner yesterday, the team principal from Reside. Oh yeah, yeah. He was at the Oracle event and we did a q and a with him and with the CMO of, it's so much fun. F1 has been unbelievable to watch the momentum and what a great, you know, transitional conversation to to, to CX and automation of experiences for fans as the fan has grown by hundreds of percent. But just to circle back full way, I was very encouraged with what I saw today. Red Hat, Ansible, IBM Strong partnership. I like what they're doing in their expanded ecosystem. And automation, by the way, is gonna be one of the most robust investment areas over the next few years, even as other parts of tech continue to struggle that in cyber security. >>You heard it here. First guys, investment in automation and cyber security straight from two analysts. I got to sit between. For our guests and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching The Cube Live from Chicago, Ansible Fest 22. John and I will be back after a short break. SO'S stick around.

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to San Francisco. Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson here. The cube is covering VMware Explorer, 2022 first year with the new name, there's about seven to 10,000 people here. So folks are excited to be back. I was in the keynote this morning. You probably were two David. It was standing room, only lots of excitement, lots of news. We're gonna be unpacking some news. Next. We have Brandon Jackson joining us S DDC architect at CDW and Keith normy is back one of our alumni head of worldwide partner solution sales at NetApp guys. Welcome back to the program. Hey, thank >>You, reunion week. >>So let's talk about what's going on, obviously, lots of news this morning, lots of momentum at VMware, lots of momentum at NetApp CDW. Keith, we'll start with you talk about what was announced yesterday, NetApp, VMware, AWS, and what's in it for customers and partners. >>Yeah, it's a new day. I talked about this in a blog that I wrote that, you know, for me, I started out with VMware and NetApp about 15 years ago when the ecosystem was still kind of emerging back in the ESX three days, for those that remember those days and, and NetApp had a really real dominant position because some of the things that they had delivered with VMware, and we're kind of at that same venture now where everyone needs to have as they talk about today. Multi-cloud, and, and there's been some things that people try to get through as they talk about cloud chaos today. It also is in the, some of the realms, the barriers that you don't often see. So releasing this new FSX capability with the metal data store within VMware cloud, and AWS is a real big opportunity. And it's not just a big opportunity for NetApp. It's a big opportunity for the people that actually deliver this for the customers, which is our partner. So for me, it's full circle. I started with a partner I come back around and I'm now in a great position to kind of work with our partners. And they're the real story here with us. Yeah. >>Brandon, talk about the value in this from CDWs perspective, what is the momentum that your you and the company are excited to carry forward? >>Yeah, this is super exciting. I've been close to the VMware cloud AWS story since its inception. So, you know, almost four years building that practice out at CDW and it's a great solution, but we spent all this time prior driving people to that HCI type of mentality where, Hey, you can just scale the portions that you need and that wasn't available in the cloud. And although it's a great solution, there's pain points there where it just can become cost prohibitive because customers see what they need. But that storage piece is a heavy component. And when that adds to what that cluster size needs to be, that's a real problem with this announcement, right? We can now use those supplemental data stores and be able to shrink that size. So it saves the customer massive amounts of money. I mean, we have like 25, 50% in savings while without sacrificing anything, they're getting the operational efficiency that they know and love from NetApp. They get that control and that experience that they've been using or want to use in VMware cloud. And they're just combining the two in a very cost friendly package. >>So I have one comment and that is finally >>Right. Absolutely. I, >>We used to refer to it as the devil's triangle of CPU, memory and storage. And if those are, if those are inextricably linked to one another, you want a little bit more storage. Okay. Here's your CPU and memory that you can pay for and power and cool that you don't need? No, no, no, no, no, no. I just need, I just need some storage over here. And in the VMware context, think of the affinity that VMware has had with NetApp forever. The irony being that EMC of course, owned VMware for a period of time, kind of owned their stock. Yeah. So you have this thing that is fundamentally built around VMFS that just fits perfectly into the filer methodology. Yeah. And now they're back together in the cloud. And, and the thing is if, if we were, if we were sitting here talking about this 5, 6, 7 years ago, an AWS person would've said we were all crazy. Yeah, yeah. AWS at the time would've said, nah, no, no, no, no. We're gonna figure that out. You, you, you, you guys are just gonna have to go away. It's >>Not lost on me that, you know, it was great seeing and hearing of NetApp in a day, one VMware keynote. >>It's amazing. >>That was great. And so we built off that because the, the, the great thing about kind of where this comes from is, you know, you built that whole HCI or converged infrastructure for simplicity and everyone is simplicity. And so this is just another evolution of the story. And as you do, so, you know, you've, you've freed up for all the workloads, all the scenarios, all the, all the operational situations that you've wanted to kind of get into. Now, if you can save anywhere from 25 to 50% of the costs of previous, you can unleash a whole nother set of workloads and do so by the way, with same consistent operational consistency from NetApp, in terms of the data that you have on-prem to cloud, or even if you don't have NetApp, on-prem, you know, we have the ways to get it to the cloud and VMware cloud and AWS, and, and, and basically give you that data simplicity for management. >>And, but again, it isn't just a NetApp part of this. There is, as everyone knows with cloud, a whole layer of infrastructure around the security networking, there's a ton of work that gets from the partner side to look at applications and workloads and understand sort of what's the composition of those, which ones are ready for the cloud. First, you know, seeing, you know, the AWS person with the SAP title, that's a big workload. Obviously that's making this journey to the cloud, along with all the rest of them. That's what the partners deliver. NetApp has done everything they can do to make that as frictionless as possible in the marketplace as a first party service, and now through VMware cloud. So we've done all we can do on, on that factor. Now it's the partners that could take it. And by the way, the reaction that we've seen kind of in some of, of the private previews are working, has been incredible. These guys bring really the true superhero muscle to what organizations are gonna need to have to take those workloads to VMware cloud and, and evolve it into this new cloud era that they're talking about at the keynote today. >>Yeah, don't get us wrong. We love vSphere eight and vs a, a and VSAN aid in particular, but there's a huge market need for this, for what you guys are delivering. >>Talk to us, Brandon, from your perspective about being able to, to part, to, to have the powerhouses of NetApp, VMware and AWS, and in terms of being able to meet your customers where they are and what they want. >>And I, that's huge, right? That the solution allows these things to come together in a seamless way, right? So we get the, the flexibility of cloud. We get the scalability of easy storage now, in a way we didn't have before, and we get the power that's VMware, right. And in that, in the virtualization platform, and that makes it easy for a customer to say, I need to be somewhere else. And maybe that's not, that's not a colo anymore. That's not a secondary data center. I want to be in the cloud, but I wanna do it on my terms. I wanna do it. So it works for me as a customer. This solution has that, right? And, and we come in as a partner and we look at, we kind of call it the full stack approach, where we really look at the entire, you know, ecosystem that we're talking. >>So from the application all the way down to the infrastructure and even below, and figure out how that's gonna work best for our customers and putting things together with the native cloud services, then with their VMware environment, living on VMware cloud, AWS, leveraging storage with a, you know, with the, the FSX in. So they can easily grow their storage and use all those operational efficiencies and the things that they love about NetApp already. And from a Dr. Use case, we can replicate from a NetApp to NetApp. And it's just, it makes it so easy to have that conversation with the customers and just, it clicks. And like, this is what I need. This is what I've been looking for. And all wrapped up in a really easy package. >>No wonder Dave's comment was finally right. >>Oh, absolutely. I mean, we've been, again, you know, we talked about the HCI, like that made sense. And three or four years ago, maybe even a little bit longer, right. That click, same thing was like, oh my gosh, this is the way infrastructure should work. And we're just having that same Nirvana moment that this is how easy cloud infrastructure can work and that I can have that storage without sacrificing the cost, throw more nodes into my cluster to be able to do so. >>Yeah. I I've just worked with so many customers who struggle to get to where they want to be BEC, and this is something that just feels like a nice worn in pair of shoes or jeans to folks who right now, you know, look, the majority of it spend is still on premises, right? So the typical deployment of VMware today is often VMware with NetApp appliances providing file storage. So this is something that I imagine will help accelerate some of your customers' moves. >>It absolutely will. And in fact, I have three customers off the hand that I know that I've been like, not wanting to say anything like let's talk next week. Right? There's this, there may be something we can talk about when, on, after Explorer waiting for the announcement, because we've been working with NetApp and, and doing some of the private preview stuff. Yeah. And our engineering teams, working with your engineering teams to build this out so that when the announcement came out yesterday, we can go back and say, okay, now let's have that conversation. Now let's talk about what this looks like, >>Where are you having customer conversation? So this is strictly an it conversation has this elevated up the stack, especially as we've seen the massive, I call it cloud migration adoption of the last couple of years. >>I, I I'll speak fairly from the partner level. It is an elevated conversation. So we're not only talking, at least I'm not only talking to it. Administrators, directors, C levels like this is a story that resonates because it's about business value, right? I have an initiative, I have a goal. And that goal is wrapped into that it solution. And typically has some sort of resource or financial cost to it. We want to hear that story. And so it resonates when we can talk about how you can achieve your goals, do it in a way with a specific solution that encompasses everything at a price point that you'll like, and then that can flow down to the directors and the it administrators. And we can start talking about, you know, turning the screws and the knobs. >>Yeah. And for us, it does start with a partner because the reality is that's who the that's, who the customers all engage. And the reality is there's not just one partner type there's many, you know, we, in fact, what the biggest thing that we've been really modernizing is how to address the different partner types. Cuz you obviously have the Accentures of the world that are the big GSIs, the big SI you have folks that are hosting providers, you have Equinox X in the middle of that. You've got partners that just do services that might be only influenced partners that are influencing the, the design. And so if you look up and down between, you know, VMware's partner ecosystem and NetApp's partner ecosystem overlap pretty well, but there's this factor with AWS about, you know, both born and the cloud partners and partners, you know, like CW that have really, you know, taken the step forward to be relevant in that phase going forward. >>And that's, what's exciting to us is to see that kind of come forward. So when something like a FSX end comes forward in this VMware cloud and AWS scenario, they can take and, and just have instant ignition with it. And for us, that's what it's about. Our job is really just to remove friction back what they do and get outta the way, help them win. And last week we were in Chicago at the AWS reinvent thing and seeing AWS with another partner in their whole briefing and how they came to life with the, with this whole anticipation for this week, you know, it's, it's all the partners are very excited for it. So we're just gonna fuel that. And you know, I often wonder we got the, the t-shirt that says, you know, two's company three is a cloud maybe should have been four because it takes the, the partner for the, the completion. >>We appreciate that for sure. >>It does. It sounds like there's tremendous momentum in the market, an appetite across all three companies, four, if you include CDW. So in terms of, of the selling motion, it sounds like you've got folks that are gonna be eating out of eating out of your pocket. Who've been waiting for this for quite a while. Yeah. >>I think you, the analogy used earlier, it's nice when the tires are already on the Ferrari, right. This thing could just go, yes. And we've got people that we're already talking to that this fits, we've got some great go to market strategies. As we start doing partner in sales enablement to make sure that our people behind the scenes are telling the story and the way that we want it to jointly so that all of us can, you know, come together and have that aligned common message to really, you know, make this win and make this pop >>One correction though is technically we sponsor Aston Martin. So it's not a fry. It's an Aston Martin. There >>You go. >>That's right. Quite taken, not a car guy. Can >>You, can you talk a little bit Brendan about the, the routes to market and the, the GTM that you guys are working on together, even at a high level? Yeah. >>At a high level, we've already had some meetings talking about how we can get this message out. The nice thing about this is it's not relegated to a single industry vertical. It's not a single type of customer. We see this across the board and, and certainly with any of our cloud infrastructure solutions, it seems very, even from a regional standpoint and an industry vertical standpoint. So really it's just about how to get our sellers, you know, that get that message to them. So we had meetings here this week. We've been talking to your teams, oh, for probably six weeks now on what's that gonna look like? You know, what type of events are we gonna hold? Do we wanna do some type of road show? Yeah. We've done that with FlexPod very successfully, a few years ago where our teams working with your teams and VMware, we all came out and, and showed this to the world and doing something similar with this to show how easy it is to add supplemental storage to VMC. And just get that out to the masses through events, maybe through sales webinars. I mean, we're still in this world where maybe it's more virtual than on person, but we're starting to shift back, but it's just about telling the message and, and showing, Hey, here's how you do it. Come talk to us. We can help you. And we want to help >>Talk about the messaging from a, a multi-cloud perspective. Here we are at VMware Explorer, the theme, the center of the multi-cloud universe, how is this solution from NetApp's perspective? And then CDWs, how does it an enabler of customers that so many are living in the multi-cloud world by default? >>Yeah. And I think the big subtlety there that, that maybe was MIS missed was the private cloud being just so their cloud. The reality of that is probably a little bit short of, you know, of what people kind of deal with with their on on-prem data centers, just because of some of the applications, data sets they're trying to work through for AI ML and analytics. But that's what the partner's great at is, is helping them kind of leap forward and actually realize the on-prem to become the private cloud and really operate in this multi-cloud scenario and, and get beyond this cloud chaos factor. So again, you know, the beautiful part about all this is that, you know, the, the, the never ending sort of options, the optionality that you have on security, on networking, on applications, data sets, locations, governance, these are all factors that the partner deals with way better than we could even think of. So for us, it's really about just trying to connect with them, get their feedback and actually design in from the partner to take something like this and make it something that works for them >>Back to your shirt. What does it say? Two's company, three's a cloud that's right. But if you want rain, you need a fourth. Yeah. Right. We're here in California. I don't care about clouds. We need it to rain. All >>Right. So >>It's all well and good that yeah. If you know, a couple of you get together and offer something up, but where the rubber meets the road, you know, the customer relationship, the strategic seat at the customer table, there, aren't more of those than there have been in the past. And, and, and ecosystems have obviously gotten more complicated. I can't help thinking back as I think back on the history of, of NetApp and VMware and CDW, there was a time when, when things were bad, you get rid of marketing. And then, and then after that, it was definitely alliances and partnerships cuz who the heck are those people right now? Everything is an ecosystem. Yeah. Everything is an ecosystem. So talk about how CW CDW has changed through its history in terms of where CDW has come from. >>Sure. And you >>Know, not everybody knows that CDW is involved in as sophisticated in area as you are. >>And, and that's true. I mean, sometimes it's tongue in cheek, but you know, we've fulfilled a lot of needs throughout the years and, and maybe at times just a fulfillment or a box pusher, but we're really so much more that, and we've been so much more than that for years. And through some of our acquisitions, you know, Sirius last year I G N w our international arm with Kway when it became CDW, K we have a, you know, a premier experience around consultative services. And that we talk about that full stack, right? Yeah. From the application to the cloud, to the infrastructure, to the security around it, to the networking, we can help out with all of that. And we've got experts and, and, you know, on the presales and postsales that, that's what they live for. It's their passion. And working with partners close in hand, that that's, we've had great relationships with, with NetApp. And again, I've been with CDW for over 12 years. And in all 12 of those years, I've been very close to NetApp in one way, shape or form, and to see how we work together to solve our customers' challenges. It's less about what we want to do. It's more about what we're doing to help the customer. And, and I've seen that day in and day out from our relationship and, you know, kind of our partnership. >>So say we're back here in six months, or maybe we're back here at reinvent, talking with you guys and a customer. What are some of the outcomes that at this stage you were expecting customers to be able to achieve, >>Be able to do more, put more out there, right. To not be limited by the construct of, I only have X amount of space. And so maybe the use case or the initiative is, is wrapped around that. Let's turn that around and say, that's, you're limitless, let's have move what you need. And you're not gonna have to worry so much about the cost, the way you did six months ago or seven months ago, or six months in a day ago that you can do more with it. And if we have an X amount in our bucket in, in July, we could do 200 VMs. You know, and now six months later, we've done 500 VMs because of those efficiency savings because of that cost savings and using supplemental storage. So I, I see that being a growth factor and being say, Hey, this was easy. We always knew this was a solution we liked, but now it's easy and bigger. >>Yeah. I think on our end, the spectrum, I'll just say what Phil Brons would say. I said previously, he was in the previous segment, which is, this could go pretty quick, folks that have wanted to do this now that they know this is something to do and that they can go at it. The part we already know, the partners are very much in like ready to go mode. They've been waiting for this day to just get the announcement out so they can get kind of get going. And it's funny because you know, when we've presented, we've kind of presented some of the tech behind what we're doing and then the ROI T C calculator last, and everyone's feedback is the same. They said you should just lead to the calculator. So then yeah, you can see exactly how much money you save. In fact, one of the jokes is there's not many times you've saved this much money in it before. And so it's, it's a big, wow. Factor, >>Big, wow. Factor, big differentiator, guys. Thank you so much for joining David, me talking about what NetApp, VMware, AWS are doing, how it's being delivered through CDW, the evolution of all these companies. We're excited to watch the solution. We better let you go because you probably have a ton of meeting. People are just chopping at the bit to get this. Yeah. >>It's, it's exciting times. I'm loving it being here and being able to talk about this finally, in a public setting. So this has been great. >>Awesome guys. Thank you again for your time. We appreciate it. Yep. For our guests and Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube live from VMware Explorer, 2022. We'll be back after a short break, stick around.

>> The rapid rise of ransomware attacks has added yet another challenge that business technology executives have to worry about these days, cloud storage, immutability, and air gaps have become a must have arrows in the quiver of organization's data protection strategies. But the important reality that practitioners have embraced is data protection, it can't be an afterthought or a bolt on it, has to be designed into the operational workflow of technology systems. The problem is, oftentimes, data protection is complicated with a variety of different products, services, software components, and storage formats, this is why object storage is moving to the forefront of data protection use cases because it's simpler and less expensive. The put data get data syntax has always been alluring, but object storage, historically, was seen as this low-cost niche solution that couldn't offer the performance required for demanding workloads, forcing customers to make hard tradeoffs between cost and performance. That has changed, the ascendancy of cloud storage generally in the S3 format specifically has catapulted object storage to become a first class citizen in a mainstream technology. Moreover, innovative companies have invested to bring object storage performance to parity with other storage formats, but cloud costs are often a barrier for many companies as the monthly cloud bill and egress fees in particular steadily climb. Welcome to Secure Storage Hot Takes, my name is Dave Vellante, and I'll be your host of the program today, where we introduce our community to Wasabi, a company that is purpose-built to solve this specific problem with what it claims to be the most cost effective and secure solution on the market. We have three segments today to dig into these issues, first up is David Friend, the well known entrepreneur who co-founded Carbonite and now Wasabi will then dig into the product with Drew Schlussel of Wasabi, and then we'll bring in the customer perspective with Kevin Warenda of the Hotchkiss School, let's get right into it. We're here with David Friend, the President and CEO and Co-founder of Wasabi, the hot storage company, David, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks Dave, nice to be here. >> Great to have you, so look, you hit a home run with Carbonite back when building a unicorn was a lot more rare than it has been in the last few years, why did you start Wasabi? >> Well, when I was still CEO of Wasabi, my genius co-founder Jeff Flowers and our chief architect came to me and said, you know, when we started this company, a state of the art disk drive was probably 500 gigabytes and now we're looking at eight terabyte, 16 terabyte, 20 terabyte, even 100 terabyte drives coming down the road and, you know, sooner or later the old architectures that were designed around these much smaller disk drives is going to run out of steam because, even though the capacities are getting bigger and bigger, the speed with which you can get data on and off of a hard drive isn't really changing all that much. And Jeff foresaw a day when the architectures sort of legacy storage like Amazon S3 and so forth was going to become very inefficient and slow. And so he came up with a new, highly parallelized architecture, and he said, I want to go off and see if I can make this work. So I said, you know, good luck go to it and they went off and spent about a year and a half in the lab, designing and testing this new storage architecture and when they got it working, I looked at the economics of this and I said, holy cow, we can sell cloud storage for a fraction of the price of Amazon, still make very good gross margins and it will be faster. So this is a whole new generation of object storage that you guys have invented. So I recruited a new CEO for Carbonite and left to found Wasabi because the market for cloud storage is almost infinite. You know, when you look at all the world's data, you know, IDC has these crazy numbers, 120 zetabytes or something like that and if you look at that as you know, the potential market size during that data, we're talking trillions of dollars, not billions and so I said, look, this is a great opportunity, if you look back 10 years, all the world's data was on-prem, if you look forward 10 years, most people agree that most of the world's data is going to live in the cloud, we're at the beginning of this migration, we've got an opportunity here to build an enormous company. >> That's very exciting. I mean, you've always been a trend spotter, and I want to get your perspectives on data protection and how it's changed. It's obviously on people's minds with all the ransomware attacks and security breaches, but thinking about your experiences and past observations, what's changed in data protection and what's driving the current very high interest in the topic? >> Well, I think, you know, from a data protection standpoint, immutability, the equivalent of the old worm tapes, but applied to cloud storage is, you know, become core to the backup strategies and disaster recovery strategies for most companies. And if you look at our partners who make backup software like Veeam, Convo, Veritas, Arcserve, and so forth, most of them are really taking advantage of mutable cloud storage as a way to protect customer data, customers backups from ransomware. So the ransomware guys are pretty clever and they, you know, they discovered early on that if someone could do a full restore from their backups, they're never going to pay a ransom. So, once they penetrate your system, they get pretty good at sort of watching how you do your backups and before they encrypt your primary data, they figure out some way to destroy or encrypt your backups as well, so that you can't do a full restore from your backups. And that's where immutability comes in. You know, in the old days you, you wrote what was called a worm tape, you know, write once read many, and those could not be overwritten or modified once they were written. And so we said, let's come up with an equivalent of that for the cloud, and it's very tricky software, you know, it involves all kinds of encryption algorithms and blockchain and this kind of stuff but, you know, the net result is if you store your backups in immutable buckets, in a product like Wasabi, you can't alter it or delete it for some period of time, so you could put a timer on it, say a year or six months or something like that, once that data is written, you know, there's no way you can go in and change it, modify it, or anything like that, including even Wasabi's engineers. >> So, David, I want to ask you about data sovereignty. It's obviously a big deal, I mean, especially for companies with the presence overseas, but what's really is any digital business these days, how should companies think about approaching data sovereignty? Is it just large firms that should be worried about this? Or should everybody be concerned? What's your point of view? >> Well, all around the world countries are imposing data sovereignty laws and if you're in the storage business, like we are, if you don't have physical data storage in-country, you're probably not going to get most of the business. You know, since Christmas we've built data centers in Toronto, London, Frankfurt, Paris, Sydney, Singapore, and I've probably forgotten one or two, but the reason we do that is twofold; one is, you know, if you're closer to the customer, you're going to get better response time, lower latency, and that's just a speed of light issue. But the bigger issue is, if you've got financial data, if you have healthcare data, if you have data relating to security, like surveillance videos, and things of that sort, most countries are saying that data has to be stored in-country, so, you can't send it across borders to some other place. And if your business operates in multiple countries, you know, dealing with data sovereignty is going to become an increasingly important problem. >> So in May of 2018, that's when the fines associated with violating GDPR went into effect and GDPR was like this main spring of privacy and data protection laws and we've seen it spawn other public policy things like the CCPA and think it continues to evolve, we see judgments in Europe against big tech and this tech lash that's in the news in the U.S. and the elimination of third party cookies, what does this all mean for data protection in the 2020s? >> Well, you know, every region and every country, you know, has their own idea about privacy, about security, about the use of even the use of metadata surrounding, you know, customer data and things of this sort. So, you know, it's getting to be increasingly complicated because GDPR, for example, imposes different standards from the kind of privacy standards that we have here in the U.S., Canada has a somewhat different set of data sovereignty issues and privacy issues so it's getting to be an increasingly complex, you know, mosaic of rules and regulations around the world and this makes it even more difficult for enterprises to run their own, you know, infrastructure because companies like Wasabi, where we have physical data centers in all kinds of different markets around the world and we've already dealt with the business of how to meet the requirements of GDPR and how to meet the requirements of some of the countries in Asia and so forth, you know, rather than an enterprise doing that just for themselves, if you running your applications or keeping your data in the cloud, you know, now a company like Wasabi with, you know, 34,000 customers, we can go to all the trouble of meeting these local requirements on behalf of our entire customer base and that's a lot more efficient and a lot more cost effective than if each individual country has to go deal with the local regulatory authorities. >> Yeah, it's compliance by design, not by chance. Okay, let's zoom out for the final question, David, thinking about the discussion that we've had around ransomware and data protection and regulations, what does it mean for a business's operational strategy and how do you think organizations will need to adapt in the coming years? >> Well, you know, I think there are a lot of forces driving companies to the cloud and, you know, and I do believe that if you come back five or 10 years from now, you're going to see majority of the world's data is going to be living in the cloud and I think storage, data storage is going to be a commodity much like electricity or bandwidth, and it's going to be done right, it will comply with the local regulations, it'll be fast, it'll be local, and there will be no strategic advantage that I can think of for somebody to stand up and run their own storage, especially considering the cost differential, you know, the most analysts think that the full, all in costs of running your own storage is in the 20 to 40 terabytes per month range, whereas, you know, if you migrate your data to the cloud, like Wasabi, you're talking probably $6 a month and so I think people are learning how to deal with the idea of an architecture that involves storing your data in the cloud, as opposed to, you know, storing your data locally. >> Wow, that's like a six X more expensive in the clouds, more than six X, all right, thank you, David,-- >> In addition to which, you know, just finding the people to babysit this kind of equipment has become nearly impossible today. >> Well, and with a focus on digital business, you don't want to be wasting your time with that kind of heavy lifting. David, thanks so much for coming in theCUBE, a great Boston entrepreneur, we've followed your career for a long time and looking forward to the future. >> Thank you. >> Okay, in a moment, Drew Schlussel will join me and we're going to dig more into product, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage, keep it right there. ♪ Whoa ♪ ♪ Brenda in sales got an email ♪ ♪ Click here for a trip to Bombay ♪ ♪ It's not even called Bombay anymore ♪ ♪ But you clicked it anyway ♪ ♪ And now our data's been held hostage ♪ ♪ And now we're on sinking ship ♪ ♪ And a hacker's in our system ♪ ♪ Just 'cause Brenda wanted a trip ♪ ♪ She clicked on something stupid ♪ ♪ And our data's out of our control ♪ ♪ Into the hands of a hacker's ♪ ♪ And he's a giant asshole. ♪ ♪ He encrypted it in his basement ♪ ♪ He wants a million bucks for the key ♪ ♪ And I'm pretty sure he's 15 ♪ ♪ And still going through puberty ♪ ♪ I know you didn't mean to do us wrong ♪ ♪ But now I'm dealing with this all week long ♪ ♪ To make you all aware ♪ ♪ Of all this ransomware ♪ ♪ That is why I'm singing you this song ♪ ♪ C'mon ♪ ♪ Take it from me ♪ ♪ The director of IT ♪ ♪ Don't click on that email from a prince Nairobi ♪ ♪ 'Cuz he's not really a prince ♪ ♪ Now our data's locked up on our screen ♪ ♪ Controlled by a kid who's just fifteen ♪ ♪ And he's using our money to buy a Ferrari ♪ (gentle music) >> Joining me now is Drew Schlussel, who is the Senior Director of Product Marketing at Wasabi, hey Drew, good to see you again, thanks for coming back in theCUBE. >> Dave, great to be here, great to see you. >> All right, let's get into it. You know, Drew, prior to the pandemic, Zero Trust, just like kind of like digital transformation was sort of a buzzword and now it's become a real thing, almost a mandate, what's Wasabi's take on Zero Trust. >> So, absolutely right, it's been around a while and now people are paying attention, Wasabi's take is Zero Trust is a good thing. You know, there are too many places, right, where the bad guys are getting in. And, you know, I think of Zero Trust as kind of smashing laziness, right? It takes a little work, it takes some planning, but you know, done properly and using the right technologies, using the right vendors, the rewards are, of course tremendous, right? You can put to rest the fears of ransomware and having your systems compromised. >> Well, and we're going to talk about this, but there's a lot of process and thinking involved and, you know, design and your Zero Trust and you don't want to be wasting time messing with infrastructure, so we're going to talk about that, there's a lot of discussion in the industry, Drew, about immutability and air gaps, I'd like you to share Wasabi's point of view on these topics, how do you approach it and what makes Wasabi different? >> So, in terms of air gap and immutability, right, the beautiful thing about object storage, which is what we do all the time is that it makes it that much easier, right, to have a secure immutable copy of your data someplace that's easy to access and doesn't cost you an arm and a leg to get your data back. You know, we're working with some of the best, you know, partners in the industry, you know, we're working with folks like, you know, Veeam, Commvault, Arc, Marquee, MSP360, all folks who understand that you need to have multiple copies of your data, you need to have a copy stored offsite, and that copy needs to be immutable and we can talk a little bit about what immutability is and what it really means. >> You know, I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about Wasabi's solution because, sometimes people don't understand, you actually are a cloud, you're not building on other people's public clouds and this storage is the one use case where it actually makes sense to do that, tell us a little bit more about Wasabi's approach and your solution. >> Yeah, I appreciate that, so there's definitely some misconception, we are our own cloud storage service, we don't run on top of anybody else, right, it's our systems, it's our software deployed globally and we interoperate because we adhere to the S3 standard, we interoperate with practically hundreds of applications, primarily in this case, right, we're talking about backup and recovery applications and it's such a simple process, right? I mean, just about everybody who's anybody in this business protecting data has the ability now to access cloud storage and so we've made it really simple, in many cases, you'll see Wasabi as you know, listed in the primary set of available vendors and, you know, put in your private keys, make sure that your account is locked down properly using, let's say multifactor authentication, and you've got a great place to store copies of your data securely. >> I mean, we just heard from David Friend, if I did my math right, he was talking about, you know, 1/6 the cost per terabyte per month, maybe even a little better than that, how are you able to achieve such attractive economics? >> Yeah, so, you know, I can't remember how to translate my fractions into percentages, but I think we talk a lot about being 80%, right, less expensive than the hyperscalers. And you know, we talked about this at Vermont, right? There's some secret sauce there and you know, we take a different approach to how we utilize the raw capacity to the effective capacity and the fact is we're also not having to run, you know, a few hundred other services, right? We do storage, plain and simple, all day, all the time, so we don't have to worry about overhead to support, you know, up and coming other services that are perhaps, you know, going to be a loss leader, right? Customers love it, right, they see the fact that their data is growing 40, 80% year over year, they know they need to have some place to keep it secure, and, you know, folks are flocking to us in droves, in fact, we're seeing a tremendous amount of migration actually right now, multiple petabytes being brought to Wasabi because folks have figured out that they can't afford to keep going with their current hyperscaler vendor. >> And immutability is a feature of your product, right? What the feature called? Can you double-click on that a little bit? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, the term in S3 is Object Lock and what that means is your application will write an object to cloud storage, and it will define a retention period, let's say a week. And for that period, that object is immutable, untouchable, cannot be altered in any way, shape, or form, the application can't change it, the system administration can't change it, Wasabi can't change it, okay, it is truly carved in stone. And this is something that it's been around for a while, but you're seeing a huge uptick, right, in adoption and support for that feature by all the major vendors and I named off a few earlier and the best part is that with immutability comes some sense of, well, it comes with not just a sense of security, it is security. Right, when you have data that cannot be altered by anybody, even if the bad guys compromise your account, they steal your credentials, right, they can't take away the data and that's a beautiful thing, a beautiful, beautiful thing. >> And you look like an S3 bucket, is that right? >> Yeah, I mean, we're fully compatible with the S3 API, so if you're using S3 API based applications today, it's a very simple matter of just kind of redirecting where you want to store your data, beautiful thing about backup and recovery, right, that's probably the simplest application, simple being a relative term, as far as lift and shift, right? Because that just means for your next full, right, point that at Wasabi, retain your other fulls, you know, for whatever 30, 60, 90 days, and then once you've kind of made that transition from vine to vine, you know, you're often running with Wasabi. >> I talked to my open about the allure of object storage historically, you know, the simplicity of the get put syntax, but what about performance? Are you able to deliver performance that's comparable to other storage formats? >> Oh yeah, absolutely, and we've got the performance numbers on the site to back that up, but I forgot to answer something earlier, right, you said that immutability is a feature and I want to make it very clear that it is a feature but it's an API request. Okay, so when you're talking about gets and puts and so forth, you know, the comment you made earlier about being 80% more cost effective or 80% less expensive, you know, that API call, right, is typically something that the other folks charge for, right, and I think we used the metaphor earlier about the refrigerator, but I'll use a different metaphor today, right? You can think of cloud storage as a magical coffee cup, right? It gets as big as you want to store as much coffee as you want and the coffee's always warm, right? And when you want to take a sip, there's no charge, you want to, you know, pop the lid and see how much coffee is in there, no charge, and that's an important thing, because when you're talking about millions or billions of objects, and you want to get a list of those objects, or you want to get the status of the immutable settings for those objects, anywhere else it's going to cost you money to look at your data, with Wasabi, no additional charge and that's part of the thing that sets us apart. >> Excellent, so thank you for that. So, you mentioned some partners before, how do partners fit into the Wasabi story? Where do you stop? Where do they pick up? You know, what do they bring? Can you give us maybe, a paint a picture for us example, or two? >> Sure, so, again, we just do storage, right, that is our sole purpose in life is to, you know, to safely and securely store our customer's data. And so they're working with their application vendors, whether it's, you know, active archive, backup and recovery, IOT, surveillance, media and entertainment workflows, right, those systems already know how to manage the data, manage the metadata, they just need some place to keep the data that is being worked on, being stored and so forth. Right, so just like, you know, plugging in a flash drive on your laptop, right, you literally can plug in Wasabi as long as your applications support the API, getting started is incredibly easy, right, we offer a 30-day trial, one terabyte, and most folks find that within, you know, probably a few hours of their POC, right, it's giving them everything they need in terms of performance, in terms of accessibility, in terms of sovereignty, I'm guessing you talked to, you know, Dave Friend earlier about data sovereignty, right? We're global company, right, so there's got to be probably, you know, wherever you are in the world some place that will satisfy your sovereignty requirements, as well as your compliance requirements. >> Yeah, we did talk about sovereignty, Drew, this is really, what's interesting to me, I'm a bit of a industry historian, when I look back to the early days of cloud, I remember the large storage companies, you know, their CEOs would say, we're going to have an answer for the cloud and they would go out, and for instance, I know one bought competitor of Carbonite, and then couldn't figure out what to do with it, they couldn't figure out how to compete with the cloud in part, because they were afraid it was going to cannibalize their existing business, I think another part is because they just didn't have that imagination to develop an architecture that in a business model that could scale to see that you guys have done that is I love it because it brings competition, it brings innovation and it helps lower clients cost and solve really nagging problems. Like, you know, ransomware, of mutability and recovery, I'll give you the last word, Drew. >> Yeah, you're absolutely right. You know, the on-prem vendors, they're not going to go away anytime soon, right, there's always going to be a need for, you know, incredibly low latency, high bandwidth, you know, but, you know, not all data's hot all the time and by hot, I mean, you know, extremely hot, you know, let's take, you know, real time analytics for, maybe facial recognition, right, that requires sub-millisecond type of processing. But once you've done that work, right, you want to store that data for a long, long time, and you're going to want to also tap back into it later, so, you know, other folks are telling you that, you know, you can go to these like, you know, cold glacial type of tiered storage, yeah, don't believe the hype, you're still going to pay way more for that than you would with just a Wasabi-like hot cloud storage system. And, you know, we don't compete with our partners, right? We compliment, you know, what they're bringing to market in terms of the software vendors, in terms of the hardware vendors, right, we're a beautiful component for that hybrid cloud architecture. And I think folks are gravitating towards that, I think the cloud is kind of hitting a new gear if you will, in terms of adoption and recognition for the security that they can achieve with it. >> All right, Drew, thank you for that, definitely we see the momentum, in a moment, Drew and I will be back to get the customer perspective with Kevin Warenda, who's the Director of Information technology services at The Hotchkiss School, keep it right there. >> Hey, I'm Nate, and we wrote this song about ransomware to educate people, people like Brenda. >> Oh, God, I'm so sorry. We know you are, but Brenda, you're not alone, this hasn't just happened to you. >> No! ♪ Colonial Oil Pipeline had a guy ♪ ♪ who didn't change his password ♪ ♪ That sucks ♪ ♪ His password leaked, the data was breached ♪ ♪ And it cost his company 4 million bucks ♪ ♪ A fake update was sent to people ♪ ♪ Working for the meat company JBS ♪ ♪ That's pretty clever ♪ ♪ Instead of getting new features, they got hacked ♪ ♪ And had to pay the largest crypto ransom ever ♪ ♪ And 20 billion dollars, billion with a b ♪ ♪ Have been paid by companies in healthcare ♪ ♪ If you wonder buy your premium keeps going ♪ ♪ Up, up, up, up, up ♪ ♪ Now you're aware ♪ ♪ And now the hackers they are gettin' cocky ♪ ♪ When they lock your data ♪ ♪ You know, it has gotten so bad ♪ ♪ That they demand all of your money and it gets worse ♪ ♪ They go and the trouble with the Facebook ad ♪ ♪ Next time, something seems too good to be true ♪ ♪ Like a free trip to Asia! ♪ ♪ Just check first and I'll help before you ♪ ♪ Think before you click ♪ ♪ Don't get fooled by this ♪ ♪ Who isn't old enough to drive to school ♪ ♪ Take it from me, the director of IT ♪ ♪ Don't click on that email from a prince in Nairobi ♪ ♪ Because he's not really a prince ♪ ♪ Now our data's locked up on our screen ♪ ♪ Controlled by a kid who's just fifteen ♪ ♪ And he's using our money to buy a Ferrari ♪ >> It's a pretty sweet car. ♪ A kid without facial hair, who lives with his mom ♪ ♪ To learn more about this go to wasabi.com ♪ >> Hey, don't do that. ♪ Cause if we had Wasabi's immutability ♪ >> You going to ruin this for me! ♪ This fifteen-year-old wouldn't have on me ♪ (gentle music) >> Drew and I are pleased to welcome Kevin Warenda, who's the Director of Information Technology Services at The Hotchkiss School, a very prestigious and well respected boarding school in the beautiful Northwest corner of Connecticut, hello, Kevin. >> Hello, it's nice to be here, thanks for having me. >> Yeah, you bet. Hey, tell us a little bit more about The Hotchkiss School and your role. >> Sure, The Hotchkiss School is an independent boarding school, grades nine through 12, as you said, very prestigious and in an absolutely beautiful location on the deepest freshwater lake in Connecticut, we have 500 acre main campus and a 200 acre farm down the street. My role as the Director of Information Technology Services, essentially to oversee all of the technology that supports the school operations, academics, sports, everything we do on campus. >> Yeah, and you've had a very strong history in the educational field, you know, from that lens, what's the unique, you know, or if not unique, but the pressing security challenge that's top of mind for you? >> I think that it's clear that educational institutions are a target these days, especially for ransomware. We have a lot of data that can be used by threat actors and schools are often underfunded in the area of IT security, IT in general sometimes, so, I think threat actors often see us as easy targets or at least worthwhile to try to get into. >> Because specifically you are potentially spread thin, underfunded, you got students, you got teachers, so there really are some, are there any specific data privacy concerns as well around student privacy or regulations that you can speak to? >> Certainly, because of the fact that we're an independent boarding school, we operate things like even a health center, so, data privacy regulations across the board in terms of just student data rights and FERPA, some of our students are under 18, so, data privacy laws such as COPPA apply, HIPAA can apply, we have PCI regulations with many of our financial transactions, whether it be fundraising through alumni development, or even just accepting the revenue for tuition so, it's a unique place to be, again, we operate very much like a college would, right, we have all the trappings of a private college in terms of all the operations we do and that's what I love most about working in education is that it's all the industries combined in many ways. >> Very cool. So let's talk about some of the defense strategies from a practitioner point of view, then I want to bring in Drew to the conversation so what are the best practice and the right strategies from your standpoint of defending your data? >> Well, we take a defense in-depth approach, so we layer multiple technologies on top of each other to make sure that no single failure is a key to getting beyond those defenses, we also keep it simple, you know, I think there's some core things that all organizations need to do these days in including, you know, vulnerability scanning, patching , using multifactor authentication, and having really excellent backups in case something does happen. >> Drew, are you seeing any similar patterns across other industries or customers? I mean, I know we're talking about some uniqueness in the education market, but what can we learn from other adjacent industries? >> Yeah, you know, Kevin is spot on and I love hearing what he's doing, going back to our prior conversation about Zero Trust, right, that defense in-depth approach is beautifully aligned, right, with the Zero Trust approach, especially things like multifactor authentication, always shocked at how few folks are applying that very, very simple technology and across the board, right? I mean, Kevin is referring to, you know, financial industry, healthcare industry, even, you know, the security and police, right, they need to make sure that the data that they're keeping, evidence, right, is secure and immutable, right, because that's evidence. >> Well, Kevin, paint a picture for us, if you would. So, you were primarily on-prem looking at potentially, you know, using more cloud, you were a VMware shop, but tell us, paint a picture of your environment, kind of the applications that you support and the kind of, I want to get to the before and the after Wasabi, but start with kind of where you came from. >> Sure, well, I came to The Hotchkiss School about seven years ago and I had come most recently from public K12 and municipal, so again, not a lot of funding for IT in general, security, or infrastructure in general, so Nutanix was actually a hyperconverged solution that I implemented at my previous position. So when I came to Hotchkiss and found mostly on-prem workloads, everything from the student information system to the card access system that students would use, financial systems, they were almost all on premise, but there were some new SaaS solutions coming in play, we had also taken some time to do some business continuity, planning, you know, in the event of some kind of issue, I don't think we were thinking about the pandemic at the time, but certainly it helped prepare us for that, so, as different workloads were moved off to hosted or cloud-based, we didn't really need as much of the on-premise compute and storage as we had, and it was time to retire that cluster. And so I brought the experience I had with Nutanix with me, and we consolidated all that into a hyper-converged platform, running Nutanix AHV, which allowed us to get rid of all the cost of the VMware licensing as well and it is an easier platform to manage, especially for small IT shops like ours. >> Yeah, AHV is the Acropolis hypervisor and so you migrated off of VMware avoiding the VTax avoidance, that's a common theme among Nutanix customers and now, did you consider moving into AWS? You know, what was the catalyst to consider Wasabi as part of your defense strategy? >> We were looking at cloud storage options and they were just all so expensive, especially in egress fees to get data back out, Wasabi became across our desks and it was such a low barrier to entry to sign up for a trial and get, you know, terabyte for a month and then it was, you know, $6 a month for terabyte. After that, I said, we can try this out in a very low stakes way to see how this works for us. And there was a couple things we were trying to solve at the time, it wasn't just a place to put backup, but we also needed a place to have some files that might serve to some degree as a content delivery network, you know, some of our software applications that are deployed through our mobile device management needed a place that was accessible on the internet that they could be stored as well. So we were testing it for a couple different scenarios and it worked great, you know, performance wise, fast, security wise, it has all the features of S3 compliance that works with Nutanix and anyone who's familiar with S3 permissions can apply them very easily and then there was no egress fees, we can pull data down, put data up at will, and it's not costing as any extra, which is excellent because especially in education, we need fixed costs, we need to know what we're going to spend over a year before we spend it and not be hit with, you know, bills for egress or because our workload or our data storage footprint grew tremendously, we need that, we can't have the variability that the cloud providers would give us. >> So Kevin, you explained you're hypersensitive about security and privacy for obvious reasons that we discussed, were you concerned about doing business with a company with a funny name? Was it the trial that got you through that knothole? How did you address those concerns as an IT practitioner? >> Yeah, anytime we adopt anything, we go through a risk review. So we did our homework and we checked the funny name really means nothing, there's lots of companies with funny names, I think we don't go based on the name necessarily, but we did go based on the history, understanding, you know, who started the company, where it came from, and really looking into the technology and understanding that the value proposition, the ability to provide that lower cost is based specifically on the technology in which it lays down data. So, having a legitimate, reasonable, you know, excuse as to why it's cheap, we weren't thinking, well, you know, you get what you pay for, it may be less expensive than alternatives, but it's not cheap, you know, it's reliable, and that was really our concern. So we did our homework for sure before even starting the trial, but then the trial certainly confirmed everything that we had learned. >> Yeah, thank you for that. Drew, explain the whole egress charge, we hear a lot about that, what do people need to know? >> First of all, it's not a funny name, it's a memorable name, Dave, just like theCUBE, let's be very clear about that, second of all, egress charges, so, you know, other storage providers charge you for every API call, right? Every get, every put, every list, everything, okay, it's part of their process, it's part of how they make money, it's part of how they cover the cost of all their other services, we don't do that. And I think, you know, as Kevin has pointed out, right, that's a huge differentiator because you're talking about a significant amount of money above and beyond what is the list price. In fact, I would tell you that most of the other storage providers, hyperscalers, you know, their list price, first of all, is, you know, far exceeding anything else in the industry, especially what we offer and then, right, their additional cost, the egress costs, the API requests can be two, three, 400% more on top of what you're paying per terabyte. >> So, you used a little coffee analogy earlier in our conversation, so here's what I'm imagining, like I have a lot of stuff, right? And I had to clear up my bar and I put some stuff in storage, you know, right down the street and I pay them monthly, I can't imagine having to pay them to go get my stuff, that's kind of the same thing here. >> Oh, that's a great metaphor, right? That storage locker, right? You know, can you imagine every time you want to open the door to that storage locker and look inside having to pay a fee? >> No, that would be annoying. >> Or, every time you pull into the yard and you want to put something in that storage locker, you have to pay an access fee to get to the yard, you have to pay a door opening fee, right, and then if you want to look and get an inventory of everything in there, you have to pay, and it's ridiculous, it's your data, it's your storage, it's your locker, you've already paid the annual fee, probably, 'cause they gave you a discount on that, so why shouldn't you have unfettered access to your data? That's what Wasabi does and I think as Kevin pointed out, right, that's what sets us completely apart from everybody else. >> Okay, good, that's helpful, it helps us understand how Wasabi's different. Kevin, I'm always interested when I talk to practitioners like yourself in learning what you do, you know, outside of the technology, what are you doing in terms of educating your community and making them more cyber aware? Do you have training for students and faculty to learn about security and ransomware protection, for example? >> Yes, cyber security awareness training is definitely one of the required things everyone should be doing in their organizations. And we do have a program that we use and we try to make it fun and engaging too, right, this is often the checking the box kind of activity, insurance companies require it, but we want to make it something that people want to do and want to engage with so, even last year, I think we did one around the holidays and kind of pointed out the kinds of scams they may expect in their personal life about, you know, shipping of orders and time for the holidays and things like that, so it wasn't just about protecting our school data, it's about the fact that, you know, protecting their information is something do in all aspects of your life, especially now that the folks are working hybrid often working from home with equipment from the school, the stakes are much higher and people have a lot of our data at home and so knowing how to protect that is important, so we definitely run those programs in a way that we want to be engaging and fun and memorable so that when they do encounter those things, especially email threats, they know how to handle them. >> So when you say fun, it's like you come up with an example that we can laugh at until, of course, we click on that bad link, but I'm sure you can come up with a lot of interesting and engaging examples, is that what you're talking about, about having fun? >> Yeah, I mean, sometimes they are kind of choose your own adventure type stories, you know, they stop as they run, so they're telling a story and they stop and you have to answer questions along the way to keep going, so, you're not just watching a video, you're engaged with the story of the topic, yeah, and that's what I think is memorable about it, but it's also, that's what makes it fun, you're not just watching some talking head saying, you know, to avoid shortened URLs or to check, to make sure you know the sender of the email, no, you're engaged in a real life scenario story that you're kind of following and making choices along the way and finding out was that the right choice to make or maybe not? So, that's where I think the learning comes in. >> Excellent. Okay, gentlemen, thanks so much, appreciate your time, Kevin, Drew, awesome having you in theCUBE. >> My pleasure, thank you. >> Yeah, great to be here, thanks. >> Okay, in a moment, I'll give you some closing thoughts on the changing world of data protection and the evolution of cloud object storage, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. >> Announcer: Some things just don't make sense, like showing up a little too early for the big game. >> How early are we? >> Couple months. Popcorn? >> Announcer: On and off season, the Red Sox cover their bases with affordable, best in class cloud storage. >> These are pretty good seats. >> Hey, have you guys seen the line from the bathroom? >> Announcer: Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage, it just makes sense. >> You don't think they make these in left hand, do you? >> We learned today how a serial entrepreneur, along with his co-founder saw the opportunity to tap into the virtually limitless scale of the cloud and dramatically reduce the cost of storing data while at the same time, protecting against ransomware attacks and other data exposures with simple, fast storage, immutability, air gaps, and solid operational processes, let's not forget about that, okay? People and processes are critical and if you can point your people at more strategic initiatives and tasks rather than wrestling with infrastructure, you can accelerate your process redesign and support of digital transformations. Now, if you want to learn more about immutability and Object Block, click on the Wasabi resource button on this page, or go to wasabi.com/objectblock. Thanks for watching Secure Storage Hot Takes made possible by Wasabi. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage, well, see you next time. (gentle upbeat music)

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to Las Vegas. This is the Cube's live coverage of day. One of snowflake summit 22 fourth annual. We're very happy to be here. A lot of people here, Lisa Martin with Dave Valante, David's always great to be at these events with you, but me. This one is shot out of the cannon from day one, data, data, data, data. That's what you heard of here. First, we have two guests joining us next, please. Welcome Matthew Scalian. Who's an alumni of the cube CEO and founder of Matillion and Jer staying chief data architect and global head of data engineering from Western union. Welcome gentlemen. Thank >>You. Great to be here. >>We're gonna unpack the Western union story in a second. I love that, but Matthew, I wanted to start with you, give the audience who might not be familiar with Matillion an overview, your vision, your differentiators, your joint value statement with snowflake, >>Of course. Well, first of all, thank you for having me on the cube. Again, Matillion S mission is to make the world's data useful, and we do that by providing a technology platform that allows our customers to load transform, synchronize, and orchestrate data on the snowflake data cloud. And on, on the cloud in general, we've been doing that for a number of years. We're co headquartered in the UK and the us, hence my dat accents. And we work with all sorts of companies, commercial scale, large end enterprises, particularly including of course, I'm delighted to say our friends at Western union. So that's why we're here today. >>And we're gonna talk about that in a second, but I wanna understand what's new with the data integration platform from Matillion perspective, lots of stuff coming out, give us an overview. >>Yeah, of course, it's been a really busy year and it's great to be here at snowflake summit to be able to share some of what we've been working on. You know, the Matillion platform is all about making our customers as productive as possible in terms of time to value insight on that analytics, data science, AI projects, like get you to value faster. And so the more technology we can put in the platform and the easier we can make it to use, the better we can achieve that goal. So this year we've, we've shipped a product that we call MDL 2.0, that's enterprise focused, exquisitely, easy to use batch data pipelines. So customers can load data even more simply into the snowflake data cloud, very excitingly we've also launched Matillion CDC. And so this is an industry first cloud native writer, head log based change data capture. >>I haven't come up with a shorter way of saying that, but, and surprise customers need this technology and it's been around for years, but mostly pre-cloud technology. That's been repurposed for the cloud. And so Matillion has rebuilt that concept for the cloud. And we launched that earlier this year. And of course we've continued to build out the core Matillion ETL platform that today over a thousand joint snowflake Matillion customers use, including Western union, of course we've been adding features there such as universal connectivity. And so a challenge that all data integration vendors have is having the right connectors for their source systems. Universal connectivity allows you to connect to any source system without writing code point and click. We shape that as well. So it's been a busy year, >>Was really simple. Sorry. I love that. He said that and it also sounded great with your accent. I didn't wanna >>Thank you. Excellent. Javier, talk about your role at Western union in, in what you've seen in terms of the evolution of the, the data stack. >>So in the last few years, well, a little bit of Western union, a 70 or 170 year old company, pretty much everybody knows what Western union is, right? Driving an interesting synergy from what Matthew says, when data moves money moves, that's what we do when he moves the da, he moves the data. We move the money. That's the synergy between, you know, us and the organization that support us from data move perspective. So what I've seen in the last few years is obviously a shift towards the cloud, but, you know, within the cloud itself, obviously there's a lot of players as well. And we as customers have always been wishing to have a short, smaller footprint of data so that the movement becomes a little lesser. You know, interestingly enough, in this conference, I've heard some very interesting stuff, which kind of helping me to bring that footprint down to a manageable number, to be more governed, to be more, you know, effective in terms of delivering more end results for my customers as well. >>So Matillion has been a great partner for us from our cloud adoption perspective. During the COVID times, we were a re we are a, you know, multi-channel organization. We have retail stores as well, our digital presence, but people just couldn't go to the retail stores. So we had to find ways to accelerate our adoption, make sure our systems are scaling and making sure that we are delivering the same experience to our customers. And that's where, you know, tools like Matillion came in and really, really partnered up with us to kind of bring it up to the level. >>So talk specifically about the stack evolution. Cause I have this sort of theory that everybody talks about injecting data and, and machine intelligence and AI and machine learning into apps. But the application development stack is like totally separate from the, the data analytics and the data pipeline stack. And the database is somewhere over here as well. How is that evolving? Are those worlds coming together? >>Some part of those words are coming together, but where I still see the difference is your heavy lifting will still happen on the data stack. You cannot have that heavy lifting on the app because if once the apps becomes heavy, you'll have trouble communicating with, with, with the organizations. You know, you need to be as lean as possible in the front end and make sure things are curated. Things are available on demand as soon as possible. And that's why you see all these API driven applications are doing really, really well because they're delivering those results back to the, the leaner applications much faster. So I'm a big proponent of, yes, it can be hybrid, but the majority of the heavy lifting still needs to happen down at the data layer, which is where I think snowflake plays a really good role >>In APIs are the connective tissue >>APIs connections. Yes. >>Also I think, you know, in terms of the, the data stack, there's another parallel that you can draw from applications, right? So technology is when they're new, we tend to do things in a granular way. We write a lot of code. We do a lot of sticking of things together with plasters and sticky tape. And it's the purview of high end engineers and people enthusiastic about that to get started. Then the business starts to see the value in this stuff, and we need to move a lot faster. And technology solutions come in and this is what the, the data cloud is all about, right? The technology getting out of the way and allowing people to focus on higher order problems of innovating around analytics, data applications, AI, machine learning, you know, that's also where Matillion sit as well as other companies in this modern enterprise data stack is technology vendors are coming in allowing organizations to move faster and have high levels of productivity. So I think that's a good parallel to application development. >>And's just follow up on that. When you think about data prep and you know, all the focus on data quality, you've got a data team, you know, in the data pipeline, a very specialized, maybe even hyper specialized data engineers, quality engineers, data, quality engineers, data analysts, data scientist, but they, and they serve a lot of different business lines. They don't necessarily have the business, they don't have the business context typically. So it's kind of this back and forth. Do you see that changing in your organization or, or the are the lines of business taking more responsibility for the data and, and addressing that problem? It's, >>It's like you die by thousand paper cuts or you just die. Right? That's the kind >>Of, right, >>Because if I say it's, it's good to be federated, it comes with its own flaws. But if I say, if it's good to be decentralized, then I'm the, the guy to choke, right? And in my role, I'm the guy to choke. So I've selectively tried to be a pseudo federated organization, where do I do have folks reporting into our organization, but they sit close to the line of business because the business understands data better. We are working with them hand in glove. We have dedicated teams that support them. And our problem is we are also regional. We are 200 countries. So the regional needs are very different than our us needs. Majority of the organizations that you probably end up talking to have like very us focused, 50 per more than 50% of our revenue is international. So we do, we are dealing with people who are international, their needs for data, their needs for quality and their needs for the, the delivery of those analytics and the data is completely different. And so we have to be a little bit more closer to the business than traditionally. Some, some organizations feel that they need >>To, is there need for the underlying infrastructure and the operational details that as diverse, or is that something that you bring standardization to the, >>So the best part about this, the cloud that happened to us is exactly that, because at one point of time, I had infrastructure in one country. I had another infrastructure sitting in another country, regional teams, making different different decisions of bringing in different tools. Now I can standardize. I will say, Matillion is our standard for doing ETL work. If this is the use case, but then it gets deployed across the geographies because the cloud helps us or the cloud platform helps us to manage it. Sitting down here. I have three centers around the world, you know, Costa Rica, India, and the us. I can manage 24 7 sitting here. No >>Problem. So the underlying our infrastructure is, is global, but the data needs are dealt with locally. Yep. >>One of the pav question, I was just thinking JVE is super well positioned funds for you, which is around that business domain knowledge versus technical expertise. Cause again, early in technology journeys tend, things tend to be very technical and therefore only high end engineers can do it, but high end engineers are scar. Right? Right. And, and also, I mean, we survey our hundreds of large enterprise customers and they tell us they spend two thirds of their time doing stuff they don't really want to do like reinventing the wheel, basic data movement and the low order staff. And so if you can make those people more productive and allow them to focus on higher value problems, but also bring pseudo technical people into it. Overall, the business can go a lot faster. And the way you do that is by making it easier. That's why Matillion is a low code NOCO platform, but Jer and Western union are doing this right. I >>Mean, I can't compete with AWS and Google to hire people. So I need to find people who are smart to figure the products that we have to make them work. I don't want them to spend time on infrastructure, Adam, I don't want them to spend time on trying to manage platforms. I want them to deliver the data, deliver the results to the business so that they can build and serve their customers better. So it's a little bit of a different approach, different mindset. I used to be in consulting for 17 years. I thought I knew it all, but it changed overnight when I own all of these systems. And I'm like, I need to be a little bit more smarter than this. I need to be more proactive and figure out what my business needs rather than what just from a technology needs. It's more what the business needs and how I can deliver that needs to them. So simple analogy, you know, I can build the best architecture in the world. It's gonna cost me an arm and leg, but I can't drive it because the pipeline is not there. So I can have a Ferrari, but I can't drive it. It's still capped at 80, 80 miles an hour. So rather than spend, rather than building one Ferrari, let me have 10 Toyotas or 10 Fs, which will go further along and do better for my cus my, for my customers. >>So how do you see this whole, we hearing about the data cloud. We hear about the marketplace, data products now, application development inside the data cloud. How do you see that affecting not so much the productivity of the data teams. I don't wanna necessarily say, but the product, the value that, that customers like you can get out >>Data. So data is moving closer to the business. That's the value I see, because you are injecting the business and you're injecting the application much more closer to the data because it, in the past, it was days and days of, you know, churn the data to actually clear results. Now the data has moved much closer. So I have a much faster turnaround time. The business can adapt and actually react much, much faster. It took us like 16 to 30 days to deliver, you know, data for marketing. Now I can turn it down in four hours. If I see something happening, I'll give you an example. The war in Ukraine happened. Let is shut down operations in Russia. Ukraine is cash swamp. There's no cash in Ukraine. We have cash. We roll out campaign, $0 money, transferred to Ukraine within four hours of the world going on. That's the impact that we have >>Massive impact. That's huge, especially with such a macro challenge going on, on the, in, in the world. Thank you so much for sharing the Matillion snowflake partnership story, how it's helping Western union really transform into a data company. We love hearing stories of organizations that are 170 years old that have always really been technology focused, but to see it come to life so quickly is pretty powerful. Guys. Thank you so much for your time. Thanks >>Guys. Thank you, having it. Thank >>You >>For Dave Velante and our guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes live coverage of snowflake summit 22 live from Las Vegas. Stick around. We'll be back after a short break.

>>Welcome back to the cubes coverage of Veeam on 2022 at the RS. Nice to be at the aria. My co-host Dave Nicholson here. We spend a lot of time at the Venetian convention center, formerly the sand. So it's nice to have a more intimate venue. I really like it here. George Burg is joining us. He's the vice president of data protection at vast data, a company that some of you may not know about. George. >>Welcome a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. >>So VAs is smoking hot, raised a ton of dough. You've got great founders, hard charging, interesting tech. We've covered a little bit on the Wikibon research side, but give us the overview of the company. Yeah, >>If I could please. So we're here at the, you know, the Veeam show and, you know, the theme is modern data protection, and I don't think there's any company that epitomizes modern data protection more than vast data. The fact that we're able to do an all flash system at exabyte scale, but the economics of cloud object based deep, cheap, and deep archive type solutions and an extremely resilient platform is really game changing for the marketplace. So, and quite frankly, a marketplace from a data protection target space that I think is, is ripe for change and in need of change based on the things that are going on in the marketplace today. >>Yeah. So a lot of what you said is gonna be surprising to people, wait a minute, you're talking about data protection and all flash sure. I thought you'd use cheap and deep disc or, you know, even tape for that or, you know, spin it up in the cloud in a, in a deep archive or a glacier. Explain your approach in, in architecture. Yeah. At a >>High level. Yeah. So great question. We get that question every day and got it in the booth yesterday, probably about 40 or 50 times. How could it be all flash that at an economic point that is the fitting that of, you know, data protection. Yeah. >>What is this Ferrari minivan of which you speak? >>Yeah, yeah, yeah. The minivan that goes 180 miles an hour, right. That, you know, it's, it's really all about the architecture, right? The component tree is, is somewhat similar to what you'll see in other devices. However, it's how we're leveraging them in the architecture and design, you know, from our founders years ago and building a solution that just not, was not available in the marketplace. So yeah, sure. We're using, you know, all flash QLC drives, but the technology, you know, the advanced next generation algorithms or erasure coding or rage striping allows us to be extremely efficient. We also have some technologies around what we call similarity, some advanced data reduction. So you need less, less capacity if you will, with a vast system. So that obviously help obviously helps us out tremendously with their economics. But the other thing is I could sell a customer exactly what they need. If you think about the legacy data protection market purpose built back of appliances, for example, you know, ALA, Adele, Aita, and HP, you know, they're selling systems that are somewhat rigid. There's always a controller in a capacity. It's tied to a model number right. Soon as you need more performance, you buy another, as soon as you need more capacity, you buy another, it's really not modular in any way. It's great >>Model. If you want to just keep, keep billing the >>Customer. Yeah. If, if that, if yeah. And, and I, I think, I think at this point, the purpose, you know, Dave, the purpose built backup appliance market is, is hungry for a change. Right. You know, there's, there's not anyone that has one. It doesn't exist. I'm not just talking about having two because of replication. I'm it's because of organic growth. Ransomware needs to have a second unit, a second copy. And just, and just scalability. Well, you >>Guys saw that fatigue with that model of, oh, you need more buy more, >>Right? Oh, without a doubt, you said we're gonna attack that. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. No, no, no. That's great. Without a doubt. So, so we can configure a solution exactly. To the need. Cause let's face it. Every single data center, every single vertical market, it's a work of art. You know, everyone's retention policies are different. Everyone's compliance needs are different. There might be some things that are self mandated or government mandated and they're all gonna be somewhat different. Right? The fact of the matter is the way that our, our architecture works, disaggregated shared everything. Architecture is different because when we go back to those model numbers and there's more rigid purpose built back of appliances, or, or maybe a raise designed specifically for data protection, they don't offer that flexibility. And, you know, I, I, I think our, our, our, our entry point is sized to exactly what the need is. Our ease of scalability. You need more performance. We just add another compute, another compute box, what we call our C box. If you need more capacity, we just add another data box, a D box, you know, where the data resides. And, you know, I, you know, especially here at Veeam, I think customers are really clamoring for that next generation solution. They love the idea that there's a low point of entry, but they also love the idea that, that it's easy to scale on demand, you know, as, as needed and as needed basis. >>So just, I wanna be just, I want to go down another layer on that architecturally. Cause I think it's important for people to understand. Sure, exactly what you're saying. When you're talking about scaling, there's this concept of the, of the sort of devil's triangle, the tyranny of this combination of memory, CPU and storage. Sure. And if you're too rigid, like in an appliance, you end up paying for things you don't need. Correct. When all I need is a little more capacity. Correct. All I need is a little more horsepower. Well, you wanna horsepower? No, you gotta buy a bunch of capacity. Exactly. Oh, need capacity. No, no. You need to buy expensive CPUs and suck a bunch of power. All I need is capacity. So what, so go through that, just a little more detail in terms of sure. How you cobble these systems together. Sure. My, the way my brain works, it's always about Legos. So feel free to use Legos. >>Yeah. We, so, so with our disaggregated solution, right. We've separated basically hardware from software. Right. So, so, so that's a good thing, right? From an economic standpoint, but also a design and architecture standpoint, but also an underlining underpinning of that solution is we've also separated the capacity from the performance. And as you just mentioned, those are typically relatively speaking for every other solution on the planet. Those are tied together. Right? Right. So we've disaggregated that as well within our architecture. So we, we again have basically three tier, tier's not the right word, three components that build out a vast cluster. And again, we don't sell like a solution designed by a model number. And that's typically our C boxes connected via NVMe over fabric to a D box C is all the performance D is all the capacity because they're modular. You can end up like our, our baseline product would start out as a one by one, one C box one D box, right? >>Connected again, via different, different size and Vme fabrics. And that could scale to hundreds. When we do have customers with dozens of C boxes, meeting high performance requirements, keep in mind when, when vast data came to market, our founders brought it to the market for high performance computing machine learning, AI data protection was an afterthought, but those found, you know, foundational things that we're able to build in that modularity with performance at scale, it behooves itself, it's perfect fit for data protection. So we see in clients today, just yesterday, two clients standing next to each other in the same market in the same vertical. I have a 30 day retention. I have a 90 day retention. I have to keep one year worth of full backups. I have to keep seven years worth of full backups. We can accommodate both and size it to exactly what the need is. >>Now, the moment that they need one more terabyte, we license into 100 terabyte increments so they can actually buy it in a sense, almost in arrears, we don't turn it off. We don't, there's not a hard cat. They have access to that capacity within the solution that they provide and they can have access immediate access. And without going through, let's face it. A lot of the other companies that we're both thinking of that have those traditional again, purpose-built solutions or arrays. They want you to buy everything up front in advance, signing license agreements. We're the exact opposite. We want you to buy for the need as, and as needed basis. And also because the fact that we're, multi-protocol multi-use case, you see people doing many things within even a single vast cluster. >>I, I wanna come back to the architecture if I, I can and just understand it better. And I said, David, Flo's written a lot about this on our site, but I've had three key meetings in my life with Mosia and I, and I you've obviously know the first week you showed up in my offices at IDC in the late 1980s said, tell me everything, you know about the IBM mainframe IO subsystem. I'm like, oh, this is gonna be a short meeting. And then they came back a year later and showed us symmetric. I was like, wow, that's pretty impressive. The second one was, I gave a speech at 43 south of 42 south. He came up and gave me a big hug. I'm like, wow. He knows me. And the third one, he was in my offices at, in Mabo several years ago. And we were arguing about the flash versus spinning disc. And he's like, I can outperform an all flash array because we've tuned our algorithms for spinning disc. Everybody else is missing that. You're basically saying the opposite. Correct. We've turned tuned our algorithms to, for QC David Flos says Dave, there's a lot of ways to skin a cat in this technology industry. So I wanted to make sure I got that right. Basically you're skinning the cat with different >>Approach. Yeah. We've also changed really the approach of backup. I mean, the, the term backup is really legacy. I mean, that's 10, 12 years of our recovery. The, the story today is really about, about restore resiliency and recovery. So when you think about those legacy solutions, right, they were built to ingest fast, right? We wanna move the data off our primary systems, our, our primary applications and we needed to fit within a backup window. Restore was an afterthought. Restore was, I might occasionally need to restore something. Something got lost, something got re corrupted. I have to restore something today with the, you know, let's face it, the digital pandemic of, of, of cyber threats and, and ransomware it's about sometimes restoring everything. So if you look at a legacy system, they ingest, I'm sorry. They, they, they write very fast. They, they, they can bring the data in very quickly, but their restore time is typically about 20 to 25%. >>So their reading at only 20, 25% of their right speed, you know, is their rate speed. We flip the script on that. We actually read eight times faster than we write. So I could size again to the performance that you need. If you need 40 terabytes, an hour 50 terabytes an hour, we can do that. But those systems that write at 40 terabytes an hour are restoring at only eight. We're writing at a similarly size system, which actually comes out about 51 terabytes an hour 54 terabytes. We're restoring at 432 terabytes an hour. So we've broken the mold of data protection targets. We're no longer the bottleneck. We're no longer part of your recovery plan going to be the issue right now, you gotta start thinking about network connectivity. Do I have, you know, you know, with the, with our Veeam partners, do we have the right data movers, whether virtual or physical, where am I gonna put the data? >>We've really helped customer aided customers to rethinking their whole Dr. Plan, cuz let's face it. When, when ransomware occurs, you might not be able to get in the building, your phones don't work. Who do you call right? By the time you get that all figured out and you get to the point where you're start, you want to start recovering data. If I could recover 50 times faster than a purpose built backup appliance. Right? Think about it. Is it one day or is it 50 days? Am I gonna be back online? Is it one hour? Is it 50 hours? How many millions of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars were like, will that cost us? And that's why our architecture though our thought process and how the system was designed lends itself. So well for the requirements of today, data protection, not backup it's about data protection. >>Can you give us a sense as to how much of your business momentum is from data protection? >>Yeah, sure. So I joined VAs as we were talking chatting before I come on about six months ago. And it's funny, we had a lot of vast customers on their own because they wanted to leverage the platform and they saw the power of VAs. They started doing that. And then as our founders, you know, decided to lean in heavily into this marketplace with investments, not just in people, but also in technology and research and development, and also partnering with the likes of, of Veeam. We, we don't have a data mover, right. We, we require a data mover to bring us the data we've leaned in tremendously. Last quarter was really our, probably our first quarter where we had a lot of marketing and momentum around data protection. We sold five X last quarter than we did all of last year. So right now the momentum's great pipeline looks phenomenal and you know, we're gonna continue to lean in here. >>Describe the relationship with Veeam, like kind of, sort of started recently. It sounds like as customer demand. Yeah. But what's that like, what are you guys doing in terms of engineering integration go to market? >>Yeah. So, so we've gone through all the traditional, you know, verifications and certifications and, and, and I'm proud to say that we kind of blew the, the, the roof off the requirements of a Veeam environ. Remember Veeam was very innovative. 10, 12 years ago, they were putting flash in servers because they, they, they want a high performing environment, a feature such as instant recovery. We've now enabled. When I talked about all those things about re about restore. We had customers yesterday come to us that have tens of thousands of VMs. Imagine that I can spin them up instantaneously and run Veeam's instant recovery solution. While then in the background, restoring those items that is powerful and you need a very fast high performance system to enable that instant. Recovery's not new. It's been in the market for very long, but you can ask nine outta 10 customers walk in the floor. >>They're not able to leverage that today in the systems that they have, or it's over architected and very expensive and somewhat cost prohibitive. So our relationship with Veeam is really skyrocketing actually, as part of that, that success and our, our last quarter, we did seven figure deals here in the United States. We've done deals in Australia. We were chatting. I, I, I happened to be in Dubai and we did a deal there with the government there. So, you know, there's no, there's no specific vertical market. They're all different. You know, it's, it's really driven by, you know, they have a great, you know, cyber resilient message. I mean, you get seen by the last couple of days today and they just want that power that vast. Now there are other systems in the marketplace today that leverage all flash, but they don't have the economic solution that we have. >>No, your, your design anticipated the era that we're we're in right now from it, it anticipated the ability to scale in, to scale, you know, in >>A variety. Well, listen, anticipation of course, co coincidental architecture. It's a fantastic fit either way, either way. I mean, it's a fantastic fit for today. And that's the conversations that we're having with, with all the customers here, it's really all about resiliency. And they know, I mean, one of the sessions, I think it was mentioned 82 or 84% of, of all clients interviewed don't believe that they can do a restore after a cyber attack or it'll cost them millions of dollars. So that there's a tremendous amount of risk there. So time is, is, is ultimately equals dollars. So we see a, a big uptick there, but we're, we're actually continuing our validation work and testing with Veeam. They've been very receptive, very receptive globally. Veeam's channel has also been very receptive globally because you know, their customers are, you know, hungry for innovation as well. And I really strongly believe ASBO brings that >>George, we gotta go, but thank you. Congratulations. Pleasure on the momentum. Say hi to Jeff for us. >>We'll we'll do so, you know, and we'll, can I leave you with one last thought? Yeah, >>Please do give us your final thought. >>If I could, in closing, I think it's pretty important when, when customers are, are evaluating vast, if I could give them three data points, 100% of customers that Triva test vast POC, vast BVAs 100% Gartner peer insights recently did a survey. You know, they, they do it with our, you know, blind survey, dozens of vast customers and never happened before where 100% of the respondents said, yes, I would recommend VA and I will buy VAs again. It was more >>Than two respondents. >>It was more, it was dozens. They won't do it. If it's not dozens, it's dozens. It's not dozen this >>Check >>In and last but not. And, and last but not least our customers are, are speaking with their wallet. And the fact of the matter is for every customer that spends a dollar with vast within a year, they spend three more. So, I mean, if there's no better endorsement, if you have a customer base, a client base that are coming back and looking for more use cases, not just data protection, but again, high performance computing machine learning AI for a company like VA data. >>Awesome. And a lot of investment in engineering, more investment in engineering than marketing. How do I know? Because your capacity nodes, aren't the C nodes. They're the D nodes somehow. So the engineers obviously won that naming. >>They'll always win that one and we, and we, and we let them, we need them. Thank you. So that awesome product >>Sales, it's the golden rule. All right. Thank you, George. Keep it right there. VEON 20, 22, you're watching the cube, Uber, Uber right back.

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto, in Boston bringing you Data Driven Insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> In the pre-cloud era hardware companies would run benchmarks, showing how database and or application performance ran better on their systems relative to competitors or previous generation boxes. And they would make a big deal out of it. And the independent software vendors, you know they'd do a little golf clap if you will, in the form of a joint press release it became a game of leaprog amongst hardware competitors. That was pretty commonplace over the years. The Dell Snowflake Deal underscores that the value proposition between hardware companies and ISVs is changing and has much more to do with distribution channels, volumes and the amount of data that lives On-Prem in various storage platforms. For cloud native ISVs like Snowflake they're realizing that despite their Cloud only dogma they have to grit their teeth and deal with On-premises data or risk getting shut out of evolving architectures. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we unpack what little is known about the Snowflake announcement from Dell Technologies World and discuss the implications of a changing Cloud landscape. We'll also share some new data for Cloud and Database platforms from ETR that shows Snowflake has actually entered the Earth's orbit when it comes to spending momentum on its platform. Now, before we get into the news I want you to listen to Frank's Slootman's answer to my question as to whether or not Snowflake would ever architect the platform to run On-Prem because it's doable technically, here's what he said, play the clip >> Forget it, this will only work in the Public Cloud. Because it's, this is how the utility model works, right. I think everybody is coming through this realization, right? I mean, excuses are running out at this point. You know, we think that it'll, people will come to the Public Cloud a lot sooner than we will ever come to the Private Cloud. It's not that we can't run a private Cloud. It's just diminishes the potential and the value that we bring. >> So you may be asking yourselves how do you square that circle? Because basically the Dell Snowflake announcement is about bringing Snowflake to the private cloud, right? Or is it let's get into the news and we'll find out. Here's what we know at Dell Technologies World. One of the more buzzy announcements was the, by the way this was a very well attended vet event. I should say about I would say 8,000 people by my estimates. But anyway, one of the more buzzy announcements was Snowflake can now run analytics on Non-native Snowflake data that lives On-prem in a Dell object store Dell's ECS to start with. And eventually it's software defined object store. Here's Snowflake's clark, Snowflake's Clark Patterson describing how it works this past week on theCUBE. Play the clip. The way it works is I can now access Non-native Snowflake data using what materialized views, external tables How does that work? >> Some combination of the, all the above. So we've had in Snowflake, a capability called External Tables, which you refer to, it goes hand in hand with this notion of external stages. Basically there's a through the combination of those two capabilities, it's a metadata layer on data, wherever it resides. So customers have actually used this in Snowflake for data lake data outside of Snowflake in the Cloud, up until this point. So it's effectively an extension of that functionality into the Dell On-Premises world, so that we can tap into those things. So we use the external stages to expose all the metadata about what's in the Dell environment. And then we build external tables in Snowflake. So that data looks like it is in Snowflake. And then the experience for the analyst or whomever it is, is exactly as though that data lives in the Snowflake world. >> So as Clark explained, this capability of External tables has been around in the Cloud for a while, mainly to suck data out of Cloud data lakes. Snowflake External Tables use file level metadata, for instance, the name of the file and the versioning so that it can be queried in a stage. A stage is just an external location outside of Snowflake. It could be an S3 bucket or an Azure Blob and it's soon will be a Dell object store. And in using this feature, the Dell looks like it lives inside of Snowflake and Clark essentially, he's correct to say to an analyst that looks exactly like the data is in Snowflake, but uh, not exactly the data's read only which means you can't do what are called DML operations. DML stands for Data Manipulation Language and allows for things like inserting data into tables or deleting and modifying existing data. But the data can be queried. However, the performance of those queries to External Tables will almost certainly be slower. Now users can build things like materialized views which are going to speed things up a bit, but at the end of the day, it's going to run faster than the Cloud. And you can be almost certain that's where Snowflake wants it to run, but some organizations can't or won't move data into the Cloud for a variety of reasons, data sovereignty, compliance security policies, culture, you know, whatever. So data can remain in place On-prem, or it can be moved into the Public Cloud with this new announcement. Now, the compute today presumably is going to be done in the Public Cloud. I don't know where else it's going to be done. They really didn't talk about the compute side of things. Remember, one of Snowflake's early innovations was to separate compute from storage. And what that gave them is you could more efficiently scale with unlimited resources when you needed them. And you could shut off the compute when you don't need us. You didn't have to buy, and if you need more storage you didn't have to buy more compute and vice versa. So everybody in the industry has copied that including AWS with Redshift, although as we've reported not as elegantly as Snowflake did. RedShift's more of a storage tiering solution which minimizes the compute required but you can't really shut it off. And there are companies like Vertica with Eon Mode that have enabled this capability to be done On-prem, you know, but of course in that instance you don't have unlimited elastic compute scale on-Prem but with solutions like Dell Apex and HPE GreenLake, you can certainly, you can start to simulate that Cloud elasticity On-prem. I mean, it's not unlimited but it's sort of gets you there. According to a Dell Snowflake joint statement, the companies the quote, the companies will pursue product integrations and joint go to market efforts in the second half of 2022. So that's a little vague and kind of benign. It's not really clear when this is going to be available based on that statement from the two first, but, you know, we're left wondering will Dell develop an On-Prem compute capability and enable queries to run locally maybe as part of an extended apex offering? I mean, we don't know really not sure there's even a market for that but it's probably a good bet that again, Snowflake wants that data to land in the Snowflake data Cloud kind of makes you wonder how this deal came about. You heard Sloop on earlier Snowflake has always been pretty dogmatic about getting data into its native snowflake format to enable the best performance as we talked about but also data sharing and governance. But you could imagine that data architects they're building out their data mesh we've reported on this quite extensively and their data fabric and those visions around that. And they're probably telling Snowflake, Hey if you want to be a strategic partner of ours you're going to have to be more inclusive of our data. That for whatever reason we're not putting in your Cloud. So Snowflake had to kind of hold its nose and capitulate. Now the good news is it further opens up Snowflakes Tam the total available market. It's obviously good marketing posture. And ultimately it provides an on ramp to the Cloud. And we're going to come back to that shortly but let's look a little deeper into what's happening with data platforms and to do that we'll bring in some ETR data. Now, let me just say as companies like Dell, IBM, Cisco, HPE, Lenovo, Pure and others build out their hybrid Clouds. The cold hard fact is not only do they have to replicate the Cloud Operating Model. You will hear them talk about that a lot, but they got to do that. So it, and that's critical from a user experience but in order to gain that flywheel momentum they need to build a robust ecosystem that goes beyond their proprietary portfolios. And, you know, honestly they're really not even in the first inning most companies and for the likes of Snowflake to sort of flip this, they've had to recognize that not everything is moving into the Cloud. Now, let's bring up the next slide. One of the big areas of discussion at Dell Tech World was Apex. That's essentially Dell's nascent as a service offering. Apex is infrastructure as a Service Cloud On-prem and obviously has the vision of connecting to the Cloud and across Clouds and out to the Edge. And it's no secret that database is one of the most important ingredients of infrastructure as a service generally in Cloud Infrastructure specifically. So this chart here shows the ETR data for data platforms inside of Dell accounts. So the beauty of ETR platform is you can cut data a million different ways. So we cut it. We said, okay, give us the Cloud platforms inside Dell accounts, how are they performing? Now, this is a two dimensional graphic. You got net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis and what ETR now calls Overlap formally called Market Share which is a measure of pervasiveness in the survey. That's on the horizontal axis that red dotted line at 40% represents highly elevated spending on the Y. The table insert shows the raw data for how the dots are positioned. Now, the first call out here is Snowflake. According to ETR quote, after 13 straight surveys of astounding net scores, Snowflake has finally broken the trend with its net score dropping below the 70% mark among all respondents. Now, as you know, net score is measured by asking customers are you adding the platform new? That's the lime green in the bar that's pointing from Snowflake in the graph and or are you increasing spend by 6% or more? That's the forest green is spending flat that's the gray is you're spend decreasing by 6% or worse. That's the pinkish or are you decommissioning the platform bright red which is essentially zero for Snowflake subtract the reds from the greens and you get a net score. Now, what's somewhat interesting is that snowflakes net score overall in the survey is 68 which is still huge, just under 70%, but it's net score inside the Dell account base drops to the low sixties. Nonetheless, this chart tells you why Snowflake it's highly elevated spending momentum combined with an increasing presence in the market over the past two years makes it a perfect initial data platform partner for Dell. Now and in the Ford versus Ferrari dynamic. That's going on between the likes of Dell's apex and HPE GreenLake database deals are going to become increasingly important beyond what we're seeing with this recent Snowflake deal. Now noticed by the way HPE is positioned on this graph with its acquisition of map R which is now part of HPE Ezmeral. But if these companies want to be taken seriously as Cloud players, they need to further expand their database affinity to compete ideally spinning up databases as part of their super Clouds. We'll come back to that that span multiple Clouds and include Edge data platforms. We're a long ways off from that. But look, there's Mongo, there's Couchbase, MariaDB, Cloudera or Redis. All of those should be on the short list in my view and why not Microsoft? And what about Oracle? Look, that's to be continued on maybe as a future topic in a, in a Breaking Analysis but I'll leave you with this. There are a lot of people like John Furrier who believe that Dell is playing with fire in the Snowflake deal because he sees it as a one way ticket to the Cloud. He calls it a one way door sometimes listen to what he said this past week. >> I would say that that's a dangerous game because we've seen that movie before, VMware and AWS. >> Yeah, but that we've talked about this don't you think that was the right move for VMware? >> At the time, but if you don't nurture the relationship AWS will take all those customers ultimately from VMware. >> Okay, so what does the data say about what John just said? How is VMware actually doing in Cloud after its early missteps and then its subsequent embracing of AWS and other Clouds. Here's that same XY graphic spending momentum on the Y and pervasiveness on the X and the same table insert that plots the dots and the, in the breakdown of Dell's net score granularity. You see that at the bottom of the chart in those colors. So as usual, you see Azure and AWS up and to the right with Google well behind in a distant third, but still in the mix. So very impressive for Microsoft and AWS to have both that market presence in such elevated spending momentum. But the story here in context is that the VMware Cloud on AWS and VMware's On-Prem Cloud like VMware Cloud Foundation VCF they're doing pretty well in the market. Look, at HPE, gaining some traction in Cloud. And remember, you may not think HPE and Dell and VCF are true Cloud but these are customers answering the survey. So their perspective matters more than the purest view. And the bad news is the Dell Cloud is not setting the world on fire from a momentum standpoint on the vertical axis but it's above the line of zero and compared to Dell's overall net score of 20 you could see it's got some work to do. Okay, so overall Dell's got a pretty solid net score to you know, positive 20, as I say their Cloud perception needs to improve. Look, Apex has to be the Dell Cloud brand not Dell reselling VMware. And that requires more maturity of Apex it's feature sets, its selling partners, its compensation models and it's ecosystem. And I think Dell clearly understands that. I think they're pretty open about that. Now this includes partners that go beyond being just sellers has to include more tech offerings in the marketplace. And actually they got to build out a marketplace like Cloud Platform. So they got a lot of work to do there. And look, you've got Oracle coming up. I mean they're actually kind of just below the magic 40% in the line which is pro it's pretty impressive. And we've been telling you for years, you can hate Oracle all you want. You can hate its price, it's closed system all of that it's red stack shore. You can say it's legacy. You can say it's old and outdated, blah, blah, blah. You can say Oracle is irrelevant in trouble. You are dead wrong. When it comes to mission critical workloads. Oracle is the king of the hill. They're a founder led company that knows exactly what it's doing and they're showing Cloud momentum. Okay, the last point is that while Microsoft AWS and Google have major presence as shown on the X axis. VMware and Oracle now have more than a hundred citations in the survey. You can see that on the insert in the right hand, right most column. And IBM had better keep the momentum from last quarter going, or it won't be long before they get passed by Dell and HP in Cloud. So look, John might be right. And I would think Snowflake quietly agrees that this Dell deal is all about access to Dell's customers and their data. So they can Hoover it into the Snowflake Data Cloud but the data right now, anyway doesn't suggest that's happening with VMware. Oh, by the way, we're keeping an eye close eye on NetApp who last September ink, a similar deal to VMware Cloud on AWS to see how that fares. Okay, let's wrap with some closing thoughts on what this deal means. We learned a lot from the Cloud generally in AWS, specifically in two pizza teams, working backwards, customer obsession. We talk about flywheel all the time and we've been talking today about marketplaces. These have all become common parlance and often fundamental narratives within strategic plans investor decks and customer presentations. Cloud ecosystems are different. They take both competition and partnerships to new heights. You know, when I look at Azure service offerings like Apex, GreenLake and similar services and I see the vendor noise or hear the vendor noise that's being made around them. I kind of shake my head and ask, you know which movie were these companies watching last decade? I really wish we would've seen these initiatives start to roll out in 2015, three years before AWS announced Outposts not three years after but Hey, the good news is that not only was Outposts a wake up call for the On-Prem crowd but it's showing how difficult it is to build a platform like Outposts and bring it to On-Premises. I mean, Outpost isn't currently even a rounding era in the marketplace. It really doesn't do much in terms of database support and support of other services. And, you know, it's unclear where that that is going. And I don't think it has much momentum. And so the Hybrid Cloud Vendors they've had time to figure it out. But now it's game on, companies like Dell they're promising a consistent experience between On-Prem into the Cloud, across Clouds and out to the Edge. They call it MultCloud which by the way my view has really been multi-vendor Chuck, Chuck Whitten. Who's the new co-COO of Dell called it Multi-Cloud by default. (laughing) That's really, I think an accurate description of that. I call this new world Super Cloud. To me, it's different than MultiCloud. It's a layer that runs on top of hyperscale infrastructure kind of hides the underlying complexity of the Cloud. It's APIs, it's primitives. And it stretches not only across Clouds but out to the Edge. That's a big vision and that's going to require some seriously intense engineering to build out. It's also going to require partnerships that go beyond the portfolios of companies like Dell like their own proprietary stacks if you will. It's going to have to replicate the Cloud Operating Model and to do that, you're going to need more and more deals like Snowflake and even deeper than Snowflake, not just in database. Sure, you'll need to have a catalog of databases that run in your On-Prem and Hybrid and Super Cloud but also other services that customers can tap. I mean, can you imagine a day when Dell offers and embraces a directly competitive service inside of apex. I have trouble envisioning that, you know not with their historical posture, you think about companies like, you know, Nutanix, you know, or Cisco where they really, you know those relationships cooled quite quickly but you know, look, think about it. That's what AWS does. It offers for instance, Redshift and Snowflake side by side happily and the Redshift guys they probably hate Snowflake. I wouldn't blame them, but the EC Two Folks, they love them. And Adam SloopesKy understands that ISVs like Snowflake are a key part of the Cloud ecosystem. Again, I have a hard time envisioning that occurring with Dell or even HPE, you know maybe less so with HPE, but what does this imply that the Edge will allow companies like Dell to a reach around on the Cloud and somehow create a new type of model that begrudgingly accommodates the Public Cloud but drafts of the new momentum of the Edge, which right now to these companies is kind of mostly telco and retail. It's hard to see that happening. I think it's got to evolve in a more comprehensive and inclusive fashion. What's much more likely is companies like Dell are going to substantially replicate that Cloud Operating Model for the pieces that they own pieces that they control which admittedly are big pieces of the market. But unless they're able to really tap that ecosystem magic they're not going to be able to grow much beyond their existing install bases. You take that lime green we showed you earlier that new adoption metric from ETR as an example, by my estimates, AWS and Azure are capturing new accounts at a rate between three to five times faster than Dell and HPE. And in the more mature US and mere markets it's probably more like 10 X and a major reason is because of the Cloud's robust ecosystem and the optionality and simplicity of transaction that that is bringing to customers. Now, Dell for its part is a hundred billion dollar revenue company. And it has the capability to drive that kind of dynamic. If it can pivot its partner ecosystem mindset from kind of resellers to Cloud services and technology optionality. Okay, that's it for now? Thanks to my colleagues, Stephanie Chan who helped research topics for Breaking Analysis. Alex Myerson is on the production team. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight and Rob Hof, on editorial they helped get the word out and thanks to Jordan Anderson for the new Breaking Analysis branding and graphics package. Remember these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen. All you do is search Breaking Analysis podcasts. You could check out ETR website @etr.ai. We publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You want to get in touch. @dave.vellente @siliconangle.com. You can DM me @dvellante. You can make a comment on our LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube Insights powered by ETR. Have a great week, stay safe, be well. And we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>And welcome back to the cubes coverage of AWS executive summit at re-invent 2021. I'm John ferry hosts of the cube. This segment is about surviving and thriving and with the digital revolution that's happening, the digital transformation that's turning into and changing businesses. We've got two great guests here with guardian life. Nick Volpi CIO of individual markets at guardian life and Kim golly CTO of life. And is at Accenture essentially, obviously doing a lot of cutting-edge work, guardian changing the game. Nick, thanks for coming on, Kevin. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks John. Good to be here. >>So I wonder before I get into the question, I want to just set the table a little bit. The pandemic has given everyone a mandate, the good projects are exposed. The bad projects are exposed. Everyone can kind of see kind of what's happening because of the pandemic forced everyone to kind of identify what's working. What's not working what the double-down on innovation for customers is a big focus, but now with the pandemic kind of relieving and coming out of it, the world's changed. This is an opportunity for businesses, Nick, this is something that you guys are focused on. Can you take us through what guardian lives doing kind of in this post pandemic changeover as cloud goes next level? >>Yeah. Thanks John. So, you know, the immediate need in the pandemic situation was about the new business capability. So those familiar with insurance traditionally, you know, life insurance, underwriting, disability underwriting is very in-person fluids labs, uh, attending physician statements. And when March of 2020 broke that all came to an abrupt halt, right doctor's office were either closed. Testing centers were either closed or inundated with COVID testing. So we had to come up with some creative ways to digitize our new business, um, adopt the application and adopt our new medical questionnaires and also get creative on some of our underwriting standards that put us at, you know, certain limits and certain levels and how we, when we needed fluids. So we, we, we have pretty quickly, we're agile about decisions there. And we moved from about, uh, you know, 40 to 50% adoption rate of our electronic applications to, you know, north of 98% across the board. >>Um, in addition, we kind of saw some opportunities for products and more capabilities beyond new business. So after we weathered the storm, we started taking a step back. And like you said, look at what we were doing. Like kind of have a start, stop, continue conversation internally to say, you know, this digitation digitization is a new norm. How do we meet it from every angle, not just a new business, right? And that's where we started to look at our policy administration systems, moving more to the cloud and leveraging the cloud to its fullest extent versus just a lift and shift. >>Kim, I want to get your perspective at a century I'm, I've done a lot of interviews with the past, I think 18 months, lots of use cases with a central, almost in every vertical where you guys are almost like the firefighters get called in to like help out cause the cloud actually now isn't an enabler. Um, how do you see the impact of the, of the pandemic around reverbing through? I mean, obviously you guys come to the table, you guys bring in, I mean, what's your perspective on this? >>So, yeah, it's really interesting. I think the most interesting fact >>Is, you know, we talk about Nick raised the, you know, such a strong area in our business of underwriting and how can we expedite that? There's been talking on the table for a number of years. Um, but the industry has been very slow or reluctant to embrace. And the pandemic became a very informed, I became an enforcer in it to be honest. And a lot of the companies were thinking about a prior. Um, but that's, it they'll think about it. I mean, even essentially we, we launched a huge three-year investment to get clients into cloud and digital transformation, but the pandemic just expedited everything. Now the upside is clients that were in a well-advanced stage of planning, uh, that we're easily able to adopt. Uh, but clients that weren't were really left behind. Um, so we became very, very busy just supporting the clients that weren't didn't have as much forethought as the likes of guardian, et cetera. >>Nick, that brings up a good point. I want to get your reaction to see if you agree. I mean, people who didn't put their toe in the cloud, or just jump in the deep end, really got flat-footed when the pandemic hit, because they weren't prepared people who were either ingratiated in with the cloud or how many active projects were even being full deployments in there did well, what's your take on that? >>Yeah, the, the enablement we had and, and the gift we were given by starting our cloud journey, and I want to say 2016, 17 was we really started moving to the cloud. And I think we were the only insurer that moved production load to the cloud at that point. Um, most of insurers were putting their development environments, maybe even their environments, but, you know, guardian had a strategy of getting out of the data center and moving to a much more flexible, scalable environment architecture using the AWS cloud. Um, so we completed our journey into the cloud by 2018, 19, and we were at the point of really capitalizing versus moving. So we were able to move very quickly, very nimbly, uh, when, when the pandemic hit or in any digital situation, we have that, that flexibility and capacity that AWS provides us to really respond to our customers, our customer's needs. So we were one of the more fortunate insurers that were well into our cloud journey and at the point of optimization versus the point of moving. >>So let's talk about the connection with, with the sensors, life insurance and annuity platform also known as a, I think the acronym is, uh, what was that? Why was that relevant? What, what was that all about? >>Yeah. So I'll go first and then Kim, you can jump in and see if you agree with me. Um, so >>It's essentially, >>I suspect you would write John, like I said, our new business focus was the original, like the, the, the, the emergency situation when the pandemic hit. But as we went further into it and realized the mortality and morbidity and the needs and wants of our customers, which is a major focus of guardian, really being, having the client at the center of every conversation we have, we realized that there was a real opportunity for product and his product continues to change. And you had regulations like 7,702 coming out where you had to reprice the entire portfolio to be able to sell it by January 1st, 2022, we realized our current systems are for policy admin. We're not matching our digital capabilities that we had moved to the cloud. So we embarked on a very extensive RFP to Accenture and a few other vendors that would come to the table and work with us. >>And we just really got to a place where combination of our, our desire to be on the cloud, be flexible and be capable for our customers. Married really well with the, the knowledge, the industry knowledge and the capabilities that Accenture brought to the table with the Ayla platform, um, their book of business, their current infrastructure, their configuration versus development, really all aligned with our need for flexible, fast time to market. You know, we're looking to cut development times significantly. We're looking to cut tests in times niggly. And as of right now, it's all proving true between the CA the cloud capability and halo capability. We are reaping the benefits of having this new platform, uh, coming up in live very soon here before. >>Well, I get to, um, a center's perspective. I want to just ask you a quick follow-up on that. Nick, if you don't mind the, you basically talk us through, okay, I can see what's happening here. You get with Accenture take advantage of what they got going on. You get into the cloud, you start getting the efficiencies, get the cultural change. What refactoring has you have you seen? What's your vision? I should say, what's your vision around what's next? Because clearly there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a playbook you get in the cloud replatform, you get the cultural fit, you understand the personnel issues, how to tap the resources. Then you gotta look for innovation where you can start changing. What, how you do things to refactor the business model. >>Yeah. So I think that, you know, specifically to this conversation, that's around the product capability, right? So for all too long, the insurance companies have had three specific sleeves of insurance products. We've had individual life. We have an individual disability and we'd have individual annuities, right? Each of them serving a specific purpose in the customer's lives, what this platform and this cloud platform allows us to do is start to think about, can we create the concept of a single rapper? Can we bring some of these products together? Can we centralize the buying process? And with ALA behind the scenes, you don't have that. You know, I kind of equate it to building a Ferrari and attaching a, uh, a trailer to it, right? And that's what we were doing today. Our digital front ends, our new business capabilities are all being anchored down or slowed down by our traditional mainframe backends by introducing Accenture on the cloud in AWS, we now have our Ferrari fully free to run as fast as it can versus anchoring this massive, you know, trailer to it. Um, so it really was a matter of bringing our product innovation to our digital front end innovation that we've been working on for, you know, two or three years prior. >>I mean, this is the kind of the Amazon way, right? You decouple things, you decompose, you don't want to have a drag. And with containers, we're seeing companies look at existing legacy in a way that's different. Um, can you talk about how you guys look at that Nick and terminally? Because a lot of CEO's are saying, Hey, you know what? I can have the best of both worlds. I don't have to kill the old to bring in the new, but I can certainly modernize everything. What's your reaction to that? >>Yeah. And I think that's, that's our exact, that's our exact path forward, right? We don't, we don't feel like we need to boil the ocean. Right. We're going after the surgically for the things that we think are going to be most impactful to our customers, right? So legacy blocks of business that are sitting out there that are, you know, full, completely closed. They're not our concern. It's really hitching this new ALA capability to the next generation of products. The next generation of customer needs understanding data, data capture is very important. And right. So if you look at the mainframes and what we're living on now, it's all about the owner of the policy. You lose connection with the beneficiary or the insured, what these new platforms allowed us to do is really understand the household around the products that they're buying. Right. I know it sounds simple, but that data architecture, that data infrastructure on these newer platforms and in the cloud, you can turn it faster. >>You have scale to do more analysis, but you're also able to capture in a much cleaner way on the traditional systems. You're talking about what we call intimately the blob on the mainframe that has your name, your first name, your last name, your address, all in one free form field sitting in some database. It's very hard to discern on these new platforms, given our need and our desire to be deeper into the client's lives, understanding their needs, ALA coupled with em, with AWS, with our new business capabilities on the front end really puts together that true customer value chain. That's going to differentiate us. >>Okay. I'm okay. CTO of a live as he calls it, the acronym for the service you have, this is a great example. I hate to use the word on-ramp cause that sounds so old, right? But in a way in vertical markets, you're seeing the power of the cloud because the data and the AI could be freed up and you can take advantage of all the heavy lifting by providing some platform or some support with Amazon, the, your expertise. This is a great use case of that, I think. And I think, you know, this is, I think a future trend where the developments can be faster, that value can be faster and your customers don't have to build all that lower level abstractions. If you will. Can you describe the essential relationship to your customers as you guys? Cause this is a real great use case. >>Yeah, it is. You know, our philosophy is simple. Let's not reinvent the wheel and with cloud and native services as AWS and, uh, provide w we want to focus on the business of what the system needs to do and not all the little side bets, we can get a great service. That's fully managed that has, uh, security patches updates. We want to focus on the real deal. Like Nick wants to focus on the business and not so much what's underneath it. That's my problem. I'm focusing on that. And we will work together, uh, in a nice little gel. You've had the relatively new term, no code, low code. You know, it's strange a modern system, like a lip has been that way for a number of years. Basically it means I don't want to make code changes. I just want to be able to configure it. >>So now more people can have access to make change, and we can even get it to the point where it's the people that are sitting there, dealing with the clients that would be the ultimate, where they can innovate and come up with ideas and try things because we've got it so simple. We're not there yet, but that's the ultimate goal. So alien, the no code, no code has been around for quite some time. And maybe we should take advantage of that, but I think we're missing one thing. So as good as the platform is the cloud moving in calculating native services, using the built-in security that comes with all that, um, and extending the function and then being able to tap into, you know, the InsureTech FinTech internet of things, and quickly adapt. I think the partnership is big. Okay. Uh, it's, it's very strong part of the exercise, so you can have the product, but without the people that work well together, I think it's also a big challenge. >>You know, all programs have their idiosyncrasies and there's a lot of challenges along the way. You know, there's one really small, simple example I can use. Um, I'd say guardian is one of our industries, market leaders, when, and when they approach the security, they really do lead the way out there. They're very strict, very, um, very responsible, which is such a pleasure to say, but at the end of the day, you still need to run a business. So, you know, because we're a partnership because we all have the same challenges we want to get to success. We were able to work together quite quickly. We planned out the right approach that maximize the security, but it also progressed the business. So, and we applied that into the overall program. So I think it is the product. Definitely. I think it is, uh, everything Nick said you actually elaborated on, but I'd like to point out there's a big part of the partnership to make it a success. >>Yeah. Great, great call out there, Nick, let's get your reaction on that because I want to get into the customer side of it. This enablement platform is kind of the new platform has been around for awhile, but the notion of buying tools and having platforms are now interesting because you have to take this kind of low code, no code capability, and you still got to code. I mean, there's some coding going on, but what it means is ease of use composing and being fast, um, platforms are super important. That requires real architecture and partnership. What's your reaction. >>Yeah. So I think, you know, I'll, I'll tie it all together between AWS and ALA, right? And here's the beauty of it. So we have something called launchpad where we're able to quickly stand up in AIDAP instance for development capabilities because of our Amazon relationship. And then to Kim's point, we have been successful 85% or more of all the work we've done with Inala is configuration versus code. And I'd actually I'd venture to say 90%. So that's extremely powerful when you think about the speed to market and our need to be product innovative. Um, so if our developers and even our, our analysts that sit on the business side could come in and quickly stand up a development buyer and start to play with, um, actuarial calculations, new product features and function, and then spin that to a more higher end development environment. You now have the perfect coupling of a new policy administration system that has the flexibility and configuration with a cloud provider like Amazon and AWS that allows us to move quickly with environments. Whereas in days past you'd have to have an architecture team come in and stand up the servers. And, you know, I'm going way back, but like buy the boxes, put the boxes in place and wire them down. This combination available in AWS has really a new capability to guardian that we're really excited about. >>I love that little comparison. Let me just quickly ask you compared to the old way, give us an order of magnitude of pain and timing involved versus what you just described as standing up something very quickly and getting value and having people shift their, their intellectual capital into value activities versus undifferentiated heavy lifting. >>Yes. I'll, I'll give you real dates. Right? So we engage really engaged with Accenture on the ALA program. Right before Thanksgiving of last year, we had our environment stood up and running all of our vitamins dev set UAT up by February, March timeframe on AWS. And we are about to launch our first product configuration into the, of the platform come November. So within a year we've taken arguably decades of product innovation from our mainframes and built it onto the Ayla platform on the Amazon cloud. So I don't know that you can do that in any other type of environment or partnership. >>It's amazing. You know, that's just great example to me, uh, where cloud scale and real refactoring and business agility is kinda plays out. So congratulations. I got to ask you now on the customer side, you mentioned, um, you guys love, uh, providing value to the customers. What is the impact of the customer? Okay, now you're a customer guardian life's customer. What's the impact of them. Can you share how you see that rendering itself in the marketplace? >>Yeah, so, so clearly AWS has rendered tons of value to the customer across the value stream, right? Whether it be our new business capability, our underwriting capability, our ability to process data and use their scale. I mean, it just goes on and on about the AWS, but specifically around ad-lib, um, the new API environment that we have, the connectivity that we can now make with the new backend policy admin systems has really brought us to a new, a new level. Um, whether it be repricing, product innovation, um, responding to claims capabilities, responding to servicing capabilities that the customer may need. You know, we're able to introduce more self-service. So if you think about it from the back end policy admin, going forward to our client portal, we're able to expose more transactions to self-serve. So minimize calls to the call center, minimize frustration of hold times and allow them to come onto the portal and do more and interact more with their policies because we're on this new, more modern cloud environment and a new, more modern policy admin. So we're delivering new capabilities to the customer from beginning to end being on the cloud with, with, >>Okay, final question. What's next for guardian life's journey year with Accenture. What's your plans? What do you want to knock down for the next year? What's what's on your mind? What's next? >>Uh, so that's an easy question. We've had this roadmap plan since we first started talking to Excentra, at least I've had it in my head. Um, we, we want off all of our policy admin systems for new business come end of 2025. So we've got about four policy admin systems maintaining our different lines of business, our individual disability or life insurance, and our newest, um, four systems that are kind of weighing us down a little bit. We have a glide path and a roadmap with Accenture as a partner to get off of all of these, for new business capability, um, by end of 2024. And that's, you know, I'm being gracious to my teams when I say that I'd like to go a little bit sooner, and then we begin to migrate the, the most important blocks of business that caused the most angst and most concerned with the executive leadership team and then, you know, complete the product. >>But along the way, you know, given regulation, given new, uh, customer customer needs, you know, meeting the needs of the customers changing life, we're going to have parallel tracks, right? So I envision we continue to have this flywheel turning of moving, but then we begin another flywheel right next to it that says we're going to innovate now on the new platform as well. So ultimately John, next year, if I could have my entire whole life block, as it stands today on the new admin platform and one or two new product innovations on the platform as well, by the third quarter, fourth quarter of next year, that would be a success. As far as that. >>Awesome. You guys had all planned out. I love, and I have such a passion for how technology powers business. And this is such a great story for next gen kind of where the modernization trend is today and kind of where it's going. It's the Nick. Appreciate it, Kim. Thanks for coming out with a censure Nixon. It's an easy question for you. I have to ask you another one. Um, this is, I got you here. You know, you guys are doing a lot of great work for other CEOs out there that are going through this right now, whether whatever they are on the spectrum missed the cloud way of getting in. Now this notion of refactoring and then replatforming, and then refactoring business is a playbook we're seeing emerge. People can get the benefits of going to the cloud, certainly for efficiency, but now it opens up the aperture for different kinds of business models. With more data access with machine learning. This refactoring seems to be the new hot thing where the best minds are saying, wow, we could do more, even more. What's your vision? How would you share those folks out there, out there, or the CEOs? What should they be thinking? What's their approach? What advice would you give? >>Yeah, so a lot of the mistakes we make as CEOs, we go for the white hot core first, right? We went the other way. We went for the newer digital assets. We went for the stuff that wasn't as concerning to the business should be fall over. Should there be an outage? Should there be anything? Right? So if you avoid the white hot core, improve it with your peripherals, easier moves to the cloud portals, broker, portals, um, beneficiary portals, uh, simple, you know, AIX frames, moving to the cloud and making them cloud native new builds. Right? So we started with all those peripheral pieces of the architecture and we avoided the white hot core because that's where you start to get those very difficult conversations about, I don't know if I'm ready to move. And I don't see the obvious benefit of moving a dividend generating policy admin system to the cloud. Like why, when you prove it in the pudding and you put the other things out there and prove you can be successful the conversation and move your core and your white hot core out to the platform out to leverage the cloud and to leverage new admin platforms, it becomes a much easier conversation because you've kind of cut your teeth on something much less detrimental to the business. Should it be >>What's the other expression, put water through the pipes, get some reps in and get the team ready to bring training, whatever metaphor you. That's what you're essentially saying. There, get, get some, get some, get your sea legs, get, get practice >>Exactly. Then go for the hard stuff, right? >>It's such a valid point. John is, you know, we see a lot of different approaches across a lot of different companies and, and the biggest challenges, the core is the biggest part. And if you start with that, it can be the scariest part. And I've seen companies trip up big time and you know, it becomes such a bubble spend, which really knocks you on for years, lose confidence in your strategy and everything else. And you're only as strong as your weakest link. So whether you do the outside first or the inside first from a weakest link until it's, the journey is complete, you're never going to maximize. So it was a, it was a very, uh, different and new and great approach that they took by doing a learning curve around the easiest stuff. And then, >>Yeah. Well, that's a great point. One quick, quick followup on that is that the talk about the impact of the personnel, Kim and Nick, because you know, there's a morale issue going on too. There's a, there's a, there's a training. I won't say training, but there's not re-skilling, but there's the rigor. If you're refactoring, you are, re-skilling, you're doing new things, the impact on morale and confidence. If you're not, you get the white, you don't wanna be in the white core unconfident. >>Maybe I should get first. Cause it's Nick's stuff. So he probably might want to say a lot, but yeah. Um, what we see with a lot of insurance companies, uh, they grow through acquisition. Okay. They're very large companies grown over time, uh, buying companies with businesses and systems and bringing it in. They usually bring a ten-year staff. So getting the staff to the next generation, uh, those staff is extremely important because they know everything that you've got today, and they're not so, uh, fair with what's coming up in the future. And there is a transition and people shouldn't feel threatened, but there is change and people do need to adopt and evolve and it should be fun and interesting, but it is a challenge at that turnover point on who controlling what, and then you get the concerns and get paranoid. So it is a true HR issue that you need to manage through >>The final word here. Go for it. >>Yeah. John, I'll give you a story that I think will sum the whole thing up about the excitement versus contention. We see here at guardian. I have a 50 year veteran on my legacy platform team and this person is so excited, got themselves certified in Amazon and is now leading the charge to bring our mainframes onto a lip and is one of the most essential. And I've actually had Accenture tell me if I had a person like this on every one of my engagements who is not only knowledgeable of the legacy, but is so excited to move to the new. I don't think I'd have a failed implementation. So that's the kind of guardian, the kind of backing guardians putting behind this, right? We are absolutely focusing on rescaling. We are not going to the market. We're giving everyone the opportunity and we have an amazing take-up rate. And again, like I said, 50 year veteran who probably could have retired 10 years ago is so excited, reeducated themselves, and is now a key part of this implementation, >>Hey, who wouldn't want to drive a Ferrari when you see it come in, right? I mean Barston magnet trailer. Great story, Nick. Thank you for coming on. Great insight, Kim, great stuff for the century as always a great story here, right? At the heart of the real focus where all companies are feeling right now, we're surviving and thriving and coming out of the pandemic with a growth strategy and a business model with powered by technology. So thanks for sharing the story. Appreciate it. Thanks John. Appreciate it. Okay. So cube coverage of 80 of us executive summit at re-invent 2021. I'm John furrier, your host of the cube. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Executive Summit at re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. This segment is about surviving and thriving with the digital revolution that's happening in the digital transformation that's turning into and changing businesses. We've got two great guests here with Guardian Life, Nick Volpe, CIO of Individual Markets at Guardian Life and Kim Gully, CTO of Life and Annuities at Accenture. Accenture obviously doing a lot of cutting-edge work, Guardian changing the game. Nick, thanks for coming on. Kim, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks John, good to be here. >> So, well, before I get into the question, I want to just set the table a little bit. The pandemic has given everyone a mandate. The good projects are exposed. The bad projects are exposed. Everyone can see what's happening because the pandemic forced everyone to identify what's working, what's not working, what the double-down on. Innovation for customers is a big focus, but now with the pandemic relieving and coming out of it, the world's changed. This is an opportunity for businesses. Nick, this is something that you guys are focused on. Can you take us through what Guardian Life's doing in this post pandemic changeover as cloud goes next level? >> Yeah, thanks John. So the immediate need in the pandemic situation was about the new business capability. So those familiar with insurance, traditionally life insurance underwriting, disability underwriting is very in-person, fluids, labs, attending physician statements. And when March of 2020 broke, that all came to an abrupt halt. Doctor's office were either closed. Testing centers were either closed or inundated with COVID testing. So we had to come up with some creative ways to digitize our new business, adopt the application, and adopt our medical questionnaires, and also get creative on some of our underwriting standards that put us at certain limits and certain levels and when we needed the fluids. So we are pretty quickly, we're agile about decisions there. And we moved from about 40 to 50% adoption rate of our electronic applications to the north of 98% across the board. In addition, we saw some opportunities for products and more capabilities beyond new business. So after we weathered the storm, we started to take a step back. And like you said, look at what we were doing, that have a start, stop, continue conversation internally to say, this digitization is a new norm. How do we meet it from every angle, not just a new business. And that's where we started to look at our policy administration systems, moving more to the cloud and leveraging the cloud to its fullest extent versus just a lifted shift. >> Kim, I want to get your perspective at Accenture. I've done a lot of interviews with the past, I think 18 months. A lot of use cases with Accenture, almost in every vertical where you guys are almost like the firefighters, get called in to like help out 'cause the cloud actually now is an enabler. How do you see the impact of the pandemic reverbing through? I mean, obviously you guys come to the table, you guys bring in, I mean, what's your perspective on this? >> So, yeah, it's really interesting. I think the most interesting fact is we talk about, Nick raise such a strong area in our business of underwriting and how can we expedite that, is being talked on the table for a number of years, but the industry has been very slow or reluctant to embrace. And the pandemic became an enforcer in it to be honest. And a lot of the companies were thinking about it prior, but that's it, they'll think about it. I mean, even Accenture, we launched a huge three-year investment to get clients into cloud and digital transformation, but the pandemic just expedited everything. Now the upside is clients that were in a well-advanced stage of planning, they were easily able to adopt, but clients that weren't, were really left behind. So we became very, very busy just supporting the clients that didn't have as much forethought as likes of Guardian, et cetera. >> Nick, it brings up a good point. I want to get your reaction to see if you agree. I mean, people who didn't put their toe in the cloud or just jump in the deep end, really got flat-footed when the pandemic hit, because they weren't prepared. People who were either ingratiated in with the cloud or having active projects or even being full deployments in there did well. What's your take on that? >> Yeah, the enablement we had and the gift we were given by starting our cloud journey, in I want to say 2016, 17 was we really started moving to the cloud. And I think we were the only insurer that moved production load to the cloud. At that point, most of insurers were putting their development environments, maybe even their SIT environments, but Guardian had the strategy of getting out of the data center or moving to a much more flexible, scalable environment architecture using the AWS cloud. So we completed our journey into the cloud by 2018, 19, and we were at the point of really capitalizing versus moving. So we were able to move very quickly, very nimbly. When the pandemic hit or in any digital situation, we have that flexibility and capacity that AWS provides us to really respond to our customers, our customers need. So we were one of the more fortunate insurers that were well into our cloud journey. And at the point of optimization versus the point of moving. >> Let's talk about the connection with Accenture's life insurance and annuity platform also known ALIP, I think the acronym is. What was that? Why was that relevant? What was that all about? >> Yeah, so I'll go first and then Kim, you can jump in and see if you agree with me. >> He essentially help that, love it. (laughs) >> Yeah, you would suspect you would, right John? >> Yeah. (laughs) >> Like I said, our new business focus was the original, like the emergency situation when the pandemic hit. But as we went further into it and realized the mortality and morbidity and the needs and wants of our customers, which is a major focus of Guardian, really being, having the client at the center of every conversation we have, we realized that there was a real opportunity for product and it's product continues to change and you had regulations like 7702 coming out where you had to reprice the entire portfolio to be able to sell it by January 1, 2022. We realized our current systems are for policy admin. We're not matching our digital capabilities that we had moved to the cloud. So we embarked on a very extensive RFP to Accenture and a few other vendors that would come to the table and work with us. And we just really got to a place where combination of our desire to be on the cloud, be flexible, and be capable for our customers, married really well with the knowledge, the industry knowledge and the capabilities that Accenture brought to the table with the ALIP platform. Their book of business, their current infrastructure, their configuration versus development, really all aligned with our need for flexible, fast time to market. We're looking to cut development times significantly. We're looking to cut test in times significantly. And as of right now, it's all proving true between the cloud capability and the ALIP capability. We are reaping the benefits of having this new platform coming up in live very soon here. >> Before I get to Accenture's perspective, I want to just ask you a quick follow-up on that, Nick, if you don't mind. You basically talk us through, okay, I can see what's happening here. You get with Accenture, take advantage of what they got going on. You get into the cloud, you start getting the efficiencies, get the cultural change. What refactoring have you seen? What's your vision, I should say. What's your vision around what's next? Because clearly there's a playbook. You get in the cloud, re-platform, you get the cultural fit, you understand the personnel issues, how to tap the resources, then you've got to look for innovation where you can start changing, how you do things to refactor the business model. >> Yeah, so I think that, specifically to this conversation, that's around the product capability. So for all too long, the insurance companies have had three specific sleeves of insurance products. We've had individual life. We have an individual disability and we'd have individual annuities. Each of them serving a specific purpose in the customer's lives. What this platform and this cloud platform allows us to do is start to think about, can we create the concept of a single wrapper? Can we bring some of these products together? Can we centralize the buying process? And with ALIP behind the scenes, you don't have that, I kind of equate it to building a Ferrari and attaching a trailer to it, and that's what we were doing today. Our digital front-ends, our new business capabilities are all being anchored down or slowed down by our traditional mainframe back-ends. By introducing Accenture on the cloud in AWS, we now have our Ferrari fully free to run as fast as it can versus anchoring this massive trailer to it. So it really was a matter of bringing our product innovation to our digital front-end innovation that we've been working on for two or three years prior. >> I mean, this is the kind of the Amazon way. You decouple things, you decompose, you don't want to have a drag. And with containers, we're seeing companies look at existing legacy in a way that's different. Could you talk about how you guys look at that Nick internally because a lot of CIO's are saying, Hey, you know what? I can have the best of both worlds. I don't have to kill the old to bring in the new, but I can certainly modernize everything. What's your reaction to that? >> Yeah. And I think that's our exact path forward. We don't feel like we need to blow the ocean. We're going after this surgically for the things that we think are going to be most impactful to our customers. So legacy blocks of business that are sitting out there, that are for completely closed, they're not our concern. It's really hitching this new ALIP capability to the next generation of products, the next generation of customer needs, understanding data. Data capture is very important. So if you look at the mainframes and what we're living on now, it's all about the owner of the policy. You lose connection with the beneficiary or the insured. What these new platforms allowed us to do is really understand the household around the products that they're buying. I know it sounds simple, but that data architecture, that data infrastructure on these newer platforms and in the cloud, you can churn it faster, you have scale to do more analysis, but you're also able to capture in a much cleaner way. On the traditional systems, you're talking about what we call intimately the blob on the mainframe that has your name, your first name, your last name, your address, all in one free form field sitting in some database. It's very hard to discern. On these new platforms, given our need and our desire to be deeper into the client's lives, understanding their needs, ALIP coupled with AWS, with our new business capabilities on the front-end really puts together that true customer value chain. That's going to differentiate us. >> Kim, okay, CTO of ALIP as he calls it, the acronym for the service you have. This is a great example. I hate to use the word on-ramp cause that sounds so old. But in a way, in vertical markets, you're seeing the power of the cloud because the data and the AI could be freed up and you can take advantage of all the heavy lifting by providing some platform or some support with Amazon, your expertise. This is a great use case of that, I think. And this is I think a future trend where the developments can be faster, that value can be faster, and your customers don't have to build all the lower level abstractions, if you will. Can you describe the essential relationship to your customers as you guys? Because this is a real great use case. >> Yeah, it is. Our philosophy is simple. Let's not reinvent the wheel. And with cloud and native services that AWS provide, we want to focus on the business of what the system needs to do and not all the little side bits. We can get a great service that's fully managed, that has security patches updates. We want to focus on the real deal. Like Nick wants to focus on the business and not so much what's underneath it. That's my problem, I'm focusing on that. And we will work together in a nice little gel. You've had the relatively new term, no code/low code. It's strange. A modern system like ALIP has been that way for a number of years. Basically it means, I don't want to make code changes. I just want to be able to configure it. So now more people can have access to make change, and we can even get it to the point where it's the people that are sitting there, dealing with the clients. That would be the ultimate, where they can innovate and come up with ideas and try things because we've got it so simple. We're not there yet, let's be realistic, but that's the ultimate goal. So ALIP, the no code/low code has been around for quite some time. And maybe we should take advantage of that, but I think we're missing one thing. So as good as the platform is, the cloud moving in, calculating native services using the built-in security that comes with all that and extending the function and then be able to tap into the InsurTech, FinTech, internet of things, and quickly adapt. I think the partnership is big. Okay, it's very strong part of the exercise. So you can add the product, but without the people that work well together, I think it's also a big challenge. All programs have their idiosyncrasies and there's a lot of challenges along the way. There's one really small simple example I can use. I'd say Guardian is one of our industries market leaders when they approach the security. They really do lead the way out there. They're very strict, very responsible, which is such a pleasure to say, but at the end of the day, you still need to run a business. So, 'cause we're a partnership because we all have the same challenges, we want to get to success. We were able to work together quite quickly. We planned out the right approach that maximize the security, but it also progressed the business and we applied that into the overall program. So I think it is a product definitely. I think it is everything Nick said, you actually elaborated on, but I'd like to point out, there's a big part of the partnership to make it a success as well. >> Yeah, great, great call out there. Nick, let's get your reaction on that because I want to get it to the customer side of it. This enablement platform is the new, I mean, platform has been around for awhile, but the notion of buying tools and having platforms are now interesting 'cause you have to take this low code/no code capability. I mean, you still got a code. I mean, there's some coding going on, but what it means is ease of use composing and being fast. Platforms are super important. That requires real architecture and partnership. What's your reaction? >> Yeah, so I think I'll tie it all together between AWS and ALIP, and here's the beauty of it. So we have something called LaunchPad where we're able to quickly stand up in ALIP instance for development capabilities because of our Amazon relationship. And then to Kim's point, we have been successful with 85% or more, of all the work we've done with an ALIP is configuration versus code and I'd actually I'd venture to say 90%. So that's extremely powerful when you think about the speed to market and our need to be product innovative. So if our developers and even our analysts that sit on the business side could come in and quickly stand up a development environment, start to play with actuarial calculations, new product features and function and then spin that to a more higher-end development environment. You now have the perfect coupling of a new policy administration system that has a flexibility and configuration with a cloud provider like Amazon and AWS that allows us to move quickly with environments, whereas in days past, you'd have to have an architecture team come in and stand up the servers. And I'm going way back, but like buy the boxes, put the boxes in place and wire them down. This combination of ALIP and AWS has really brought a new capability to Guardian and we're really excited about. >> I love that little comparison. Let me just quickly ask you, compared to the old way, give us an order of magnitude of pain and timing involved versus what you just described as standing up something very quickly and getting value and having people shift their intellectual capital into value activities versus undifferentiated heavy lifting. >> Yes, I'll give you real dates. So we really engaged with Accenture on the ALIP program right before Thanksgiving of last year. We had our environment stood up and running, all of our DEV, SIT, UAT up by February, March timeframe on AWS and we are about to launch our first product configuration into the ALIP platform coming November. So within a year, we've taken arguably decades of product innovation from our mainframes and built it onto the ALIP platform on the Amazon cloud. So I don't know that you can do that in any other type of environment or partnership. >> That's amazing. That's just great example to me where cloud scale and real refactoring and business agility is plays out. So congratulations. I got to ask you now, on the customer side you mentioned, you guys love providing value to the customers. What is the impact to the customer? Okay, now you're a customer, Guardian Life's customer. What's the impact to them? Can you share how you see that rendering itself in the marketplace? >> Yeah, so clearly AWS has rendered tons of value to the customer across the value stream whether it be our new business capability, our underwriting capability, our ability to process data and use their scale. I mean, it just goes on and on about the AWS, but specifically around ALIP, the new API environment that we have, the connectivity that we can now make with the new back-end policy admin systems has really brought us to a new level, whether it be repricing, product innovation, responding to claims capabilities, responding to servicing capabilities that the customer might need. We're able to introduce more self-service. So if you think about it from the back-end policy admin going forward to our client portal, we're able to expose more transactions to self-serve. So minimize calls to the call center, minimize frustration of hold times and allow them to come onto the portal and do more and interact more with their policies because we're on this new, more modern cloud environment and a new more modern policy admin. So we're delivering new capabilities to the customer from beginning to end being on the cloud with ALIP. >> Okay, final question. What's next for Guardian Life's journey year with Accenture? What's your plans? What do you want to knock down for the next year? What's on your mind? What's next? >> So that's an easy question. We've had this roadmap plan since we first started talking to Accenture, at least I've had it in my head. We want off all of our policy admin systems for new business come end of 2025. So we've got about four policy admin systems maintaining our different lines of business, our individual disability, our life insurance, and our annuities, for systems that are weighing us down a little bit. We have a glide path and a roadmap with Accenture as a partner to get off of all of these for new business capability by end of 2024. And I'm being gracious to my teams when I say that I'd like to go a little bit sooner. And then we begin to migrate the most important blocks of business that caused the most angst and most concerned with the executive leadership team and then complete the product. But along the way, given regulation, given new customer needs, meeting the needs of the customer's changing life, we're going to have parallel tracks. So I envision we continue to have this flywheel turning of moving, but then we begin another flywheel right next to it that says we're going to innovate now on the new platform as well. So ultimately John, next year, if I could have my entire whole life block, as it stands today on the new admin platform, and one or two new product innovations on the platform as well by the 3rd quarter, 4th quarter of next year, that would be a success as far as I'm concerned. >> Awesome, you guys had all planned out. I love, and I have such a passion for how technology powers business. And this is such a great story for next gen where the modernization trend is today and where it's going. So Nick appreciate it. Kim, thanks for coming out with Accenture. Nick, so just an easy question for you. I have to ask you another one. This is I got you here. You guys are doing a lot of great work. For other CIOs out there that are going through this right now, whatever they are on the spectrum, missed the CloudWave, getting in now, this notion of refactoring and then re-platforming and then refactoring business is a playbook we're seeing emerge. People can get the benefits of going to the cloud, certainly for efficiency, but now it opens up the aperture for different kinds of business models. With more data access, with machine learning. This refactoring seems to be the new hot thing where the best minds are saying, wow, we could do more, even more. What's your vision? How would you share those folks out there of the CIOs? What should they be thinking? What's their approach? What advice would you give? >> Yeah, so a lot of the mistakes we make as CIOs, we go for the white hot core first. We went the other way. We went for the newer digital assets. We went for the stuff that wasn't as concerning to the business. Should we fall over? Should there be an outage? Should there be anything? So if you avoid the white hot core, improve it with your peripherals, easier moves to the cloud portals, broker portals, beneficiary portals, simple AIX frames, moving to the cloud and making them cloud native, new builds. So we started with all those peripheral pieces of the architecture and we avoided the white hot core because that's where you start to get those very difficult conversations about, I don't know if I'm ready to move. And I don't see the obvious benefit of moving a dividend generating policy admin system to the cloud, like why? When you prove it in the pudding and you put the other things out there and prove you can be successful, the conversation to move your core and your white hot core out to the platform out to leverage the cloud and to leverage new admin platforms, it becomes a much easier conversation because you've kind of cut your teeth on something much less detrimental to the business should it go alright. >> What's the old expression, put water through the pipes, get some reps in and get the team ready to bring training, whatever your metaphor you use, that's what you're essentially saying there. Get some, your sea legs, get practice. >> Exactly. >> Then go for the hard stuff. >> It's such a valid point, John. We see a lot of different approaches across a lot of different companies and the biggest challenges, the core is the biggest part. And if you start with that, it can be the scariest part. And I've seen companies trip up big time and it becomes such a bubble spend, which really knocks you on for years, lose confidence in your strategy and everything else. And you're only as strong as your weakest link. So whether you do the outside first or the inside first, from a weakest link until the journey is complete, you never going to maximize. So it was a very different and new and great approach that they took by doing a learning curve around the easiest stuff and then hit in the core. >> Yeah, well, that's a great point. One quick, quick followup on that is that, talk about the impact to the personnel, Kim and Nick, because there's a morale issue going on too. There's a training. I won't say training, but there's a not re-skilling, but there's the rigor, if you're refactoring, you are re-skilling, you're doing new things. The impact of morale and confidence you get certainly. you don't want to be in the white core unconfident. >> Maybe I should get first 'cause it's Nick's stuff. So he probably might want to say a lot, yeah. What we see with a lot of insurance companies, they grow through acquisition. Okay, they're very large companies, grown over time, buying companies with businesses and systems and bringing it in. They usually bring a tenure staff. So getting the staff to the next generation, that staff is extremely important because they know everything that you've got today and then not so aware with what's coming up in the future. And there is a transition and people shouldn't feel threatened, but there is change and people do need to adopt and evolve and it should be fun and interesting, but it is a challenge at that turnover point on who controlling what, and then you get the concerns and get paranoid. So it is a true HR issue that you need to manage through. >> Nick you're the final word here. Go for it. >> Yeah, John. I'll give you a story that I think will sum the whole thing up about the excitement versus contention we see here at Guardian. I have a 50-year veteran on my legacy platform team and this person is so excited, got themselves certified in Amazon and is now leading the charge to bring our mainframes onto ALIP and is one of the most essential, and I've actually had Accenture tell me, if I had a person like this on every one of my engagements who is not only knowledgeable of the legacy, but is so excited to move to the new, I don't think I'd have a failed implementation. So that's the kind of Guardian, the kind of backing Guardian's putting behind this. We are absolutely focusing on rescaling. We are not going to the market. We're giving everyone the opportunity and we have an amazing take-up rate. And again, like I said, 50-year veteran who probably could have retired 10 years ago is so excited, reeducated themselves and is now a key part of this implementation. >> And who wouldn't want to drive a Ferrari when you see it come in. I mean, back in the trailer. Great story, Nick. Thank you for coming on, great insight. Kim, great stuff for the Accenture, as always a great story here. We're here at the heart of the real focus where all companies are feeling right now. We're surviving and thriving and coming out of the pandemic with a growth strategy and a business model powered by technology. So thanks for sharing the story, appreciate it. >> Thanks John, appreciate it. >> Okay, it's CUBE coverage of AWS Executive Summit at re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

(bright music) >> Well, hi everybody. John Walls here on theCUBE, continuing our coverage of AnsibleFest 2021 with Tom Anderson, the Vice President of Product Management at Red Hat. And Tom, you've been the answer, man, for theCUBE here over the last a week, 10 days or so. Third cube appearance, I hope we haven't worn you out. >> No, you haven't John, I love it, I love doing it. So that's great to have you have you at the event. >> Thank you for letting us be a part of that. It's been a lot of fun. Let's let's go and look at the event now. As far as big picture here, major takeaways that you think that have been talked about, that you think you'd like people, customers to go home with. If you will, though, a lot of this has been virtual obviously, but when I say go home, I made that figuratively, but what, what do you want people to remember and then apply to their businesses? >> Right. So being a product guy, I want to talk about products usually, right? So the big kind of product announcements from this year's event have been the rollout, and really, the next generation of the Ansible automation platform, which is really a rearchitecture turning it into a cloud native application an automation application itself that scales to our customer needs. So a lot of big announcements around that. And so what does that do for customers? That's really bringing them the automation platform that they can scale from the data center, to the cloud, to the Edge and everywhere in between, across a single platform with a single easy to use automation language. And then secondly, on that, as automation starts to shift left, we always talk about technology shifting left towards the developer, as automation is also shifting left towards the developer and other personas in an organization we're really happy about the developer tools and the tooling that we're providing to the customers with the new automation platform too, that brings development of content automation content. So the creation, the testing, the deployment and the management of that content across an enterprise far easier than it's ever been. So it's really kind of, it's a little bit about the democratization of automation. We see that shifting left, if you will. And I know I've said that already, but we see that shifting left of automation into other parts of the organization, beyond the domain experts, the network engineers or the storage experts, et cetera, pushing that automation out into the hands of other personas in the organization has been a big trend that we've seen and a lot of product announcements around that. So really excited about the product announcements in particular, but also the involvement and the engagement of our ecosystem, our upstream community. So important to our product and our success, our ecosystem partners, and obviously last but not least our customers and our users. >> So you hit a lot of big topics there. So let's talk about the Edge. You know, that seems to be a, you know, a fairly significant trend at this point, right? 'Cause trying to get the automation out there where the data besides, and that's where the apps are. Right? So where the data is, that's where things are happening out there on the Edge. So maybe just dive into that a little bit and about how you're trying to facilitate that need. >> Yeah. So a couple of trends around the Edge, obviously it's the architecture itself with lower capacity or lower capability devices and compute infrastructure at the Edge. And whether that's at the far edge with very low capacity devices, or even at near edge scenarios where you don't have, you know, data center, IT people out there to support those environments. So being able to get at those low capability, low capacity environments remotely Ansible is a really good fit for that because of our agentless architecture, the agentless architecture of Ansible itself allows you to drive automation out into the devices and into the environments where there isn't a high capacity infrastructure. And the other thing that the other theme that we've seen is one of the commonalities that no matter where the compute is taking place and the users are, there always has to be network. So we see a lot of network automation use cases out at the Edge and Ansible is, you know, the defacto network automation solution in the market. So we see a lot of our customers driving Ansible use cases out into their Edge devices. >> You know, you talk about development too, and just kind of this changing relationship between Ansible and DevOps and how that has certainly been maturing and seems to be really taking off right now. >> Yeah. So for, you know, what we've seen a lot of, as you know, is becoming frictionless, right? How do we take the friction out of the system that frees developers up to be more productive for organizations to be more agile, to roll out applications faster? How do we do that? We need to get access to the infrastructure and the resources that developers need. We need to get that access into their hands when they need it. And in our frictionless sort of way, right? So, you know, all of the old school, traditional ways of developers having to get infrastructure by opening a help desk ticket to get servers built for them and waiting for IT ops to build the servers and to deploy them and to send them back a message, all that is gone now. These, you know, subsystem owners, whether that's compute or cloud or network or storage, their ability to use Ansible to expose their resources for consumption by other personas, developers in this case, makes developers happy and more efficient because they can just use those automation playbooks, those Ansible playbooks to deploy the infrastructure that they need to develop, test and deploy their applications on. And the actual subsystem owners themselves can be assured that the usage of those environments is compliant with their standards because they've built and shared the automation with those developers to be able to consume when they want. So we're making both sides happy, agile, efficient developers and happy infrastructure owners, because they know that the governance and compliance around that system usage is on point with what they need and what they want. >> Yeah. It's a big win-win and a very good point. I always like it when we kind of get down to the nitty-gritty and talk about what a customer is really doing. Yeah. And because if we could talk about hypotheticals and trends and developing and maturity rates and all those kinds of things, but in terms of actual customers, you know, what people really are doing, what do you think have been a few of the plums that you'd like to make sure people were paying attention to? >> Yeah. I think from this year's event, I was really taken by the JP Morgan Chase presentation. And it really kind of fits into my idea of shifting left in the democratization of automation. They talked about, I think the number was around 7,000 people, associates inside that organization that are across 22 countries. So kind of global consumption of this. Building automation playbooks and sharing those across the organization. I mean, so gone are the days of, you know, very small teams of people doing, just automating the things that they do and it's grown so big. And, so pervasive now, I think JP Morgan Chase really kind of brings that out, tease that out, that kind of cultural impacts that's had on their organization, the efficiencies that have been able to draw off from that their ability to bring the developers and their operations teams together to be working as one. I think their story is really fantastic. And I think this is the second year. I think this is the second year that JP Morgan Chase has been presenting at Fest and this years session was fantastic. I really, really enjoyed that. So I would encourage, I would encourage anybody to go back and look at the recording of that session and there's game six groups, total other end of the spectrum, right? Financial services, JP Morgan Chase, global company to Gamesis, right? These people who are rolling out new games and need to be able to manage capacity really well. When a new game hits, right? Think about a new game hits and the type of demand and consumption there is for that game. And then the underlying infrastructure to support it. And Gamesis did a really great presentation around being able to scale out automation to scale up and down automation, to be able to spin up clusters and deploy infrastructure, to run their games on an as-needed basis. So kind of that business agility and how automation is driving that, or business agility is driving the need for automation in these organizations. So that that's just a couple of examples, but there was a good ones from another financial services that talked about the cultural impacts of automation, their idea of extreme automation. In fact, one of the sessions I interviewed Joe Mills, a gentlemen from this card services, financial services company, and he talked about extreme automation there and how they're using automation guilds in communities of practice in their organization to get over the cultural hurdles of adopting automation and sharing automation across an organization. >> Hm. So a wide array obviously of customer uses and all very effective, I guess, and, you know, and telling their own story. Somewhat related to that, and you, as you put it out there too, if you want to go back and look, these are really great case studies to take a look at. For those who, again, who maybe couldn't attend, or haven't had a chance to look at any of the sessions yet, what are some of the kinds of things that were discussed in terms of sessions to give somebody a flavor of what was discussed and maybe to tease them a little bit for next year, right? And just in case that you weren't able to participate and can't right now, there's always next year. So maybe if you could give us a little bit of flavor of that, too. >> Yeah. So we kind of break down the sessions a little bit into the more kind of technical sessions and then the sort of less technical sessions, let's put it that way. And on the technical session front, certainly a couple of sessions were really about getting started. Those are always popular with people new to Ansible. So there's the session that aired on the 29th, which has been recorded and you can rewatch it. That's getting started Q and A with the technical Ansible experts. That's a really, really great session 'cause you see that the types of questions that are being asked. So you know, you're not alone. If you're new to Ansible, the types of questions are probably the questions that you have as well. And then the, obviously the value of the tech Ansible experts who are answering this question. So that was a great session. And then for a lot of folks who may want to get involved in the community, the upstream community, there's a great session that was also on the 29th. And it was recorded for rewatching, around getting started with participation in the Ansible community and a live Q and A there. So the Ansible community, for those who don't know is a large, robust, vibrant, upstream community of users, of software companies, of all manners of people that are contributing and contributing upstream to the code and making Ansible a better solution for them and for everybody. So that's a great session. And then last but not least, almost always the most popular session is the roadmap sessions and Massimo Ferrari, gentleman on my team did a great session on the Ansible roadmap. So I do a search on roadmap in the session catalog, and you can see the recording of that. So that's always a big deal. >> Yeah, roadmaps were great, right? Because especially for newcomers, they want to know how I'm down here at 0.0. And, I've got a destination in mind, I want to go way out there. So how do I get there? So, to that point for somebody who is beginning their journey, and maybe they have, you know, they're automated with the ability to manually intervene, right? And now you've got to take the hands off the wheel and you're going to allow for full automation. So how, what's the message you want to get across to those people who maybe are going to lose that security blanket they've been hanging on to, you know, for a long time and you take the wheels off and go. >> No John, that's a great question. And that's usually a big apprehension of kind of full automation, which is, you know, that kind of turning over the reins, if you will, right to somebody else. If I'm the person who's responsible for this storage system, if I'm the person responsible for this network elements, these routers, these firewalls, whatever it might be, I'm really kind of freaked out about giving controls or access to those things, from a configuration standpoint, to people outside of my organization, who don't have the same level of expertise that I do, but here's the deal that in a well implemented well architected Ansible automation platform environment, you can control the type of automation that people do. Who does that against what managing that automation as code. So checking in, checking out, version control, deployment access. So there's a lot of controls that can be put in place. So it isn't just a free-for-all automated. Everybody automating everything. Organizations can roll out automation and have access to different kinds of automation, can control and manage what their organizations can use and see and do with Ansible. So there's lots of controls built-in for organizations to put in place and to make those subsystem owners give them confidence that how people are accessing their subsystems using Ansible automation can be controlled in a way that makes them comfortable and assures compliance and governance around those resources. >> Well, Tom, we appreciate the time. Once again, I know you've been a regular here on theCUBE over the course of the event. We'll give you a little bit of time off and let you get back to your day job, but we do appreciate that and I wish you success down the road. >> Thank you very much. And we'll see you again next year. >> You bet. Thank you, Tom Anderson, joining us Vice President of Product Management at Red Hat, talking about AnsibleFest, 2021. I'm John Walls, and you're watching theCUBE. (lively instrumental music)

(upbeat music) >> From around the globe, it's theCUBE! With digital coverage of Postgres Vision 2021, brought to you by EDB. >> Welcome back to Postgres Vision 21, where theCUBE is covering the innovations in open source trends in this new age of application development and how to leverage open source database technologies to create world-class platforms that are cost-effective and also scale. My name is Dave Vellante, and with me is Roberto Giordano, who is the End User Computing, Corporate, and Database Services Manager at Borsa Italiana, the Italian Stock Exchange. Roberto, great to have you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks Dave, and thanks to the interview friend for the invitation. >> Okay, and we're going to dig in to the great customer story here. First, Roberto, tell us a little bit more about Borsa Italiana and your role at the organization. >> Absolutely. Well, as you mentioned, Borsa is the Italian Stock Exchange. We used to be part of the London Stock Exchange, but last month we left that group, and we joined another group called Euronext, so we are now part of another group, I would say. And right now within Euronext, Euronext provide the biggest liquidity pool in Europe, just to mention something. And basically we provide the market infrastructure to our customers across Europe and the whole world. So probably if it happens for you to buy a little of, I don't know, Ferrari for instance, probably use our infrastructure. >> So I wonder if you could talk about the key drivers in the exchange business in Italy. I don't know how closely you follow what's going on in the United States, but it's crypto madness, there's the Reddit army driving up stocks that have big short positions, and of course the regulators have to look at that, and there's a big debate going on. Well, I don't know what's it like in Italy, but what are the key drivers that are really informing the priorities for your technology strategy? >> Well, you mentioned, for instance, the stereotypical cases that are a little bit of laterally to the global markets and also to our markets as a it professional running market infrastructure is our first the goal to provide an infrastructure that is reliable and be with the lowest possible latency. So we are very focused on performance and reliability just to mention the two main drivers within our systems. >> Well, and you have end-user computing in your title and we're going to get into the database discussion, but I presumably with with COVID you had to pivot and that that piece of your job was escalated in 2020, I would imagine. And you mentioned latency which is a key factor in obviously in database access but that must've been a big challenge last year. >> Well, it was really a challenge, but basically we move just within a weekend, the wall organization working remotely. And it has been like this since February, 2020. Think about the challenge of moving almost 1000 people that used to come to the office every day to start to work remotely. And as within my team of the end user computing this was really a challenge but it was a good one at the end. We, we, we succeeded and everything work. It's fine from our perspective, no news is is a good news, you know, because normally when something doesn't work, we are on newspapers. So if you didn't heard about us it means that everything worked out just fine. >> Yeah. It's amazing, Roberto. We both in the technology business that you'll be you're a practitioner observer, but I mean if you're in the tech business most companies actually pivoted quite well. You're have always been a digital business, different. I mean, if you're a Ferrari and making cars and you can't get semiconductors, but but most technology companies actually made the transition you know, quite amazingly, let's get into the, the case study a bit of it. I wonder if you could paint a picture of your organization's infrastructure and applications what it looks like and and particularly your database infrastructure what does that look like? >> Well, we are a multi-vendor shop. So we would like to pick the right technology for for the right service. This means that my database services teams currently manage several different technology where possible that plays a big role in, in, in our portfolio. And because we, we, we currently support both the open source, fully open source version of Postgres, but also the EDB distribution in particular we prefer to use EDB distribution where we did specific functionalities that just EDB provide. And we, when we need a first class level of support that EDB in recent year was able to provide to us. >> When you say full functioning, are you talking about things like acid compliance, two phase commits? I mean, all these enterprise capabilities, is that right? Or maybe you could be >> Just too much just to mention one, for instance we recently migrated our wire intrasite availability solution using the ADB fail-over manager. That is an additional component that just it'll be provide. >> Yeah. Okay. So, so par recovery obviously is, is and so that's a solution that you to get from the EDB distro as opposed to having to build it yourself with open source tooling. >> Yeah, correct. Well, basically sterically, we used to rely on OSTP clustering from, from, from that perspective. But over the years we found that even if it's a technology that works fine, it has been around for four decades. And so on. We faced some challenges internally because within my team we don't own also the operative system layers. So we want a solution that was 100% within our control and perimeter. So just few months ago we asked the EDB EDB folks if they can provide something. And after a couple of meetings also with their pre-sales engineers, we found the the right solution for us. So we launched long story short, just a quick proof of concept to a tissue test together, again using the ADB consultancy. And, and then we, beginning of this year, we, we went live with the first mission critical service using this brand new technology, well brand new technology for us. You know, it'd be created a few years ago >> And I do have some follow-up questions but I want to understand what catalyzed the, you know what was the motivation for going with an open source database? I mean, you're, you're a great example because you have your multi-vendor so you have experienced with all of it, the full spectrum. What was it about open source database generally EDB specifically that triggered the, the choice? >> Well thanks for the question. It is, this is one of the, or one of the questions that I always, like. I think what really drove us was the right combination between easy to use, so simplicity and also good value for money. So we like to pick the right database technology for the right kind of service slash budget that the survey says and, and the open source solution for a specific service. It, it, it's, it's our, you know, first, first, first choice. So we are not going to say a company that use just one technology. We like to take the best of breed that the market can offer. In some cases, the open source and Postgres in particular is, is our choice. How involved was >> The line of business in this both the decision and the implementation? Was it kind of invisible to them, or this was really more of a technology decision based on the your interpretation of the requirements I'm interested in who was involved and how you actually got it done? >> Well, I, I think this decision was transplant for, for, for, for the business at the end of the day don't really have that kind of visibility. You know, they just provide requirements in particular in terms of performance and rehabil area, the reliability. And so, so this this is something they are not really involved about. And obviously if they, if we are in opposition to save a little bit of money everybody's at the, even the business >> No. So what did you have to do? So that makes sense to me, I figured that was the case. Who would, who were the stakeholders on your team? I mean, what kind of technical resources did you require an implementation resources? What take us through what the project if you will look like, wh how did you do it? >> Well, it's a combination of database expertise. I got the pleasure to run a team that is paid by very, very senior, very, very skilled database services professional that are able to support more than one more than what the county and also are very open to innovation and changes. Plus obviously we need also the development teams the relevant development teams on board, when you when you run this kind of transformations and it looks like also, they liked the idea to use PostgreSQL for for this specific service I got in mind. So it, it, it was quite, quite easy, not be discussion. You know. >> What was the, what was the elapsed time from from when you said, okay, we're in, you know signed the agreement we're going here you made the decision to actually getting into production. >> Well, as I mentioned, we, we, we were on we're on services and application that are really focused on high availability and performance. So generally speaking, we are not a peak organization. Also we run a business that is highly regulated. So as you know, as you can imagine we are an organization that don't have a lot of appetite for risk, you know, so generally speaking in order to run this kind of transformation is a matter of several months, I will say six nine months to have something delivered in that space. >> Okay. Well, that's, I mean, that's reasonable. I mean, if you could do it inside of a year that's I think quite good especially in the highly regulated industry. And then you mentioned kind of the fail over the high availability Cape Cape capabilities. Were there other specific EDB tools that that you utilize to sort of address the objectives? >> Yeah, absolutely. We were in particular, we used Postgres enterprise, AKA Pam. Okay. And very recently we were involved within ADB about per se specifically developing one functionality that, that that we needed back in the day. I think together with Bart these are the free EDB specific tools that, that we, that that we use right now. >> And, and I'm, I'm interested in, I want to get to the business impact and I know it's early days for you but the real motivation was to save money and simplify. I would actually, I would imagine your developers were happy because they get to use modern tooling and open source. But, but really though if your industry is bottom line, right, I mean that's really what the, the business case was all about. But I wonder if you could add some color there in terms of the business impact that you expect. And then, I mean I don't know how much visibility you have now but anything you can share with us. >> Well, thinking about the EFM implementation that the business impact the, was that in case of a failure or the DBA team that a services team is it is able to provide a solution that is within our 100% within our perimeter. So this means that we are fully accountable for it. So in a nutshell, when you run a service, the less people the less teams you have to involve the more control you can deliver. And in some, again, very critical services that is a great value. >> Okay. So, and, and where do you want to take this? I mean, how do you see w what's your, if you're thinking about your Postgres and, and generally an EDB you know, roadmap, where do you want it to go? >> Well, I stay to, to trends within within the organization, the, the, the, the the first one is about migrating more existing services to open source solution for database is going to be, is going to be prosperous. And other trends that I see within my organization is about designing applications, not really to be, to to use PostgreSQL as the base, as it does a base layer. I think both trends are more or less surroundings at the same state right now. >> Yeah. A lot of the audience members at Postgres vision 21 is just like you they they're managing day-to-day infrastructure. They're there they're expert practitioners. What advice would you give to somebody that is thinking about, you know taking this journey, maybe if you had to do something over again maybe what would you do differently? How can you help your peers here? >> Well, I think in particular, if you are going to say a big organization that runs a highly regulated business in some cases, you are a little bit afraid of open source because there is this, I can say general consideration about the lack of enterprise level support. I would like to say that it is just about the past because they're around bunch of companies like EDB that are we're a hundred percent capable of providing enterprise level of support, even on, on, on even on the open source distribution of Paul's presser. Obviously Dan is you're going to go with their specific distribution. The level of support is going to be even more accurate but as we know, it could be currently is they across say main contributor of the pollsters community. And I think is, is that an insurance for every organization? >> Your advice is don't be afraid. >> Yeah. My advice is done is absolutely, don't be, don't be afraid. And if, if, if I can, if we can mention about also about, you know, the cloud called technologies this is also another, another topic where if possible I would like to suggest to not being afraid EDB as every every I would say organization within the it industry is really pushing for it. And I think for a very, for, for a lot of cases not all of them, but a lot of cases, there is a great value about the design services application to be cloud native or migrating existing application into the cloud. >> Okay. But, but being a highly regulated industry and being a, you know, very much aware of the the narrative around open source, et cetera, you, you must've had just a little piece of your mind saying, okay I have to manage this risk. So there's anything specifically you did with managing the risks that you would advise? Was it, was it or is it really just about good change management? >> I think it was mainly about a good change management when you got, you know the relevant stakeholders that you need on board and we are, everybody's going the same direction. That basically is about executing. >> Excellent. Well, Roberto, I really appreciate your time and your knowledge that you share with the audience. So thanks so much for coming on the cube. >> Thank you, Dave. It was a great pleasure. >> And thank you for watching the cubes continuous coverage of Postgres vision 21. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> From around the globe, it's theCUBE! With digital coverage of Postgres Vision 2021, brought to you by EDB. >> Welcome back to Postgres Vision 21, where theCUBE is covering the innovations in open source trends in this new age of application development and how to leverage open source database technologies to create world-class platforms that are cost-effective and also scale. My name is Dave Vellante, and with me is Roberto Giordano, who is the End User Computing, Corporate, and Database Services Manager at Borsa Italiana, the Italian Stock Exchange. Roberto, great to have you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks Dave, and thanks to the interview friend for the invitation. >> Okay, and we're going to dig in to the great customer story here. First, Roberto, tell us a little bit more about Borsa Italiana and your role at the organization. >> Absolutely. Well, as you mentioned, Borsa is the Italian Stock Exchange. We used to be part of the London Stock Exchange, but last month we left that group, and we joined another group called Euronext, so we are now part of another group, I would say. And right now within Euronext, Euronext provide the biggest liquidity pool in Europe, just to mention something. And basically we provide the market infrastructure to our customers across Europe and the whole world. So probably if it happens for you to buy a little of, I don't know, Ferrari for instance, probably use our infrastructure. >> So I wonder if you could talk about the key drivers in the exchange business in Italy. I don't know how closely you follow what's going on in the United States, but it's crypto madness, there's the Reddit army driving up stocks that have big short positions, and of course the regulators have to look at that, and there's a big debate going on. Well, I don't know what's it like in Italy, but what are the key drivers that are really informing the priorities for your technology strategy? >> Well, you mentioned, for instance, the stereotypical cases that are a little bit of laterally to the global markets and also to our markets as a it professional running market infrastructure is our first the goal to provide an infrastructure that is reliable and be with the lowest possible latency. So we are very focused on performance and reliability just to mention the two main drivers within our systems. >> Well, and you have end-user computing in your title and we're going to get into the database discussion, but I presumably with with COVID you had to pivot and that that piece of your job was escalated in 2020, I would imagine. And you mentioned latency which is a key factor in obviously in database access but that must've been a big challenge last year. >> Well, it was really a challenge, but basically we move just within a weekend, the wall organization working remotely. And it has been like this since February, 2020. Think about the challenge of moving almost 1000 people that used to come to the office every day to start to work remotely. And as within my team of the end user computing this was really a challenge but it was a good one at the end. We, we, we succeeded and everything work. It's fine from our perspective, no news is is a good news, you know, because normally when something doesn't work, we are on newspapers. So if you didn't heard about us it means that everything worked out just fine. >> Yeah. It's amazing, Roberto. We both in the technology business that you'll be you're a practitioner observer, but I mean if you're in the tech business most companies actually pivoted quite well. You're have always been a digital business, different. I mean, if you're a Ferrari and making cars and you can't get semiconductors, but but most technology companies actually made the transition you know, quite amazingly, let's get into the, the case study a bit of it. I wonder if you could paint a picture of your organization's infrastructure and applications what it looks like and and particularly your database infrastructure what does that look like? >> Well, we are a multi-vendor shop. So we would like to pick the right technology for for the right service. This means that my database services teams currently manage several different technology where possible that plays a big role in, in, in our portfolio. And because we, we, we currently support both the open source, fully open source version of PostgreSQL, but also the EDB distribution in particular we prefer to use DDB distribution where we did specific functionalities that just EDB provide. And we, when we need a first class level of support that ADB in in recent year was able to provide to us. >> When you say full functioning, are you talking about things like acid compliance, two phase commits? I mean, all these enterprise capabilities, is that right? Or maybe you could be >> Just too much just to mention one, for instance we recently migrated our wire intrasite availability solution using the ADB fail-over manager. That is an additional component that just it'll be provide. >> Yeah. Okay. So, so par recovery obviously is, is and so that's a solution that you to get from the EDB distro as opposed to having to build it yourself with open source tooling. >> Yeah, correct. Well, basically sterically, we used to rely on OSTP clustering from, from, from that perspective. But over the years we found that even if it's a technology that works fine, it has been around for four decades. And so on. We faced some challenges internally because within my team we don't own also the operative system layers. So we want a solution that was 100% within our control and perimeter. So just few months ago we asked the EDB EDB folks if they can provide something. And after a couple of meetings also with their pre-sales engineers, we found the the right solution for us. So we launched long story short, just a quick proof of concept to a tissue test together, again using the ADB consultancy. And, and then we, beginning of this year, we, we went live with the first mission critical service using this brand new technology, well brand new technology for us. You know, it'd be created a few years ago >> And I do have some follow-up questions but I want to understand what catalyzed the, you know what was the motivation for going with an open source database? I mean, you're, you're a great example because you have your multi-vendor so you have experienced with all of it, the full spectrum. What was it about open source database generally EDB specifically that triggered the, the choice? >> Well thanks for the question. It is, this is one of the, or one of the questions that I always, like. I think what really drove us was the right combination between easy to use, so simplicity and also good value for money. So we like to pick the right database technology for the right kind of service slash budget that the survey says and, and the open source solution for a specific service. It, it, it's, it's our, you know, first, first, first choice. So we are not going to say a company that use just one technology. We like to take the best of breed that the market can offer. In some cases, the open source and Pasquesi in particular is, is our choice. How involved was >> The line of business in this both the decision and the implementation? Was it kind of invisible to them, or this was really more of a technology decision based on the your interpretation of the requirements I'm interested in who was involved and how you actually got it done? >> Well, I, I think this decision was transplant for, for, for, for the business at the end of the day don't really have that kind of visibility. You know, they just provide requirements in particular in terms of performance and rehabil area, the reliability. And so, so this this is something they are not really involved about. And obviously if they, if we are in opposition to save a little bit of money everybody's at the, even the business >> No. So what did you have to do? So that makes sense to me, I figured that was the case. Who would, who were the stakeholders on your team? I mean, what kind of technical resources did you require an implementation resources? What take us through what the project if you will look like, wh how did you do it? >> Well, it's a combination of database expertise. I got the pleasure to run a team that is paid by very, very senior, very, very skilled database services professional that are able to support more than one more than what the county and also are very open to innovation and changes. Plus obviously we need also the development teams the relevant development teams on board, when you when you run this kind of transformations and it looks like also, they liked the idea to use PostgreSQL for for this specific service I got in mind. So it, it, it was quite, quite easy, not be discussion. You know. >> What was the, what was the elapsed time from from when you said, okay, we're in, you know signed the agreement we're going here you made the decision to actually getting into production. >> Well, as I mentioned, we, we, we were on we're on services and application that are really focused on high availability and performance. So generally speaking, we are not a peak organization. Also we run a business that is highly regulated. So as you know, as you can imagine we are an organization that don't have a lot of appetite for risk, you know, so generally speaking in order to run this kind of transformation is a matter of several months, I will say six nine months to have something delivered in that space. >> Okay. Well, that's, I mean, that's reasonable. I mean, if you could do it inside of a year that's I think quite good especially in the highly regulated industry. And then you mentioned kind of the fail over the high availability Cape Cape capabilities. Were there other specific EDB tools that that you utilize to sort of address the objectives? >> Yeah, absolutely. We were in particular, we used Postgres enterprise, AKA Pam. Okay. And very recently we were involved within ADB about per se specifically developing one functionality that, that that we needed back in the day. I think together with Bart these are the free EDB specific tools that, that we, that that we use right now. >> And, and I'm, I'm interested in, I want to get to the business impact and I know it's early days for you but the real motivation was to save money and simplify. I would actually, I would imagine your developers were happy because they get to use modern tooling and open source. But, but really though if your industry is bottom line, right, I mean that's really what the, the business case was all about. But I wonder if you could add some color there in terms of the business impact that you expect. And then, I mean I don't know how much visibility you have now but anything you can share with us. >> Well, thinking about the EFM implementation that the business impact the, was that in case of a failure or the DBA team that a services team is it is able to provide a solution that is within our 100% within our perimeter. So this means that we are fully accountable for it. So in a nutshell, when you run a service, the less people the less teams you have to involve the more control you can deliver. And in some, again, very critical services that is a great value. >> Okay. So, and, and where do you want to take this? I mean, how do you see w what's your, if you're thinking about your Postgres and, and generally an EDB you know, roadmap, where do you want it to go? >> Well, I stay to, to trends within within the organization, the, the, the, the the first one is about migrating more existing services to open source solution for database is going to be, is going to be prosperous. And other trends that I see within my organization is about designing applications, not really to be, to to use PostgreSQL as the base, as it does a base layer. I think both trends are more or less surroundings at the same state right now. >> Yeah. A lot of the audience members at Postgres vision 21 is just like you they they're managing day-to-day infrastructure. They're there they're expert practitioners. What advice would you give to somebody that is thinking about, you know taking this journey, maybe if you had to do something over again maybe what would you do differently? How can you help your peers here? >> Well, I think in particular, if you are going to say a big organization that runs a highly regulated business in some cases, you are a little bit afraid of open source because there is this, I can say general consideration about the lack of enterprise level support. I would like to say that it is just about the past because they're around bunch of companies like EDB that are we're a hundred percent capable of providing enterprise level of support, even on, on, on even on the open source distribution of Paul's presser. Obviously Dan is you're going to go with their specific distribution. The level of support is going to be even more accurate but as we know, it could be currently is they across say main contributor of the pollsters community. And I think is, is that an insurance for every organization? >> Your advice is don't be afraid. >> Yeah. My advice is done is absolutely, don't be, don't be afraid. And if, if, if I can, if we can mention about also about, you know, the cloud called technologies this is also another, another topic where if possible I would like to suggest to not being afraid EDB as every every I would say organization within the it industry is really pushing for it. And I think for a very, for, for a lot of cases not all of them, but a lot of cases, there is a great value about the design services application to be cloud native or migrating existing application into the cloud. >> Okay. But, but being a highly regulated industry and being a, you know, very much aware of the the narrative around open source, et cetera, you, you must've had just a little piece of your mind saying, okay I have to manage this risk. So there's anything specifically you did with managing the risks that you would advise? Was it, was it or is it really just about good change management? >> I think it was mainly about a good change management when you got, you know the relevant stakeholders that you need on board and we are, everybody's going the same direction. That basically is about executing. >> Excellent. Well, Roberto, I really appreciate your time and your knowledge that you share with the audience. So thanks so much for coming on the cube. >> Thank you, Dave. It was a great pleasure. >> And thank you for watching the cubes continuous coverage of Postgres vision 21. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the >>cube presenting >>active de que intelligent automation for data quality brought to you by Iota Ho >>Welcome to the sixth episode of the I. O. Tahoe data automation series. On the cube. We're gonna start off with a segment on how to accelerate the adoption of snowflake with Glenn Grossman, who is the enterprise account executive from Snowflake and yusef khan, the head of data services from Iota. Gentlemen welcome. >>Good afternoon. Good morning, Good evening. Dave. >>Good to see you. Dave. Good to see you. >>Okay glenn uh let's start with you. I mean the Cube hosted the snowflake data cloud summit in November and we heard from customers and going from love the tagline zero to snowflake, you know, 90 minutes very quickly. And of course you want to make it simple and attractive for enterprises to move data and analytics into the snowflake platform but help us understand once the data is there, how is snowflake helping to achieve savings compared to the data lake? >>Absolutely. dave. It's a great question, you know, it starts off first with the notion and uh kind of, we coined it in the industry or t shirt size pricing. You know, you don't necessarily always need the performance of a high end sports car when you're just trying to go get some groceries and drive down the street 20 mph. The t shirt pricing really aligns to, depending on what your operational workload is to support the business and the value that you need from that business? Not every day. Do you need data? Every second of the moment? Might be once a day, once a week through that t shirt size price and we can align for the performance according to the environmental needs of the business. What those drivers are the key performance indicators to drive that insight to make better decisions, It allows us to control that cost. So to my point, not always do you need the performance of a Ferrari? Maybe you need the performance and gas mileage of the Honda Civic if you would just get and deliver the value of the business but knowing that you have that entire performance landscape at a moments notice and that's really what what allows us to hold and get away from. How much is it going to cost me in a data lake type of environment? >>Got it. Thank you for that yussef. Where does Io Tahoe fit into this equation? I mean what's, what's, what's unique about the approach that you're taking towards this notion of mobilizing data on snowflake? >>Well, Dave in the first instance we profile the data itself at the data level, so not just at the level of metadata and we do that wherever that data lives. So it could be structured data could be semi structured data could be unstructured data and that data could be on premise. It could be in the cloud or it could be on some kind of SAAS platform. And so we profile this data at the source system that is feeding snowflake within snowflake itself within the end applications and the reports that the snowflake environment is serving. So what we've done here is take our machine learning discovery technology and make snowflake itself the repository for knowledge and insights on data. And this is pretty unique. Uh automation in the form of our P. A. Is being applied to the data both before after and within snowflake. And so the ultimate outcome is that business users can have a much greater degree of confidence that the data they're using can be trusted. Um The other thing we do uh which is unique is employee data R. P. A. To proactively detect and recommend fixes the data quality so that removes the manual time and effort and cost it takes to fix those data quality issues. Uh If they're left unchecked and untouched >>so that's key to things their trust, nobody's gonna use the data. It's not trusted. But also context. If you think about it, we've contextualized are operational systems but not our analytic system. So there's a big step forward glen. I wonder if you can tell us how customers are managing data quality when they migrate to snowflake because there's a lot of baggage in in traditional data warehouses and data lakes and and data hubs. Maybe you can talk about why this is a challenge for customers. And like for instance can you proactively address some of those challenges that customers face >>that we certainly can. They have. You know, data quality. Legacy data sources are always inherent with D. Q. Issues whether it's been master data management and data stewardship programs over the last really almost two decades right now, you do have systemic data issues. You have siloed data, you have information operational, data stores data marks. It became a hodgepodge when organizations are starting their journey to migrate to the cloud. One of the things that were first doing is that inspection of data um you know first and foremost even looking to retire legacy data sources that aren't even used across the enterprise but because they were part of the systemic long running operational on premise technology, it stayed there when we start to look at data pipelines as we onboard a customer. You know we want to do that era. We want to do QA and quality assurance so that we can, And our ultimate goal eliminate the garbage in garbage out scenarios that we've been plagued with really over the last 40, 50 years of just data in general. So we have to take an inspection where traditionally it was E. T. L. Now in the world of snowflake, it's really lt we're extracting were loading or inspecting them. We're transforming out to the business so that these routines could be done once and again give great business value back to making decisions around the data instead of spending all this long time. Always re architect ng the data pipeline to serve the business. >>Got it. Thank you. Glenda yourself of course. Snowflakes renowned for customers. Tell me all the time. It's so easy. It's so easy to spin up a data warehouse. It helps with my security. Again it simplifies everything but so you know, getting started is one thing but then adoption is also a key. So I'm interested in the role that that I owe. Tahoe plays in accelerating adoption for new customers. >>Absolutely. David. I mean as Ben said, you know every every migration to Snowflake is going to have a business case. Um uh and that is going to be uh partly about reducing spending legacy I. T. Servers, storage licenses, support all those good things um that see I want to be able to turn off entirely ultimately. And what Ayatollah does is help discover all the legacy undocumented silos that have been built up, as Glenn says on the data estate across a period of time, build intelligence around those silos and help reduce those legacy costs sooner by accelerating that that whole process. Because obviously the quicker that I. T. Um and Cdos can turn off legacy data sources the more funding and resources going to be available to them to manage the new uh Snowflake based data estate on the cloud. And so turning off the old building, the new go hand in hand to make sure those those numbers stack up the program is delivered uh and the benefits are delivered. And so what we're doing here with a Tahoe is improving the customers are y by accelerating their ability to adopt Snowflake. >>Great. And I mean we're talking a lot about data quality here but in a lot of ways that's table stakes like I said, if you don't trust the data, nobody's going to use it. And glenn, I mean I look at Snowflake and I see obviously the ease of use the simplicity you guys are nailing that the data sharing capabilities I think are really exciting because you know everybody talks about sharing data but then we talked about data as an asset, Everyone so high I to hold it. And so sharing is is something that I see as a paradigm shift and you guys are enabling that. So one of the things beyond data quality that are notable that customers are excited about that, maybe you're excited about >>David, I think you just cleared it out. It's it's this massive data sharing play part of the data cloud platform. Uh you know, just as of last year we had a little over about 100 people, 100 vendors in our data marketplace. That number today is well over 450 it is all about democratizing and sharing data in a world that is no longer held back by FTp s and C. S. V. S and then the organization having to take that data and ingested into their systems. You're a snowflake customer. want to subscribe to an S and P data sources an example, go subscribe it to it. It's in your account there was no data engineering, there was no physical lift of data and that becomes the most important thing when we talk about getting broader insights, data quality. Well, the data has already been inspected from your vendor is just available in your account. It's obviously a very simplistic thing to describe behind the scenes is what our founders have created to make it very, very easy for us to democratize not only internal with private sharing of data, but this notion of marketplace ensuring across your customers um marketplace is certainly on the type of all of my customers minds and probably some other areas that might have heard out of a recent cloud summit is the introduction of snow park and being able to do where all this data is going towards us. Am I in an ale, you know, along with our partners at Io Tahoe and R. P. A. Automation is what do we do with all this data? How do we put the algorithms and targets now? We'll be able to run in the future R and python scripts and java libraries directly inside Snowflake, which allows you to even accelerate even faster, Which people found traditionally when we started off eight years ago just as a data warehousing platform. >>Yeah, I think we're on the cusp of just a new way of thinking about data. I mean obviously simplicity is a starting point but but data by its very nature is decentralized. You talk about democratizing data. I like this idea of the global mesh. I mean it's very powerful concept and again it's early days but you know, keep part of this is is automation and trust, yussef you've worked with Snowflake and you're bringing active D. Q. To the market what our customers telling you so far? >>Well David the feedback so far has been great. Which is brilliant. So I mean firstly there's a point about speed and acceleration. Um So that's the speed to incite really. So where you have inherent data quality issues uh whether that's with data that was on premise and being brought into snowflake or on snowflake itself, we're able to show the customer results and help them understand their data quality better Within Day one which is which is a fantastic acceleration. I'm related to that. There's the cost and effort to get that insight is it's a massive productivity gain versus where you're seeing customers who've been struggling sometimes too remediate legacy data and legacy decisions that they've made over the past couple of decades, so that that cost and effort is much lower than it would otherwise have been. Um 3rdly, there's confidence and trust, so you can see Cdos and see IOS got demonstrable results that they've been able to improve data quality across a whole bunch of use cases for business users in marketing and customer services, for commercial teams, for financial teams. So there's that very quick kind of growth in confidence and credibility as the projects get moving. And then finally, I mean really all the use cases for the snowflake depend on data quality, really whether it's data science, uh and and the kind of snow park applications that Glenn has talked about, all those use cases work better when we're able to accelerate the ri for our joint customers by very quickly pushing out these data quality um insights. Um And I think one of the one of the things that the snowflake have recognized is that in order for C. I. O. Is to really adopt enterprise wide, um It's also as well as the great technology with Snowflake offers, it's about cleaning up that legacy data state, freeing up the budget for CIA to spend it on the new modern day to a state that lets them mobilise their data with snowflake. >>So you're seeing the Senate progression. We're simplifying the the the analytics from a tech perspective. You bring in Federated governance which which brings more trust. Then then you bring in the automation of the data quality piece which is fundamental. And now you can really start to, as you guys are saying, democratized and scale uh and share data. Very powerful guys. Thanks so much for coming on the program. Really appreciate your time. >>Thank you. I appreciate as well. Yeah.

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS, and our community partners. >>Hi everyone. Welcome back to the cubes. Virtual coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 virtual. We are the cube virtual I'm John ferry, your host with my coach, Dave Alante for keynote analysis from Swami's machine learning, all things, data huge. Instead of announcements, the first ever machine learning keynote at a re-invent Dave. Great to see you. Thanks Johnny. And from Boston, I'm here in Palo Alto. We're doing the cube remote cube virtual. Great to see you. >>Yeah, good to be here, John, as always. Wall-to-wall love it. So, so, John, um, how about I give you my, my key highlights from the, uh, from the keynote today, I had, I had four kind of curated takeaways. So the first is that AWS is, is really trying to simplify machine learning and use machine intelligence into all applications. And if you think about it, it's good news for organizations because they're not the become machine learning experts have invent machine learning. They can buy it from Amazon. I think the second is they're trying to simplify the data pipeline. The data pipeline today is characterized by a series of hyper specialized individuals. It engineers, data scientists, quality engineers, analysts, developers. These are folks that are largely live in their own swim lane. Uh, and while they collaborate, uh, there's still a fairly linear and complicated data pipeline, uh, that, that a business person or a data product builder has to go through Amazon making some moves to the front of simplify that they're expanding data access to the line of business. I think that's a key point. Is there, there increasingly as people build data products and data services that can monetize, you know, for their business, either cut costs or generate revenue, they can expand that into line of business where there's there's domain context. And I think the last thing is this theme that we talked about the other day, John of extending Amazon, AWS to the edge that we saw that as well in a number of machine learning tools that, uh, Swami talked about. >>Yeah, it was great by the way, we're live here, uh, in Palo Alto in Boston covering the analysis, tons of content on the cube, check out the cube.net and also check out at reinvent. There's a cube section as there's some links to so on demand videos with all the content we've had. Dave, I got to say one of the things that's apparent to me, and this came out of my one-on-one with Andy Jassy and Andy Jassy talked about in his keynote is he kind of teased out this idea of training versus a more value add machine learning. And you saw that today in today's announcement. To me, the big revelation was that the training aspect of machine learning, um, is what can be automated away. And it's under a lot of controversy around it. Recently, a Google paper came out and the person was essentially kind of, kind of let go for this. >>But the idea of doing these training algorithms, some are saying is causes more harm to the environment than it does good because of all the compute power it takes. So you start to see the positioning of training, which can be automated away and served up with, you know, high powered ships and that's, they consider that undifferentiated heavy lifting. In my opinion, they didn't say that, but that's clearly what I see coming out of this announcement. The other thing that I saw Dave that's notable is you saw them clearly taking a three lane approach to this machine, learning the advanced builders, the advanced coders and the developers, and then database and data analysts, three swim lanes of personas of target audience. Clearly that is in line with SageMaker and the embedded stuff. So two big revelations, more horsepower required to process training and modeling. Okay. And to the expansion of the personas that are going to be using machine learning. So clearly this is a, to me, a big trend wave that we're seeing that validates some of the startups and I'll see their SageMaker and some of their products. >>Well, as I was saying at the top, I think Amazon's really trying, working hard on simplifying the whole process. And you mentioned training and, and a lot of times people are starting from scratch when they have to train models and retrain models. And so what they're doing is they're trying to create reusable components, uh, and allow people to, as you pointed out to automate and streamline some of that heavy lifting, uh, and as well, they talked a lot about, uh, doing, doing AI inferencing at the edge. And you're seeing, you know, they, they, uh, Swami talked about several foundational premises and the first being a foundation of frameworks. And you think about that at the, at the lowest level of their S their ML stack. They've got, you know, GPU's different processors, inferential, all these alternative processes, processors, not just the, the Xav six. And so these are very expensive resources and Swami talked a lot about, uh, and his colleagues talked a lot about, well, a lot of times the alternative processor is sitting there, you know, waiting, waiting, waiting. And so they're really trying to drive efficiency and speed. They talked a lot about compressing the time that it takes to, to run these, these models, uh, from, from sometimes weeks down to days, sometimes days down to hours and minutes. >>Yeah. Let's, let's unpack these four areas. Let's stay on the firm foundation because that's their core competency infrastructure as a service. Clearly they're laying that down. You put the processors, but what's interesting is the TensorFlow 92% of tensor flows on Amazon. The other thing is that pie torch surprisingly is back up there, um, with massive adoption and the numbers on pie torch literally is on fire. I was coming in and joke on Twitter. Um, we, a PI torch is telling because that means that TensorFlow is originally part of Google is getting, is getting a little bit diluted with other frameworks, and then you've got MX net, some other things out there. So the fact that you've got PI torch 91% and then TensorFlow 92% on 80 bucks is a huge validation. That means that the majority of most machine learning development and deep learning is happening on AWS. Um, >>Yeah, cloud-based, by the way, just to clarify, that's the 90% of cloud-based cloud, uh, TensorFlow runs on and 91% of cloud-based PI torch runs on ADM is amazingly massive numbers. >>Yeah. And I think that the, the processor has to show that it's not trivial to do the machine learning, but, you know, that's where the infrared internship came in. That's kind of where they want to go lay down that foundation. And they had Tanium, they had trainee, um, they had, um, infrared chow was the chip. And then, you know, just true, you know, distributed training training on SageMaker. So you got the chip and then you've got Sage makers, the middleware games, almost like a machine learning stack. That's what they're putting out there >>And how bad a Gowdy, which was, which is, which is a patrol also for training, which is an Intel based chip. Uh, so that was kind of interesting. So a lot of new chips and, and specialized just, we've been talking about this for awhile, particularly as you get to the edge and do AI inferencing, you need, uh, you know, a different approach than we're used to with the general purpose microbes. >>So what gets your take on tenant? Number two? So tenant number one, clearly infrastructure, a lot of announcements we'll go through those, review them at the end, but tenant number two, that Swami put out there was creating the shortest path to success for builders or machine learning builders. And I think here you lays out the complexity, Dave butts, mostly around methodology, and, you know, the value activities required to execute. And again, this points to the complexity problem that they have. What's your take on this? >>Yeah. Well you think about, again, I'm talking about the pipeline, you collect data, you just data, you prepare that data, you analyze that data. You, you, you make sure that it's it's high quality and then you start the training and then you're iterating. And so they really trying to automate as much as possible and simplify as much as possible. What I really liked about that segment of foundation, number two, if you will, is the example, the customer example of the speaker from the NFL, you know, talked about, uh, you know, the AWS stats that we see in the commercials, uh, next gen stats. Uh, and, and she talked about the ways in which they've, well, we all know they've, they've rearchitected helmets. Uh, they've been, it's really a very much database. It was interesting to see they had the spectrum of the helmets that were, you know, the safest, most safe to the least safe and how they've migrated everybody in the NFL to those that they, she started a 24%. >>It was interesting how she wanted a 24% reduction in reported concussions. You know, you got to give the benefit of the doubt and assume some of that's through, through the data. But you know, some of that could be like, you know, Julian Edelman popping up off the ground. When, you know, we had a concussion, he doesn't want to come out of the game with the new protocol, but no doubt, they're collecting more data on this stuff, and it's not just head injuries. And she talked about ankle injuries, knee injuries. So all this comes from training models and reducing the time it takes to actually go from raw data to insights. >>Yeah. I mean, I think the NFL is a great example. You and I both know how hard it is to get the NFL to come on and do an interview. They're very coy. They don't really put their name on anything much because of the value of the NFL, this a meaningful partnership. You had the, the person onstage virtually really going into some real detail around the depth of the partnership. So to me, it's real, first of all, I love stat cast 11, anything to do with what they do with the stats is phenomenal at this point. So the real world example, Dave, that you starting to see sports as one metaphor, healthcare, and others are going to see those coming in to me, totally a tale sign that Amazon's continued to lead. The thing that got my attention was is that it is an IOT problem, and there's no reason why they shouldn't get to it. I mean, some say that, Oh, concussion, NFL is just covering their butt. They don't have to, this is actually really working. So you got the tech, why not use it? And they are. So that, to me, that's impressive. And I think that's, again, a digital transformation sign that, that, you know, in the NFL is doing it. It's real. Um, because it's just easier. >>I think, look, I think, I think it's easy to criticize the NFL, but the re the reality is, is there anything old days? It was like, Hey, you get your bell rung and get back out there. That's just the way it was a football players, you know, but Ted Johnson was one of the first and, you know, bill Bellacheck was, was, you know, the guy who sent him back out there with a concussion, but, but he was very much outspoken. You've got to give the NFL credit. Uh, it didn't just ignore the problem. Yeah. Maybe it, it took a little while, but you know, these things take some time because, you know, it's generally was generally accepted, you know, back in the day that, okay, Hey, you'd get right back out there, but, but the NFL has made big investments there. And you can say, you got to give him, give him props for that. And especially given that they're collecting all this data. That to me is the most interesting angle here is letting the data inform the actions. >>And next step, after the NFL, they had this data prep data Wrangler news, that they're now integrating snowflakes, Databricks, Mongo DB, into SageMaker, which is a theme there of Redshift S3 and Lake formation into not the other way around. So again, you've been following this pretty closely, uh, specifically the snowflake recent IPO and their success. Um, this is an ecosystem play for Amazon. What does it mean? >>Well, a couple of things, as we, as you well know, John, when you first called me up, I was in Dallas and I flew into New York and an ice storm to get to the one of the early Duke worlds. You know, and back then it was all batch. The big data was this big batch job. And today you want to combine that batch. There's still a lot of need for batch, but when people want real time inferencing and AWS is bringing that together and they're bringing in multiple data sources, you mentioned Databricks and snowflake Mongo. These are three platforms that are doing very well in the market and holding a lot of data in AWS and saying, okay, Hey, we want to be the brain in the middle. You can import data from any of those sources. And I'm sure they're going to add more over time. Uh, and so they talked about 300 pre-configured data transformations, uh, that now come with stage maker of SageMaker studio with essentially, I've talked about this a lot. It's essentially abstracting away the, it complexity, the whole it operations piece. I mean, it's the same old theme that AWS is just pointing. It's its platform and its cloud at non undifferentiated, heavy lifting. And it's moving it up the stack now into the data life cycle and data pipeline, which is one of the biggest blockers to monetizing data. >>Expand on that more. What does that actually mean? I'm an it person translate that into it. Speak. Yeah. >>So today, if you're, if you're a business person and you want, you want the answers, right, and you want say to adjust a new data source, so let's say you want to build a new, new product. Um, let me give an example. Let's say you're like a Spotify, make it up. And, and you do music today, but let's say you want to add, you know, movies, or you want to add podcasts and you want to start monetizing that you want to, you want to identify, who's watching what you want to create new metadata. Well, you need new data sources. So what you do as a business person that wants to create that new data product, let's say for podcasts, you have to knock on the door, get to the front of the data pipeline line and say, okay, Hey, can you please add this data source? >>And then everybody else down the line has to get in line and Hey, this becomes a new data source. And it's this linear process where very specialized individuals have to do their part. And then at the other end, you know, it comes to self-serve capability that somebody can use to either build dashboards or build a data product. In a lot of that middle part is our operational details around deploying infrastructure, deploying, you know, training machine learning models that a lot of Python coding. Yeah. There's SQL queries that have to be done. So a lot of very highly specialized activities, what Amazon is doing, my takeaway is they're really streamlining a lot of those activities, removing what they always call the non undifferentiated, heavy lifting abstracting away that it complexity to me, this is a real positive sign, because it's all about the technology serving the business, as opposed to historically, it's the business begging the technology department to please help me. The technology department obviously evolving from, you know, the, the glass house, if you will, to this new data, data pipeline data, life cycle. >>Yeah. I mean, it's classic agility to take down those. I mean, it's undifferentiated, I guess, but if it actually works, just create a differentiated product. So, but it's just log it's that it's, you can debate that kind of aspect of it, but I hear what you're saying, just get rid of it and make it simpler. Um, the impact of machine learning is Dave is one came out clear on this, uh, SageMaker clarify announcement, which is a bias decision algorithm. They had an expert, uh, nationally CFUs presented essentially how they're dealing with the, the, the bias piece of it. I thought that was very interesting. What'd you think? >>Well, so humans are biased and so humans build models or models are inherently biased. And so I thought it was, you know, this is a huge problem to big problems in artificial intelligence. One is the inherent bias in the models. And the second is the lack of transparency that, you know, they call it the black box problem, like, okay, I know there was an answer there, but how did it get to that answer and how do I trace it back? Uh, and so Amazon is really trying to attack those, uh, with, with, with clarify. I wasn't sure if it was clarity or clarified, I think it's clarity clarify, um, a lot of entirely certain how it works. So we really have to dig more into that, but it's essentially identifying situations where there is bias flagging those, and then, you know, I believe making recommendations as to how it can be stamped. >>Nope. Yeah. And also some other news deep profiling for debugger. So you could make a debugger, which is a deep profile on neural network training, um, which is very cool again on that same theme of profiling. The other thing that I found >>That remind me, John, if I may interrupt there reminded me of like grammar corrections and, you know, when you're typing, it's like, you know, bug code corrections and automated debugging, try this. >>It wasn't like a better debugger come on. We, first of all, it should be bug free code, but, um, you know, there's always biases of the data is critical. Um, the other news I thought was interesting and then Amazon's claiming this is the first SageMaker pipelines for purpose-built CIC D uh, for machine learning, bringing machine learning into a developer construct. And I think this started bringing in this idea of the edge manager where you have, you know, and they call it the about machine, uh, uh, SageMaker store storing your functions of this idea of managing and monitoring machine learning modules effectively is on the edge. And, and through the development process is interesting and really targeting that developer, Dave, >>Yeah, applying CIC D to the machine learning and machine intelligence has always been very challenging because again, there's so many piece parts. And so, you know, I said it the other day, it's like a lot of the innovations that Amazon comes out with are things that have problems that have come up given the pace of innovation that they're putting forth. And, and it's like the customers drinking from a fire hose. We've talked about this at previous reinvents and the, and the customers keep up with the pace of Amazon. So I see this as Amazon trying to reduce friction, you know, across its entire stack. Most, for example, >>Let me lay it out. A slide ahead, build machine learning, gurus developers, and then database and data analysts, clearly database developers and data analysts are on their radar. This is not the first time we've heard that. But we, as the kind of it is the first time we're starting to see products materialized where you have machine learning for databases, data warehouse, and data lakes, and then BI tools. So again, three different segments, the databases, the data warehouse and data lakes, and then the BI tools, three areas of machine learning, innovation, where you're seeing some product news, your, your take on this natural evolution. >>Well, well, it's what I'm saying up front is that the good news for, for, for our customers is you don't have to be a Google or Amazon or Facebook to be a super expert at AI. Uh, companies like Amazon are going to be providing products that you can then apply to your business. And, and it's allowed you to infuse AI across your entire application portfolio. Amazon Redshift ML was another, um, example of them, abstracting complexity. They're taking, they're taking S3 Redshift and SageMaker complexity and abstracting that and presenting it to the data analysts. So that, that, that individual can worry about, you know, again, getting to the insights, it's injecting ML into the database much in the same way, frankly, the big query has done that. And so that's a huge, huge positive. When you talk to customers, they, they love the fact that when, when ML can be embedded into the, into the database and it simplifies, uh, that, that all that, uh, uh, uh, complexity, they absolutely love it because they can focus on more important things. >>Clearly I'm this tenant, and this is part of the keynote. They were laying out all their announcements, quick excitement and ML insights out of the box, quick, quick site cue available in preview all the announcements. And then they moved on to the next, the fourth tenant day solving real problems end to end, kind of reminds me of the theme we heard at Dell technology worlds last year end to end it. So we are starting to see the, the, the land grab my opinion, Amazon really going after, beyond I, as in pass, they talked about contact content, contact centers, Kendra, uh, lookout for metrics, and that'll maintain men. Then Matt would came on, talk about all the massive disruption on the, in the industries. And he said, literally machine learning will disrupt every industry. They spent a lot of time on that and they went into the computer vision at the edge, which I'm a big fan of. I just loved that product. Clearly, every innovation, I mean, every vertical Dave is up for grabs. That's the key. Dr. Matt would message. >>Yeah. I mean, I totally agree. I mean, I see that machine intelligence as a top layer of, you know, the S the stack. And as I said, it's going to be infused into all areas. It's not some kind of separate thing, you know, like, Coobernetti's, we think it's some separate thing. It's not, it's going to be embedded everywhere. And I really like Amazon's edge strategy. It's this, you, you are the first to sort of write about it and your keynote preview, Andy Jassy said, we see, we see, we want to bring AWS to the edge. And we see data center as just another edge node. And so what they're doing is they're bringing SDKs. They've got a package of sensors. They're bringing appliances. I've said many, many times the developers are going to be, you know, the linchpin to the edge. And so Amazon is bringing its entire, you know, data plane is control plane, it's API APIs to the edge and giving builders or slash developers, the ability to innovate. And I really liked the strategy versus, Hey, here's a box it's, it's got an x86 processor inside on a, throw it over the edge, give it a cool name that has edge in it. And here you go, >>That sounds call it hyper edge. You know, I mean, the thing that's true is the data aspect at the edge. I mean, everything's got a database data warehouse and data lakes are involved in everything. And then, and some sort of BI or tools to get the data and work with the data or the data analyst, data feeds, machine learning, critical piece to all this, Dave, I mean, this is like databases used to be boring, like boring field. Like, you know, if you were a database, I have a degree in a database design, one of my degrees who do science degrees back then no one really cared. If you were a database person. Now it's like, man data, everything. This is a whole new field. This is an opportunity. But also, I mean, are there enough people out there to do all this? >>Well, it's a great point. And I think this is why Amazon is trying to extract some of the abstract. Some of the complexity I sat in on a private session around databases today and listened to a number of customers. And I will say this, you know, some of it I think was NDA. So I can't, I can't say too much, but I will say this Amazon's philosophy of the database. And you address this in your conversation with Andy Jassy across its entire portfolio is to have really, really fine grain access to the deep level API APIs across all their services. And he said, he said this to you. We don't necessarily want to be the abstraction layer per se, because when the market changes, that's harder for us to change. We want to have that fine-grained access. And so you're seeing that with database, whether it's, you know, no sequel, sequel, you know, the, the Aurora the different flavors of Aurora dynamo, DV, uh, red shift, uh, you know, already S on and on and on. There's just a number of data stores. And you're seeing, for instance, Oracle take a completely different approach. Yes, they have my SQL cause they know got that with the sun acquisition. But, but this is they're really about put, is putting as much capability into a single database as possible. Oh, you only need one database only different philosophy. >>Yeah. And then obviously a health Lake. And then that was pretty much the end of the, the announcements big impact to health care. Again, the theme of horizontal data, vertical specialization with data science and software playing out in real time. >>Yeah. Well, so I have asked this question many times in the cube, when is it that machines will be able to make better diagnoses than doctors and you know, that day is coming. If it's not here, uh, you know, I think helped like is really interesting. I've got an interview later on with one of the practitioners in that space. And so, you know, healthcare is something that is an industry that's ripe for disruption. It really hasn't been disruption disrupted. It's a very high, high risk obviously industry. Uh, but look at healthcare as we all know, it's too expensive. It's too slow. It's too cumbersome. It's too long sometimes to get to a diagnosis or be seen, Amazon's trying to attack with its partners, all of those problems. >>Well, Dave, let's, let's summarize our take on Amazon keynote with machine learning, I'll say pretty historic in the sense that there was so much content in first keynote last year with Andy Jassy, he spent like 75 minutes. He told me on machine learning, they had to kind of create their own category Swami, who we interviewed many times on the cube was awesome. But a lot of still a lot more stuff, more, 215 announcements this year, machine learning more capabilities than ever before. Um, moving faster, solving real problems, targeting the builders, um, fraud platform set of things is the Amazon cadence. What's your analysis of the keynote? >>Well, so I think a couple of things, one is, you know, we've said for a while now that the new innovation cocktail is cloud plus data, plus AI, it's really data machine intelligence or AI applied to that data. And the scale at cloud Amazon Naylor obviously has nailed the cloud infrastructure. It's got the data. That's why database is so important and it's gotta be a leader in machine intelligence. And you're seeing this in the, in the spending data, you know, with our partner ETR, you see that, uh, that AI and ML in terms of spending momentum is, is at the highest or, or at the highest, along with automation, uh, and containers. And so in. Why is that? It's because everybody is trying to infuse AI into their application portfolios. They're trying to automate as much as possible. They're trying to get insights that, that the systems can take action on. >>And, and, and actually it's really augmented intelligence in a big way, but, but really driving insights, speeding that time to insight and Amazon, they have to be a leader there that it's Amazon it's, it's, it's Google, it's the Facebook's, it's obviously Microsoft, you know, IBM's Tron trying to get in there. They were kind of first with, with Watson, but with they're far behind, I think, uh, the, the hyper hyper scale guys. Uh, but, but I guess like the key point is you're going to be buying this. Most companies are going to be buying this, not building it. And that's good news for organizations. >>Yeah. I mean, you get 80% there with the product. Why not go that way? The alternative is try to find some machine learning people to build it. They're hard to find. Um, so the seeing the scale of kind of replicating machine learning expertise with SageMaker, then ultimately into databases and tools, and then ultimately built into applications. I think, you know, this is the thing that I think they, my opinion is that Amazon continues to move up the stack, uh, with their capabilities. And I think machine learning is interesting because it's a whole new set of it's kind of its own little monster building block. That's just not one thing it's going to be super important. I think it's going to have an impact on the startup scene and innovation is going, gonna have an impact on incumbent companies that are currently leaders that are under threat from new entrance entering the business. >>So I think it's going to be a very entrepreneurial opportunity. And I think it's going to be interesting to see is how machine learning plays that role. Is it a defining feature that's core to the intellectual property, or is it enabling new intellectual property? So to me, I just don't see how that's going to fall yet. I would bet that today intellectual property will be built on top of Amazon's machine learning, where the new algorithms and the new things will be built separately. If you compete head to head with that scale, you could be on the wrong side of history. Again, this is a bet that the startups and the venture capitals will have to make is who's going to end up being on the right wave here. Because if you make the wrong design choice, you can have a very complex environment with IOT or whatever your app serving. If you can narrow it down and get a wedge in the marketplace, if you're a company, um, I think that's going to be an advantage. This could be great just to see how the impact of the ecosystem this will be. >>Well, I think something you said just now it gives a clue. You talked about, you know, the, the difficulty of finding the skills. And I think that's a big part of what Amazon and others who were innovating in machine learning are trying to do is the gap between those that are qualified to actually do this stuff. The data scientists, the quality engineers, the data engineers, et cetera. And so companies, you know, the last 10 years went out and tried to hire these people. They couldn't find them, they tried to train them. So it's taking too long. And now that I think they're looking toward machine intelligence to really solve that problem, because that scales, as we, as we know, outsourcing to services companies and just, you know, hardcore heavy lifting, does it doesn't scale that well, >>Well, you know what, give me some machine learning, give it to me faster. I want to take the 80% there and allow us to build certainly on the media cloud and the cube virtual that we're doing. Again, every vertical is going to impact a Dave. Great to see you, uh, great stuff. So far week two. So, you know, we're cube live, we're live covering the keynotes tomorrow. We'll be covering the keynotes for the public sector day. That should be chock-full action. That environment is going to impact the most by COVID a lot of innovation, a lot of coverage. I'm John Ferrari. And with Dave Alante, thanks for watching.