>> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE! Covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman, my cohost, John Troyer, and this is theCUBE's fourth year of coverage of KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2019. We're in here San Diego and happy to welcome to the program a first-time guest, Amr Abdelhalem, who is the head of Cloud Platforms at Fidelity Investments. Of course, Fidelity, we love talking to an end user. Big financial company. Your boss was up on the main stage in front of 8000 people, just in that room, there's over 12,000 here in person. Fidelity itself, you know, founded in 1946, first computers in 1965. In the last year, you've now got over 500 applications running in the public cloud, and Fidelity also joined the CNCS. So let's start there, Amr, if we would. Just kind of how does Fidelity look at kind of Kubernetes and CNCS? How does that fit into your company's mission? >> Absolutely, I mean thank you so much for inviting me here. Innovation in Fidelity is, a big part of the process. We're very focused at this time in cloud computing and machine learning, NEI technology. We had the first financial robot in 2015, I believe. We have the first augmented reality financial advisor, was actually released this year as a prototype. So a part of that innovation, we're seeing, CNCF and cloud computing and Cloud Native, is keys for strategy for our innovation part. >> All right, maybe if you could, give us a little bit of the breadth and depth of your team, what they cover, cloud platforms. What does that mean inside of Fidelity? >> Sure, so Fidelity had over, like, over 10,000 of IT. Hundreds and hundreds of develop teams, thousands of applications. It's globally distributed. It had all kind of workloads, that you can imagine. And it's in a highly regulated environment as well. And that's where we are seeing that we are all looking for this autonomy between teams, and agility, and improved time to market and customer experience. And the key for that is Cloud Native. We're seeing Kubernetes and CNCF and Cloud Native technology is like a key player for us when we go, multicloud to hypercloud model. >> Can you talk a little bit about more into that portfolio of technologies? You know, there's a lot of talk about public cloud verses on-prem, and, as if one thing is going to, one knife is going to be the only thing you need in your kitchen. >> Amr: Right. >> So you have a portfolio of platforms, you have a portfolio of destinations and a portfolio of applications. Can you talk a little bit, both about what you're using, and maybe how you're organized to access and address all those needs? >> Absolutely. So, I think, 2019, I would say, is the year of multicloud-hypercloud modeling, right? Actually, I would say that 2020 is going to more about distributed cloud, where you can distribute your workload across multicloud providers. We're not there yet. I don't think we're, anyone, is there yet. But at least we should start somewhere. We already has this multicloud providing. Distributing the workload itself between, I mean, it's a journey to move thousands of applications and thousands workloads and data as well, between on-premises data centers to a public cloud. You need to move through this journey of hypercloud models. And be able to move apps slowly and aggressively to other apps. >> All right. Amr, I want to dig into what you talked about there, multiclouds. >> Sure. >> So when you talk about multiple clouds, yes, everybody has that. I've got, walk us through a little bit, you know, where you have workloads and how many public clouds you use in life, but I want to set you up with a premise. You know, we really said, for multicloud to really be a reality-- >> Amr: Right. >> The value that you extract should be greater than the sum of its parts. And most of us lived through the multi vendor years, and that wasn't necessarily happiness and joy, when I had to span between those environments. So how do we make sure that multicloud doesn't become the least common denominator or a detriment to what I need to do with my data, my applications, the value that the company has? >> And that's why we are here. We are actually incorporated at Kubecon for that reason. That where we see this abstract layer that guarantee you the portability for moving your application from one cloud provider to another. That capability of the ability to deploy the same workload into multiclouds, the ability to have the workload itself, managed in different characteristic, next to assess services that you will find in AWS via Azure, via Google Cloud, the others. That's were we need that flexibility, and Kubernetes and Cloud Native itself, the ability to have the same deployable structure for your application, the ability to have the same ecosystem around that construction, around that artifact. The ability to move all of that, as-is, from one cloud provider to another cloud provider is big, big key. And that you can only find with script native. >> All right, Amr, can you share which cloud or clouds you're working on today, and what is your roadmap, do you have a timeline to when that vision becomes reality? >> At this moment, we're with a major cloud provider keys that, you guys can name them, all the colors. >> Stu: You're using all of them, okay. >> All the colors. >> And how are you using Kubernetes today? Where are you in that journey? >> So Kubernetes is mainly, I mean, I would say the majority is still running on premise. We are very intensively moving to public cloud in the Kubernates side. At this moment, actually, we're building an offer, inside my team, which is a cloud platform team. That offer will guarantee that portability between all the cloud provider. So for development team to port our platform, it will be kind of seamless for them, where it's going to land, is it going to be landing in AWS or Azures or on premise. >> Okay, joining the CNCF as a member, bring us inside. I understand the journey. Are there any specific goals you have? How do you measure the investment, and what you're hoping to, both as a company as well as part of the community, get out of it? >> So we have a big hold right now and opensource our project our little project about multiclouding, and our focus is mainly about the high regulation part. We're very focused in compliance and security, and in that way we can, I think, we can contribute back to the open source community around that. >> So Amr, you talked about, you know, we talked about the platforms here, and Kubernetes, but that goes hand-in-hand with the culture, and the up-skilling, and the organization and the processes. What intrigued me is you said, well, we put some things on Kubernetes on-prem, and then, and you know some things in the cloud, but then we're going to move some of those apps over time, we'll move to other appropriate homes. So that implies that you've changed process and you've changed, or maybe to be able to build cloud native apps, and that was actually separate, in some cases, from being in the public cloud. Is that the case, can you talk a little bit about how you've approached from the perspective of people who are listening or watching who are IT admins, and wondering how a company, a major organization, like your org, gets there? >> Right, and this is a main challenge. The challenge is not in the technology side itself, or the tools, that seems a majority there in the ecosystem at this moment. The challenge is mainly building the sculpture inside teams. So we're building many like, star-point or COEs across all of our business unit and all of our teams. And again, to build a sculpture across 10,000 developers plus, that's a major. >> And it's funny, because sometimes people go, well, COE is a dirty word, right, don't do a COE, but you said multiple COEs distributed across. >> So it's like nuclear reaction, our COEs, the first one, that will communicate with few COEs, each one of them would be with other COEs, and that's how that chain will go and expand quite quickly. >> All right. >> And this is happening at this moment. >> So, Amr, I have a few friends that this is the first time that they've come, and they go into the keynote, or they look at the schedule, and they're a bit overwhelmed. >> Amr: Right >> They say, it's not just Kubernetes, there's dozens and dozens of projects. The ecosystem is sprawling. If you could, give us a little walkthrough as to, the projects you're using, any key partners that you're allowed to talk about that are useful in helping you to achieve your mission. >> So, we're very focused at this moment, actually, in the Kubernetes project itself. We start exploring some of the open source project and in the CICD part, additional to that, we are starting using few frameworks like Flux, this is one of the frameworks like GitOps in general, building this culture of GitOps deployment, and moving toward, like, more ops of deployment, that's one of areas that we are very invested in. We're exploring service mesh at this time, and I hope like, we're going to get, like, maybe next year we can talk about service mesh more. >> Yeah, is there something that's holding you back on service mesh, 'cause there's a few options out there at various maturity levels, and who's driving them. What will some of your criteria be? >> I would say it's mainly, I'm waiting little bit more, I feel like 214 for me, when we had that discussion, instead of sitting here, 214, you will be discussing Mesos via Kubernetes via Swarm. So I think we are still moving at this time, service mesh as well. >> Any partners that you can speak to from a technology standpoint that are helping you, that you're allowed to talk about? >> Amr: Well, I mean, first of all CNCF. >> Yeah. >> I greatly appreciate all their help in that. Most of the public cloud providers are helping us in this areas as well, yeah. >> I'll be interested in catching you after the show and seeing how you thought, I mean this is, in some ways, it's a science project a few years ago, and now it's this robust thing. Did you bring, I'm curious, did you bring mostly engineers, mostly managers, a mix of the two? >> Amr: Mostly engineers, yeah, mostly engineers. >> Hands on? >> All hands on, I mean, this is like another change in culture right now, where most of our engineers are in innovation, like, they are full stack engineers. We're using VDI process at this moment, to move forward. All our road maps, in turn, have been published, it's being used like evolving process, to go, like, with continuous deployment, and continues feature enhancement for the teams. So it's fantastic honestly, yeah. >> Okay, Amr, what things does your team hope to achieve this week, anything that is on your roadmap, or on the public open source road map that you're waiting on? We talked a little bit, service mesh? >> We're definitely exploring OPA at this moment. I think that's like, that's big potentials there. So that's one of them, yeah. I think going through that showroom and try to see what option we have as well, that's on the area where we going to be very interested at. >> OPA, the Policy Agent, I mean, you talked about compliance before >> Yeah. >> A few years ago, with folks in the financial industry, you would have some arguments, some discussions, sometimes heated discussions about security in the cloud and et cetera and highly regulated industry, yet, kind of, maybe ironically or somewhat, maybe surprisingly for some, right? Very advanced in many areas, the whole industry. That's well known if you're in it. Do you still have to have discussions about compliance and security in the cloud? Maybe, I guess, maybe when you talk about data locality and international borders more? >> Right, and that's why we already have our own policy management tool, which is built in, we build it ourself, and that's where I see the potential, like, our moving from building it yourself to more of using an open source project and try to reuse it and contribute back to that open source community, like something like OPA, for example. So that's the next generation, where I can see it will help us as well. >> Amr, any advice you'd give your peers out there, if they're new to the community? Things you've learned along the journey so far? >> I would say start small, don't boil the ocean. Start with small COEs, small pilots program. Look for success, look for goals. Technology is great, but don't just move toward technology, because it's a moving target, it will never end. Try to set business goals for you, like targets for your project, and that's how you can achieve success. >> Well, Amr, really appreciate you sharing Fidelity's update. >> Thank you. >> Wish you and your team the best of luck here at the show and beyond, and we definitely hope to catch up soon. >> Thank you, I appreciate it. >> All right, for John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, be sure to checkout theCUBE.net for all of the coverage of this, as well as all the cloud, Cloud Native, and more shows that we have. Thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE covering UiPath Forward Americas 2019. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to the Bellagio, everybody. You are watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, this is Day 2 of UiPath's Forward III Conference and Kourtney Bradbeary is here R&D specialist at American Fidelity. She's joined by Michael Setticasi, who's the senior director of business development at Boston-based DataRobot, but Michael's from Seattle. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. >> Kourtney B.: Thank you. >> Kourtney, let's start with you. I know you guys, you kind of do benefit solutions, but maybe talk a little a bit about the company and some of the big trends that are driving what you guys are doing. >> Kourtney B: Absolutely. So I work with American Fidelity, it's an insurance company based out of Oklahoma, but our main focus is providing solutions to our customer pain points. So we're a niche-based organization that focuses mainly on education, so the public sector, so education in municipalities in providing solutions and benefits to our employers and our employees that we work with. >> Cool, and Michael, you guys, obviously data science is your thing, but describe a little bit more about what you guys do. >> Yeah, we're an AI enterprise company. What we're really trying to do is democratize the use of AI machine learning within organizations, and we really appeal to both data scientists and business users that understand their business and data and want to do more. >> So Kourtney, you're title is really interesting. R&D special projects, so you got this little sandbox that you get to play with, RPA is on the hype cycle and now it's in the trough of disillusionment, but it's kind of an early play around with things. How did you get in to RPA? Where you guys at? What's this R&D thing going on? Right, so with research and development, I guess there's a lot of space to work with emerging technologies, and AI, and RPA, and how those two things come together and anything new that we see and exciting we're able to apply that technology. It's one thing to think, "Oh, AI, that's cool. Let's do that." But if it doesn't benefit your customer at the end of the day, if it's not driving decisions in your organization, then we don't want to do AI just 'cause it's cool. We really want to do AI because it's what benefits our customer. So we got into RPA because when we saw a demo, and it was like, whoa. If that's real, if that's what we think it's going to be, that's a game changer. So you have RPA, and you have AI kind of coming up at the same time and whenever it was, first coming out a few years ago, they're silo, they're separate. What we've started to do recently is to bring the two industries together and really bring together the RPA component and the AI component to really become IPA, or Intelligent Process Automation, so that way we can really start to transform businesses. >> So this is interesting to me, Michael, because as Kourtney was saying, most people think of these things as separate and more aspirational down the road. You guys are AI experts, what are you seeing in terms of these two domains coming together? >> You hear about intelligent automation everywhere, right? We are pushing it hard, and we're seeing a lot of customers and potential prospects look at it, but I have to give credit to American Fidelity. They are ahead of the curve. They're combining this ability to use an RPA process and a machine learning model to really automate things and provide better customer service and get to the endpoint faster and more efficiently. So I think they're ahead of the curve, but you're going to see more and more of this in the marketplace. >> So Kourtney, a lot of the customers that we talk to, this is kind of my observation, is they're automating obviously mundane processes but frankly really crappy processes. They're really screwed up in a lot of ways. And they're throwing RPA at the problem, it sounds like you have a little different philosophy around how to apply automation. Can you explain that? >> Right, so you don't want to automate something that's bad because then it's going to break a lot, and it's just not a good idea. So what we've tried to do is whenever we get request in the door, there's always a stopping, if somebody has to make a decision, in the past, it's been "Okay, well we can automate the first part and the last part", but it's kind of have to stop in the middle for you to make a decision. And what DataRobot has allowed us to do, in the past, it was really hard to actually apply machine learning, 'cause you had to have these data scientists and they'd have to spend months trying to figure out what model for the data, and is it, you know, retraining a model is really difficult. DataRobot makes a data scientist's job so much easier and actually applicable to the workplace where you could scale, enable scaling, because without DataRobot or without a service like that, it's impossible to scale. So it allows us to implement AI with our RPA to then not just automate the mundane processes, but the small decisions that we make everyday, just 'cause we do our jobs everyday and we know how to do our jobs, AI enables us to automate those processes, as well. >> And you're doing that in an unattended way, or is it an attended automation? >> Both, both. So there's some processes that we have to have a human select things and make certain decisions along the way, or there's some processes that are completely unattended. With any automation, your goal is always to automate 100%, but in reality, you're usually going to get about 80% of a process automated. So what we try to do, we go for the hundred percent, rarely get that, but then you can take out the 20% for human review. And so maybe of the 20% that's not fully automated, maybe we can make stop points for human interaction there, but there have been some processes that we have been able to fully automate. >> So Michael, the data scientists complain that 80% of their time is spent in wrangling data and getting the data ready to actually build a model. I presume that's what you guys do, you solve that problem, right? >> We definitely solve some of that, right? If you get the data all in one place, DataRobot takes care of a lot of the data preparation that's involved in data science. We've also have ways to kind of manage the best places you store your data, so that if other people use the platform, they can see where to get it to. But overall, I would just say, when you look at UiPath and the way it's growing, it's such an exciting growing company like we heard Daniel yesterday mention their growth from customer from year to year, how they're the fastest enterprise software growing company out there. So you combine that RPA market with this growing machine learning market, and there's a ton of excitement. I mean, that's what you're seeing at the conference today. >> So you guys have data scientists on staff, is that right, or-- >> Correct! >> Okay, and so what does this mean for them? Does it mean you just need less of them, or they spend more of their time doing productive work? >> It means they spend more of their time doing productive work, instead of trying to figure out what model to fit, 'cause if you're a data scientist, or an actuary, or any, data analyst, or any of those things, you might know five models that you try to fit everything to. What DataRobot enables us to do is not be stuck to those five models that we know. It enables us to combine models, and choose models based on that data, so it really helps us with the modeling. >> Are you, I should've asked this before, are you still in R&D? Or are you in production? Or where are you at in terms of majority? >> Oh no, we're in production. We have two IPA processes in production today, and we're working on increasing that as we go. We have over a hundred an fifty RPA processes in production, as well as, many many just machine learning, so we're working on combining those now. So we have many machine learning, we have many RPA, and we're working on increasing our IPA. >> What have you seen as the business impact? Do we have enough data yet to sort of-- >> Absolutely. We don't try to focus on ROI. What we try to focus on is how is this impacting our customer, and how is this impacting employees' lives. There's obviously a lot of fear around automation but at American Fidelity, what we try to do is show how this is going to improve our employees' lives and we're by no means trying to cut jobs. We're actually going to have a net increase of jobs over the next five years. We're re skilling our workforce. We're really focusing on how it improves our employees, rather than focusing on ROI. >> So you're not on the ROI treadmill? So how did you get your CFO to sort of agree to all of this? >> So we do track ROI. It's not something we share publicly. But we focus more on our humans and our employees than our ROI. >> Is that because, I mean you're not, virtually every customer I've talked to says, "Well, we're not firing people. We're just getting more productive, or shifting them to more interesting tasks, et cetera, et cetera," and if you do the ROI calculations, you say "Oh, I don't need as many humans to do this anymore", and so you'd say, "Okay, FTE cost" and then you apply that, it's kind of a BS number, 'cause it's not like you're cutting people, so it's not a hard ROI. Is that why you don't focus on ROI? Or you just think it's worthless metric? >> No... >> Actually, I'm sorry. You said you do have it, you just don't share it publicly. >> Right, we just don't share our ROI publicly. And I don't think it's made up, or it's fake. I've never met an organization that says they have more people than they have work for people. There's always work. I really enjoy the first video opening of UiPath, it's, "since the beginning of time, humans have worked", and everyone thinks that automation is going to get rid of jobs, there's a lot of controversy over that, but realistically, if you think about the first industrial revolution, that was, after the first industrial revolution hit, that was the biggest economic upturn that had seen since that time. We're in that same space now. It's just hard to see it with where we're at. It's only going to increase, work is only going to increase. It's definitely going to change. I think it's naive to think that jobs won't change. And there will be jobs that will be eliminated, job functions, but I don't think there's elimination of humans needed, if that makes sense. >> Well yeah, it does. You guys sound like you're pretty visionary about how to apply technology to your business. And Michael, I mean, Kourtney's right, machines have always replaced humans, this is nothing new, first time ever that it's in cognitive function, so that scares people a little bit, but what else are you seeing in the marketplace that you can share with us? >> We're just seeing increased use of automation. So like, you might think when you talk DataRobot, you're using us for the top 1% things that a company might do, right? If you're a bank, you might use us to help out, figure out, how you can more efficiently lend customer's money, and make sure that you're making good investments, but what we're finding is, automation and machine learning models are being used everywhere. They're being used in marketing now, right? An example could be this show. We'll get leads from this show. Let's run some machine learning to understand what leads to follow up on first, because we'll get the best result. We're seeing machine learning in HR, right? Making sure their employees are happy, tracking employee churn through machine learning, so I think what we're seeing is it's being adopted more broadly, which means you need more people. We're not replacing people. >> So, why UiPath? >> Whenever we started the vendor process and started looking at several vendors, the UiPath product just was unmatched, frankly. There was a lot of vendors that had more code base, and there was then UiPath that anyone can learn. And that's what we really liked 'cause in American Fidelity, we've chosen to go with, we have a COE but we've also chosen to go with a democratized model where everyone in the organization will be able to build robots. We're training people to build robots. We have, each department has people that are dedicated. A certain portion of their time is building robots and UiPath really made that available with their products for anybody to be able to learn. >> So you have a COE. >> Kourtney B.: Yes. It was interesting, Craig LeClaire this morning, I don't know if you saw his keynote, but he kind of made this statement, it was sort of a off-handed statement, he said, "COE, maybe that's asking too much". He didn't use term tiger team, but I inferred, it's like, rather just kind of get a tiger team of some experts, but talk a little bit more about your COE. >> So, we kind of go with a hybrid model. If you think about, typical, it's weird because RPA is only a few years old, and we're thinking typical RPA, but people usually either go with a COE or completely democratized. We've really gone with a hybrid model, so we have a COE with governance where we've set a loose framework of what to follow, and we have code standards, when you say, follow these things. We have a knowledge library that we share. But we only have a handful of full-time RPA developers, and everyone help, those developers help, teach and help grow that knowledge throughout the organization, so that way we have people in every area that can also develop. So our developers are not our own key developers. Our developers are focused on the IPA, on the AI, whereas our other people throughout the organization are focused more on RPA so we can really make a big difference more quickly. >> Do you have a software robot that automates auditing and checks for compliance? >> Yes, so we have, one of our robots, the function that it does is audit one of our inputs, so we do have robots in almost every area that, yeah, we do have audit robots. >> Has it cut the auditing bill? Is that part of the ROI? You don't have to answer that. (giggles) >> Michael, our last question for you is where do you see this all going? This is very interesting to me because I've inferred from a lot of the conversations that, like that PepsiCo guy was up yesterday, talking about an AI fabric throughout the organization, not just tactical projects, and that kind of interested me, but I expected it's much further off. I'm hearing from Kourtney that it's actually real today. What's your sort of prediction or forecast for the adoption of this more advanced intelligent process automation? Is it kind of just starting now and it's going to explode? Or am I just missing the mark here? >> No, I think you're a hundred percent on. I mean, first off, I think, like I mentioned earlier, RPA and machine learning separately, are in these incredible growth stages. Right, and we think our message to customers now is if you're not thinking about how you're doing AI and machine learning, you're already behind 'cause your competition is. And so you better get thinking about it. I think we're going to get to that level with intelligent automation, with RPA plus machine learning very soon. I do think right now we're in that infancy stage where people are looking for used cases, and they want to hear great stories, and so I do think American Fidelity is ahead of the curve, but they're not going to be ahead of the curve for long. It's catching up. If you're not doing it, we're going to eventually get to that point where you'll have someone like Elon Musk or Masayoshi Son, say, if you're not thinking of intelligent automation, you're already going to be left behind. >> All right, congratulations on the work that you've done. >> Kourtney B.: Thank you. >> It's a really awesome story. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Yeah, yeah, thanks for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back from UiPath Forward day number 2. You're watching theCUBE. Be right back. (upbeat music)

(upbeat intro music) >> Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen and welcome back to fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada where we are theCUBE covering AWS re:Invent for the 10th year in a row. John Furrier, you've been here for all 10. How does this one stack up? >> It's feeling great. It's just back into the saddle of more people. Everyone's getting bigger and growing up. The companies that were originally on are getting stronger, bigger. They're doing takeovers in restaurants and still new players are coming in. More startups are coming in and taking care of what I call the (indistinct) on classic, all the primitives. And then you starting to see a lot more ecosystem platforms building on top of AWS. I call that NextGen Cloud, NextGen AWS. It's happening. It's happening right now. >> Best thing about all of these startups is they grow up, they mature, and we stay the same age, John. (John laughing) All right. All right. All right. Very excited to introduce you our next guest, he wears a lot of hats as the CEO, founder, and chairman at Reltio, please welcome Manish. Manish, welcome to the show. How is your show going so far? >> Well, thank you so much. You know, this is amazing. Just the energy, the number of people. You know, I was here last year, just after the pandemic, and I think it's almost double, if not more the number of people this year. >> John: Pushing 50,000. The high water mark was 65,000 in 2019. >> We should be doing like a Price Is Right sort of thing here on the show and figure out. >> Yeah, $1. >> Savannah: Yeah, yeah. (laughing) One guest, 80,000 guests. How many guests are here? Just in case the audience is not familiar, we know you're fast growing, very exciting business. Tell us what Reltio does. >> So, Reltio is a SaaS platform for data unification and we started Reltio in 2011. We have been serving some of the largest customers across industries like life sciences, healthcare, financial services, insurance, high tech, and retail. Those are, you know, some of the areas that we are focused on. The product capabilities are horizontal because we see the same data problem across every industry. Highly fragmented, highly siloed data that is slowing down the business for every organization out there. And that's the problem that we are solving. We are breaking down these silos, you know, one profile or one record, or one customer product supplier information record at a time, and bringing the acceleration of this unified data to every organization. >> This is the show Steam this year, Adam Celeste is going to be on stage talking about data end to end. Okay. Integrating in all aspects of a company. The word data analyst probably goes away pretty shortly. Everyone was going to be using data. This has been, and he talks about horizontal and vertical use cases. We've been saying that in theCUBE, I think it was about seven years ago, we first said we're going to start to see horizontally scalable data not just compute and cloud. This is now primetime conversation. Making that all work with governance is a real hard problem. Understanding the data. Companies have to put this horizontal and vertical capabilities in place together. >> Absolutely. You know, the data problem may be a horizontal problem, but every industry or vertical that you go into adds its own nuance or flavor to it. And that's why, you know, this has to be a combination of the horizontal and vertical. And we at Reltio thought about this for a while, where, you know, every time we enter a conversation, we are talking about patient data or physician data or client data and financial services or policy and customer information and insurance. But every time it's the number of silos that we encounter that is just an increasing number of applications, increasing number of third party data sources, and bringing that together in a manner where you can understand the semantics of it. Because, you know, every record is not created equal. Every piece of information is not created equal. But at the same time, you have to stitch it together in order to create that holistic, you know, the so-called 360 degree view. Because without that, the types of problems that you're trying to solve are not possible. Right? It's not possible to make those breakthroughs. And that's where I think the problem may be horizontal, but the application of the capabilities has to be verticalized. >> John: I'm smiling because, you know, when you're a founder like you are, and Dave, a lot here are at theCUBE, you're often misunderstood before people figure out what you do and why you started the company. And I can imagine, and knowing you and covering your company, that this is not just yesterday you came up with this idea that now everyone's talking about. There was probably moments in your history when you started, you're scratching it, "Hey the future's going to be this horizontal and vertical, especially where machine learning needs to know the data, the linguistics, whatever the data is, it's got to be very particular for the vertical, but you need to expand it." So when did you have the moment where people finally figured out like, what you guys doing is, like, relevant? I mean, now the whole world now sees- >> Savannah: Overnight success 11 years later. >> John: This shows the first time I've heard Amazon and the industry generally agree that horizontally scalable data systems with vertical value, that it's natural. We've been saying it for seven years on theCUBE. You've been doing the startup. >> Yeah. >> As a founder, you were there early. Now people are getting it. What's it like? Tell, take us through. When did you have the moment? When did you tipping point for the world getting it? >> Yeah, and you know, the key thing to remember is that, you know, not only have I been in this space for a long time but the experiences that we have gone through starting in 2011, there was a lot of focus on, you know, even AWS was at that point in time in the infancy stages. >> Yeah. >> And we said that we are going to set up a software as a service capability that runs only on public cloud because we had seen what customers had tried to do behind their firewalls and the types of hurdles that they had run into before. And while the concept was still in its nascent stages, but the directional signals, the fact that number of applications that you see in use today across any organization, that's growing. It used to be a case when in early 2000s, you know, this is early part of my career, where having six different applications across the enterprise landscape was considered complex. But now those same organizations are talking about 400, 500, a thousand different applications that they're using to run their business end to end. So, you know, this direction was clear. The need for digital transformation was becoming clear. And the fact that, you know, cloud was the only vehicle that you could use to solve these types of ad scale problems was also becoming clear. But what wasn't yet mainstream was this notion that, you know, if you're doing digital transformation, you need access to clean, consistent, trusted information. Or if you're doing machine learning or any kind of data analytics, you need similar kinds of trusted information. It wasn't a mainstream concept, but people were struggling with it because, you know, the whole notion of garbage in garbage out was becoming clearer to them as they started running into hurdles. And it's great to see that now, you know, after having gone through the transformation of, yes, we have provided the compute and the storage, but now we really need to unlock the value out of data that goes on this compute and storage. You know, it's great to see that even Amazon or AWS is talking about it. >> Well, as a founder, it's satisfying, and congratulations, we've been covering that. I got to ask, you mention this end to end. I like the example of in the 2006 applications considered complex, now hundreds and thousands of workloads are on an enterprise. Today we're going to hear more end to end data services on AWS and off AWS, hybrid or edge or whatever, that's happens. Now cross, it sounds like it's going to get more complex still. >> I mean... >> John: Right. I mean, that's not easy. >> Savannah: The gentle understatement of the century. I love that. Yes. >> If Adam's message is end to end, it's going to be more complex. How does it get easier? Because the enterprise, you know, the enterprise vendors love solving complexity with more complexity. That's the wrong answer. >> Well, you're absolutely right that things are going to get more complex. But you know, this is where, whether it is Amazon or you know, us, Reltio as a vendor coming in, the goal should always be what are we going to simplify for the customer? Because they are going to end up with a complex landscape on their hands anyway. Right? >> Savannah: Right. >> So that is where, what can be below the surface and simplified for the customers to use versus bringing their focus to the business value that they can get out of it. Unlocking that business value has to be the key aspect that we have to bring to the front. And, you know, that is where, yes, the landscape complexity may grow, but how is the solution making it simpler, easier, faster for you to get value out of the data that you're trying to work with? >> As a mission, that seems very clear and clean cut, but I'm curious, I can imagine there's so many different things that you're prioritizing when you're thinking about how to solve those problems. What is that decision matrix like for you? >> For us, it goes back to the core focus and the core problem that we are in the business of solving which is in a siloed, fragmented landscape, how can we create a single source of truth orientation that your business can depend on? If you're looking for the unified view of the customer, the product, the supplier, the location, the asset, all these are elements that are critical or crucial for you to run your business end to end. And we are there to provide that solution as Reltio to our customers. So, you know, we always, for our decision matrix have to go back to are we simplifying that problem for our customers and how much faster, easier, nimbler can it be, you know, both as a solution and also the time to value that it brings to the equation for the customer. >> Super important, end of the equation. Clearly you are on to something. You are not only a unicorn company, unicorn company being evaluated at over $1 billion latest evaluation, correct me if I'm wrong, is $1.7 billion as of last year. But you are also a centaur, which is seven times more rare than a unicorn, which for the audience maybe not familiar with the mythical creatures that define the Silicon Valley nomenclature in Lexicon. A centaur is a company with a hundred million in annual reoccurring revenue. How does it feel to be able to say that as a CEO or to hear me say that to you? >> Well, as a CEO, it's, you know, something that we have been working towards. the goal that we can deliver value to our customers, help every industry, you know, you just think about the types of products that you touch in a day, whether it's, you know, any healthcare related products that you're looking at. We are working with customers who are solving for the patient record to be unified with our platform. We are working with financial services companies who are helping you simplify how you do banking with them. We are working with retailers who are working in the area of, you know, leisure apparel or athletic goods and they are using our capabilities to simplify how they deliver better experience to you. So as I go across these industries, being able to influence and touch and simplify things overall for the customers that these companies are serving, that's an amazing feeling. And, you know, doing this while we are also making sure that we can build a durable business that has substantial revenue behind it- >> Savannah: Substantial. >> Gives us a lot of legs to stand on and talk about how we can change how the companies should run their entire data stack. >> And you're obviously a very efficient team practicing what you teach. You told me how many employees that you have? >> We have 450 employees across the globe. >> 450 employees and a hundred million in reoccurring revenue. It's pretty strong. It's pretty strong. >> Thank you. >> That's a quarter million in rev per employee. They're doing a pretty good job. That's absolutely fantastic. >> The cloud has been very successful, partnering with the cloud, a lot of leverage for the cloud. >> And that's been a part of our thesis from the very beginning that, you know, the capabilities that we build and bring to life have to be built on public cloud infrastructure. That's something that has been core to our innovation cycle because we look at it as a layer cake of innovation that we sit on and we can continue to drive faster value for our customers. >> John: Okay, so normally we do a bumper sticker. Tell me the bumper sticker for the show. We changed it to kind of modernize it called the Insta Challenge, Instagram challenge. Instagram has reels, short videos. What's the Instagram reel from your perspective? You have to do an Instagram reel right now about why this time in history, this time in for Amazon web services, this point for Reltio. Why is this moment in time important in the computer industry? Because, you know, we've reported, I put a story out, NextGen Clouds here. People are seeing their status go from ISV to ecosystem platforms on top of AWS. Your success has continued to grow. Something's going on. What's the Instagram reel about why this year's so important in the history of the cloud? >> Well, you know, just think about the overall macroeconomic conditions. You know, everybody's trying to think about where the next, you know, the set of growth is going to come from or how we are going to tackle, you know, what we have as challenges in front of us. And at the end of the day, most of the efficiency that came from applying new applications or, you know, buying new products in the application space has delivered its value. The next unlock is going to come from data. And that is the key that we have to think about because the traditional model of going across 500 different applications to run your business is no longer going to be a scalable model to work with. If you really want to move faster with your business, you have to think about how to use data as a strategic asset and think about things differently. And we are talking about delivering experience at the edge, delivering, you know, real time type of engagement with the customers that we work with. And that is where the entire data value proposition starts to deliver a whole new set of options to the customers. And that's something that we all have to think about differently. It's going to require a fundamentally different architecture, innovation, leading with data instead of thinking about the traditional landscape that we have been running with. >> Leading with data and transforming architecture. A couple themes we've had on the show lately already. >> John: Well I think there's been a great, I mean this is a great leadership example of what's going on in the industry. As young people are looking at their careers. I've talked with a lot of folks under 30, they're trying to figure out what's a good career path and they're looking at all this change in front of them. >> That's a great point, John. >> Whether it's a computer science student or someone in healthcare, these industries are being reinvented with data. What's your advice to those young, this up and coming generation that might not take the traditional path traveled 'cause it might not be there. What's your advice for those people making these career decisions? >> I think there are two things that are relevant to every career option out there. Knowledge and awareness of data and how to apply computing techniques to the data is key and relevant. It's the language that we all have to learn and be familiar with. Without that, you know, you'll be missing a key part of your arsenal that you will be required to bring to work but won't have access to if you're not well-versed or familiar with those two areas. So this is lingua franca that we all have to get used to. >> Data and computer technology applied to business or some application or some problem. >> Manish: Applied to business. You know, figuring out how to apply it to deliver business outcomes is the key thing to keep in mind. >> Okay. >> Yeah. Last question for you to wrap us up. It's obviously an exciting, thrilling, vibrant moment here on the show floor, but I'm curious because I can imagine some of your customers, especially given the scale that they're at, I mean we're talking about some Fortune 100s here, how are you delivering value in this uncertain market? I mean, I know you solved this baseline problem but I can imagine there's a little bit of frantic energy within your customer base. >> Manish: Yeah. You know, with data this has been a traditional challenge. Everybody talks about the motherhood and apple pie. If you have better data, you can drive better outcomes. But some of the work that we have been doing is quantifying, measuring those outcomes and translating what the dollar impact of that value is for each one of the customers. And this is where the work that we have done with large, you know, let's say life sciences companies like AstraZeneca or GSK or in financial services with companies like Northwestern Mutual or Fidelity or, you know, common household names like McDonald's where they're delivering their digital transformation with the data capabilities that we are helping build with them. That's the key part that's been, you know, extremely valuable. And that is where in each one of these situations, we are helping them measure what the ROI is at every turn. So being able to go into these discussions with the hard dollar ROI that you can expect out of it is the key thing that we are focused on. >> And that's so mission critical now and at any economic juncture. Just to echo that, I noticed that Forrester did an independent study looking at customers that invested in your MDM solution. 366% ROI and a total net present value of 13 million over three years. So you clearly deliver on what you just promised there with customers and brands that we touch in all of our everyday lives. Manish, thank you so much for being on the show with us today. You and Reltio are clearly crushing it. We can't wait to have you back hopefully for some more exciting updates at next year's AWS re:Invent. John, thanks for- >> Or sooner. >> Yeah, yeah. Or sooner or maybe in the studios or who knows, at one of the other fabulous events we'll all be at. I'm sure you'll be traveling around given the success that the company is seeing. And John, thanks for bringing the young folks into the conversation, was a really nice touch. >> We got skill gaps, we might as well solve that right now. >> Yeah. And I like to think that there are young minds watching theCUBE or at least watching, maybe their parents are- >> We're streaming to Twitch. All the gamers are watching this right now. Stop playing the video games. >> We have the hottest stream on Twitch right now if you're not already ready for it. John Furrier, Manish Sood, thank you so much for being on the show with us. Thank all of you at home or at the office or in outer space or wherever you happen to be tuned in to this fabulous live stream. You are watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. My name is Savannah Peterson. We're at AWS re:Invent here in Las Vegas where we'll have our head in the clouds all week.

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: theCUBE presents KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2022, brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to Valencia, Spain, in KubeCon, CloudNativeCon Europe 2022. It's near the end of the day, that's okay. We have plenty of energy because we're bringing it. I'm Keith Townsend, along with my cohost, Paul Gillon. Paul, this has been an amazing day. Thus far we've talked to some incredible folks. You got a chance to walk the show floor. >> Yeah. >> So I'm really excited to hear what's the vibe of the show floor, 7,500 people in Europe, following the protocols, but getting stuff done. >> Well, at first I have to say that I haven't traveled for two years. So getting out to a show by itself is an amazing experience. But a show like this with all the energy and the crowd too, enormously crowded at lunchtime today. It's hard to believe how many people have made it all the way here. Out on the floor the booth are crowded, the demonstrations are what you would expect at a show like this. Lots of code, lots of block diagrams, lots of architecture. I think the audience is eating it up. They're on their laptops, they're coding on their laptops. And this is very much symbolic of the crowd that comes to a KubeCon. And it's just a delight to see them out here having so much fun. >> So speaking of lots of code, we have Varun Talwar, co-founder of Tetrate. But, I just saw I didn't realize this, Istio becoming part of CNCF. What's the latest on Istio? >> Yeah, Istio is, it was always one of those service mesh projects which was very widely adopted. And it's great to see it going into the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. And, I think what happened with Kubernetes like just became the de-facto container orchestrator. I think similar thing is happening with Istio and service mesh. >> So. >> I'm sorry, go ahead Keith. What's the process like of becoming adopted by and incubated by the CNCF? >> Yeah, I mean, it's pretty simple. It's an application process into the foundation where you say, what the project is about, how diverse is your contributor base, how many people are using it. And it goes through a review of, with TOC, it goes through a review of like all the users and contributors, and if you see a good base of deployments in production, if you see a diverse community of contributors, then you can basically be part of the CNCF. And as you know, CNCF is very flexible on governance. Basically it's like bring your own governance. Then the projects can basically seamlessly go in and get into incubation and gradually graduate. >> Another project close and dear to you, Envoy. >> Yes. >> Now I've always considered Envoy just as what it is. It's a, I've always used it as a low balancer type thing. So, I've always considered it some wannabe gateway of proxy. But Envoy gateway was announced last week. >> Yes. So Envoy is, basically won the data plane war of in cloud native workloads, right? And, but, and this was over the last five years. Envoy was announced even way before Istio, and it is used in various deployment models. You can use it as a front load balancer, you can use it as an ingress in Kubernetes, you can use it as a side car in a service mesh like Istio. And it's lightweight, dynamically programmable, very open with the right community. But, what we looked at when we looked at the Envoy base was, it still wasn't very approachable for application developers. Like, when you still see like the nouns that it uses in terms of clusters and so on is not what an application developer was used to. And, so Envoy gateway is really an effort to make Envoy even more stronger out of the box for an application developer to use it as an API gateway, right? Because if you think about it, ultimately people, developers, start deploying workloads onto their Kubernetes clusters, they need some functionality like an API gateway to expose their services and you want to make it really, really easy and simple, right? I often say like, what Engine X was to like static websites, like Envoy gateway will be to like APIs. And it's really, the community coming together, we are a big part, but also VMware, and as well as end users, like in this case Fidelity, who is investing heavily into Envoy and API gateway use cases, joining forces saying, let's do this in upstream Envoy. >> I'd like to go back Istio, because this is a major step in Istio's development. Where do you see Istio coming into the picture? And Kubernetes is already broadly accepted, is Istio generally adopted as an after, an after step to Kubernetes, or are they increasingly being adopted together? >> Yeah. So, usually it's adopted as a follow on step. And, the reason is, primarily the learning curve, right? It's just to get used to all the Kubernetes and, it takes a while for people to understand the concepts, get applications going, and then, Istio was made to basically solve, three big problems there, right? Which is around, observability, traffic management, and security, right? So as people deploy more services they figure out, okay, how do I connect them? How do I secure all the connections? And how do I do more fine grain routing? I'm doing more frequent deployments with Kubernetes, but I would like to do canary releases, to make safer roll outs, right? And those are the problems that Istio solves. And I don't really want to know the metrics of like, yes, it'll be, it's good to know all the node level, and CPO level metrics, but really what I want to know is, how are my services performing? Where is the latency, right? Where is the error rate? And those are the things that Istio gives out of the box. So that's like a very natural next step for people using Kubernetes. And, Tetrate was really formed as a company to enable enterprises to adopt Istio, Envoy, and service mesh in their environment, right? So we do everything from, run an academy for like courses and certifications on Envoy and Istio, to a distribution, which is, compliant with various rules and tooling, as well as a whole platform on top of Istio, to make it usable in deployment in a large enterprise. >> So paint the end to end for me for Istio and Envoy. I know they can be used in similar fashions as like side cars, but how do they work together to deliver value? >> Yeah. So if you step back from technology a little bit, right? And you make sort of, look at what customers are doing and facing, right? Really it is about, they have applications, they have some applications that new workloads going into Kubernetes and cloud native, they have a lot of legacy workloads, a lot of workloads in VMs, and with different teams in different clouds or due to acquisitions, they're very heterogeneous, right? Now our mission, Tetrate's mission is power the world's application traffic. But really the business value that we are going after is consistency of application operations, right? And I'll tell you how powerful that is. Because the more places you can deploy Envoy into, the more places you can deploy Istio into, the more consistency you can get for the value pillars of observability, traffic management, and security, right? And really if you think about what is the journey for an enterprise to migrate from VM workloads into Kubernetes, or from data centers into cloud, the challenges are around security and connectivity, right? Because if it's Kubernetes fabric, the same Kubernetes app and data center can be deployed exactly as it is in cloud, right? >> Keith: Right. >> So why is it hard to migrate to cloud, right? The challenges come in the security and networking layer, right? >> So let's talk about that with some granularity and you can maybe give me some concrete examples. >> Right. >> Because as I think about the hybrid infrastructure, where I have VMs on-premises, cloud native stuff running in the public cloud or even cloud native next to VMs. >> Varun: Right. >> I do security differently when I'm in the VM world. I say, you know what? This IP address can't talk to this Oracle database server. >> Right. >> Keith: That's not how cloud native works. >> Right. >> I can't say, if I have a cloud native app talking to a Oracle database, there's no IP address. >> Yeah. >> Keith: But how do I secure the communication between the two? >> Exactly. So I think you hit it, well, straight on the head. So which is, with things like Kubernetes IP is no longer a really a valid noun, where you can say because things will auto scale either from Kubernetes or the cloud autoscalers. So really the noun that is becoming now is service. So, and I could have many instances of it. They could, will scale up and down. But what I'm saying is, this service, which you know some app server, some application can talk to the Oracle service. >> Keith: Hmm. >> And what we have done with the Tetrate Service Bridge which is why we call our platform service bridge, because it's all about bridging all the services, is whatever you're running on the VM can be onboarded onto the mesh, like as if it were a Kubernetes service, right? And then my policy around this service can talk to this service, is same in Kubernetes, is same for Kubernetes talking to VM, it's same for VM to VM, both in terms of access control. In terms of encryption what we do is, because it's, the Envoy proxy goes everywhere and the traffic is going through them we actually take care of distributing certs, encrypting everything, and it becomes, and that is what leads to consistent application operations. And that's where the value is. >> We're seeing a lot of activity around observability right now, a lot of different tools, both open source and proprietary Istio, certainly part of the open telemetry project, and I believe you're part of that project? >> Yes. >> But the customers are still piecing together a lot of tools on their own. >> Right. >> Do you see a more coherent framework forming around observability? >> I think very much so. And there are layers of observability, right? So the thing is, like if we tell you there is latency between these two services at L seven layer, the first question is, is it the service? Is it the Envoy? Or is it the network? It sounds like a very simple question. It's actually not that easy to answer. And that is one of the questions we answer in like platforms like ours, right? But even that is not the end. If it's neither of these three, it could be the node, it could be the hardware underneath, right? And those, you realize like those are different observability tools that work on each layer. So I think there's a lot of work to be done to enable end users to go from IP, like from top to bottom, to make, reduce what is called MPTR or meantime to, resolution of an issue where is the problem. But I think with tools like what is being built now, it is becoming easier, right? It is because, one of the things we have to realize is with things like Kubernetes we made the development of microservices easier, right? And that's great, But as a result, what is happening is that more things are getting broken down. So there is more network in between. So there's, harder it gets to troubleshoot, harder it gets to secure everything, harder it gets to get visibility from everywhere, right? So I often say like, actually if you're going, embarking down microservices journey, you actually are... You better have a platform like this. Otherwise, you're taking on operational cost. >> Wow, Jevons paradox, the more accessible we make something, the more it get used, the more complex it is. That's been a theme here at KubecCon, CloudNativeCon Europe 2022, from Valencia, Spain. I'm Keith Townsend, along with my cohost Paul Gillon. And you're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to theCUBE's AWS startup showcase. This is season two of the startup showcase, episode one. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Pleased to be welcoming back one of our alumni, Alexis Richardson, the founder >> Hey. >> and CEO of Weaveworks. Alexis, welcome back to the program. >> Thank you so much, Lisa, I'm really happy to be here. Good to see you again. >> Likewise. So it's been a while since we've had Weaveworks on the program. Give the audience an overview of Weaveworks. You were founded in 2014, pioneering getopts, automating Kubernetes across all industries, but help us understand, unpack that a bit. >> Well, so my previous role was at Pivotal, where I was head of application platform and I was responsible for Spring and Vfabric, and some pieces of Cloud Foundry. And you may remember back in those days, everybody wanted to build like a Heroku, but for the enterprise. And so they were asking, how can we build more cloud services? And my team was involved in building out cloud services, but we were running into trouble with the technology that we had. And then when containers appeared, we thought this is the technology for us to roll out cloud services. So with some of my team, we decided to start a new company, Weaveworks, really intending to focus on developers. Because these new containers were pretty cool, but they were really complex operational centric tools, and enterprise developers need simplicity. That's what we'd learned from things like Spring. They want simplicity, productivity, velocity, all of that stuff, they don't want operational complexity. So Weaveworks' mission is to make applications easy for developers with containers. >> Talk to me about how you've accomplished that over the last seven years, and some of the things that you're doing to facilitate a DevOps practice within organizations across any industry? >> Yeah, well, our story is pretty interesting because of course in 2014, all of this was incredibly new. You couldn't even take two containers and put them together into a single application. So forget about enterprise. What we did was we built a network, which gave the company its name, Weave. But then we spent several years building out more and more pieces of the stack. We decided that we should go to market commercially because we're an open source company with a commercial SaaS. And we thought we would be like new Relic, that there'll be lots of customers in the cloud. And, therefore, they would need monitoring and management. And Weave started writing a SaaS based on Kubernetes, which was what we chose as our platform, back in the day, very, very, very early. We were one of the very first companies to start running Kubernetes in production other than Google. And so what we learned was customers didn't want to have management and monitoring for applications in the cloud, based on Kubernetes. Because they were all still struggling to get Docker working, to get basic Kubernetes clusters set up. And they kept saying to us "this is great, we love your tool, but we really need simpler things right now." So what we had done was we'd learned how to operate Kubernetes. And we discovered that we were doing it in this specific way, a way that meant that we could be reliable, we could set things up remotely, we could move things between zones. And so we called this approach getopts. So we've named the practice of getopts, which is really DevOps for Kubernetes. We decided that it was exciting after we had an outage and made a very quick recovery. Told people about it and they said, "well, we can't even Kubernetes started, let alone recover it from a crash." So we started evangelizing getopts and saying to people that we knew how to set up and run Kubernetes as operators for developers of apps, based on this experience. And people said, "well, why don't you help us do that?" So we pivoted the company away from a SaaS business, doing management, and straight back into enterprise software, providing a solution for people to run Kubernetes stacks, deploy applications, detect drifts, and operate them at scale. And we've never looked back. And since then we've built, very successfully, a big business out of telco customers, banks, car companies, really global two thousands. Starting from that open source base, continuing to respect that, but always keeping in mind helping developers build applications at scale. >> So in terms of that pivot that you've made, it sounds like you made that in conjunction with developers across industries to really understand what the right direction is here. What's the approach, what's their appetite? Talk to me about a customer example or two that really you think articulate the value and the right decision that that pivot was and how you're helping customers to really further their DevOps practice. >> Well, one of our first customers was actually Fidelity in this new world. Fidelity has a very advanced technology organization, a very forward thinking CTO, who I seem to recall is, or CEO, who I think is female. Really is into technology as a source of, you know, velocity and business strength. And we were brought to Fidelity by our partner, Amazon. And they said, "look, Fidelity have been using your open source tools, they want to run on Kubernetes, the early EKS service on AWS, but they need help, because what they want is a shared application platform that people can use across Fidelity to deploy and manage apps." So the idea Fidelity had was they're going to split their IT into a platform team, that was going to provide this platform, and a bunch of app teams that were going to write business apps like risk management, other financial processing. Paths, basically. And we came in to help Fidelity. And what we did was help Fidelity rollout, using getopts, a Amazon wide application platform. We also helped them to build, this was very early days for us post pivot, we really helped them to build an add on layer. So you could take any Kubernetes cluster and add other components to it, and then you'd have your platform right there. And the whole stack would be managed by getopts, which nobody had done before. Nobody who'd come up with a way of managing the whole stack, so you could start and stop stacks wherever you wanted, at will, correctly. I mean, if you talk to people about what's hard in IT, they'll tell you shutting down Kubernetes is hard, 'cause I know I'm never going to know how to start it again. So being able to start and stop things, move them around is really crucial. What Fidelity also wanted, which made I think the whole thing even more exciting, was to duplicate this environment on Azure and actually also on-premise later on. So where Fidelity are today is the whole Fidelity platform runs on Microsoft and on Amazon and on-premise, using three different implementations of Kubernetes. But using this platform technology and getopts that we helped Fidelity rollout. And if you want to know a bit about the story, type FIDEKS, F I D E K S into Google and you'll find a video of me three or four years ago on stage at Cube Con talking with a Fidelity chief architect about this story. It's pretty exciting and these are early days for these new Kubernetes platforms. >> Early days, but so transformative. And I can't imagine the events of the last few years without having this capability and this technology to facilitate such pivots and transformation where we would all be. I want to kind of dig into some use cases, 'cause one of the things that you just mentioned with the Fidelity example got me thinking use case of hybrid, multi-cloud, but also continuous app development. Talk to me about some of the key use cases that you work with customers on. >> Well you just named two. So hybrid and multi-cloud is absolutely critical, and also sovereign, which is when you're actually offline and you only update your cloud periodically. That's one of the major use cases for us. And what customers want there is they want consistency. They want a single operating model, across all of these different locations, so that all of their teams can get trained on one set of technologies and then move from place to place. They're not looking for magic, where apps move with the sun or any of that stuff. They just want to know they can base everything on a single, homogeneous skillset and have scale across their teams. Maybe tens of thousands of developers, all who know how to do the same thing. That's a really important use case. You also mentioned continuous delivery. That's probably the second really critical use case for us. People say, "I've got Kubernetes set up now, and I have Jenkins." At JP Morgan once told me they had 40,000 Jenkins servers, or something like that, you know, Jenkins at scale. And they're like, "okay, how do I push changes from Jenkins into the cloud?" So getopts provides a bridge between the world of CI and the runtime of Kubernetes. So one group of our customers is help me to put that middle piece of CD that gets you CI, CD, to Kubernetes, that's a classic. And then what they're looking for is an increase in velocity. And what we typically see is people go from deploying once every six months to deploying once a week, to deploying once a day, to deploying several times a day. And then they split things up into teams and suddenly, wow, that vision of microservices has come and everybody's excited 'cause IT velocity has gone up by two X. Another really >> So, >> Sorry, carry on. >> Go ahead, I was just going to say in terms of IT velocity it sounds like that's a major business outcome that you're enabling for, whether it's teleco, financial services, or whatnot. That velocity is, as you just described, is rapidly accelerating. >> Yeah, if you go to our website, you'll find a bunch of these use cases. And one that I really like is NatWest mettle, which is another financial example. They're not all financial by the way. But there's some metrics in there. We're getting people up to two X productivity, which at scale is huge, really makes a difference. Also, meantime to recovery. If you know the metric space, you'll know these are all DORA metrics. And DORA, which was acquired by Google a couple of years ago, is a really fantastic analyst in the space that came up with a bunch of ways of thinking about how to measure your performance as a business and IT organization. Recovery time and things like this that you really need to focus on if you're in this world. >> Well, from an IT velocity perspective, if I translate that to business outcomes, especially given the dynamics in the market over the last two years, this is transformative and probably helped a lot of organizations to pivot multiple times during the last couple of years. To get to that survival mode and into that thriving mode, enabling organizations to meet customer demand that was changing faster, et cetera. That's a really big imperative that this technology can deliver to the business. >> Yeah, I mean, that's been huge for us. So when the pandemic first began, obviously, we had some road bumps and there were some challenges, but what we found out very quickly was that people were moving into digital much faster. And we've been mostly enabling them, not just in finance, as I said, but also, car companies, utilities, et cetera. The other one, of course, is modern operations. So, everyone's excited about the potential for automation. If I have thousands and thousands of developers and thousands of applications, do I need thousands of operations staff? And the answer is, with Kubernetes in this new era, you can reduce your operational loads. So that actually very few people are needed to keep systems up, to do basic monitoring, to do redeployments and so on, which are all boring infrastructure tasks that no developer wants to do. If we can automate all of that, we can modernize the whole IT space. And that's what I think the promise of Kubernetes that we're also seeing as well. So applications speed first and then operational competence second. >> So you guys had a launch, here we are in early calendar year 2022, you guys had a launch just about six or eight weeks ago in November of 2021, where you were launching announcing the GA of Weave getopts enterprise, which is a licensed product building on the free open source Weave getopts core. Talk to me about that and what the significance of that is. >> Well, this is an enterprise solution that helps customers build these critical use cases, like shared service platform or secure DevOps or multi-cloud, using getopts, which gives them higher security, lower costs of management, and better operations, and higher velocity. And all of it is taking all the best practices that we've learned starting from those days of running our own Kubernetes stack and then through those early customers like Fidelity into the modern era where we have an at-scale platform for these people. And the crucial properties are it provides you with a platform, it provides you with trusted delivery, and it provides you with what we call release orchestration, which is when you deploy things at scale into production, using tools like canaries and other modern practices. So, all of it is enabling what we call the cloud native enterprise, application delivery, modern operations. >> So what's the upgrade path for customers that are using the free open-source tier to the enterprise package, what does that look like? >> The good news is it's an add on. So, I have been in the industry a while and I strongly believe it's really important that if you have an open source product, you shouldn't ask people to delete it or uninstall it to install your enterprise product, unless you really, really, really have to. And I'm not trying to be picky here. Maybe there are cases where it's important, but actually in our case, it's very simple. If you're already using one of our upstream tools, like Flux, for example, then going from Flux to Weave getopts enterprise is an add-on installation. So you don't have to change or take out what you're doing. You might be using Flux without knowing it. You may not be aware of this, but it's also insight as your AKS and ARC, it's inside the Amazon EKS anywhere bundle. It's available on Alibaba, VMware have used it in cartographer and Tanzu application platform. And even Red Hat use it too in some cases. So you may be using it already, from one of the big vendors who are partners of ours, as a precursor to buying Weave getopts enterprise. So, you know, don't be scared. Get in touch is what I would say to people. >> Get in touch. And of course, folks can go to weave.works to learn more about that. And, also we want to watch the Weave.works space, 'cause you have some news coming out relatively soon that sounds pretty exciting, Alexis. >> Well, I mentioned trusted delivery. And I think one of the things with that is no CIO wants to go faster, unless they also have the safety wheels on, let's face it. And the big question we get asked is "I love this getopts stuff, but how can I bring my team with me? How can I introduce change?" I have all of these approvals mechanisms in place, can I move into the world of getopts? And the answer is yes, yes you can because we now support policy engines as baked into our enterprise product. Now, if you don't know what policy is, it's really a way of applying rules to what you're seeing in IT. And you can detect whether something passes or fails conditions, which means that we can detect if something bad is about to happen in a deployment and stop it from happening, this is really critical. It also goes hand in hand with things like supply chain and security, which I'm sure we read about in the news far too much. >> Yeah, pretty much daily supply chain and security >> Pretty much daily. >> is one of those things that we're all in every generation concerned about. Well, Alexis, it's been a pleasure having you back on the program, talking to us about what's new at Weaveworks, the direction that you're going, how you're helping organizations across industries really advance their DevOps practice. And we will check weave.works in the next couple of weeks for more on that news that you started to break a little bit with us today. We appreciate your time, Alexis. >> Thank you very much, indeed, take care. >> Likewise. For Alexis Richardson, I'm Lisa Martin. Keep it right here on theCUBE, your leader in hybrid tech event coverage. (bright music) (music fades)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from the cube in ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> On Friday, December 10th, Oracle announced a strong earnings beat and raise, on the strength of its licensed business, and slightly better than expected cloud performance. The stock was up sharply on the day and closed up nearly 16% surpassing 280 billion in market value. Oracle's success is due largely to its execution, of a highly differentiated strategy, that has really evolved over the past decade or more, deeply integrating its hardware and software, heavily investing in next generation cloud, creating a homogeneous experience across its application portfolio, and becoming the number one platform. Number one for the world's most mission critical applications. Now, while investors piled into the stock, skeptics will point to the beat being weighed toward licensed revenue and likely keep one finger on the sell button until they're convinced Oracle's cloud momentum, is more consistent and predictable. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibond CUBE insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we'll review Oracle's most recent quarter, and pull in some ETR survey data, to frame the company's cloud business, the momentum of fusion ERP, where the company is winning and some gaps and opportunities that we see. The numbers this quarter was strong, particularly top line growth. Here are a few highlights. Oracle's revenues that grew 6% year on year that's in constant currency, surpassed $10 billion for the quarter. Oracle's non-gap operating margins, were an impressive 47%. Safra Catz has always said cloud is more profitable business and it's really starting to show in the income statement. Operating cash and free cash flow were 10.3 billion and 7.1 billion respectively, for the past four quarters, and would have been higher, if not for charges largely related to litigation expenses tied to the hiring of Mark Hurd, which the company said would not repeat in the future quarters. And you can see in this chart how Oracle breaks down its business, which is kind of a mishmash of items they lump into so-called the cloud. The largest piece of the revenue pie is cloud services, and licensed support, which in reading 10Ks, you'll find statements like the following; licensed support revenues are our largest revenue stream and include product upgrades, and maintenance releases and patches, as well as technical support assistance and statements like the following; cloud and licensed revenue, include the sale of cloud services, cloud licenses and on-premises licenses, which typically represent perpetual software licenses purchased by customers, for use in both cloud, and on-premises, IT environments. And cloud license and on-prem license revenues primarily represent amounts earned from granting customers perpetual licenses to use our database middleware application in industry specific products, which our customers use for cloud-based, on-premise and other IT environments. So you tell me, "is that cloud? I don't know." In the early days of Oracle cloud, the company used to break out, IaaS, PaaS and SaaS revenue separately, but it changed its mind, which really makes it difficult to determine what's happening in true cloud. Look I have no problem including same same hardware software control plane, et cetera. The hybrid if it's on-prem in a true hybrid environment like exadata cloud@customer or AWS outposts. But you have to question what's really cloud in these numbers. And Larry in the earnings call mentioned that Salesforce licenses the Oracle database, to run its cloud and Oracle doesn't count that in its cloud number, rather it counts it in license revenue, but as you can see it varies that into a line item that starts with the word cloud. So I guess I would say that Oracle's reporting is maybe somewhat better than IBM's cloud reporting, which is the worst, but I can't really say what is and isn't cloud, in these numbers. Nonetheless, Oracle is getting it done for investors. Here's a chart comparing the five-year performance of Oracle to some of its legacy peers. We excluded Microsoft because it skews the numbers. Microsoft would really crush all these names including Oracle. But look at Oracle. It's wedged in between the performance of the NASDAQ and the S&P 500, it's up over 160% in that five-year timeframe, well ahead of SAP which is up 59% in that time, and way ahead of the dismal -22% performance of IBM. Well, it's a shame. The tech tide is rising, it's lifting all boats but, IBM has unfortunately not been able to capitalize. That's a story for another day. As a market watcher, you can't help but love Larry Ellison. I only met him once at an IDC conference in Paris where I got to interview Scott McNealy, CEO at the time. Ellison is great for analysts because, he's not afraid to talk about the competition. He'll brag, he'll insult, he'll explain, and he'll pitch his stories. Now on the earnings call last night, he went off. Educating the analyst community, on the upside in the fusion ERP business, making the case that because only a thousand of the 7,500 legacy on-prem ERP customers from Oracle, JD Edwards and PeopleSoft have moved Oracle's fusion cloud ERP, and he predicted that Oracle's cloud ERP business will surpass 20 billion in five years. In fact, he said it's going to bigger than that. He slammed the hybrid cloud washing. You can see one of the quotes here in this chart, that's going on when companies have customers running in the cloud and they claim whatever they have on premise hybrid, he called that ridiculous. I would agree. And then he took an opportunity to slam the hyperscale cloud vendors, citing a telco customer that said Oracle's cloud never goes down, and of course, he chose the same week, that AWS had a major outage. And so to these points, I would say that Oracle really was the first tech company, to announce a true hybrid cloud strategy, where you have an entirely identical experience on prem and in the cloud. This was announced with cloud@customer, two years, before AWS announced outposts. Now it probably took Oracle two years to get it working as advertised, but they were first. And to the second point, this is where Oracle differentiates itself. Oracle is number one for mission critical applications. No other vendor really can come close to Oracle in this regard. And I would say that Oracle is recent quarterly performance to a large extent, is due to this differentiated approach. Over the past 10 years, we've talked to hundreds literally. Hundreds and hundreds of Oracle customers. And while they may not always like the tactics and licensing policies of Oracle in their contracting, they will tell you, that business case for investing and staying with Oracle are very strong. And yes, a big part of that is lock-in but R&D investments innovation and a keen sense of market direction, are just as important to these customers. When you're chairman and founder is a technologist and also the CTO, and has the cash on hand to invest, the results are a highly competitive story. Now that's not to say Oracle is not without its challenges. That's not to say Oracle is without its challenges. Those who follow this program know that when it comes to ETR survey data, the story is not always pretty for Oracle. So let's take a look. This chart shows the breakdown of ETR is net score methodology, Net score measures spending momentum and works ETR. Each quarter asks customers, are you adding in the platform, That's the lime green. Increasing spend by 6% or more, that's the fourth green. Is you're spending E+ or minus 5%, that's the gray. You're spending climbing by 6%, that's the pinkish. Or are you leaving the platform, that's the bright red retiring. You subtract the reds from the greens, and that yields a net score, which an Oracle's overall case, is an uninspiring -4%. This is one of the anomalies in the ETR dataset. The net score doesn't track absolute actual levels, of spending the dollars. Remember, as the leader in mission critical workloads, Oracle commands a premium price. And so what happens here is the gray, is still spending a large amount of money, enough to offset the declines, and the greens are spending more than they would on other platforms because Oracle could command higher prices. And so that's how Oracle is able to grow its overall revenue by 6% for example, whereas the ETR methodology, doesn't capture that trend. So you have to dig into the data a bit deeper. We're not going to go too deep today, but let's take a look at how some of Oracle's businesses are performing relative to its competitors. This is a popular view that we like to share. It shows net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis, and market share. Market share is a measure of pervasiveness in the survey. Think of it as mentioned share. That's on the x-axis. And we've broken down and circled Oracle overall, Oracle on prem, which is declining on the vertical axis, Oracle fusion and NetSuite, which are much higher than Oracle overall. And in the case of fusion, much closer to that 40% magic red horizontal line, remember anything above that line, we consider to be elevated. Now we've added SAP overall which has, momentum comparable to fusion in the survey, using this methodology and IBM, which is in between fusion and Oracle, overall on the y-axis. Oracle as you can see on the horizontal axis, has a larger presence than any of these firms that are below the 40% line. Now, above that 40% line, you see companies with a smaller presence in the survey like Workday, salesforce.com, pretty big presence still, Google cloud also, and Snowflake. Smaller presence but much much higher net score than anybody else on this chart. And AWS and Microsoft overall with both a strong presence, and impressive momentum, especially for their respective sizes. Now that view that we just showed you excluded on purpose Oracle specific cloud offering. So let's now take a look at that relative to other cloud providers. This chart shows the same XY view, but it cuts the data by cloud only. And you can see Oracle while still well below the 40% line, has a net score of +15 compared to a -4 overall that we showed you earlier. So here we see two key points. One, despite the convoluted reporting that we talked about earlier, the ETR data supports that Oracle's cloud business has significantly more momentum than Oracle's overall average momentum. And two, while Oracle is smaller and doesn't have the growth of the hyperscale giants, it's cloud is performing noticeably better than IBM's within the ETR survey data. Now a key point Ellison emphasized on the earnings call, was the importance of ERP, and the work that Oracle has done in this space. It lives by this notion of a cloud first mentality. It builds stuff for the cloud and then, would bring it on-prem. And it's been attracting new customers according to the company. He said Oracle has 8,500 fusion ERP customers, and 28,000 NetSuite customers in the cloud. And unlike Microsoft, it hasn't migrated its on-prem install base, to the cloud yet. Meaning these are largely new customers. Now this chart isolates fusion and NetSuite, within a sector ETR calls GPP. The very giant, public and private companies. And this is a bellwether of spending in the ETR dataset. They've gone back and it correlates to performance. So think large public companies, the biggest ones, and also privates big privates like Mars or Cargo or Fidelity. The chart shows the net score breakdown over time for fusion and NetSuite going back to 2019. And you can see, a big uptick as shown in the blue line from the October, 2020 survey. So Oracle has done a good job building and now marketing its cloud ERP to these important customers. Now, the last thing we want to show you is Oracle's performance within industry sectors. On the earnings call, Oracle said that it had a very strong momentum for fusion in financial services and healthcare. And this chart shows the net score for fusion, across each industry sector that ETR tracks, for three survey points. October, 2020, that's the gray bars, July 21, that's the blue bars and October, 2021, the yellow bars. So look it confirms Oracles assertions across the board that they're seeing fusion perform very well including the two verticals that are called out healthcare and banking slash financial services. Now the big question is where does Oracle go from here? Oracle has had a history of looking like it's going to break out, only to hit some bumps in the road. And so investors are likely going to remain a bit cautious and take profits off the table along the way. But since the Barron's article came out, we reported on that earlier this year in February, declaring Oracle a cloud giant, the stock is up more than 50% of course. 16 of those points were from Friday's move upward, but still, Oracle's highly differentiated strategy of integrating hardware and software together, investing in a modern cloud platform and selectively offering services that cater to the hardcore mission critical buyer, these have served the company, its customers and investors as well. From a cloud standpoint, we'd like to see Oracle be more inclusive, and aggressively expand its marketplace and its ecosystem. This would provide both greater optionality for customers, and further establish Oracle as a major cloud player. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of both AWS and Azure is the momentum being created, by their respective ecosystems. As well, we'd like to see more clear confirmation that Oracle's performance is being driven by its investments in technology IE cloud, same same hybrid, and industry features these modern investments, versus a legacy licensed cycles. We are generally encouraged and are reminded, of years ago when Sam Palmisano, he was retiring and leaving as the CEO of IBM. At the time, HP under the direction ironically of Mark Hurd, was the now company, Palmisano was asked, "do you worry about HP?" And he said in fact, "I don't worry about HP. I worry about Oracle because Oracle invests in R&D." And that statement has proven present. What do you think? Has Oracle hit the next inflection point? Let me know. Don't forget these episodes they're all available as podcasts wherever you listen, all you do is search it. Breaking Analysis podcast, check out ETR website at etr.plus. We also publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconANGLE.com. You can get in touch with me on email David.vellante@siliconangle.com, you can DM me @dvellante on Twitter or, comment on our LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights. Powered by ETR. Have a great week everybody. Stay safe, be well, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCUBE conversation. >> Hello everyone, David Vellante here and welcome to the special CUBE conversation with a colleague and friend of mine, Randy Seidl is a accomplished CEO, he's an executive, sales pro, and he's a founder of the Sales Community, this newly formed social network, Randy, good to see you again, welcome. >> Hey, great to see you, it's been a lot of great years, great relationship with you and congratulations with all your success with SiliconANGLE and theCUBE. I was remembering back, I think it's been probably since 1985, so 35 years ago when we were both Cub Scouts, I was at EMC, and you were at IDC. >> Yeah, I mean, first of all, I love where you are, your man-cave there, we heard you held a great little networking event that you do periodically with some of our joint colleagues. And yeah, wow, we were both in our twenties, I was a young pop and Dicky Eagan, and Jack and Mike, and they would have me talk to you guys, you know, sort of brief you on the market, what little I knew now looking back. But wow, Randy, I mean. >> We knew! >> Right, I mean, and then just the whole thing just took off, but we had a good instinct, that storage was going to matter, everything back then was mainframe and IBM was the king of the world, and then you guys just crushed it. Wow, what a run, amazing. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> So tell me about Sales Community. What are you trying to accomplish with this new social network? >> Well, it was kind of really my COVID moment. I was talking to Peter Bell I know, you know well as well, and it was right in the beginning of COVID we were kind of comparing notes and long story short, he said, hey Randy, you do all this work with these technology companies, and channel partners, and use your customers, CIO, CTO, CSOs, but you're really not doing much for those that you know the best, which are really technology sales professionals, CROs, STRs kind of up and down the food chain. And that really got me thinking, then he introduced me to one of his companies that sells to CROs and I was going through with them and they were kind of calling me on the carpet saying, okay, do I really know these people? I'm like, oh my gosh! They basically just said, I'm a dope, I haven't really done anything here. So, one thing led to another and ended up developing a Sales Community, a big thing and big help for me was talking to probably 150 or so during the course of the summer, CROs, VPs of sales, Reps STRs to really kind of help get some feedback from them in terms of I caught now they call product-market fit, but kind of what they think it's missing, what's needed, what are their teams need, what do they want? So, it's kind of all a perfect storm, which to be honest without COVID probably wouldn't have created Sales Community. >> Well, I joined and it was a great onboarding experience and love participating with colleagues. I mean, sales is hard, I mean, you've got your ups and your downs and you just got to keep pressing on, but who's participating in Sales Community. >> We're targeting STRs on up to CROs and the kind of the tagline is learn more so you can sell more. We have a lot of great different kind of content areas and we're going to kind of bob and weave based on the feedback that we get, but we've got some great virtual events and interviews. We have an executive coach, Tony Jerry, who's doing nine sessions on designing your life. We did a recording, a live session last week on personal goal setting. We did one yesterday, it was a live session that'll be posted shortly on strategic health. Next one's on branding, so that's not necessarily specific to tech sales, but kind of adding value. We also have Dave Knorr, another executive coach doing a weekly interview series that we're calling tech sales insights with some of the leading CROs, CEOs, Jim Sullivan, who I know you know well, he's going to be the first one, it's going to be next Wednesday, he runs a NWN and he's done a lot of great things and a lot of other great leaders from there. Also still on the interview virtual events side, Michael Cotoia from Tech Target he's going to do a CMO insights series. His Tech Target International editors are also going to do regional ones. So CIO interviews from AMEA, Asia Pac, Latin America, Australia, also on the CSO side, we have somebody focused on doing a CSO interviews, Paul Salamanca of channel interviews, I think this channel, by and large gets missed a lot. CEO's and then Steve Duplessie, I know you know well as well is going to do and focus on CIO, sub-CIO insights, but basically creating virtual events and interview series that are really targeted at people that we sell to. So that covers the kind of virtual event and interview side. And I maybe more quickly go through some of the other key segments. So another one is a content library. There's the guy who's a STR at ServiceNow went through, send me note the other day that said, hey, I found out you have some great feedback on prospecting cold calling, I shared it with my team helped me a lot. So a lot of good things in terms of content library, also opportunity to network. So you could be say selling to Fidelity, you could send a note to the community and members and say anybody else trying to sell the Fidelity, let's network, let's compare notes, also great opportunities for channel partners. So channel partner could raise their hand and say, hey, I know Fidelity, let me help with you. A lot of sharing of best practices. And also just in terms of communication, slack channels, and then opportunities to create round tables. So you might have CROs from startups that want to have maybe six to 10 of them get together. So they can kind of commiserate, ask questions, you could have CROs, companies that are maybe transforming going from on-prem to kind of SAS model. So a lot of different great things, ultimately really to serve the folks in the tech Sales Community. >> Yeah, it sounds like, I mean, first of all tons of content, the other thing I like about it is we all read books on sales, some of them are so like gimmicky, some of them are inspirational. Some of them have really great suggestions. Some of them can be life changing, but what's always been missing in my opinion, is this notion of a network, a social network, if you will, where people can help each other, you just gave a ton of good examples. So you're really trying to differentiate from a lot of the things that have worked over the years, but have really sort of one way communication, some sales guru either training or you're reading his or her book. >> Yes, and we're also fortunate on the content side, we have some of the best kind of consulting sales methodology companies that love what we're doing. So they're likewise providing a lot of content and as you said, it's crazy. You think of any other industry, restaurant, hotel, lawyers, landscape, they have these big, kind of user groups, even technology companies user groups within the larger field of technology sales enterprise B2B sales, there's really nothing that looks like this that exists. So far the feedback's been great. >> Well, so just to what you're describing, I mean, I've known you for a long, long time, and one of the principles of great salespeople is, you help others, right? You make as many friends as you can, and you're the master of that. But essentially you're bringing a lot of the things that have worked, a lot of the principles that have worked in your career to this community. Maybe talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, I mean, especially I think some of the younger sales folks, it's not kind of off the cuff as we know, but it's really kind of training, being disciplined, being prepared, what are you going to do, how are you going to do it in this COVID moment? You know, I'm seeing lots of friends where the companies that have great relationships, they can do really well and kind of lean in a lot. If you're kind of cold calling and this environment, and it's tough, so kind of, how can you be best prepared, how can you do the best homework? How can you have the kind of right agenda, when you're going to do the sales calls? And then it's not really as much follow up, but really follow through in terms of what you do afterwards. So kind of what is the training? What can you do, how can you do it? And, you know, it's crazy, a lot of companies spend lots of money on training, but if you think about it they're really tied in specifically to tech sales, hopefully this will be great. Plus being able to just kind of throw out questions here and there works out well as well. >> Well that's what I'm looking forward to, say, hey, I got some challenges, how do others deal with this? You know, one of the things that is, I think, paramount to being a great salesperson is the attitude you hear it all the time. How do you stay pumped up? (laughing) Like I said before, we've all been through ups and downs, and what do you tell people there? >> In terms of staying pumped up, interestingly enough, the session we did yesterday on strategic health, probably plays a key role. So yeah, there's the work aspects and how are you going to focus and wake up and get fired up. But ultimately, I think you really got to take several steps back and saying are you taking care of yourself? Are you sleeping, are you eating and drinking correctly? Are you drinking enough water, are you exercising? So, in this moment, I think that's probably something that gets missed a lot in terms of getting fired up. And then ultimately just being excited about kind of what you're doing, how are you doing it, taking care of the customers and serving those around you. And you had mentioned in terms of giving it back, but a lot of us that have been around, love the idea of kind of paying it forward, helping out others and seeing a lot of the great younger folks really rise up and become stars. >> I think that's one of the most exciting things is somebody has been around for awhile. Like (laughing) we all get cold calls and say, hey, how you doing today? You know, (laughing) you really had that dead air, and you actually want to reach out and help these individuals. A lot of times they'll call you, they have no idea what you do, well I've read your website, and I think we'd be a great fit for, you know, something that would not be a great fit. So, there's a level of preparation we always talk about in sales, you got to be prepared, but there's also sometimes... I was talking to a sales pro the other day, you know, sometimes you can over prepare he said, I've been on sales calls, I prepare for hours and hours and hours, and then they get there, and it was just a lot of wasted hours. I probably could have done it in 15 minutes. I mean, so there's a really a balance there. And it comes with experience, I guess. >> Yeah, I mean, I don't know how anybody could prepare hours and hours, so that's a whole different subject to think. >> Well, he said, my technique now is just 15 minutes before the call I'll jump on and just, you know, cram as much as I can. And it actually, it worked for him. So, different approaches, right? >> Yeah, absolutely. The other thing I'd like to mention is the advisory board I'm fortunate to have a work with, and be friends with several of the best in industry like you. So if anybody goes to the website, you can click on an advisory board and there's a 200 plus and haven't count them exactly. But you know, some of the best in technology, we've got them sorted on the sales side and the channel side, the consulting side, the coaching side, analyst side, but, really just such a tremendous each head of talent that can really help us continue to go and grow and pivot and you're making sure that we are serving our Sales Community and making sure everybody's learning more so they can sell more. And then I guess I should add onto that also, earning more and making more money. >> So I got to ask you where you land on this. I mean, you're a sports fan, I am too and for a while there once the "Moneyball" came out, you saw Billy Bean and it was this sort of formulaic approach. The guy, you know, we would joke the team with the best nerds would win. But it seems like there's an equilibrium. It used to be all gut feel and experience, and then it became the data nerds. And it seems like in our industry, it's following a similar pattern, the marketing ops, Martech, becoming very, very data driven. But it feels to me, Randy, especially in these COVID times that there really is this equilibrium, this balance between experience, and tribal knowledge, gut feel, network, which is something you're building and the data. How do you see that role, that CRO role, that sales role evolving, especially in the context of what I just talked about with the data nerds? (laughing) >> Yeah, absolutely, I think I heard two points there since you brought up Billy Bean, I forgot the guy's name, but in the movie is kind of nerd. I've got Jesse and Tucker who have been tremendously helpful for us putting together a Sales Community. But to answer the question on the CMOs side, the CMOs out there frankly not going to like this answer, but I think more and more, you see CMOs and CROs kind of separated and it's kind of different agendas, my belief is that eventually the CMO function or marketing is really going to come under sales and sales are really going to take a much more active role in driving and leveraging that marketing function in terms of what's the best bang for the buck, what are they doing, how are they doing it? And I've got a lot of friends, I won't name names, but they're not on the sales side and they're doing what they can, but they just see what I'd call it kind of wasted money or inefficiencies on the marketing side. So, if I maybe I spin that a different way, I think given kind of analytics and those companies that do have best practices, and I write things on the marketing side, you know, they're going to continue to go and grow, you know, on cert with the right sales team. So I think that you bring up a great point and that area is going to continue to evolve a lot. >> Does that principle apply to product marketing? In other words do you feel like product marketing should be more aligned with engineering or sales and maybe sales and finance, where do you land on that? >> Yeah, I mean, I'm kind of old school, so I go back to Dick and Jack and Roger and Mike Rutgers, and you all in terms of, hey, you have those silos, but you get everybody at the table, kind of what we're working well together. It is interesting though in today's world, the PLG, Product-Led Growth models, where a lot of companies now are trying to get in maybe almost like a VMware, maybe BMC did in the early days where you're kind of getting into the low level developers and then kind of things bubble up so that you think Product-Led Growth model, having a lower cost insight sales model, works when I'll say the kind of the product sells itself. But I would argue, that I think some of those PLG led companies really miss out on leveraging the high end enterprise relationships, to kind of turbocharge and supersize and expedite larger sales deals, larger (indistinct). >> Well, and you mentioned earlier a channel you said a lot of times that's overlooked and I couldn't agree more, channel increasingly important. That's where a lot of the relationships live, it gives you scale, it just gives you a lot of leverage, maybe you talk about the importance of channel and how it relates to Sales Community. >> Yeah, I mean, it's interesting they're really unto themselves, there's some things that are channel channel, but if you think about, you know, go to market tech sales, pick the company on average is probably half of the business goes through the channel. And it used to be way back when just kind of fulfillment, but now the best companies really are those that have the right relationships, that are adding value, that can help on the pre sales, that can help on the post sales, that can help kind of cross sale. You know, if I'm a customer, I don't want to deal with whatever five or 10 different vendors if I can have a one stop shop with one bar solution provider, partner, SI, or whatever you want to call them, you know, that certainly makes life a lot easier. And I think a lot of companies almost been kind of a second class citizen, but I think those companies that really bring them into the fold as really partners at the table, whether it be an account planning sessions, whether you're doing sales calls, but kind of leveraging that I call it a variable cost kind of off balance sheet, sales force really is where the future is going to continue to go. >> So you've been a successful individual sales contributor. You've been a CEO, you've run large sales organizations. I mean, you basically ran sales at HP for Donna Telly, and so you've seen it all, and you've been helping startups. When you look at hiring sales people, what are the attributes that you look for? Is it intelligence, is it hard work, is it coach ability? What are some of the things that are most important to you, and do you apply different attributes in different situations? What are your thoughts on that? >> Great question in a little plug, maybe for a recruiting business, top talent recruiting, (laughing) but one of the key things that we do, which I think is different from others in the recruiting side is the relationships. So a lot of people don't dig in, when we're talking to candidates, they say, well, nobody really asked me this before. And I would argue a key differentiator, and this is way before COVID, but especially now with COVID is okay, who do you have relationships with? So I could be talking to a candidate that maybe somebody is hiring, wants to cover financial services in New York. And then I'll say, okay, well, who do you know what City JPB Bay and I'll know more people than they know. And I'll probably say, just so you know, that's weird me up in Boston. I know more than the council you probably know the best. So really trying to unearth, really kind of who has the right relationships and then separate from that in terms of a reference check, being able to reference checks sooner in the process with somebody that know well firsthand, as opposed to second hand. And a lot of times I've seen even some of the larger, more expensive recruiting firms, you're kind of wait until somebody is the final say, when do an offer, then they do a reference check and they do the reference check with somebody that they don't know. And to me, I mean, that's totally useless which quite with LinkedIn today, I could be say if we're looking at you for candidate, maybe a bad example, but I don't know, we probably have a 1000 in common, and from those, we probably have 200 that we both know, well, that I could check. And when you do reference checking, it's not a maybe it's either, hey, the person is a yes, or the person's a no. So trying to do that early in the process, I think is a big differentiator. And then last and probably third piece I'd highlight is, if it's a startup company, you can't get somebody that's just from a big company. If it's a big company role, you can't get somebody that just from a small company, you got to really make sure you kind of peel back the onions and see where they're from. And you could have somebody from a big company, but they were kind of wearing a smaller division. So again, you have to kind of, you can't judge a book by the cover. You got to kind of peel back the onion. >> So Randy, how do people learn more about Sales Community? Where do they go to engage, sign up, et cetera? >> Absolutely, it's salescommunity.com. So it should be pretty straight forward. A lot of great information there. You can go subscribe, and if you like it spread the word and a lot of great content and you can ping me there. And if not I'm randy@salescommunity.com. So love to get any feedback, help out in any way we can. >> Well, I think it's critical that you're putting this network together and you are probably the best networker that I know I've seen you in action at gatherings and you really have been a great inspiration and a friend. So, Randy, thanks so much for doing the Sales Community and coming on theCUBE and sharing your experience with us. >> Great, thanks Dave, appreciate it. >> All right you're very welcome and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of biz ops Manifesto unveiled Brought to you by Biz Ops Coalition >>Hey, Welcome back, everybody. Jeffrey here with the Cube. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of the biz. Opps manifesto Unveil Something has been in the works for a little while. Today's a formal unveiling and we're excited to have three of the core founding members of the manifesto Authors of the manifesto, if you will joining us again. We've had them all on individually. Now we're gonna have a great power panel. First up, we have met Kirsten returning. He's the founder and CEO of Task Top make good to see again. Where you dialing in from? >>Great to see you again, Jeff. I'm dialing from Vancouver, Canada. >>Vancouver, Canada. One of my favorite cities in the whole wide world. Also, we've got Tom Davenport coming from across the country. He's a distinguished professor and author from Babson College. Tom, great to see. And I think you said you're a fund Exotic place on the East Coast. >>Falmouth, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. >>Nice. Great to see you again. And also joining surge. Lucio. He is the VP and general manager Enterprise Software division at Broadcom Surge. Great to see you again. Where you coming in from? >>From Boston. Right next to kick off. Terrific. >>So welcome back, everybody again. Congratulations. On this day I know it's It's been a lot of work to get here for this unveil, but let's just jump into it. Biz Opps Manifesto What was the initial reason to do this? And how did you decide to do it in a kind of a coalition way, bringing together a group of people versus just making it an internal company, uh, initiative that, you know, you could do better stuff within your own company Surge. Why don't we start with you? >>Yeah, so? So I think we are really a critical juncture, right? Many large enterprises are basically struggling with their digital transformation. In fact, many recognized that the the Business Society collaboration has been one of the major impediments to drive that kind of transformation. And if we look at the industry today, many people or whether we're talking about vendors or system integrators, consulting firms are talking about the same kind of concepts but using very different language. And so we believe that bringing a lot these different players together assed part of the coalition and formalizing, uh, basically the core principles and values in a busy office manifesto. We can really start to have kind of a much bigger movement where we can all talk about kind of the same concepts. And we can really start to provide kind of a much better support for large organizations to transform eso, whether it is technology or services or trading. I think that that's really the value of bringing all of these players together >>and Mick to you. Why did you get involved in this in this effort? >>So I've been closely involved the actual movement since it started two decades ago with that manifesto, and I think we got a lot of improvement at the team level. And I think, as started just noted, we really need to improving. At the business level, every companies trying to become a software innovator trying to make sure that they can pick them, adapt quickly in the changing market economy and what everyone's dealing with in terms of needing to deliver value to customers. Sooner. However, agile practices have really focused that these metrics these measures and understanding processes that help teams be productive. Those things now need to be elevated to the business as a whole, and that just hasn't happened. Organizations are agile. Transmissions are actually failing because they're measuring activities and how they're becoming more agile. Have teams air functioning, not how much quickly they're delivering value to the customer. So we need to now move. Asked that. And that's exactly what the buzz off there's also manifested. Provides, >>right? Right And Tom to you. You've been covering tech for a very long time. You've been looking at really hard challenges and and a lot of work around analytics and data on data evolution. So there's a definitely a data angle here. I wonder if you kind of share your perspective of of what you got excited Thio to sign on to this manifesto? >>Sure. Well, I have. You know, for the past 15 or 20 years, I've been focusing on Data Analytics and AI. But before that, I was a process management guy and a knowledge management guy and a in general. I think, you know, we've just kind of optimized at too narrow a level. Whether you're talking about agile or Dev ops or, um, ml ops. Any of these kind of obs oriented movements, we're making individual project, um, performance and productivity better, But we're not changing the business effectively enough. And that's the thing that appealed to me about the biz ops idea that we're finally creating a closer connection between what we do with technology and how it changes the business and provides value to it. >>That's great, uh, surge back to you, right? I mean, people have been talking about digital transformation for a long time, and it's been, you know, kind of trucking along. And then Cove it hit, and it was instant lights, which everyone's working from home. You've got a lot more reliance on your digital tools, digital communication both within your customer base and your partner base, but also then you're employees. When if you could share how that really pushed this all along, right, because now suddenly the acceleration of digital transformation is higher. Even more importantly, you've got much more critical decisions to make into what you do next. So kind of your portfolio management of projects has been elevated significantly. When maybe revenues are down on. Do you really have Thio prioritize and get it right? >>Yeah. I mean, I'll just start by quoting city An Adele basically recently said that there's bean two years of digital transformation just last two months, and in many ways that's true. Um, but But yet when we look at large enterprises, they're still struggling with kind of a changes in culture that they really need Thio drive to be able to describe themselves. And not surprisingly, you know, when we look at certain parts of the industry, you know, we see some things which are very disturbing, right. About 40% of the personal loans today are being origin dated by Finn tax of a like of Sophie or or ah Lendingclub, right, Not your traditional brick and worked for bank. And so the while there is kind of ah, much more of an appetite, and it's it's more of a survival type driver these days. The reality is that in order for these large enterprises to truly transform and engage on these digital transformation, they need to start to really aligned the business 90 you know, in many ways and make cover that actually really emerge from the court desire to really improve software predictability, but we've which we have really missed is all the way. Start to aligning the software predictability to business predictability and to be able to have continuously continuous improvement and measurement off business outcomes. So by lining, but of this dis kind of inward metrics that I t is typically being using to business outcomes, we think we can start to really help different stakeholders within the organization to collaborate. So I think there is more than ever. There is an imperative to act now, um, and and results. I think it's kind of the right approach to drive that kind of transformation, >>right? I want to follow up on the culture comment with Utah because you've talked before about kind of process, flow and process flow throughout a whore, unorganized ation. And, you know, we talk about people process and tech all the time, and I think the tech is the easy part compared to actually changing the people the way they think and then the actual processes that they put in place. It's a much more difficult issue than just a tech issue to get this digital transformation in your organization. >>Yeah, you know, I've always found that the soft stuff the you know, the culture of the behavior of the values is the hard stuff to change and mawr and mawr. We we realized that to be successful with any kind of digital transformation, you have tow change, people's behaviors and attitudes. Um, we haven't made much progress in that area as we might have. I mean, I've done some surveys suggesting that most organizations still don't have data driven cultures, and in many cases, there is a lower percentage of companies that say they have that then did a few years ago. So we're kind of moving in the wrong direction, which means I think that we have to start explicitly addressing that cultural behavioral dimension and not just assuming that it will happen if we if we build a system, you know, if if we build it, they won't necessarily come right, >>right? So I want to go toe to you, Nick, because, you know, we're talking about work flows and flow. Andi, you've written about flow both in terms of, you know, moving things along a process and trying to find bottlenecks, identify bottlenecks which is now even more important again when these decisions are much more critical because you have a lot less ah, wiggle room in tough times. But you also talked about flow from the culture side on the people's side. So I wonder if you could just share your thoughts on, you know, using flow as a way to think about things to get the answers better? >>Yeah, absolutely. And I'll refer back to what Tom just said. If you're optimize, you need to optimize your system. You need to optimize how you innovate and how you deliver value to the business into the customer. Now what we've noticed in the data since that that we've learned from customers value streams, enterprise organizations, value streams is that what's taking six months and to and to deliver that value, the flow is that slow. You've got a bunch of unhappy developers. Unhappy customers, when you're innovating, have so high performing organizations we can measure their intent flow time in days. All of a sudden, that feedback loop the satisfaction your developers measurably goes up. So not only do you have people context switching last year, delivering so much more value to customers at a lower cost because you've optimized for flow rather than optimizing for these thes other approximately six that we use, which is how efficient my annual team. How quickly can we deploy software? Those are important, but they do not provide the value of agility, of fast learning, of adaptability, of the business. And that's exactly what the bishops manifesto pushes your organization to. You need to put in place this new operate model that's based on flow on the delivery of business value and on bringing value to market much more quickly than you were before, >>right? I love that. I'm gonna go back to Utah, him on that to follow up, because I think I don't think people think enough about how they prioritize what they're optimizing for. Because, you know, if you're optimizing for a vs B, you know you could have a very different product that that you kick out. You know, my favorite example with With Clayton Christensen and Innovator's Dilemma talking about the three inch our drive, if you optimize it for power, you know, is one thing. If you optimize it for vibration is another thing, and sure enough, you know they missed it on the Palm because it was the it was the game council which which drove that whole business. So when you're talking to customers and we think we're here with cloud all the time people optimizing for cost efficiency instead of thinking about it as an innovation tool, how do you help them? Kind of rethink and really, you know, forced them to to look at the at the prioritization and make sure they're prioritizing on the right thing is make just that. What do you optimizing for? >>Oh yeah, you have one of the most important aspects of any decision or attempt to resolve a problem in an organization is the framing process. And, um, you know, it's it's a difficult aspect toe of the decision toe frame it correctly in the first place. Um, there. It's not a technology issue. In many cases, it's largely a human issue. But if you frame that decision or that problem incorrectly too narrowly, say, or you frame it as an either or situation when you could actually have some of both, um, it's very difficult for the process toe work out correctly. So in many cases, I think we need to think mawr at the beginning about how we frame this issue or this decision in the best way possible before we charge off and build a system to support it. You know, it's worth that extra time to think. Think carefully about how the decision has been structured. Right? >>Surge. I wanna go back to you and talk about the human factors because we just discussed you could put in great technology. But if the culture doesn't adopt it and people don't feel good about it, you know it's not gonna be successful. And that's going to reflect poorly on the technology. Even if I had nothing to do with it. And you know, when you look at the core values of the best hopes manifesto, you know a big one is trust and collaboration. You know, learn, responded pivot. Wonder if you can share your thoughts on trying to get that cultural shift s so that you can have success with the people or excuse me with the technology in the process and helping customers, you know, take this more trustworthy and kind of proactive position. >>So I think I think at the ground level, it really starts with the realization that we were all different. We come from different backgrounds. Oftentimes we tend Thio. Blame the data. It's not uncommon my experience that we spend the first, you know, 30 minutes of any kind of one hour the conversation to debate the ability of the data on DSO, one of the first kind of probably manifestations that we've had. Our revelations as we start to engage with our customers is by just exposing high Fidelity data set two different stakeholders from their different lands. We start to enable these different stakeholders to not debate the data, but that's really collaborate to find a solution. So in many ways, when when when we think about kind of the types of changes were trying Thio truly affect around data driven decision making? It's all about bringing the data in context the context that is relevant and understandable for different stakeholders. Whether we're talking about an operator developed for a business analyst, so that's that's the first thing. The second layer, I think, is really to provide context to what people are doing in their specific silo. So I think one of the best examples I have is if you start to be able to align business k p i. Whether you are accounting, you know, with sales per hour or the engagement of your users on your mobile application, whatever it is, if you start to connect that k p I business K p I to the key piece that developers might be looking at, whether it is now the number of defects or velocity or whatever over metrics that they are used to to actually track, you start to be able to actually contextual eyes in what we are. The affecting, basically metric that that is really relevant. And what we see is that this is a much more systematic way to approach the transformation than say, You know, some organizations kind of creating some of these new products or services or initiatives to to drive engagement, right? So, you know, if you look at zoom, for instance, Zoom giving away, it's service thio education is all about. I mean, there's obviously a marketing aspect in there, but it's it's fundamentally about trying to drive also the engagement of their own teams and because now they're doing something for good, and many organizations are trying to do that. But you only can do this kind of things in a limited way. And so you really want to start to rethink? Oh, you connect everybody kind of business objective fruit data. And I always start to get people to stare at the same data from their own lands and collaborating on the data. Right? >>Right. That's good. Uh, Tom, I want to go back to you. You've been studying I t for a long time writing lots of books and and getting into it. Um, Why now? You know what? Why now? Are we finally aligning business objectives with objects? You know, why didn't this happen before? And, you know, what are the factors that are making now? The time for this. This this move with the with the biz ops. >>Well, in much of the past, I t waas sort of a back office related activity. You know, it was important for, um, producing your paychecks and, uh, capturing the customer orders, but the business wasn't built around it. Now, every organization needs to be a software business of data business. A digital business. The anti has been raised considerably. And if you aren't making that connection between your business objectives and the technology that supports it. You run a pretty big risk of, you know, going out of business or losing out to competitors. Totally so. And even if you're in a new industry that hasn't historically been terribly, um, technology oriented customer expectations flow from, you know, the digital native companies that they work with to basically every industry. So you're compared against the best in the world. So we don't really have the luxury anymore of screwing up our I T projects or building things that don't really work for the business. Um, it's mission critical that we do that well, almost every time, >>right. And I just I just wanna fall by that time, in terms of the you've talked extensively about kind of these evolutions of data analytics, from artisanal stage to the big data stage, the data economy stage the ai driven stage. What I find interesting about all the stages you always put a start date. You never put it in date. Um, so you know, is the is the big data. I'm just gonna use that generically moment in time. Finally, here. Where were, you know, off mahogany row with the data scientists, But actually could start to see the promise of delivering the right insight to the right person at the right time to make that decision. >>Well, I think it is true that in general, these previous stages never seem to go away. The three artisanal stuff is still being done, but we would like for less and less of it to be artisanal. We can't really afford for everything to be artisanal anymore. It's too labor and time consuming to do things that way. So we shift Mawr and Mawr of it to be done through automation and be to be done with a higher level of productivity. And, um, you know, at some point maybe we we reached the stage where we don't do anything artisanal e anymore. I'm not sure we're there yet, but, you know, we are We are making progress, >>right? Right. And make back to you in terms of looking at agile because you're you're such a student of agile. When when you look at the opportunity with biz ops, um, and taking the lessons from agile, you know what's been the inhibitor to stop this in the past. And what are you so excited about? you know, taking this approach will enable >>Yeah, I think both surgeon Tom hit on this. Is that in agile? What's happened is that we've been, you know, measuring tiny subsets of the value stream, right? We need to elevate the data's there, developers air working on these tools of delivering features. The foundations for for great culture are there. I spent two decades as a developer, and when I was really happy when I was able to deliver value to customers, the quicker is able to do that. The fewer impediments are in my way, the quicker was deployed and running the cloud, the happier I waas and that's exactly what's happening if we could just get the right data elevated to the business, not just to the agile teams, but really these values of ours are to make sure that you've got these data driven decisions with meaningful data that's oriented and delivering value to customers. None of these legacies that Tom touched on, which has cost center metrics from a nightie, came from where for I t being a cost center and something that provided email on back office systems. So we need thio rapidly shift to those new, meaningful metrics, their customer and business centric. And make sure that every development organization is focused on those as well as the business itself that we're measuring value. And they were helping that value flow without interruption. >>I love that because if you don't measure it, you can't improve on it. And you gotta but you gotta be measuring the right thing. So, gentlemen, thank you again for for your time. Uh, congratulations on the on the unveil of the biz ops manifesto and bringing together this coalition of industry experts to get behind this. And, you know, there's probably never been a more important time than now to make sure that your prioritization is in the right spot. And you're not wasting resource is where you're not gonna get the r. O. I. So, uh, congratulations again. And thank you for sharing your thoughts with us here on the Cube. Thank >>you. All >>right, So we have surged. Tom and Mick. I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube. It's a biz ops manifesto unveiled. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. Yeah,

>> Narrator: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. Brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Docker, Docker, Docker. No, you're in the right place. This is KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2019 here in San Diego. I'm Stu Miniman kicking off three days of live, wall to wall coverage. My co-host for most of the week this week is John Troyer. Justin Warren's also in the house. He'll be hosting for me. And a big shout out to John Furrier who's back at the corporate ranch in Palo Alto keeping an eye on all the CloudNative stuff with us. The reason that I actually mentioned Docker is because it is the first thing that is on our lips this week. Just this week, Docker, which is the company that, if it wasn't for Docker, we wouldn't have 12,500 people here at this event. Really democratized containers. But the company itself built out a platform, millions and millions of companies using containers. But when the orchestration layer came in there was some contention, there's lots of politics. I'm waiting for Docker the Broadway musical to come out to talk about all the ins and outs there because Kubernetes really sucked the air out of the CloudNative world. Spawned tons of projects here. As you can see behind us, this ecosystem is massive and swelling. Last year it was 8,000 people, year before it was 4,000 people, so many people here, so. And John, so, let's start. This is your first time at this show, you've done many shows with us, definitely covered some of the cloud-native, you've worked with many of the companies that are in this ecosystem here. Give me your first impressions here of KubeCon CloudNativeCon. >> Sure, sure. Well, I mean Stu, 12,000 people, it's pretty crowded here. We're right by the t-shirt line, on day one of the conference. Look, a conference this big, especially an open source conference, there's several jobs to be done, right. This is an active set of open source projects and open source communities. So a lot of the keynote this morning was updating people on details about the latest releases, the latest features, what's in, what's out, what's going on. CNCF is a very broad umbrella for a very broad number of projects, not a coherent opinionated stack, it's a lot of different things that all contribute to a set of CloudNative technologies. So, that's job one. Job two, it's a trade show, and it's an industry show, and people are coming here to figure out how to build and learn and operate. So, that wasn't particularly well served by the keynote this morning. There was certainly a lot of hands-on this week. There's a huge number of breakouts, there's a huge number of tracks. Even day zero, which is a set of specialty breakout workshops and sessions, everything was packed. There were over a dozen of those. So, what strikes me is the breadth here is that it's a mile wide. I won't say it's an inch deep, because there's some, but it is a mile wide. >> Yeah, yeah, John you are right, there's so much going on. The day zero tracks are amazing. I think there were over two dozen, maybe even more of the sessions where, you know, half-day or full day deep dives. Even talk, there was some other small events even that went on for two or three days leading up to this. So, sprawling ecosystem. Last year at this show in Seattle, I actually said that this show is the independent cloud show that we've been looking for. John, I was at Microsoft Ignite just a couple of weeks ago, and absolutely, Satya Nadella, they're not talking about the bits and the bytes. It's a, you know, Microsoft is your trusted partner for everything you're going to do, including building 50 billion new applications. Amazon Reinvent will just be right after Thanksgiving, and we will hear a very different message from Amazon and where they play. But this is not a company, it is a lot of different projects. The CNCF is the steward of this, and so Kubernetes is the one that gets all the attention. I think for this group to even grow more, it needs to be focused more on the CloudNativeCon, because how do we do cloud-native? You know, what does that mean? We heard, you know, Sugu was up on stage talking about Vitess, and he said, look, if you bake your database directly in fully Kubernetes cloud-native, that means that when you want to move between clouds you bring your data with you. So, data, security, networking, messaging, there's so many pieces here. It's a lot of work to be done to mature this stack, but it definitely is getting more mature. You start hearing many of these projects with a million or more downloads a month. So many pieces. John, what are you looking to dig into this week, what are you most excited for, what questions do you want answered? >> Well, here on theCUBE I'm always excited when we get to talk to people in production, customers, really see what's going on. There's a lot of stuff in production right now, which is not to say a lot of stuff isn't bleeding edge, right. I hear a lot of stuff, just out of the woodwork, about things that are fragile, things that aren't ready, things that are not quite updated, and I think Kubernetes is an architectural as well as a spiritual home for everything. But there's a lot of pieces that plug in, and there are opinionated ways of doing it, there are best of breed way, there are vertically integrated stacks. What's the best approach, it's not clear to me. I mean if you have to look at it from a company perspective, who are the winners and losers, I don't think that's a very productive way of looking at it. I'm interested in some projects like, we're going to be talking with Rancher, and they've got some announcements, but I'm also interested in K3s, which is their project there. I'm been hearing some really interesting things on the storage front. You know, all these things are really necessary. It's not all just magic containers moving around. You got to actually get the bits and bytes into the right place at the right time and backed up. >> Yeah, I love that you brought up K3s. Edge is definitely something that I hear talking a lot, because if you talk about cloud-native, it's not just about public cloud. Many of these things can run in my on-premises data centers and everything like that. >> And Edge fits in all of these environments, so. Right, winners and losers, I remember two years ago, first time I got a chance to interview Kelsey Hightower, who we do have on the program. He had actually taken a couple shows off, but he's back here at the show. I said Kelsey, why are we spending so much talking about Kubernetes? Doesn't this just get baked into every platform? And he's like, yeah totally, that's not the importance of it. It's not about distributions, and not about who's who, any of the software companies, it's how do they pull all of the pieces together. How do they add value on top of it. One of the terms I've heard mentioned a lot is, we need to think a lot about day two. Heck, there was even one of the companies that was heavy in this space, Mesosphere, they renamed the company Day Two IQ, spelled D2IQ. No relation to R2D2. But you know, that's what they are focused on to help these things really go together. So yeah, we talk about multicloud, and how do I get my arms around all of these pieces, how do I manage a sprawling environment. You add Edge into it. I've got a huge surface of attack for security issues. So, John, remember cloud was supposed to be simple and cheap, and it really isn't either of those things anymore, so yeah, a lot for us to dig into. >> Yeah, it'll be an interesting mix. Developers, experts, people brand new, probably half the people here they're the first time, and people coming over from the IT space as well as people coming from the open source space and I even saw this morning this is the biggest conference I've ever been to. So it's a many, it's different parts of the elephant, I'd say. >> Yeah, absolutely. It is a good sized conference, especially for open source it probably is the largest. But Salesforce Dreamforce is going on this week, which is more than an order of magnitude bigger, so my condolences to anybody in San Francisco right now, because we know the BART and everything else completely swamped with too many people. One other thing, you know, CNCF, what's really interesting for me always is when you look at a lot of these projects, the people that we saw up on stage were companies, it was the person that oh, I started this project and I'm the technical lead on it, and that's where I'm going. We've interviewed many of the people that start these projects, and they come many times out of industry. It's not a vendor that said, hey, I built something and I'm selling it. It is companies like Uber and Lyft that said, we did things at massive scale, we had a problem, we built something, we thought it was useful for us. Open source seemed a good way to help us get broader visibility and maybe everybody could help, and other people not only pitch in, but say this is hugely valuable, and that's where we go with it. So, it's something we, a narrative I've heard for years about everybody's going to be a software company, well, almost everybody at this conference is building software. We've heard about 30 to 40% of the people attending this show are developers, and therefore many of them are going to build products. A question I have and I'll give you is, with Docker, we just kicked off talking about Docker. You know, Docker created this huge wave of what happens there, but to put it bluntly, Docker the business failed. So, they are not dead, there's the piece that's in Mirantis, there's the piece doing the developer piece. We wish all of them the best of luck, but they had the opportunity to be the next VMware, and instead they are the company that gave us this wave, but did not capitalize on it. So, I look around and I see so many companies, and you say, "Hey, what are you?" "Oh, we're the creators of X technology in this project," and my question is, are you actually going to be able to make money and do a business, or is this just something that gets fit into the overall ecosystem. John, any thoughts and advice for those kind of companies. >> Well, I mean we are here, even though there's 12,000 people here, this is still very leading edge, right. There's a lot of pieces, parts here. We're not sure how they're all going to fit together. A lot of the projects have come out of real use cases, like you say, but they're, it's commercial viability is a different beast than utility. Docker was very good at developer experience, but the DNA of actually selling an enterprise management stack is a whole different beast, and there are a lot of those too. So I mean I think a lot of the companies here may not be around, but their technologies will live on. I think if you're here, and the interviews here at the show I think will be a, you'll want to have your antenna out to see like, okay, does this give you a feeling like this is solving a real problem and is incorporated in a real ecosystem. You know, the big company, it cuts both ways, right. Some of the times those technologies get absorbed and become the standard, sometimes they disappear. So the advice is you just put one foot in front of the other and try to find people in production. That's the only way at the end of the day that you could move ahead as a small company. >> All right, John, I gave you one piece of advice when we came here and I said, you know one thing we don't talk about at this show, we don't talk about OpenStack. So, I'm going to break that rule for a second here, just 'cause I feel we have as an industry learned some of the lessons. There is some of the irrational exuberance around some of these. There's lots of money being thrown at these environments, but I do feel that we are reaching maturity and adoption so much faster, because we are not trying to replacing something. The early days of OpenStack was, you know, we're your alternative for AWS, and we're going to get you off of VMware licensing. And both of those things were, they didn't happen for the most part. And OpenStack did fit in certain environments, especially outside of North America there's lots of OpenStack deployments. The telecommunications environment OpenStack is used a bunch. Telecom, another area, talk about Edge, that plays in here and we have a number of conversations. But there are both the big and the small companies when I look at our list of people we're going to be talking on the program. You know, I love first the customers. We've got Fidelity, Bloomberg, Red Cross, and Ford Motor Company all on the program, and we've got big companies, mega giants like Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, as well as couple of companies that came out of stealth like in the last week, including Render and Chronosphere. So, you know, broad spectrum of what's going on. You've done some of the OpenStack shows with me. You've got a long community and ecosystem viewpoint, John. What do you think and what do you hear, yeah. >> You know, this is, I guess yeah, this is a next generation, you could look at it that way. Anytime you bring together one of these open source foundations, you know, it is kind of a new style of development. You do have differing agendas. People do again have to have their antenna up to see, is this person promoting this open source project and what is their commercial interest in it. Because there are different agendas here. But it looks pretty healthy. Look, there's probably a million engineers worldwide that are going to have to know the guts of Kubernetes, but it's a different job to be done than OpenStack. OpenStack community is actually, that exists, is still thriving. It is good for the job to be done there. This job to be done's a little different. I think it's going to be an engine, you know, the engine that's embedded in everything else. So there's going to be a hundred million engineers that don't need to know anything about Kubernetes, but people here are the people that pop the hood open and start to you know, mess with the carburetor and this is a carburetor show. And so for the coverage here we're going to try to up level it to talk about the business a little bit, but this feels important. It feels cross-cloud, it feels outside of any one silo, and I'm really interested to see what we're going to learn this week. >> Okay, and thank you John. I really appreciate it to get it right final. It's like what is our job here? We are an independent media organization. Yes, we did bring our own stickers here to be able to, you know, we know everybody here loves stickers, so we've got theCUBE and we've got the fun gopher one, our friends at Women Who Go that support this, because, you know, inclusion, diversity, something that this community definitely embraces, we are huge supporters of their, but right, we want to be able to give that broad viewpoint of everything. We're not going to be able to get into every project. We're not going to go as deep as the day zero content web, but give a good flavor for everything going on in the show. I've found of all the shows I've gone to in recent years, this is some of the biggest brains in the industry. There's a lot of really important stuff, so I appreciate bringing my PHD holding co-host with me, John. Looking forward to three days with you to dig into all the environment. All right, so we will be wall to wall coverage, three days. If you're at the event, we are here in the expo hall. You can't miss us, we've got the big lights right next to the CloudNativeCon store. If you're online of course reach out to us. I'm @stu, S-T-U on Twitter. He's @jtroyer, and hit us up, see us in person, come grab some stickers, let us know who you want to talk to and what question you have, and as always, thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering NAB 2017. Brought to you by HGST. (lively music) >> Welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here, everybody, with theCUBE. We are live at NAB 2017 at the Las Vegas Convention Center. 100,000 people, all kinds of gear. If you're into video and you're into fun, this is the place to be. We're real excited to have Brian Frager on. He's a VR and AR creative producer for Technicolor. Welcome Brian. >> Thank you, happy to be on. >> And then, on your bio, you have all my new vocabulary words that I've picked up. Photo, I can't even say the stupid word. Photogrametgramatry? >> Gamatry, photogrammetry. >> Jeff: Awesome. >> Yeah. >> So, first off, welcome. >> You've been doing this PR thing, since the beginning, early days. >> It's still early days. >> Jeff: It's still early days. >> Basically, I have a film back on, a traditional film production. But when I saw these new work flows emerging in these interactive stories and really, the whole spectrum of story telling opening up from what was, traditionally, either a film or a video game. Now, there's this whole spectrum of experiences in between that are, very much, a hybrid between the two and you, as a user or an audience, have some agency and some control over how you effect the experience. I was just all in on that. I took a deep dive into coding and development and the game engines and landed at Technicolor within the last few months. >> And that's through the volumetric video response to that, right? Cause you're creating a space or correct me if I'm wrong. >> Brian: Exactly. >> And now you interact in that space. >> Exactly, so you're building a whole environment and the idea is that, the user rather than, most 360 experiences that we're seeing right now that are being shipped as VR, are, really, just from a fixed point. Even though you can look around and that's, a little bit, innovative it's still very restrictive in how you can interact with the space. We focus on real time rendered game engine experiences where you build the entire environment and so, really, you, as a user, can go walk around the whole room, look at anything, inspect things and you just have a lot more freedom to explore. >> On the story telling aspect of that, how does that now, get stitched into what's, basically, a video game engine? >> That's a great question. It is a paradime shift because rather than dictating the sequence of events or the linear story and force feeding it to an audience, you're, really, creating an open world. You want to design it in a way where they still take away a narrative experience or at least some kind of experience from it. But you need to give the user freedom to navigate that world however they see fit. It's about a lot of play testing, to be honest, to get early iterations out into user's hands and to see what they're instinct is. You have an idea for how they're going to consume something but until you see someone in the experience and see what they're impulse is and what they want to interact with, then you can build towards that. So, it's a more iterative process that's more akin to game development. >> Are you sharing any funny stories or surprises or something where you thought somebody's going to go left and they went right, just completely counter to what you built into your script if you will? >> Oh man, funny experiences. You know, so we've been to a few festivals. We premiered it at Sundance and then at South by Southwest. We've put hundreds of people thought it. There's one character that's very anthropomorphized and we had an idea that people would like to interact with it. But the minute it shows up, there's people getting on the ground next to this little water buffalo and he's just chillin and looking around. And there's people sitting right next to him and trying to pet him and do all kinds of things and you realize people, once they feel emersed in a space and they find something they can emotionally connect with, they just want to hang out there and spend some time with that as a microcosm of the experience. So, we added some little interactive elements to him. So, that was an insight. Actually, the fumiest was when I showed it to my mom for the first time. They don't, totally, understand this new world. A character appeared and she happened to be standing, you never know where the user's going to be standing in these paths. So, she happened to be standing directly in the path where the character was going to run. So, she turns around and sees the character and it just starts running straight at her and she just screams and throws the controller. (laughing) And the character just goes right through you but you know, that immersion. You feel like you're about to get hit by something. >> Right, right. So, a lot of us have played, I've got the Samsung thing I put my Galaxy in. What are some of the secrets that help people feel that immersive experience? In terms of is it, really it's not the super quality view cause a lot of times, you don't have that. But a lot of times, it's the softer things is what pull people in. So, what are the things that, really, make it connect with people from VR? >> Absolutely, there's a lot of elements because, really, you are recreating reality, sense by sense. The nice thing about VR is our visual system is so overpowering in terms of how we interpret the world around us that, luckily, that's been the access point and the entry point to this whole VR boom that we've seen. Is that, finally, mobile screens are at a point, the sensors are all packed very tight. So, we can, really, ship at a low cost. Google cardboard, for example, being the widest distribution and give people a pretty compelling visual experience. That's really step one and I'd say that's, pretty well, established and distributed. >> Visuals and audio have been married but, really, it's about bringing the other senses into VR. For example, the agency of being able to move around a space and interact with real things in the space. That's more commonly termed mixed reality and that's going to be the next wave that you're going to see which is highly interactive spaces that are more of a mixture of the virtual world and physical elements. So that, even though I'm in a headset and I see a pen, in the headset, when I reach out and touch it, there's really a pen there that's tracked in the space. That adds a whole other level of immersion that allows it to be social. Because that's a contract between you and I that this is a physical thing that one of us is holding. It allows for a whole new world of opportunities of what can be done in VR. >> How important is the social aspect, in terms of adoption? Yourself or your mom cruising around on her own versus the opportunity to bring other people in? Is that some of the stuff that's going to make this, really, the killer app to get it over the next hump? Or what is the killer app, I guess, beyond cruising around half the time? >> 100%, I think it's making it social. How to open up that world. Because right now, it is a very isolating experience. There's no reason that it has to be, necessarily, it's just that the user base is not congregated around individual platforms. Facebook made a big opening salva last week when they released their Facebook spaces. That allows you to bring in people from the real world into your virtual experience. By being able to, through Facebook Messenger, I can call out while I'm in VR, I can call out to anyone who has Facebook Messenger's app installed. Then, I get a little video feed and they see me as an avatar on their phone screen. So, it's those hybridizations of connecting people in VR to people who are outside in the real world that's going to, really, hit the inflection point of wide adoption. >> There were some early versions of that in the past right? Where you had these virtual reality spaces inside the computer but they were not nearly as immersive as the ones that we have today. Why did those not, really, take off What was the one of them? I can't think of the name right now. Let's say it's Second City but that's not it. >> Brian: Oh, Second Life? >> Second Life versus today's world. What changed? >> Sure well, I wouldn't characterize Second Life as a failure. It had it's heyday. >> No, not a failure but I mean, it was an early attempt at what you just described, really, in the Facebook Messenger which is what triggered the thought. >> And funny enough, the Second Life team is now creating the virtual version of that called High Fidelity. So, they have their own attempt. There's a couple of other like ALTSpace Nobody has the install base of Facebook. And so once you plug in to that community, you're already connected with your friends. It just takes away the friction. The friction of VR is, really, what's holding back people. That and the isolation, I'd say, from wide adoption. Which is that, it's just not a seamless experience. Going in, finding the app I want, connecting with people easily. Being an early adopter, I've tried to run meetings through the Oculus social spaces. There's just a lot of friction with technical issues and people dropping in and out. It improves. They do releases all the time. All those issues are being worked out and the friction's just going to slowly going to go away to the point where it will be more convenient for us to take a meeting where we can sit face-to-face and read each other's expressions then it will to try to get the same amount done over the telephone or something like that. >> I have to laugh cause every time, whether you're on WebEx, pick your favorite meeting tool. It's still technical issues. I was thinking that YouTube video. One of the greatest YouTube videos ever. >> New medium, same problem. >> Yeah, same problem. Is Bob even here? He checks in at the end of the meeting. So, that's very cool. As you look forward and I know it's a fast moving space. What are some of your priorities? What do you see as some short term changes that are going to make a big impact? And what about, say a year from now. I don't even want to even guess much further out than that, that you see coming down the pike that's going to have a huge impact on the adoption of VR? >> Sure, so at the low end, we're starting to see inside out tracts mobile solutions. Meaning that, you can get that same kind of freedom to wander around a space that you can on a Vive or an Oculus but with a mobile headset. So, because the price point and the buried entry is so low, everyone already has or they'll have soon enough, a phone that's capable of running an experience like that. I think that will be an important first step. At the Technicolor Experience Center, which is Technicolor's new VR and AR and mixed reality focused wing, they're really betting that these immersive stories are the future of entertainment and how that will trickle across different market adjacencies and verticals to apply to medical and education and sports and fitness. The applications are just endless. I think we're seeing early Enterprise adoption right now. And then, on the consumer side, gaming is, really, where they found the early niche and there is a modernization model. But what we're, personally, interested in is showing people the very, very high end of what VR can be. Because once we show them the high end, they have a compelling reason to familiarize themselves with whatever it can be to them today. We're working on very high fidelity tract spaces where social and networks and we can be geographically together or remotely beamed in together but we feel embodied in that space in a way that's more immersive than currently available. In terms of being able to move lens and interact with the objects around us. That's what we're trying to prove out at Technicolor is how do we build high end entertainment experiences around those technical infrastructures that are not widely deployed today but they will be coming. I think, for monetization on those models, you're going to see a lot of installed spaces that people will, hopefully, flock to to get these high end experiences. >> So, what's your favorite high end experience right now? >> Well, I did get the chance to do the Void, the Ghostbusters VR Experience after Sundance and that was pretty incredible. It was a lot of fun. Just cause you're in it with someone else. It's like a new version of laser tag. It can apply to other areas, that was just a shooter game. Just that shared experience where we are both in the space together and we just know that we're getting access to this virtual world that no one else is seeing is a really special thing. >> It's just amazing how powerful the social aspect is to all these things. >> You want to talk about it with people. >> You want to talk about it. You want do it with somebody. You want to share it. It's such a powerful impact. >> Yeah and, I think, even on the mobile side that will help open up the world a lot because right now, if it's on a Vive or an Oculus, you can plug it into a monitor or a TV and I can see what you're doing in it. So, that's easy enough for me to feel like I'm, at least, participating in your experience. But when you're in mobile right now, you're, pretty much, locked in and I, really, have no idea what you are doing in the experience. So, I think, making it easily shareable across traditional channels or just me being able to opt into your experience or jointly share one, those are all things that are going to make it much more compelling for us to just say, hey, we have 10 minutes, let's dive into VR and do something together. That would be fun. >> Right, right, very cool. Alright Brian. Thanks for stopping by out of your busy day. >> Of course. Great to talk. >> Alright, Brian Frager. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from NAB 2017. Thanks for watching. (lively music)

>> Narrator: Recovery. DataWorks Summit Europe 2017. Brought to you by Hortonworks. >> Hello everyone, welcome to The Cube's special presentation here in Munich, Germany for DataWorks Summit 2017. This is the Hadoop Summit powered by Hortonworks. This is their event and again, shows the transition from the Hadoop world to the big data world. I'm John Furrier. My co-host Dave Vellante, good to see you Dave. We're back in the seats together, usually on different events, but now here together in Munich. Great beer, great scene here. Small European event for Hortonworks and the ecosystem but it's called DataWorks 2017. Strata Hadoop is calling themselves Strata and Data. They're starting to see the word Hadoop being sunsetted from these events, which is a big theme of this year. The transition from Hadoop being the branded category to Data. >> Well, you're certainly seeing that in a number of ways. The titles of these events. Well, first of all, I love being in Europe. These venues are great, right? They're so Euro, very clean and magnificent. But back to your point. You're seeing the Hadoop Summit now called the DataWorks Summit. You're seeing the Strata Plus Hadoop is now Strata Plus, I don't even know what it is. Right, it's not Hadoop driven anymore. You see it also in Cloudera's IPO. They're going to talk about Hadoop and Hadoop Distro. They're a Hadoop Distro vendor but they talked about being a data management company and John, I think we are entering the era, or well deep into the era of what I have been calling for the last couple of years, profitless prosperity. Really where you see the Cloudera IPO, as you know, they raised money from Intel, over $600 million at a $4.1 billion dollar valuation. The Wall Street Journal says they'll have a tough time getting a billion dollar valuation. For every dollar each of these companies spends, Hortonworks and Cloudera, they lose between $1.70 and $2.50, so we've always said at SiliconANGLE, Wiki Bond and The Cube that people are going to make money in big data or the practitioners of big data, and it's hard to find those guys, it's hard to see them but that's really what's happening is the industries are transforming and those are the guys that are putting money into their bottom line. Not so much for technology vendors. >> Great to unpack that but first of all, I want to just say congratulations to Wiki Bond for getting it right again. As usual Wiki Bond, ahead of the curve and being out there and getting it right because I think you nailed it and I think Wiki Bond saw this first of all the research firms, kind of, you know, pat ourselves on the back here, but the truth is that practitioners are making the money and I think you're going to see more of that. In fact, last night as I'm having a nice beer here in Germany, I just like to listen to the conversations in the bar area and a lot of conversations around, real conversations around, you know, doing deals, and you know, deployments. You know, you're hearing about HBase, you're hearing about clusters, you're hearing about service revenue, and I think this is the focus. Cloudera, I think, in a classic Silicon Valley way, their hubris was tempered by their lack of scale. I mean, they didn't really blow it out. I mean, now they do 200 million in revenue. Nothing to shake a stick at, they did a great job, but they're buying revenue and Hortonworks is as well. But the ecosystem is the factor, and this is the wildcard. I'm making a prediction. Profitless prosperity that you point out is right, but I think that it has longevity with these companies like Hortonworks and Cloudera and others, like MapR because the ecosystem's robust. If you factor in the ecosystem revenue that is enough rising tide in my opinion. The question is how do they become sustainable as a standalone venture, that Red Hat for Hadoop never worked as Pat Gilson, you know, predicted. So, I think you're going to see a quick shift and pivot quickly by Hortonworks, certainly Cloudera's going to be under the microscope once they go public. I'm expecting that valuation to plummet like a rock. They're going to go public, Silicon Valley people are going to get their exits but. >> Excel will be happy. >> Everyone, yeah, they'll be happy. They already sold in 2013. They did a big sale, I mean, all of them cashed out two years ago when that liquidation event happened with Intel but that's fine. But now it's back to business building and Hortonworks has been doing it for years, so when you see your evaluation is less than a billion, so I'm expecting Cloudera to plummet like a rock. I would not buy the IPO at all because I think it's going to go well under a billion dollars. >> And I think it's the right call and as we know, last year, at the end of last year, Fidelity and other mutual funds devalued their holdings in Cloudera and so, you know, you've got this situation where, as you say, a couple hundred, maybe you know, on the way to 300 million in revenue, Hortonworks on the way to 200 million in revenue. Add up the ecosystem, yeah, maybe you get to a billion, throw in all of what IBM and Oracle call big data, and it's kind of a more interesting business, but you've called it same wine, new bottle. Is it a new bottle? Now, what I mean by that is the shift from Hadoop and then again, you read Cloudera's S1, it's all about AI, machine learning, you know, the cloud. Interesting, we'll talk about the cloud a little later, but is it same wine, new bottle, or is this really a shift toward a new era of innovation? >> It's not a new shift. It's the same innovation that the Hortonworks was founded on. Big data is a categorical and Hadoop was the horse they rode in on, but I think what's changing is the fact that customers are now putting real projects on the table and the scrutiny around those projects have to produce value, and the value comes down to total cost of ownership and business value. And that's becoming a data specific thing, and you look at all the successes in the big data world, Spark and others, you're seeing a focus on cloud integration and real-time workloads. These are real projects. This isn't fantasy. This isn't hype. This isn't early adopter. These are real companies saying we are moving to a new paradigm of digital transforming our companies and we need cost efficiencies but revenue-producing applications and workloads that are going to be running in the cloud with data at the heart of it. So, this is a customer-forcing function where the customers are generally excited about machine learning, moving to real-time classification of workloads. This is the deal and no hubris, no technology posturing, no open standards, jockeying can right the situation. Customers have demands and they want them filled, and we're going to have a lot of guests on here and I'm going to ask them those direct questions. What are you looking for and? >> Well, I totally agree with what you're saying and when we first met, it was right around the, you know, the mid point of the web 2.0 era, and I remember Tim Berners-Lee commenting on all this excitement, everybody's doing, he said this is what the web was invented to do, and this is what big data was invented to do. It was to produce deep analytics, deep learning, machine learning, you know, cognitive, as IBM likes to brand that, and so, it really is the next era even though people don't like to use the term big data anymore. We were talking to, you know, some of the folks in our community earlier, John, you and I, about some of the challenges. Why is it profitless, you know? Why is there so much growth but it's no profit? And you know, we have to point out here that people like Hortonworks and Cloudera, they've made some big bets, take HDSF of example. And now you have the cloud guys, particularly Amazon, coming in, you know, with S3. Look at YARN, big open source project. But you got Docker and Kubernetes seem to be mopping that up. Tez was supposed to replace MapReduce and now you've got. >> I mean, I wouldn't say mopping up, I mean. >> You've got Spark. >> At the end of the day the ecosystem's going to revolve around what the customers want, and portability of workloads, Kubernetes and microservices, these are areas that just absolutely make a lot of sense and I think, you know, people will move to where the frictionless action is and that's going to happen with Kubernetes and containers and microservices, but that just speaks to the devops culture, and I think Hadoop ecosystem, again, was grounded in the devops culture. So, yeah, there's some progress that are going to maybe go out of flavor, but there's other stuff coming up trough the ranks in open source and I think it's compelling. >> But where I disagree with what you're saying is well, the point I'm trying to make, is you have to, if you're Cloudera and Hortonworks, you have to support those multiple projects and it's expensive as hell. Whereas the cloud guys put all their wood behind one arrow, to use an old Scott McNealy phrase, and you know, Amazon, I would argue is mopping up in big data. I think the cloud guys, you know, it's ironic to me that Cloudera in the cloud era picked that name, you know, but really never had. >> John: They missed the cloud. >> They've never really had a strong cloud play, and I would say the same thing with Hortonworks and MapR. They have to play in the cloud and they talk about cloud, but they've got to support hybrid, they've got to support on param, they got to pick the clouds that they're going to support, AWS, Azure, maybe IBM's cloud. >> Look, Cloudera completely missed the cloud era, pun intended. However, they didn't miss open source but they're great at and I'm an admirer of Cloudera and Hortonworks on is that their open source ethos is what drove them, and so they kind of got isolated in with some of their product decisions, but that's not a bad thing. I mean, ultimately, I'm really bullish on Cloudera and Hortonworks because the ecosystem points I mentioned earlier are not high on the I wouldn't buy the IPO, I think I'd buy them at a discount, but Cloudera's not going to go away, Dave. They're going to go public. I think the valuation's going to drop like a rock and then settle around a billion, but they have good management. The founders still there, Michael Olson, Amr Awadallah. So, you're going to see Cloudera transform as a company. They have to do business out in the open and they're not afraid to, obviously they're open source. So, we're going to start to see that transition from a private venture backed, scale up, buy revenue. In the playbook of Silicon Valley venture capital's Excel partners and Greylock. Now they go public and get liquid and then now next phase of their journey is going to be build a public company and I think that they will do a good job doing it and I'm not down on them at all for that and I think it's just going to be a transition. >> Well, they're going to raise what? A couple 100 million dollars? But this industry, yeah, this industry's cashflow negative, so I agree with you. Open source is great, let's ra-ra for open source and it drives innovation, but how does this industry pay for itself? That's what I want to know. How you respond to that? >> Well, I think they have sustainable issues around services and I think partnering with the big companies like Intel that have professional services might help them on that front, but Michael Olson said in his founder's letter in his S1, kind of AI washing, he said AI and cognitive. But that's okay because Cloudera could easily pivot with their brain power, and same with Hortonworks to AI. Machine learning is very open source driven. Open source culture is growing, it's not going away, so I think Cloudera's in a very good position. >> I think the cloud guys are going to kill them in that game, and cloud guys and IBM are going to cream these profitless startups in that AI and machine learning game. >> We'll see. >> You disagree? >> I disagree, I think. Well, I mean, it depends. I mean, you know, I'm not going to, you know, forecast what the managements might do, but I mean, if I'm cloud looking at what Cloudera's done. >> What would you do? >> I would do exactly what Mike Olson's doing is I'd basically pivot immediately to machine learning. Look at Google. TensorFlow it's go so much traction with their cloud because it's got machine learning built into it. Open source is where the action is, and that's where you could do a lot of good work and use it as an advantage in that they know that game. I would not count out the open source game. >> So, we know how IBM makes money at that, you know, in theory anyway it wants. We know how Amazon's going to make money at that with their priority approach, Microsoft will do the same thing. How to Cloudera and Hortonworks make money? >> I think it's a product transition around getting to the open source with cloud technologies. Amazon is not out to kill open source, so I think there's an opportunity to wedge in a position there, and so they just got to move quickly. If they don't make these decisions then that's a failed execution on the management team at Cloudera and Hortonworks and I think they're on it. So, we'll keep an eye on that. >> No, Amazon's not trying to kill open source, I would agree, but they are bogarting open source in a big way and profiting amazingly from it. >> Well, they just do what Amy Jessie would say, they're customer driven. So, if a customer doesn't want to do five things to do one thing this is back to my point. The customers want real-time workloads. They want it with open source and they don't want all these steps in the cost of ownership. That's why this is not a new shift, it's the same wine, new bottle because now you're just seeing real projects that are demanding successful and efficient code and support and whoever delivers it builds the better mousetrap. In this case, the better mousetrap will win. >> And I'm arguing that the better mousetrap and the better marginal economics, I know I'm like a broken record on this, but if I take Kinesis and DynamoDB and Red Ship and wrap it into my big data play, offer it as a service with a set of APIs on the cloud, like AWS is going to do, or is doing, and Azure is doing, that's a better business model than, as you say, five different pieces that I have to cobble together. It's just not economically viable for customers to do that. >> Well, we've got some big new coming up here. We're going to have two days of wall-to-wall coverage of DataWorks 2017. Hortonworks announcing 2.6 of their Hadoop Hortonworks data platform. We're going to talk to Scott now, the CTO, coming up shortly. Stay with us for exclusive coverage of DataWorks in Munich, Germany 2017. We'll be back with more after this short break.