(upbeat music) >> The Cloud essentially turned the data center into an API and ushered in the era of programmable infrastructure, no longer do we think about deploying infrastructure in rigid silos with a hardened, outer shell, rather infrastructure has to facilitate digital business strategies. And what this means is putting data at the core of your organization, irrespective of its physical location. It also means infrastructure generally and storage specifically must be accessed as sets of services that can be discovered, deployed, managed, secured, and governed in a DevOps model or OpsDev, if you prefer. Now, this has specific implications as to how vendor product strategies will evolve and how they'll meet modern data requirements. Welcome to this Cube conversation, everybody. This is Dave Vellante. And with me to discuss these sea changes is Ajay Singh, the Chief Product Officer of Pure Storage, Ajay welcome. >> Thank you, David, gald to be on. >> Yeah, great to have you, so let's talk about your role at Pure. I think you're the first CPO, what's the vision there? >> That's right, I just joined up Pure about eight months ago from VMware as the chief product officer and you're right, I'm the first our chief product officer at Pure. And at VMware I ran the Cloud management business unit, which was a lot about automation and infrastructure as code. And it's just great to join Pure, which has a phenomenal all flash product set. I kind of call it the iPhone or flash story super easy to use. And how do we take that same ease of use, which is a heart of a Cloud operating principle, and how do we actually take it up to really deliver a modern data experience, which includes infrastructure and storage as code, but then even more beyond that and how do you do modern operations and then modern data services. So super excited to be at Pure. And the vision, if you may, at the end of the day, is to provide, leveraging this moderate experience, a connected and effortless experience data experience, which allows customers to ultimately focus on what matters for them, their business, and by really leveraging and managing and winning with their data, because ultimately data is the new oil, if you may, and if you can mine it, get insights from it and really drive a competitive edge in the digital transformation in your head, and that's what be intended to help our customers to. >> So you joined earlier this year kind of, I guess, middle of the pandemic really I'm interested in kind of your first 100 days, what that was like, what key milestones you set and now you're into your second a 100 plus days. How's that all going? What can you share with us in and that's interesting timing because the effects of the pandemic you came in in a kind of post that, so you had experience from VMware and then you had to apply that to the product organization. So tell us about that sort of first a 100 days and the sort of mission now. >> Absolutely, so as we talked about the vision, around the modern data experience, kind of have three components to it, modernizing the infrastructure and really it's kudos to the team out of the work we've been doing, a ton of work in modernizing the infrastructure, I'll briefly talk to that, then modernizing the data, much more than modernizing the operations. I'll talk to that as well. And then of course, down the pike, modernizing data services. So if you think about it from modernizing the infrastructure, if you think about Pure for a minute, Pure is the first company that took flash to mainstream, essentially bringing what we call consumer simplicity to enterprise storage. The manual for the products with the front and back of a business card, that's it, you plug it in, boom, it's up and running, and then you get proactive AI driven support, right? So that was kind of the heart of Pure. Now you think about Pure again, what's unique about Pure has been a lot of our competition, has dealt with flash at the SSD level, hey, because guess what? All this software was built for hard drive. And so if I can treat NAND as a solid state drive SSD, then my software would easily work on it. But with Pure, because we started with flash, we released went straight to the NAND level, and as opposed to kind of the SSD layer, and what that does is it gives you greater efficiency, greater reliability and create a performance compared to an SSD, because you can optimize at the chip level as opposed to at the SSD module level. That's one big advantage that Pure has going for itself. And if you look at the physics, in the industry for a minute, there's recent data put out by Wikibon early this year, effectively showing that by the year 2026, flash on a dollar per terabyte basis, just the economics of the semiconductor versus the hard disk is going to be cheaper than hard disk. So this big inflection point is slowly but surely coming that's going to disrupt the hardest industry, already the high end has been taken over by flash, but hybrid is next and then even the long tail is coming up over there. And so to end to that extent our lead, if you may, the introduction of QLC NAND, QLC NAND powerful competition is barely introducing, we've been at it for a while. We just recently this year in my first a 100 days, we introduced the flasher AC, C40 and C60 drives, which really start to open up our ability to go after the hybrid story market in a big way. It opens up a big new market for us. So great work there by the team,. Also at the heart of it. If you think about it in the NAND side, we have our flash array, which is a scale-up latency centric architecture and FlashBlade which is a scale-out throughput architecture, all operating with NAND. And what that does is it allows us to cover both structured data, unstructured data, tier one apps and tier two apps. So pretty broad data coverage in that journey to the all flash data center, slowly but surely we're heading over there to the all flash data center based on demand economics that we just talked about, and we've done a bunch of releases. And then the team has done a bunch of things around introducing and NVME or fabric, the kind of thing that you expect them to do. A lot of recognition in the industry for the team or from the likes of TrustRadius, Gartner, named FlashRay, the Carton Peer Insights, the customer choice award and primary storage in the MQ. We were the leader. So a lot of kudos and recognition coming to the team as a result, Flash Blade just hit a billion dollars in cumulative revenue, kind of a leader by far in kind of the unstructured data, fast file an object marketplace. And then of course, all the work we're doing around what we say, ESG, environmental, social and governance, around reducing carbon footprint, reducing waste, our whole notion of evergreen and non-disruptive upgrades. We also kind of did a lot of work in that where we actually announced that over 2,700 customers have actually done non-disruptive upgrades over the technology. >> Yeah a lot to unpack there. And a lot of this sometimes you people say, oh, it's the plumbing, but the plumbing is actually very important too. 'Cause we're in a major inflection point, when we went from spinning disk to NAND. And it's all about volumes, you're seeing this all over the industry now, you see your old boss, Pat Gelsinger, is dealing with this at Intel. And it's all about consumer volumes in my view anyway, because thanks to Steve Jobs, NAND volumes are enormous and what two hard disk drive makers left in the planet. I don't know, maybe there's two and a half, but so those volumes drive costs down. And so you're on that curve and you can debate as to when it's going to happen, but it's not an if it's a when. Let me, shift gears a little bit. Because Cloud, as I was saying, it's ushered in this API economy, this as a service model, a lot of infrastructure companies have responded. How are you thinking at Pure about the as a service model for your customers? What's the strategy? How is it evolving and how does it differentiate from the competition? >> Absolutely, a great question. It's kind of segues into the second part of the moderate experience, which is how do you modernize the operations? And that's where automation as a service, because ultimately, the Cloud has validated and the address of this model, right? People are looking for outcomes. They care less about how you get there. They just want the outcome. And the as a service model actually delivers these outcomes. And this whole notion of infrastructure as code is kind of the start of it. Imagine if my infrastructure for a developer is just a line of code, in a Git repository in a program that goes through a CICD process and automatically kind of is configured and set up, fits in with the Terraform, the Ansibles, all that different automation frameworks. And so what we've done is we've gone down the path of really building out what I think is modern operations with this ability to have storage as code, disability, in addition modern operations is not just storage scored, but also we've got recently introduced some comprehensive ransomware protection, that's part of modern operations. There's all the threat you hear in the news or ransomware. We introduced what we call safe mode snapshots that allow you to recover in literally seconds. When you have a ransomware attack, we also have in the modern operations Pure one, which is maybe the leader in AI driven support to prevent downtime. We actually call you 80% of the time and fix the problems without you knowing about it. That's what modern operations is all about. And then also Martin operations says, okay, you've got flash on your on-prem side, but even maybe using flash in the public Cloud, how can I have seamless multi-Cloud experience in our Cloud block store we've introduced around Amazon, AWS and Azure allows one to do that. And then finally, for modern applications, if you think about it, this whole notion of infrastructure's code, as a service, software driven storage, the Kubernetes infrastructure enables one to really deliver a great automation framework that enables to reduce the labor required to manage the storage infrastructure and deliver it as code. And we have, kudos to Charlie and the Pure storage team before my time with the acquisition of Portworx, Portworx today is truly delivers true storage as code orchestrated entirely through Kubernetes and in a multi-Cloud hybrid situation. So it can run on EKS, GKE, OpenShift rancher, Tansu, recently announced as the leader by giggle home for enterprise Kubernetes storage. We were really proud about that asset. And then finally, the last piece are Pure as a service. That's also all outcome oriented, SLS. What matters is you sign up for SLS, and then you get those SLS, very different from our competition, right? Our competition tends to be a lot more around financial engineering, hey, you can buy it OPEX versus CapEx. And, but you get the same thing with a lot of professional services, we've really got, I'd say a couple of years and lead on, actually delivering and managing with SRE engineers for the SLA. So a lot of great work there. We recently also introduced Cisco FlashStack, again, flash stack as a service, again, as a service, a validation of that. And then finally, we also recently did a announcement with Aquaponics, with their bare metal as a service where we are a key part of their bare metal as a service offering, again, pushing the kind of the added service strategy. So yes, big for us, that's where the buck is skating, half the enterprises, even on prem, wanting to consume things in the Cloud operating model. And so that's where we're putting it lot. >> I see, so your contention is, it's not just this CapEx to OPEX, that's kind of the, during the economic downturn of 2007, 2008, the economic crisis, that was the big thing for CFOs. So that's kind of yesterday's news. What you're saying is you're creating a Cloud, like operating model, as I was saying upfront, irrespective of physical location. And I see that as your challenge, the industry's challenge, be, if I'm going to effect the digital transformation, I don't want to deal with the Cloud primitives. I want you to hide the underlying complexity of that Cloud. I want to deal with higher level problems, but so that brings me to digital transformation, which is kind of the now initiative, or I even sometimes call it the mandate. There's not a one size fits all for digital transformation, but I'm interested in your thoughts on the must take steps, universal steps that everybody needs to think about in a digital transformation journey. >> Yeah, so ultimately the digital transformation is all about how companies are gain a competitive edge in this new digital world or that the company are, and the competition are changing the game on, right? So you want to make sure that you can rapidly try new things, fail fast, innovate and invest, but speed is of the essence, agility and the Cloud operating model enables that agility. And so what we're also doing is not only are we driving agility in a multicloud kind of data, infrastructure, data operation fashion, but we also taking it a step further. We were also on the journey to deliver modern data services. Imagine on a Pure on-prem infrastructure, along with your different public Clouds that you're working on with the Kubernetes infrastructures, you could, with a few clicks run Kakfa as a service, TensorFlow as a service, Mongo as a service. So me as a technology team can truly become a service provider and not just an on-prem service provider, but a multi-Cloud service provider. Such that these services can be used to analyze the data that you have, not only your data, your partner data, third party public data, and how you can marry those different data sets, analyze it to deliver new insights that ultimately give you a competitive edge in the digital transformation. So you can see data plays a big role there. The data is what generates those insights. Your ability to match that data with partner data, public data, your data, the analysis on it services ready to go, as you get the digital, as you can do the insights. You can really start to separate yourself from your competition and get on the leaderboard a decade from now when this digital transformation settles down. >> All right, so bring us home, Ajay, summarize what does a modern data strategy look like and how does it fit into a digital business or a digital organization? >> So look, at the end of the day, data and analysis, both of them play a big role in the digital transformation. And it really comes down to how do I leverage this data, my data, partner data, public data, to really get that edge. And that links back to a vision. How do we provide that connected and effortless, modern data experience that allows our customers to focus on their business? How do I get the edge in the digital transformation? But easily leveraging, managing and winning with their data. And that's the heart of where Pure is headed. >> Ajay Singh, thanks so much for coming inside theCube and sharing your vision. >> Thank you, Dave, it was a real pleasure. >> And thank you for watching this Cube conversation. This is Dave Vellante and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE! Covering Cisco Live 2020. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, this is theCUBE's live coverage of Cisco Live 2020, here in Barcelona. Our third year of the show, over 17,000 in attendance between the Cisco people, their large partner ecosystem, and the customers, I'm Stu Miniman, my cohost for this segment is Dave Vellante. John Furrier's scouring the show for all of the news at the event, and joining us, we have two first time guests on the program, first, sitting to my left is Patrick Smith, who is the field CTO for EMEA with Pure Storage. Sitting to his left is Eric Greffier, who is the managing director of EMEAR specialists with Cisco, so you have a slightly larger region than Patrick does, gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Patrick: Great to be here. >> All right, so, we know this show, we were talking that broad ecosystem, and of course Cisco in the data center group has very strong storage partnerships, highlighted by their converged infrastructure stacks. I wrote my research many many years ago, Cisco's brilliant job was when they entered the server market, they made sure that that fragmented storage ecosystem, they made partnerships across the board. And of course, when Pure's ascendancy with the flash era made the stack, so helping to paint those data centers orange with your Cisco partnership, so Patrick, give us the update here, 2020, what's interesting and important to know about Pure Storage and Cisco customer base? >> You know, we continue to see significant adoption of FlashStack, our converged infrastructure with Cisco. Driving just great interest and great growth, both for Pure and for Cisco with the UCS platform, and the value that the customers see in FlashStack, bringing together storage, networking and compute together with overall automation of the stack, and that really gives customers fantastic time to value. And that's what they're looking for in this day and age. >> All right, and Eric, what differentiates the partnership with Pure, versus, as you said, you do work with many of the storage companies out there. >> Well, we had a baby together, it was called FlashStack, and it was couple of years ago now, and as you said, I think the key element for us is really to have those CVDs, those Cisco Validated Designs together, and FlashStack was a great addition to our existing partnership at that time, talking about a couple of years ago. And of course, with the flash technology of Pure, we've seen the demand that we'd say going and going, and it has been amazing, amazing trajectory together. >> But talk a little bit more about the CVDs, the different use cases that you're seeing. You don't have to go through all 20, but maybe pick a couple of your favorite children. >> Well, just to make sure that people understand what CVD means, it's Cisco Validated Design, and this is kind of an outcome in the form of a document, which is available for customers and partners, which is the outcome of the partnership from R&D to R&D, which is just telling customers and partners what they need to order and have in it to fit all of this together for a specific business outcome. And the reason why we have multiple CVDs, is we have one CVD per use case. So the more use cases we have together, the more the CVD's precise, and you just have to follow the CVD design principles. Of course, the later swarms, and maybe Patrick can say a word, but we've been of course doing things regarding analytics and AI, because this is a big demand right now, so maybe Patrick, you want to say a word on this. >> Yeah, you guys were first with the AI and bringing AI and storage together with your partnership with Nvidia, so maybe double down on that. >> The FlashBlade was our move into building a storage platform for AI and model analytics, and we've seen tremendous success with that in lots of different verticals. And so with Cisco we launched FlashStack for AI, which brings together FlashBlade networking, and Cisco's fantastic compute platform with capability for considerable scale of Nvidia GPUs. So an in-a-box capability to really deliver fast time to market solutions for the growing world of analytics and modern AI, people want quick insight into the vast amounts of data we have, and so FlashStack for AI is really important for us being able to deliver as part of the Cisco ecosystem, and provide customers with a platform for success. >> What's happening with modernization, generally, but specifically in Europe, obviously Cisco, long history in Europe, Pure, you've got a presence here, good presence, but obviously much newer. Larger proportion, far larger proportion is in North America, so it's a real opportunity for you guys. What are you seeing in terms of modernization of infrastructure, and apps in the European community? >> Modernization I think is particularly important, and it's more and more seen under the guise of digital transformation, because investing in infrastructure just doesn't get the credit that sometimes it deserves. But the big push there is really all around simpler infrastructure, easier management, and the push for automation. Organizations don't want to have large infrastructure support teams who are either installing or managing in a heavy touch way, their environments, and so the push towards automation, not just at the infrastructure layer, but all the way up the stack, is really key. And you know, we were talking earlier, behind us we have the DevNet sessions here, all about how customers of Cisco and by correlation Pure, can really optimize the management to their environment, use technology like Intersight, like Ansible and others, to really minimize the overhead of managing technology, deliver services faster to customers and be more agile, in this always-on world that we live in, there's no time to really add a human to the cycle of managing infrastructure. >> I think we've been very proud over the years because this notion of converged infrastructure, which was, the promise was to simplify and modernize the data centers, before it was like, "Everything needs to get connected to anything," and coming was this notion of a pod, everything converged, "We've done the job for you, mister customer, "just think about adding some pod." This has been the promise for the last 10 years, and we've been very proud, almost to have created this market, but it wouldn't have been possible without the partnership with the storage players, and with Pure, we've been one step further in terms of simplifying things for customers. >> I love the extension you're talking about, because absolutely converged infrastructure was supposed to deliver on that simplicity, and it was, let's think of the entire rack as a unit of how we manage it, but with today's applications, with the speed of change happening in the environment, we've gone beyond human speed, and so therefore if we don't have the automation that you were talking about, we can't keep up with what the business needs to be able to do there. >> Yeah, that's what it's all about, it's the rapid rate of change. Whether it's business services, whether it's supporting developers in the developer environment, more and more our customers are becoming software development organizations, their developers are a key resource, and making them as efficient as possible is really important, so being able to quickly spin up development environments, new environments for developers, using snapshot technology, giving them the latest sets of data to test their applications on, is really central to enabling and empowering the developer. >> You know, you talk about Cisco's play and kind of creation of the converged infrastructure, Mark, and I think that's fair, by the way. Others may claim it, but I think the mantle goes to you. But there were two friction points, or headwinds, that we pointed out early in the day, the first was organizational, the servers team, the storage team, the network team didn't speak together, then the practitioner told us one day, "Look, you want to solve that problem, "put it in and watch what happens." 'Cause if you try to figure out the organization you'll never get there, and that sort of took care of itself. The other was the channel. The channel likes things separate, they can add value, they have this sort of box selling mentality, so I wonder if you could update us on what the mindset is in the channel, and how that's evolved. >> Yeah, it's a great question. I think the channel actually really likes the simplicity of a converged infrastructure to sell, it's a very simple message, and it really empowers the channel to take, to your point about organization, they have the full stack, all in one sellable item, and so they don't have to fight for the different components, it's one consistent unit that they sell as a whole, and so I think it simplifies the channel, and actually, we find that customers are actively seeking out, it's shown by our growth with FlashStack that customers are actually seeking out the channel partners who are selling FlashStack. >> Yeah, and do you think the channel realizes, "Wow, we really do have to go up the stack, "add more value, do things like partner with"? >> Well for most of the partners, they were heavily specialized on storage or compute or network, so for most of them, supporting the converged infrastructure was to be able to put a foot into another market, which was an expansion for them, which was part number one. Part number two, maybe the things that we've been missing, because since the beginning we had APIs around all those platforms. I don't believe in the early days, I'm talking about five years from now, that they got, that they could really really build something upon the converged infrastructure. Now, if you go through the DevNet area here at Cisco Live, you will see that I think this is the time now for them to understand, and really build new services on top of it, so I believe the value for the channel is pretty obvious now, more than ever. >> Well yeah, it's a great point, you don't usually hear converged infrastructure and infrastructure as code in the same conversation, but the maturation of the platforms underneath are bringing things together. >> They really are, in the same way that IT organizations are freeing up more time to focus up the stack on automation and added value, the same is true of the partners. It's interesting the corollary between the two. >> So I have a question on your act two, so what got us here the last 10 years, both firms were disruptors. Cisco came in and disrupted the compute space, it was misunderstood, "Cisco getting into servers, "that'll never work!" "Well, really not getting into servers, "we're changing the game." "Ah, okay," 10 years later. Pure, all-flash, really created some havoc in the industry, injected a ton of flash into the data center, practically drove a truck through the legacy business. Okay, so very successful. What's act two for you guys, what do you envision, disruptors, are you more incrementalists, I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. >> I start, Patrick. Probably for us, phase two is what you heard yesterday morning, I think Liz Anthony did a great speech regarding Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer, sorry for the name, this is a bit long, but what it means is now we truly connect the infrastructure to the application performance, and the fact that we can place and discuss about converged infrastructure but in the context of what truly matters for customers, which is application, this is the first time ever you're going to see such amount of R&D put into bringing the two worlds together. So this is just the beginning, but I think this was probably for me yesterday one of the most important announcement ever. And by the way, Pure is coming with this announcement, so if you as a customer buy Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer, you'll get everything you need to know about Pure and if you have to move things around the storage area, you know the tool will be doing it for you. So we are really the two of us in this announcement, so Patrick, if you want to? >> No, I mean as Eric mentioned, Intersight's important for Cisco, it's important for us, we're very proud to be early integrators as a third party into Intersight to allow that simple management, but you know, as you talk about the future, we were viewed as disruptors when we first came to market with flash array, and we consider still ourselves to be disruptors and innovators, and the amount of our revenue that we invest in innovation, in what is a really focused product portfolio, I think is showing benefits, and you've seen the announcements over the last six months or so with FlashArray//C, bringing all the benefits of flash to tier two applications, and just the interest that that has generated is huge. In the world of networking with NVMe, we have a fabric in RoCEv2, just increasing the performance for business applications that will have fantastic implications for things like SAP, time and performance-critical databases, and then what we announced with direct memory with adding SCM as a read cache onto flash array as well. Really giving customers investment protection for what they bought from us already, because they can, as you well know, Evergreen gives customers an asset that continues to appreciate in value, which is completely the opposite. >> And you're both sort of embracing that service consumption model, I mean Cisco's becoming a very large proportion of your business, you guys have announced some actual straight cloud plays, you've built an aray inside of AWS, which is pretty innovative, so. >> Yes, and as well as the cloud play with Cloud Block Store in AWS, there's Pure as a service, which takes that cloud-like consumption model and allows a customer to run it in their own data center without owning the assets, and that's really interesting, because customers have got used to the cloud-like consumption model, and paying as an OpEx rather than CapEx, and so bringing that into their own facility, and only paying for the data you have written, really does change the game in terms of how they consume and think about their storage environments. >> Patrick, we'd just love to get your viewpoint, you've been talking to a lot of customers this week, you said you've been checking out the DevNet zone, for people that didn't make it to the show here, what have they been missing, what would their peers be telling them in the hallway conversations? >> There's a huge amount as we've been talking about, there's a huge amount on automation, and actually we see it as we go into customers, the number of people we're now talking to who are developers but not developers developing business applications but developers developing code for managing infrastructure is key, and you see it all around the DevNet zone. And then, the focus on containers, I've been talking about it for a long time, and containers is so important for enterprises going forward. We have a great play in that space, and I think as we roll forward, the next three to five years, containers is just going to be the important technology that will be prevalent across enterprises large and small. >> Dave: Yeah, we agree. >> Eric and Patrick, thank you so much for giving us the update, congratulations on all the progress and definitely look forward to keeping an eye on your progress. >> Thanks very much. >> All right, Dave Vellante and I will be back with much more here from Cisco Live 2020 in Barcelona, thanks for watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Announcer: From Austin, Texas it's theCube, covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2019. Brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Howdy from Austin, Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante we are on day one of our coverage of Pure Accelerate 2019. Welcoming a couple of guests to theCube. One is an alumni, Nathan Hall, VP of America's Systems Engineering from Pure, Nathan welcome back to theCube. >> Thanks, thanks very much. >> Lisa: And you brought a buddy from Cisco. We have Tom Sutliff, director of systems engineering and the America's data center, welcome to the Cube Tom. >> Thanks for having me. >> Dave: It's howdy you all. >> Howdy you all, okay. Thank you, it took the wicked smart guy from Boston to figure that out. >> A local. >> All right, so you all, let's talk about Cisco and Pure, you guys have been partners now since, Nathan we were chatting, since about the IPO, about four years ago. Let's start with you Nathan, our Pure guy. The Cisco, Pure partnership evolution, better together? What have you done over those last five years that sets you up for another first that you're going to share with us today? >> Sure, so it's a deep relationship that's only getting deeper and it's really at all levels. It starts with the executive alignment and think about Charlie Giancarlo from Cisco we've got a lot of just common, cross pollination there. But now it extends, certainly the field level, Tom and I are doing a lot of planning together in terms of having our teams go after common use cases. But now it extends to engineering as well, we had a UCS director plugin that we've had for some time now but Pure is now first in terms of having integration into Cisco intersight, so we are first and only to have storage integration of the Cisco intersight so that Cisco and Pure customers can really manage their environment from one console, so a lot of simplicity, just single SaaS interface for managing everything. >> Tom why Pure, why first with them? >> Well you know Nathan he articulated it well, we can look at the executive level, we talked about Charlie, but even, you know all of our Cisco executives but also to the engineering. We started really strong with the field sales teams but even if you look at the little things that our customers notice but a lot of people may not like the internal development of validated design guides, use cases. We churn them out with Pure as our top ecosystem partner, more than anybody and there's a lot of work being done, our customers see that and it's really helped drive our goal to market together it's really a very strong strategy. >> So there's a CVD around this is that right? >> Yeah there's many there's 22 right now and we're churning them out about one or two a quarter. With some vendors we might put out some initially we might do one or two things well, we do a lot of things well I guess you could say we do 22 things well with the CVD's but more than that. >> So this really started in the field if I understand correctly is that right? [Nathan] - Yes. >> So I always look for these deals and say is it a Barney deal, you know Barney deal I love you, you love me. And if there's real engineering going on then you say okay it's beyond a Barney deal. So it starts in the field with what, hey we should you know a customer wants us to work together and then how does the partnership evolve into where you're putting engineering resources and what does that look like? >> I think a lot of it evolves from just showing progress and showing success. If you look at, we just have a lot of common goals and from a portfolio perspective we fill in a lot of each others gaps so that's really where it started was having the success in the field and that drove, we should actually make greater investments in terms of engineering development, those 22 CVD's, the intersight integration, et cetera. >> So we were talking earlier about CI, HCI for audience members who it's kind of nuanced, how do you guys look at the intersection of those two? >> I say it's another better together story, for example we have a recent joint customer win where essentially across their entire SAP landscape we have Cisco hyper flex the HX managing the database portion, we have FlashStack with Pure Storage managing the Hanna portion, and really it all comes down to single console which is intersight. So we're really able to provide the best type of infrastructure for the right workload at the right time but all make it look like one single experience to the customer. >> So from a customer conversation perspective let's go back to you know we've talked about now this exciting new first engineering alignment. Going back to the field where customers have a multitude of workloads, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, FEEdi, and there's FlashStack like 31 flavors of FlashStack right. What's that conversation like in terms of CI versus HCI when you guys come into play? Obviously FlashStack being I mentioned a number of flavors of that have been around for awhile, how do you help the customers determine what infrastructure is optimal for their workloads and their business objectives? >> You know there's a clear delineation between a hyper convergence, our HX platform, a hyper flex platform, and the converged infrastructure that we have with FlashStacks. If you look at a FlashStack it's an all in one solution, compute, fabric, storage. It's more for tier one apps, something that's you know scalable, something that's a highly dense tier one application. Latency obviously plays into this you know, I'd say it's a little less with the hyper flex platform and hyper convergence, much easier to stand up, much quicker to stand up within a half an hour. It's a storage play it does many of the similar same things but you know we're kind of closing the gap on both of them because even what you would call that smaller platform that started off at more tier one, excuse me tier two and tier three is now moving into the tier one space so. But it's really about scalability, ease of use, some of them are stronger in some markets like maybe a higher enterprise. But we can sell them across anywhere whether it be public sector, commercial, mid market, smaller customers. But they each have use cases that they fit in very well. >> This morning in the key notes we heard a lot about API's, I want to get into Multi Cloud in a second but before I do we talk a lot about infrastructures code, DevOps, we heard a lot about Kubernetes, a little bit about Kubernetes this morning. And the Cisco DevNet I've often said on theCUBE that they're the only large established company that's figured out how to do something for developers. Now does your partnership extend into sort of infrastructures code, how does that all sort of go through? Is DevNet a play here or even on the roadmap? >> Nathan: So from DevNet can you take that one? >> Well I can say yes it is a play, if you take a look at all of our solutions, primarily the compute and the fabric solutions, programmability is really a key function that we have and the customers can go in and they can actually working with our API's, API's that we work with separate with other vendors too that are dedicated to other vendors. It is a key thing and DevNet became to the forefront probably about five years ago and it was really built off of that development effort so that's critical for us going forward here there's a lot that we're doing I know we're going to talk about intersight and some other things where that was a key element of it. >> Yeah so this is important. You were at Cisco Live. >> And Cisco DevNet. >> And we were in the DevNet zone and you remember, you had many many booths, very specialized, then you have CCIE's learning python, learning how to program infrastructure for new use cases, edge comes in. Anything you'd add Nathan to sort of programmability? >> So I think just from day one from Pure Storage just having our restful API interface, having code.purestorage.com we've tried to make it as much automatable as possible, as easy for to really create a community of developers that can create these integrations very quickly, and honestly evidence of that is in intersight itself. How quickly we got that integration happening is because of that restful API interface. We were able to take the kind of AI Ops of Pure One and bring it into intersight, be able to get intersight to talk to Pure Storage very easily because of that strength of API first. >> What do we need to know about intersight? Add some color there, what is it, how's it work, what's the kind of history and how do you guys turn what you're doing in integration into customer value? >> So if I look at, going back to your comments around why converge versus hyper converge, it's often really a story of simplicity right? Customers want something simple for the data center, they know they can get it out in the Cloud but they can't always run their workloads out in the external Cloud. So simplicity is for intersight, no matter what it is, if it's converged or hyper converged, if it's Pure Storage, being able to have single interface to monitor your infrastructure, lifecycle it, to get really specific imagine a VMware administrator is able to in that single console, provision storage from Pure to a UCS server, format it for VMware ESX and VMFS, and in that single console so doesn't have to go to a bunch of different consoles, gets that Cloud like experience and that's what intersight delivers. So you get that simplicity whether its converged or hyper converged with intersight. >> Whether it's in the Cloud, it's the Edge, it's the Branch, Hybrid Cloud, instead of having to manage it I think that Nathan just hit on these single clusters of storage, compute, what have you. These can all be managed from one single console world wide no matter where they sit. >> So I want to talk about Multi Cloud if we can. So if I look at the players in Multi Cloud, the big whales, VMware, Red Hat, Google, Microsoft, and Cisco, you partner with all of those pretty much I think. AWS is not on the list but you figure they're kind of the facto part of the Multi Cloud scene but they're not going after Multi Cloud, Cisco was a relatively new entrant there. You got companies that have a Cloud like Microsoft and Google that want to participate, you've got companies that don't have a Cloud like Cisco that want to participate, where does Pure fit in to that Multi Cloud opportunity and how does it relate to the partnership? >> Well I think where we found a solid partnership with Cisco and Multi Cloud is the same approach to Multi Cloud and that is I'd call it open Multi Cloud. As opposed to having, forcing a single type of hyper visor on one side or a single Cloud, external Cloud on the other side, how do we make certain that our customers can run any app, anywhere? How do we appear and provide the data fabric having the most efficient amenity of fabric out there to kind of get around the data gravity problems of moving workloads, and we do that now with Pure Flash right on premises, Cloud block store out in the Cloud, our ability to Cloud snap to Azure, to AWS, and that's part of the story. The other part of the story is the fabric and the compute. So with ACI anywhere really that compeletes the any workload anywhere story, and keeping it open so it's not just one hyper visor or one Cloud provider on the other side. >> So you be the data plane in that equation, with the management of that data plane, and Cisco is the overall management framework the control plane I guess we could call that. Is that the right way to think about it? >> I'd say part of the control plane and the network fabric as well, and we're part of essentially the consistent data services no matter where you go. So really upleveling for example EBS to an enterprise grade of storage that it wasn't before, now we have something that whether you're on hardware on premises or in the cloud, you can run that monolithic application in places you couldn't do it before. >> So let's look at this in the real world in a customer environment, talk to me about whatever kind of whether it's a bank or an airline or what have you, what are the business benefits that, we'll use delta Airlines as an example, what would they get out of this if they think of all of the things that they need to achieve internally and be able to deliver to their customers? What's that you know TCO, ROI, what are all those sexy things that you guys are delivering? >> So I'd say they get essentially a lot of the barriers to getting the TCO you want for a given workload are based on compatibility. Maybe you want to run it out in Amazon but you can't get it there because it's this massive monolithic gap, the sync would take days, the SLA out there isn't quite what you want. Now being able to provide a consistent experience no matter where that data plane is, you get that choice. You can go and evaluate AWS or Azure and say that's ultimately the right TCO for my application and I know it could run out there because I've essentially standardized my data fabric anywhere, and it's the same story essentially now with ACI anywhere as well. So the ability to keep essentially the fundamental elements of the application, the infrastructure around it consistent no matter where it is, freeze that IT decision maker to put it in the right place. You don't have to be constrained by compatibility anymore. >> So internal operations can be dialed way up which means those folks are free to resources to work on other higher value projects, and the customer on the other end who doesn't know any of this stuff is under the hood is getting what they need when they want it. >> Exactly, yeah you can manage if you look at ACI you can manage the automation of the applications across the network fabric again wherever it may be, and there's robustness there, there's telemetry, there's measurements. So instead of just looking at the application you look at the robustness of that on the network and the network here us absolutely critical, none of this is going to run I think as Nathan hit on that it could be in the Cloud, it could be in the Branch, you still want the same level of performance the SLA, the five nines and that's where the network comes in that's what's critical. >> Well and the security piece as well. >> Absolutely. >> You guys are largely coming at the Multi Cloud from of course the network strength that you have but you've also got a security angle there because you can go deep packet inspection and that's a sweet spot for you guys. >> Tom: Absolutely. >> Talk about security and it's importance and so on. >> Well I think the security I mean one of the big plays that we have with ACI and with Tetration is being able to look in literally billions of packets a second and being able to track and make realtime decisions on any type of threat, threat defense that's built right in. So normally obviously you have firewall and you try to keep everything out but a lot of what will happen a lot of the penetration security hack happens inside. So this is able to look at all of the flows, at every single packet the flow of the application and the information to see if there's a threat in real time. It takes a lot of processing power a lot of storage and a lot of capacity but you know that's a Tetration product and it's a huge play, our security team is actually out selling that in addition to the data center teams. >> So is Wallingford Yankee's country or Red Sox country? >> Oh it's right on the border so I've got my in laws Yankee's, my parents Redsox, so it's very difficult at home. >> You're a Pat's fan of course, did you feel dirty watching the game on Sunday or? >> Tom: No not at all. >> Oh you felt good? >> Maybe 19 and O this year we'll see. >> And you're Switzerland in this whole debate? >> I try to be it's hard. >> Well you know this company is Warrior's so we can talk NBA too. >> You bet! >> There's a really interesting NBA season coming up now. Not so much for our team but. (laughter) >> Lisa: You never know! >> You never know. >> I had to try to be Switzerland too cause I was the West Coaster with the East Coaster boss, you know how it goes. So Tom last question for you, whole bunch of announcements that came out of Pure today as we look at all of the partnerships that Pure has we talked about that, that Cisco has as well, what are some of the things that as a partner as a valued strategic partner, that Cisco hears when they hear Pure talking about delivering everything as a service and what they're doing with AI and dialing up things there, what is Ciscos reaction to that news? >> Well the thing with Pure and it preceded this conference but you know I really heard it with the new announcements and Nate and I we have a lot of things we're going to work with our systems engineers on in the Americas, it's just the innovation which is pretty incredible. You know you kind of have the big four products here but primarily with the Flash arrays the CI platforms, the Flash blades, what's going on with Pure one, that's going to be critical going forward and we have very similar messages with Multi Cloud. We talked about the validated designs, this is really going to lead us to almost like it's kind of funny when you have an innovative partner you can do reboots every year and people don't think you're just throwing work at them or what have you. It's like now we really innovated again, 12, 15 months later we're going to hit this again and come at it. And so Pure is probably one of the only partners we have that type of relationship with. >> Alright well guys thank you so much for joining Dave and me on theCUBE today we appreciate it. We look forward to following the evolution of this Cisco Pure partnership, thanks for your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you guys. >> For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE ya'll from Pure Accelerate in Austin, Texas. (upbeat music)

>> Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. Our coverage of Cisco Live day three is in full effect. I am Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante and we have a couple of guests joining us. We've got Mike Bundy, head of Cisco Strategic Alliances from, guess where? The jacket should give it away, Pure Storage. And Tom Koppelman, the VP of Architecture Sales America for Cisco, hi guys! >> Hi. >> Hi. >> How ya doing? >> Thanks for bringing more brightness to our set. >> Yeah I forgot my sunglasses. >> I know, we're in the buzzy, bright DevNet Zone. We've been here all week. Great event, massive event, my goodness. 28,000 folks or so, Mike let's start with you. Give us a status of the Pure-Cisco relationship, the evolution of that, where you guys are now. What is exciting? >> Sure, so the relationship, it's unbelievable in terms of the amount of synergies and energy we have together. In fact, Tom at Cisco was really involved in the early genesis of this relationship, prior to me joining the company. And, in the last couple years, we've probably doubled in terms of our go-to-market and sell to customers together. So, tremendous growth. Partnership brings a value to us because of the strong heritage that we have from a DevNet tie-in, in terms of all the automation that we have on the platform, so. It's just a tremendous, tremendous, great partnership. >> And Tom, Cisco has a massive partner ecosystem, a lot of choice. What is it about Pure Storage that is providing advantages to Cisco? Where it's helping customers really kind of bridge this gap between hyper-converged, multi-cloud hybrid, all that jazz? >> Right, so Pure was a first mover in terms of flash storage, right. We saw demand from our customers wanting that technology to improve their data center environments. And when we partnered up early, we were able to kind of capture that momentum, right. And, when I think about our go-to-market with Pure, which is really where I kind of focus, there's very little friction in that relationship, right. There's not competitive overlap. There's not things like that. It's technology that the customers want, that they ask for, and a good field go-to-market in leadership on both sides that are willing to invest and get engaged and move the relationship forward. >> So what else are you guys doing besides just the go-to-market partnership because I got a hold of this timeline of Cisco Validated Designs that Pure and Cisco have put out over the last five years, four years. >> Right. >> And there's like 13 milestones on there. So that's roughly three a year. Of course, it started with Pure's IPO. So that's when Cisco said, all right, these guys are real. Start working with them. And in the early days, of course, you started with FlashStack. That was the flagship product. And then VDI, everybody does VDI, analysts are like, yeah, yeah, everybody does VDI. But then it started really accelerating the cadence. So it's more than just go-to-market. What's beneath that go-to-market? >> Yeah, good question. >> You want to? >> You hit the highlights of the CVD's and whatnot. >> I would say that Pure, this is our number one partnership that we have from an alliance perspective. The investment is far exceeding other partnerships we have. So, the amount of product integration that we're doing is tremendous, as you see there. We've focused on ACI and multi data centers the last couple years. We've focusing on AI and machine learning, most recently. And beyond that, we just signed an agreement and have released resell of Cisco SAN switches in the marketplace. It's the resell agreement we've ever done as a company and it just further shows the commitment in resources that we're willing to put into making sure the partnership is successful and continues to grow and evolve. >> And on top of that the investment in Cisco Intersight, in integrating with Cisco Intersight, the management platform, which is very important to us, it just shows commitment of the partnership. >> Let's talk more about that. So, how does that work? What problems is that solving for customers? >> Well, Cisco Intersight is our cloud based management offering for compute and Pure has integrated their storage platform as part of that solution. So allowing customers, whether it's a converged solution, just raw compute, a hyper-converged solution, but allowing them to manage those pools and deliver that via a cloud solution. >> So Pure plugs into the Cisco API. Now you're part of that stack, essentially. So it's transparent to the customer. And, Cisco's management plane takes care of all that. >> That's exactly right, correct, yes. >> Its' a big deal for us because it was the first integration with Intersight from any storage partner that Cisco has, right. So first to market. We want to embrace hyper-convergence, which is a big important priority for Cisco, and also bridging that gap. So as we compete against single vendor stacks, we have the right solution that customers are looking for. And ultimately, that's why it's so important for us. >> Yeah, Pure is big on firsts. First to flash, you just mentioned another first, you were the first with NVMe, before that you were with the evergreen. I mean, you like being first. >> First orange sport coat. >> That's definitely first there. (laughing) >> Let's talk about customer value though. Obviously, that's what it's all about. As we look at, not just the tremendous amount of choice that customer have when it comes to technology partners, but also the amount of data that's being generated, that's growing astronomically. Yet, organizations are getting so little value out of that because they can't extract the insights. What are you guys doing together leveraging the superpowers of AI and machine learning to help customers in any industry search a really, not just monetize that data, but really accelerate their businesses. Tom you're smiling so let's start with you. >> Yeah, so we came out with an AI server, right, our ML 480, and we've integrated that. Pure has invested, we've both invested and done an integration between FlashBlade, and I'll let Mike talk a little about FlashBlade and the value proposition of FlashBlade, but integrated that with our AI server. And our AI server is an Nvidia powered server, so it essentially gives you scale of processing and capabilities to allow you capitalize on all that data so the customers can get the information they need out of that. If you want to take a second on FlashBlade. >> And you know, AI is the buzz. It's the hot two letter acronym in the industry these days. $13 billion infrastructure opportunity, et cetera, et cetera. So, what Pure is really focused on is, data is the new oil of commodities for customers and clients. What we've built is a platform called FlashBlade, an architecture called the Data Hub, that allows you to not have to copy data and move it around and create silos in data warehouses. So, you can much easier execute a data strategy with the Data Hub architecture, using FlashBlade. When you look at machine learning in terms of how you build a data pipeline so that you can then get to quicker results from a business application standpoint with AI. That's what we've built together with Cisco. We're uber, uber, super excited a number of customers already in the last couple months. >> So I'm going to push a little on that, AI server, AI storage, people don't associate storage and server guys with AI. But if I hear you correctly, there's a $13 billion opportunity for workloads. To manage workloads running on your servers and your storage. >> Correct. >> And so you're optimizing them for AI workloads. >> Absolutely, exactly right. >> So you're not necessarily inventing AI. You're providing infrastructure so that people can leverage AI, is that right? >> Yes. >> Yeah, and the same way that we've built APIs together to work with Intersight, we do that in a way that allows our customers to leverage Cafe, other applications that can help build that data pipeline. We build the platform from the infrastructure level, it makes the management easy and we partner with all of the applications at the top end, but also the middleware and that software prepackage layer that connects via APIs to us. So, it's easy, it's agile, it's manageable, it's a cloud-like experience for the customers, right. >> Easy, agile, all awesome but security. Absolutely critical today. What are you guys doing, Tom I'll start with you, how are you guys working together infuse and integrate security into the technology so that from a customer's perspective, those risks dial down. >> So, Cisco is integrating security across all of our product portfolio, right. And, that includes our data center portfolio, all the way through our campus, our WAN, all those portfolios. We continue to look for opportunities to integrate, whether it's dual-factor authentication or things like secure data center where the highly scalable, multi-instance firewall in front of a data center, things like that. So we're definitely looking for areas and angles and opportunities for us to, not only integrate it from a product standpoint, but also ensure that we are talking that story with our customers so that they know they can leverage Cisco for the full architecture from a security standpoint. >> And the same thing on the storage of the data from an encryption perspective, and as the data gets moved or is mobile, that level of security and policy follows it wherever the data is moved. >> So, what should we expect, what's next in the time? What's 14 going to look like? You don't have top give us specifics but are we going to see blockchain CVDs? What should observers think about the partnership going forward? What could we look forward to? >> Yeah, I mean, the adoption of Container capability is tremendous in our customers environment. Cisco has a cloud Container platform available today. We're integrating that into FlashStack in the very near future. Embracing the cloud. Disaster recovery and data protection it's very hot for customers. Improving that experience so that you have faster restoration times, you're able to look at multi-tier strategy that's very easy to manage from a storage perspective, leveraging S3 with Amazon, Azure, et cetera. So, that's a couple things that are on the short term building block together. >> Yeah, I was going to comment on certainly multi cloud and Containers, those would be two of the big ones that I'd hit on, right. And, in the event of multi cloud leveraging, converged and hyper-converged together to better solve a customer's problems. >> So I was going to ask you. So hyper-converged now becomes a bridge to the cloud if, in fact, that's where customers want to go. >> Yes, it can be. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah, it can be, yes. >> Absolutely. >> Well guys thank you so much for joining Dave and me on the program, sharing with us the momentum that the Pure-Cisco relationship has and what excites you for the future. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank guys. >> For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live from Cisco Live San Diego. Thanks for watching. (electronic music)

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Barcelona, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my cohost, Stu Miniman. This is day one of Cisco Live Barcelona. Katie Colbert is here. She's the vice president of alliances at Pure Storage, and she's joined by Kaustubh Das, otherwise known as KD, who's the vice president of computing systems at Cisco. Katie and KD, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Alright, so let's start off, KD2, if you could just tell us about the partnership. Where did it start, how did it evolve? We'll get into it. >> We just had a terrific partnership, and the reason it's so great is it's really based on some foundational things that are super compatible. Pure Storage, Cisco, both super technology-driven companies, innovating. They're both also super programmatic companies. They'll do everything via API. It's very modern in that sense, the frameworks that we work on. And then from a business perspective, it's very compatible. We're chasing common markets, very few conflicts. So it's been rooted in solid foundations. And then, we've actually invested over the years to build more and more solutions for our customers jointly. So it's been terrific. >> So, Katie, I hate to admit how long we talk about partnering with Cisco >> It's going to age us. >> So you and I won't admit how many decades it's been partnering with Cisco, but here we are, 2019, Cisco's a very different company than it was a decade or two ago. >> Absolutely. >> Tell me what it's like working with them, especially as a company that's primarily in storage and data at Pure, what it means to partner with them. >> Absolutely, you're right. So, worked with Cisco as a partner for many years at the beginning of my career, then went away for, I'd say, a good 10 years, and joined Pure in June, and I will tell you one of the most exciting reasons why I joined Pure was the Pure and Cisco relationship. When I worked with them at the beginning of my career, it was great and I would tell you it's even better now. I will say that the momentum that these two companies have in the market is very phenomenal. A lot of differentiation from our products separately, but both together, I think that it's absolutely been very successful, and to KD's point, the investment that both companies are making really is just astronomical, and I see that our customers are the beneficiaries of that. It makes it so much easier for them to deploy and use the technologies together, which is exciting. >> So we always joke about Barney deals, I love you, you love me, I mean, it's clear you guys go much much deeper than that. So I want to probe at that a little bit. Particularly from an engineering standpoint, whether it's validated designs or other innovations that you guys are working on together, can we peel the onion on that one a little bit? Talk about what you guys are doing below that line. >> I'll start there then I'll hand it over to the engineering leader from Cisco. But if you think about the pace of this, the partnership, I think, is roughly 3 or so years old. We've 16 Cisco-validated designs for our FlashStack infrastructure. So that is just unbelievable. So, huge amount of investment from engineers, product managers, on both sides of the fence. >> Yeah, totally second that. We start out with the... Cisco-validated designs are like blueprints, so we start out with the blueprints for the standard workloads: Oracle, SAP. And we keep those fresh as new versions come out. But then I think we've taken it further into new spaces of late. ACI, we saw in the keynote this morning, it's going everywhere, it's going multi-site. We've done some work on marrying that with the clustering service of Pure Storage. On top of that, we're doing some work in AI and ML, which is super exciting, so we got some CBDs around that that's just coming out. We're doing some work on automation, coupling Intersight, which is Cisco's cloud-based automation suite, with Pure Storage and Pure Storage's ability to integrate into the Intersight APIs. We talked about it, in fact, I talked about it in my session at the Cisco Live in the summer last year, and now we've got that out as a product. So tremendous amount of work, both in traditional areas as well as some of these new spaces. >> Maybe we can unpack that Intersight piece a bit, because people might look at it initially and say, "Okay, multi-cloud, on-prem, all these environments, "but is this just a networking tool?" And working we're working with someone with Pure, maybe explain a little bit the scope and how, if I'm a Pure administrator, how I live into this world. >> Absolutely, so let's start with what is Intersight, just for a foundational thing. Intersight is our software management tool driven from the cloud. So everything from the personality of the server, the bios settings, the WLAN settings, the networking and the compute pieces of it, that gets administered from the cloud, but it does more. What it does is it can deliver playbooks from the cloud that give the server a certain kind of personality for the workload that it's supporting. So then the next question that anyone asks is, "Now that we have this partnership, "well can it do the same thing for storage? "Can it actually provision that storage, "get that up and running?" And the answer is yes, it can, but it's better because what it can not only do is, not only can it do that, getting that done is super simple. All Pure Storage needed to do was to write some of those Intersight APIs and deliver that playbook from the cloud, from a remote location potentially, into whatever your infrastructure is, provisioning compute, provisioning networking, provisioning storage, in a truly modern cloud-driven environment, right? So I think that's phenomenal what it does for our customers. >> Yeah, I'd agree with that. And I think it'll even become more important as the companies are partnering around our multi-cloud solutions. So, as you probably saw earlier this year in February, sorry, the end of 2018, Pure announced our first leaning into hybrid cloud, so that's Pure Cloud Data Services. That enables us to have Purity, which is our operating system on our storage, running in AWS to begin with. So you can pretty easily start to think about where this partnership is going to go, especially as it pertains to Intersight integration. >> And just to bounce on that, strategically, you can see the alignment there as well. I mean, Cisco's been talking about multi-cloud for a bit now, we've done work to enable similar development environments, whether we're doing something on-prem or in the cloud, so that you can move workloads from one to the other, or actually you can make workloads on both sides talk to each other, and, again, combined with what Katie just said, it makes it a really really compelling solution. >> Like you said, you've got pretty clear swimming lanes for the two companies. There's very little overlap here. You can't have too many of these types of partnerships, right, I mean, you got 25 thousand engineers almost, but still, you still have limited resources. So what makes this one so special, and why are you able to spend so much time and effort, each of you? >> I could start, so from a Pure perspective, I think the cultures are aligned, you called it out there, there's inherently not a lot of overlap in terms of where core competencies are. Pure is not looking at all to become a networking company. And just a lot of synergies in the market make it one that our engineers want to invest in. We have really picked Cisco as our lean-in partner, truthfully, I run all of the alliances at Pure, and a lion's share of my resources really are focused at that partnership. >> Yeah, and if you look at both these companies, Pure is a relative youngster among the storage companies, a new, modern, in a good way, a new, modern company built on modern software practices and so forth. Cisco, although a pretty veteran company, but Cisco compute is relatively new as well as a compute provider. So we are very similar in how our design philosophies work and how modern our infrastructures are, and that gets us to delivering results, delivering solutions to our customers with relatively less effort from our engineers. And that pace of innovation that we can do with Pure is not something we can do with every other company. >> We had a session earlier today, and we went pretty deep into AI, but it's probably worth touching on that. I guess my question here is, what are the customers asking you guys for in terms of AI infrastructure? What's that infrastructure look like that's powering the machine and intelligence era? >> You want to start? >> You want to go, I'll go first. This is a really exciting space, and not only is it exciting because AI is exciting, it's actually exciting because we've got some unique ingredients across Pure and Cisco to make this happen. What does AI feed on? AI feeds on data. The model requires that volume of data to actually train itself We've got an infrastructure, so we just released the C4ATML, the UCC4ATML, highly powered infrastructure, eight GPUs, interconnected, 180 terabytes on board, high network bandwidth, but it needs something to feed it the data, and what Pure's got with their FlashBlade is that ability to actually feed data to this AI infrastructure so that we can train bigger models or train these models faster. Makes for a fantastic solution because these ingredients are just custom made for each other. >> Anything you can add? >> Absolutely I'd agree with that. Really, if you look at AI and what it needs to be successful, and, first of all, all of our customers, if they're not thinking about it, they should be, and I will tell you most of them are, is, how do you ingest that amount of data? If you can't ingest that quickly, it's not going to be of use. So that's a big piece of it, and that's really what the new Cisco platform, I mean, the folks over at Pure are just thrilled about the new Cisco product, and then you take a look at the FlashBlade and how it's able to really scale out unstructured data, object it and file, really to make that useful, so when you have to scrub that data to be able to use it and correlate it, FlashBlade is the perfect solution. So really, this is two companies coming together with the best of breed technologies. >> And the tooling in that world is exploding, open source innovation, it needs a place to run all the Kafkas and the Caffes and the TensorFlows and the Pythons. It's not just confined to data scientists anymore. It's really starting to seep throughout the organization, are you seeing that? >> Yeah. >> What's happening is you've got the buzzwords going around, and that leads to businesses and the leaders of businesses saying, "We've got to have an AI strategy. "We've got to hire these data scientists." But at the same time, the data scientists can get started on the laptop, they can get started on the cloud. When they want to deploy this, they need an enterprise class, resilient, automated infrastructure that fits into the way they do their work. You've got to have something that's built on these components, so what we provide together is that infrastructure for the ITTs so that the data scientists, when they build their beautiful models, have a place to deploy them, have a place to put that into production, and can actually have that life cycle running in a much more smooth production-grade environment. >> Okay, so you guys are three years in, roughly. Where do you want to take this thing, what's the vision? Give us a little road map for the future as to what this partnership looks like down the road. >> Yeah, so I can start. So I think there's a few different vectors. We're going to continue driving the infrastructure for the traditional workloads. That's it, that's a big piece that we do, we continue doing that. We're going to drive a lot more on the automation side, I think there's such a lot of potential with what we've got on Intersight, with the automation that Pure supports, bring those together and really make it simple for our customers to get this up and running and manage that life cycle. And third vector's going to be imparting those new use cases, whether it be AI or more data analytics type use cases. There's a lot of potential that it unleashes for our customers and there's a lot of potential of bringing these technologies together to partner. So you'll see a lot more of that from us. I don't know, will you add something? >> Yeah, no, I absolutely agree. And I would say more FlashStack, look for more FlashStack CVDs, and AI, I think, is one to watch. We believe Cisco, really, this step that Cisco's made, is going to take AI infrastructure to the next level. So we're going to be investing much more heavily into that. And then cloud, from a hybrid cloud, how do these two companies leverage FlashStack and all the innovation we've done on prem together to really enable the multi-cloud. >> Great, alright, well Katie and KD, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. It was great to have you. >> Great. Thanks for having us. >> Thank you very much. >> You're welcome, alright. Keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE Live from Cisco Live Barcelona. We'll be right back. (techy music)

(bouncy music) >> Live, from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone. Live here in Barcelona it's theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Cisco Live 2019. I'm John Furrier. Dave Vellante, my co-host for the week, and Stu Miniman, who's also here doing interviews. Our next two guests is Mike Bundy, Senior Director of Global Cisco Alliance with Pure Storage, and Z, who's in charge of product strategy for Cisco. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for having us here. >> You're welcome. >> Thank you. >> We're in the DevNet zone. It's packed with people learning real use cases, rolling up their sleeves. Talk about the Cisco Pure relationship. How do you guys fit into all this? What's the alliance? >> You want to start? >> Sure. So, we have a partnership with Cisco, primarily around a solution called Flashstack in the converged infrastructure space. And most recently, we've evolved a new use-case and application together for artificial intelligence that Z's business unit have just released a new platform that works with Cisco and NVIDEA to accomplish customer application needs mainly in machine learning but all aspects of artificial intelligence, so. >> So AI is obviously a hot trend in machine learning but today at Cisco, the big story was not about the data center as much anymore as it's the data at the center of the value proposition which spans the on-premises, IoT edge, and multiple clouds so data now is everywhere. You've got to store it. It's going to be stored in the cloud, it's on-premise. So data at the center means a lot of things. You can program with it. It's got to be addressable. It has to be smart and aware and take advantage of the networking. So with all of that as the background, backdrop, what is the AI approach? How should people think about AI in context to storing data, using data? Not just moving packets from point A to point B, but you're storing it, you're pulling it out, you're integrating it into applications. A lot of moving parts there. What's the-- >> Yeah, you got a really good point here. When people think about machine learning, traditionally they just think about training. But we look at it as more than just training. It's the whole data pack line that starts with collecting the data, store the data, analyze the data, train the data, and then deploy it. And then put the data back. So it's really a very, it's a cycle there. It's where you need to consider how you actually collect the data from edge, how you store them, in the speed that you can, and give the data to the training side. So I believe when we work with Pure, we try to create this as a whole data pack line and think about the entire data movement and the storage need that we look at here. >> So we're in the DevNet zone and I'm looking at the machine learning with Python, ML Library, (mumbles) Flow, Appache Spark, a lot of this data science type stuff. >> Yup. >> But increasingly, AI is a workload that's going mainstream. But what are the trends that you guys are seeing in terms of traditional IT's involvement? Is it still sort of AI off on an island? What are you seeing there? >> So I'll take a guess, a stab at it. So really, every major company industry that we work with have AI initiatives. It's the core of the future for their business. What we're trying to do is partner with IT to get ahead of the large infrastructure demands that will come from those smaller, innovative projects that are in pilot mode so that they are a partner to the business and the data scientists rather than a laggard in the business, the way that sometimes the reputation that IT gets. We want to be the infrastructure, solid, like a cloud-like experience for the data scientists so they can worry more about the applications, the data, what it means to the business, and less about the infrastructure. >> Okay. And so you guys are trying to simplify that infrastructure, whether it's converged infrastructure, and other unifying approaches. Are you seeing the shift of that heavy lifting, of people now shifting resources to new workloads like AI? Maybe you could discuss what the trends are there? >> Yeah, absolutely. So I think AI started with more like a data science experiment. You see a couple of data scientists experimenting. Now it's really getting into mainstream. More and more people are into that. And as, I apologize. >> Mike. >> Mike. >> Mike, can we restart that question? (all laughing) My deep apology. I need a GPU or something in my brain. I need to store that data better. >> You're on Fortnite. Go ahead. >> Yes, so as Mike has said earlier on, it's not just the data scientists. It's actually an IT challenge as well and I think with Cisco, what we're trying to do with Pure here is, you know that Cisco thing, we're saying, "We're a bridge." We want to bridge the gap between the data scientists and the IT and make it not just AI as an experiment but AI at scale, at production level, and be ready to actually create real impact with the technology infrastructure that we can enable. >> Mike, talk about Pure's position. You guys have announced Pure in the cloud? >> Yes. >> You're seeing that software focus. Software is the key here. >> Absolutely. >> You're getting into a software model. AI and machine learning, all this we're talking about is software. Data is now available to be addressed and managed in that software life cycle. How is the role of the software for you guys with converged infrastructure at the center of all the Cisco announcements. You were out on stage today with converged infrastructure to the edge. >> Yes, so, if you look at the platform that we built, it's referenced back, being called the Data Hub. The Data Hub has a very tight synergy with all the applications you're referring to: Spark, Tensor Flow, et cetera, et cetera, Cafe. So, we look at it as the next generation analytics and the platform has a super layer on top of all those applications because that's going to really make the integration possible for the data scientists so they can go quicker and faster. What we're trying to do underneath that is use the Data Hub that no matter what the size, whether it's small data, large data, transaction based or more bulk data warehouse type applications, the Data Hub and the FlashBlade solution underneath handle all of that very, very different and probably more optimized and easier than traditional legacy infrastructures. Even traditional, even Flash, from some of our competitors, because we built this purpose-built application for that. Not trying to go backwards in terms of technology. >> So I want to put both you guys on the spot for a question. We hear infrastructure as code going on many, many years since theCUBE started nine years ago. Infrastructure as code, now it's here. The network is programmable, the infrastructure is programmable, storage is programmable. When a customer or someone asks you, how is infrastructure, networks, and storage programmable and what do I do? I used to provision storage, I've got servers. I'm going to the cloud. What do I do? How do I become AI enabled so that I could program the infrastructure? How do you guys answer that question? >> So a lot of that comes to the infrastructure management layer. How do you actually, using policy and using the right infrastructure management to make the right configuration you want. And I think one thing from programmability is also flexibility. Instead of having just a fixed configuration, what we're doing with Pure here is really having that flexibility where you can put Pure storage, different kind of storage with different kind of compute that we have. No matter we're talking about two hour use, four hour use, that kind of compute power is different and can max with different storage, depending on what the customer use case is. So that flexibility driven to the programmability that is managed by the infrastructure management layer. And we're extending that. So Pure and Cisco's infrastructure management actually tying together. It's really single pane of glass within the side that we can actually manage both Pure and Cisco. That's the programmability that we're talking about. >> Your customers get Pure storage, end-to-end manageability? >> With the Cisco compute, it's a single pane of glass. >> Okay. >> So where do I buy? I want to get started. What do you got for me? (laughing) >> It's pretty simple. It's three basic components. Cisco Compute and a platform for machine learning that's powered by NVIDEA GPUs; Cisco FlashBlade, which is the Data Hub and storage component; and then network connectivity from the number one network provider in the world, from Cisco. It's very simple. >> And it's a SKU, it's a solution? >> Yup, it's very simple. It's data-driven. It's not tied to a specific SKU. It's more flexible than that so you have better optimization of the network. You don't buy a 1000 series X and then only use 50% of it. It's very customizable. >> Okay, do I can customize it for my, whatever, data science team or my IT workloads? >> Yes, and provision it for multi-purpose, same way a service provider would if you're a large IT organization. >> Trend around breaking silos has been discussed heavily. Can you talk about multiple clouds, on-premise in cloud and edge all coming together? How should companies think about their data architecture because silos are good for certain things, but to make multi-cloud work and all this end-to-end and intent-based networking and all the power of AI's around the corner, you got to have the data out there and it's got to be horizontally scalable, if you will. How do you break down those silos? What's your advice, is there a use case for an architecture? >> I think it's a classic example of how IT has evolved to not think just silos and be multi-cloud. So what we advocate is to have a data platform that transpires the entire community, whether it's development, test, engineering, production applications, and that runs holistically across the entire organization. That would include on-prem, it would include integration with the cloud because most companies now require that. So you can have different levels of high availability or lower cost if your data needs to be archived. So it's really building and thinking about the data as a platform across the company and not just silos for various applications. >> So replication never goes away. >> Never goes away. (laughing) >> It's going to be around for a long, long time. >> Dev Test never goes away either. >> Your thoughts on this? >> Yeah, so adding on top of that, we believe where your infrastructure should go is where the data goes. You want to follow where the data is and that's exactly why we want to partner with Pure here because we see a lot of the data are sitting today in the very important infrastructure which is built by Pure Storage and we want to make sure that we're not just building a silo box sitting there where you have to pour the data in there all the time, but actually connect to our server with Pure Storage in the most manageable way. And for IT, it's the same kind of manual layer. You're not thinking about, oh, I have to manage all this silo box, or the shadow IT that some data scientists would have under their desk. That's the least thing you want. >> And the other thing that came up in the key note today, which we've been saying on theCUBE, and all the experts reaffirm, is that moving data costs money. You've got latency costs and also just cost to move traffic around. So moving compute to the edge or moving compute to the data has been a big, hot trend. How has the compute equation changed? Because I've got storage. I'm not just moving packets around. I'm storing it, I'm moving it around. How does that change the compute? Does that put more emphasis on the compute? >> It's definitely putting a lot more emphasis on compute. I think it's where you want compute to happen. You can pull all the data and want it to happen in the center place. That's fine if that's the way you want to manage it. If you have already simplified the data, you want to put it in that's the way. If you want to do it at the edge, near where the data source is, you can also do the cleaning there. So we want to make sure that, no matter how you want to manage it, we have the portfolio that can actually help you to manage that. >> And it's alternative processors. You mentioned NVIDEA. >> Exactly. >> You guys are the first to do a deal with them. >> And other ways, too. You've got to take advantage of technology like Kubernetes, as an example. So you can move the containers where they need to be and have policy managers for the compute requirements and also storage, so that you don't have contention or data integrity issues. So embracing those technologies in a multi-cloud world is very, very essential. >> Mike, I want to ask you a question around customer trends. What are you seeing as a pattern from a customer standpoint, as they prepare for AI, and start re-factoring some of their IT and/or resources, is there a certain use-case that they set up with Pure in terms of how they set up their storage? Is it different by customer? Is there a common trend that you see? >> Yeah, there are some commonalities. Take financial services, quant-trading as an example. We have a number of customers that leverage our platform for that because it's very time-sensitive, high-availability data. So really, I think that the trend overall of that would be: step back, take a look at your data, and focus on, how can I correlate and organize that? And really get it ready so that whatever platform you use from a storage standpoint, you're thinking about all aspects of data and get it in a format, in a form, where you can manage and catalog, because that's kind of essential to the entire thing. >> It really highlights the key things that we've been saying in storage for a long time. High-availability, integrity of the data, and now you've got application developers programming with data. With APIs, you're slinging APIs around like it's-- >> The way it should be. >> That's the way it should be. This is like Nirvana finally got here. How far along are we in the progress? How far? Are we early? Are we moving the needle? Where are the customers? >> You mean in terms of a partnership? >> Partnership, customer AI, in general. You guys, you've got storage, you've got networking and compute all working together. It has to be flexible, elastic, like the cloud. >> My feeling, Mike can correct me, or you can disagree with me. (laughing) I think right now, if we look at what all the analysts are saying, and what we're saying, I think most of the companies, more than 50% of companies either have deployed AI MO or are considering a plan of deploying that. But having said that, we do see that we're still at a relatively early stage because the challenges of making AI deployment at scale, where data scientists and IT are really working together. You need that level of security and that level of skill of infrastructure and software and evolving DevNet. So my feeling is we're still at a relatively early stage. >> Yeah, I think we are in the early adopter phase. We've had customers for the last two years that have really been driving this. We work with about seven of the automated car-driving companies. But if you look at the data from Morgan Stanley and other analysts, there's about a $13 billion infrastructure that's required for AI over the next three years, from 2019-2021, so that is probably 6X, 7X what it is today, so we haven't quite hit that bell curve yet. >> So people are doing their homework right now, setting up their architecture? >> It's the leaders. It's leaders in the industry, not the mainstream. >> Got it. >> And everybody else is going to close that gap, and that's where you guys come in, is helping them do that. >> That's scale. (talking over one another) >> That's what we built this platform with Cisco on, is really, the Flashstack for AI is around scale, for tens and twenties of petabytes of data that will be required for these applications. >> And it's a targeted solution for AI with all the integration pieces with Cisco built in? >> Yes. >> Great, awesome. We'll keep track of it. It's exciting. >> Awesome. >> It's cliche to say future-proof but in this case, it literally is preparing for the future. The bridge to the future, as the new saying at Cisco goes. >> Yes, absolutely. >> This is theCube coverage live in Barcelona. We'll be back with more live coverage after this short break. Thanks for watching. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vallente. Stay with us. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's The Cube, covering Cisco Live Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Barcelona, everybody. You're watching The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my cohost, Stu Miniman. This is day one of Cisco Live Barcelona. Katie Colbert is here. She's the vice president of alliances at Pure Storage, and she's joined by Kaustubh Das, otherwise known as KD, who's the vice president of computing systems at Cisco. Katie and KD, welcome to The Cube, good to see you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Alright, so let's start off, KD2, if you could just tell us about the partnership. Where did it start, how did it evolve? We'll get into it. >> We just had a terrific partnership, and the reason it's so great is it's really based on some foundational things that are super compatible. Pure Storage, Cisco, both super technology-driven companies, innovating. They're both also super programmatic companies. They'll do everything via API. It's very modern in that sense, the frameworks that we work on. And then from a business perspective, it's very compatible. We're chasing common markets, very few conflicts. So it's been rooted in solid foundations. And then, we've actually invested over the years to build more and more solutions for our customers jointly. So it's been terrific. >> So, Katie, I hate to admit how long we talk about partnering with Cisco >> It's going to age us. >> So you and I won't admit how many decades it's been partnering with Cisco, but here we are, 2019, Cisco's a very different company than it was a decade or two ago. >> Absolutely. >> Tell me what it's like working with them, especially as a company that's primarily in storage and data at Pure, what it means to partner with them. >> Absolutely, you're right. So, worked with Cisco as a partner for many years at the beginning of my career, then went away for, I'd say, a good 10 years, and joined Pure in June, and I will tell you one of the most exciting reasons why I joined Pure was the Pure and Cisco relationship. When I worked with them at the beginning of my career, it was great and I would tell you it's even better now. I will say that the momentum that these two companies have in the market is very phenomenal. A lot of differentiation from our products separately, but both together, I think that it's absolutely been very successful, and to KD's point, the investment that both companies are making really is just astronomical, and I see that our customers are the beneficiaries of that. It makes it so much easier for them to deploy and use the technologies together, which is exciting. >> So we always joke about Barney deals, I love you, you love me, I mean, it's clear you guys go much much deeper than that. So I want to probe at that a little bit. Particularly from an engineering standpoint, whether it's validated designs or other innovations that you guys are working on together, can we peel the onion on that one a little bit? Talk about what you guys are doing below that line. >> I'll start there then I'll hand it over to the engineering leader from Cisco. But if you think about the pace of this, the partnership, I think, is roughly 3 or so years old. We've 16 Cisco-validated designs for our FlashStack infrastructure. So that is just unbelievable. So, huge amount of investment from engineers, product managers, on both sides of the fence. >> Yeah, totally second that. We start out with the... Cisco-validated designs are like blueprints, so we start out with the blueprints for the standard workloads: Oracle, SAP. And we keep those fresh as new versions come out. But then I think we've taken it further into new spaces of late. ACI, we saw in the keynote this morning, it's going everywhere, it's going multi-site. We've done some work on marrying that with the clustering service of Pure Storage. On top of that, we're doing some work in AI and ML, which is super exciting, so we got some CBDs around that that's just coming out. We're doing some work on automation, coupling Intersight, which is Cisco's cloud-based automation suite, with Pure Storage and Pure Storage's ability to integrate into the Intersight APIs. We talked about it, in fact, I talked about it in my session at the Cisco Live in the summer last year, and now we've got that out as a product. So tremendous amount of work, both in traditional areas as well as some of these new spaces. >> Maybe we can unpack that Intersight piece a bit, because people might look at it initially and say, "Okay, multi-cloud, on-prem, all these environments, "but is this just a networking tool?" And working we're working with someone with Pure, maybe explain a little bit the scope and how, if I'm a Pure administrator, how I live into this world. >> Absolutely, so let's start with what is Intersight, just for a foundational thing. Intersight is our software management tool driven from the cloud. So everything from the personality of the server, the bios settings, the WLAN settings, the networking and the compute pieces of it, that gets administered from the cloud, but it does more. What it does is it can deliver playbooks from the cloud that give the server a certain kind of personality for the workload that it's supporting. So then the next question that anyone asks is, "Now that we have this partnership, "well can it do the same thing for storage? "Can it actually provision that storage, "get that up and running?" And the answer is yes, it can, but it's better because what it can not only do is, not only can it do that, getting that done is super simple. All Pure Storage needed to do was to write some of those Intersight APIs and deliver that playbook from the cloud, from a remote location potentially, into whatever your infrastructure is, provisioning compute, provisioning networking, provisioning storage, in a truly modern cloud-driven environment, right? So I think that's phenomenal what it does for our customers. >> Yeah, I'd agree with that. And I think it'll even become more important as the companies are partnering around our multi-cloud solutions. So, as you probably saw earlier this year in February, sorry, the end of 2018, Pure announced our first leaning into hybrid cloud, so that's Pure Cloud Data Services. That enables us to have Purity, which is our operating system on our storage, running in AWS to begin with. So you can pretty easily start to think about where this partnership is going to go, especially as it pertains to Intersight integration. >> And just to bounce on that, strategically, you can see the alignment there as well. I mean, Cisco's been talking about multi-cloud for a bit now, we've done work to enable similar development environments, whether we're doing something on-prem or in the cloud, so that you can move workloads from one to the other, or actually you can make workloads on both sides talk to each other, and, again, combined with what Katie just said, it makes it a really really compelling solution. >> Like you said, you've got pretty clear swimming lanes for the two companies. There's very little overlap here. You can't have too many of these types of partnerships, right, I mean, you got 25 thousand engineers almost, but still, you still have limited resources. So what makes this one so special, and why are you able to spend so much time and effort, each of you? >> I could start, so from a Pure perspective, I think the cultures are aligned, you called it out there, there's inherently not a lot of overlap in terms of where core competencies are. Pure is not looking at all to become a networking company. And just a lot of synergies in the market make it one that our engineers want to invest in. We have really picked Cisco as our lean-in partner, truthfully, I run all of the alliances at Pure, and a lion's share of my resources really are focused at that partnership. >> Yeah, and if you look at both these companies, Pure is a relative youngster among the storage companies, a new, modern, in a good way, a new, modern company built on modern software practices and so forth. Cisco, although a pretty veteran company, but Cisco compute is relatively new as well as a compute provider. So we are very similar in how our design philosophies work and how modern our infrastructures are, and that gets us to delivering results, delivering solutions to our customers with relatively less effort from our engineers. And that pace of innovation that we can do with Pure is not something we can do with every other company. >> We had a session earlier today, and we went pretty deep into AI, but it's probably worth touching on that. I guess my question here is, what are the customers asking you guys for in terms of AI infrastructure? What's that infrastructure look like that's powering the machine and intelligence era? >> You want to start? >> You want to go, I'll go first. This is a really exciting space, and not only is it exciting because AI is exciting, it's actually exciting because we've got some unique ingredients across Pure and Cisco to make this happen. What does AI feed on? AI feeds on data. The model requires that volume of data to actually train itself We've got an infrastructure, so we just released the C4ATML, the UCC4ATML, highly powered infrastructure, eight GPUs, interconnected, 180 terabytes on board, high network bandwidth, but it needs something to feed it the data, and what Pure's got with their FlashBlade is that ability to actually feed data to this AI infrastructure so that we can train bigger models or train these models faster. Makes for a fantastic solution because these ingredients are just custom made for each other. >> Anything you can add? >> Absolutely I'd agree with that. Really, if you look at AI and what it needs to be successful, and, first of all, all of our customers, if they're not thinking about it, they should be, and I will tell you most of them are, is, how do you ingest that amount of data? If you can't ingest that quickly, it's not going to be of use. So that's a big piece of it, and that's really what the new Cisco platform, I mean, the folks over at Pure are just thrilled about the new Cisco product, and then you take a look at the FlashBlade and how it's able to really scale out unstructured data, object it and file, really to make that useful, so when you have to scrub that data to be able to use it and correlate it, FlashBlade is the perfect solution. So really, this is two companies coming together with the best of breed technologies. >> And the tooling in that world is exploding, open source innovation, it needs a place to run all the Kafkas and the Caffes and the TensorFlows and the Pythons. It's not just confined to data scientists anymore. It's really starting to seep throughout the organization, are you seeing that? >> Yeah. >> What's happening is you've got the buzzwords going around, and that leads to businesses and the leaders of businesses saying, "We've got to have an AI strategy. "We've got to hire these data scientists." But at the same time, the data scientists can get started on the laptop, they can get started on the cloud. When they want to deploy this, they need an enterprise class, resilient, automated infrastructure that fits into the way they do their work. You've got to have something that's built on these components, so what we provide together is that infrastructure for the ITTs so that the data scientists, when they build their beautiful models, have a place to deploy them, have a place to put that into production, and can actually have that life cycle running in a much more smooth production-grade environment. >> Okay, so you guys are three years in, roughly. Where do you want to take this thing, what's the vision? Give us a little road map for the future as to what this partnership looks like down the road. >> Yeah, so I can start. So I think there's a few different vectors. We're going to continue driving the infrastructure for the traditional workloads. That's it, that's a big piece that we do, we continue doing that. We're going to drive a lot more on the automation side, I think there's such a lot of potential with what we've got on Intersight, with the automation that Pure supports, bring those together and really make it simple for our customers to get this up and running and manage that life cycle. And third vector's going to be imparting those new use cases, whether it be AI or more data analytics type use cases. There's a lot of potential that it unleashes for our customers and there's a lot of potential of bringing these technologies together to partner. So you'll see a lot more of that from us. I don't know, will you add something? >> Yeah, no, I absolutely agree. And I would say more FlashStack, look for more FlashStack CVDs, and AI, I think, is one to watch. We believe Cisco, really, this step that Cisco's made, is going to take AI infrastructure to the next level. So we're going to be investing much more heavily into that. And then cloud, from a hybrid cloud, how do these two companies leverage FlashStack and all the innovation we've done on prem together to really enable the multi-cloud. >> Great, alright, well Katie and KD, thanks so much for coming to The Cube. It was great to have you. >> Great. Thanks for having us. >> Thank you very much. >> You're welcome, alright. Keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching The Cube Live from Cisco Live Barcelona. We'll be right back. (techy music)

>> Announcer: Live from the Bill Graham Auditorium in San Francisco, it's The Cube, covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2018. Brought to you by Pure Storage. (upbeat techno music) >> Welcome back to The Cube, we are live at Pure Accelerate 2018 at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco. I'm Lisa Martin, moonlighting as Prince today, joined by Dave Vellante, moonlighting as The Who. Should we call you Roger? >> Yeah, Roger. Keith. (all chuckling) I have a moon bat. (laughing) >> It's a very cool concert venue, in case you don't know that. We are joined by a couple of guests, Cube alumnae, welcoming them back to The Cube. Rajiev Rajavasireddy, the VP of Product Management and Solutions at Pure Storage and Siva Sivakumar, the Senior Director of Data Center Solutions at Cisco. Gentlemen, welcome back. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Rajiev: Happy to be here. >> So talk to us about, you know, lots of announcements this morning, Cisco and Pure have been partners for a long time. What's the current status of the Cisco-Pure partnership? What are some of the things that excite you about where you are in this partnership today? >> You want to take that, Siva, or you want me to take it? >> Sure, sure. I think if you look back at what brought us together, obviously both of us are looking at the market transitions and some of the ways that customers were adopting technologies from our site. The converged infrastructure is truly how the partnership started. We literally saw that the customers wanted simplification, wanted much more of a cloud-like experience. They wanted to see infrastructure come together in a much more easier fashion. That we bring the IT, make it easier for them, and we started, and of course, the best of breed technology on both sides, being a Flash leader from their side, networking and computer leader on our side, we truly felt the partnership brought the best value out of both of us. So it's a journey that started that way and we look back now and we say that this is absolutely going great and the best is yet to come. >> So from my side, basically Pure had started what we now call FlashStack, a converged infrastructure offering, roughly about four years ago. And about two and a half years ago, Cisco started investing a lot in this partnership. We're very thankful to them, because they kind of believed in us. We were growing, obviously. But we were not quite as big as we are right now. But they saw the potential early. So about roughly two-and-a-half years ago, I talked about them investing in us. I'm not sure how many people know about what a Cisco validated design is. It's a pretty exhaustive document. It takes a lot of work on Cisco's site to come up with one of those. And usually, a single CVD takes about two or three of their TMEs, highly technical resources and about roughly three to six months to build those. >> Per CVD? >> Per CVD. >> Wow. >> Like I said, it's very exhaustive, I mean you get your building materials, your versions, your interoperability, your, you can actually, your commands that you actually use to stand up that infrastructure and the applications, so on and so forth. So in a nine-month span, they kind of did seven CVDs for us. That was phenomenal. We were very, very thankful that they did that. And over time, that investment paid off. There was a lot of good market investment that Cisco and Pure jointly made, all those investments paid off really well in terms of the customer adoption, the acquisition. And essentially we are at a really good point right now. When we came out with our FlashArray X70 last April, Cisco was about the same time, they were coming out with the M5 servers. And so they invested again, and gave us five more CVDs. And just recently they've added FlashBlade to that portfolio. As you know, FlashBlade is a new product offering. Well not so new, but relatively new, product offering from PR, so we have a new CV that just got released that includes FlashArray and Flash Blade for Oracle. So FlashArray does the online transaction processing, FlashBlade does data warehousing, obviously Cisco networking and Cisco servers do everything OLTB and data warehouse, it's an end to an architecture. So that was what Matt Burr had talked about on stage today. We are also excited to announce that we had that we had introduced AIRI AI-ready infrastructure along with Nvidia at their expo recently. We are excited to say that Cisco is now part of that AIRI infrastructure that Matt Burr had talked about on stage as well. So as you can tell, in a two and half year period we've come a really long way. We have a lot of customer adoption every quarter. We keep adding a ton of customers and we are mutually benefiting from this partnership. >> So I want to ask you about, follow up on the Oracle solution. Oracle would obviously say, "Okay, you buy our database, "buy our SAS, buy the Red Stack, "single throat to choke, "You're going to run better, "take advantage of all the hooks we have." You've heard it before. And it's an industry discussion. >> Rajiev: Of course. >> Customer have it, Oracle comes in hard. So what's the advantage of working with you guys, versus going with an all-Red Stack? Let's talk about that a little bit. >> Sure. Do you want to do it? >> I think if you look at the Oracle databases being deployed, this is a, this really powers many companies. This is really the IT platform. And one of the things that customers, or major customers standardize on this. Again, if they have a standardization from an Oracle perspective, they have a standardization from an infrastructure perspective. Just a database alone is not necessarily easy to put on a different infrastructure, manage them, operate them, go through lifecycle. So they look for a architecture. They look for something that's a overall platform for IT. "I want to do some virtualization. "I want to run desktop virtualization. "I want to do Oracle. "I want to do SAP." So the typical IT operates as more of "I want to manage my infrastructure as a whole. "I want to manage my database and data as its own. "I want its own way of looking." So while there are way to make very appliancey behaviors, that actually operates one better, the approach we took is truly delivering a architecture for data center. The fact that the network as well as the computer is so programmable it makes it easy to expand. Really brings a value from a complete perspective. But if you look at Pure again, their FlashArrays truly have world-class performance. So the customer also looks at, "Well I can get everything from one vendor. "Am I getting the best of breed? "Am I getting the world-class technology from "every one of those aspects and perspectives?" So we certainly think there are a good class of customers who value what we bring to the table and who certainly choose us for what we are. >> And to add to what Siva has just said, right? So if you looked at pre-Flash, you're mostly right in the sense that, hey, if you built an application, especially if it was mission-vertical application, you wanted it siloed, you didn't want another application jumping in and kind of messing up the performance and response times and all that good stuff, right? So in those kind of cases, yeah, appliances made sense. But now, when you have all Flash, and then you have servers and networking that can actually elaborates the performance of Flash, you don't really have to worry about mixing different applications and messing up performance for one at the expense of the other. That's basically, it's a win-win for the customers to have much more of a consolidated platform for multiple applications as opposed to silos. 'Cause silos are always hard to manage, right? >> Siva, I want to ask you, you know, Pure has been very bullish, really, for many years now. Obviously Cisco works with a lot of other vendors. What was it a couple years ago? 'Cause you talked about the significant resource investment that Cisco has been making for a couple of years now in Pure Storage. What is it that makes this so, maybe this Flash tech, I'm kind of thinking of the three-legged stool that Charlie talked about this morning. But what were some of the things that you guys saw a few years ago, even before Pure was a public company, that really drove Cisco to make such a big investment in this? >> I think they, when you look at how Cisco has evolved our data center portfolio, I mean, we are a very significant part of the enterprise today powered by Cisco, Cisco networking, and then we grew into the computer business. But when you looked at the way we walked into this computer business, the traditional storage as we know today is something we actually led through a variety of partnerships in the industry. And our approach to the partnership is, first of all, technology. Technology choice was very very critical, that we bring the best of breed for the customers. But also, again, the customer themself, speaking to us, and then our channel partners, who are very critical for our enablement of the business, is very very critical. So the way we, and when Pure really launched and forayed into all Flash, and they created this whole notion that storage means Flash and that was never the patterning before. That was a game-changing, sort of a model of offering storage, not just capacity but also Flash as my capacity as well as the performance point. We really realized that was going to be a good set of customers will absorb that. Some select workloads will absorb that. But as Flash in itself evolved to be much more mainstream, every day's data storage can be in a Flash medium. They realize, customers realized, this technology, this partner, has something very unique. They've thought about a future that was coming, which we realized was very critical for us. When we evolved network from 10-gig fabric to 40-gig to 100-gig, the workloads that are the slowest part of any system is the data movement. So when Flash became faster and easier for data to be moved, the fabric became a very critical element for the eventual success of our customer. We realized a partnership with Pure, with all Flash and the faster network, and faster compute, we realized there is something unique that we can bring to bear for the customer. So our partnership minds had really said, "This is the next big one that we are going to "invest time and energy." And so we clearly did that and we continue to do that. I mean we continue to see huge success in the customer base with the joint solutions. >> This issue of "best of breed" versus a kind of integrated stacks, it's been around forever, it's not going to go away. I mean obviously Cisco, in the early days of converged infrastructure, put a lot of emphasis on integrating, and obviously partnerships. Since that time, I dunno what it was, 2009 or whatever it was, things have changed a lot. Y'know, cloud was barely a thought back then. And the cloud has pushed this sort of API economy. Pure talks about platforms and integrating through APIs. How has that changed your ability to integrate "best of breed" more seamlessly? >> Actually, you know, I've been working with UCS since it started, right? And it's perhaps, it was a first server system that was built on an API-first philosophy. So everything in the Cisco UCS system can be basically, anything you can do to it GUI or the command line, you can do it their XML API, right? It's an open API that they provide. And they kind of emphasized the openness of it. When they built the initial converged infrastructure stacks, right, the challenge was the legacy storage arrays didn't really have the same API-first programmability mentality, right? If you had to do an operation, you had a bunch of, a ton of CLI commands that you had to go through to get to one operation, right? So Pure, having the advantage of being built from scratch, when APIs are what people want to work with, does everything through rest APIs. All function features, right? So the huge advantage we have is with both Pure, Pure actually unlocks the potential that UCS always had. To actually be a programmable infrastructure. That was somewhat held back, I don't know if Siva agrees or not, but I will say it. That kind of was held back by legacy hardware that didn't have rest space APIs or XML or whatever. So for example, they have Python, and PowerShell-based toolkits, based on their XML APIs that they built around that. We have Python PowerShell toolkits that we built around our own rest APIs. We have puppet integration installed, and all the other stuff that you saw on the stage today. And they have the same things. So if you're a customer, and you've standardized, you've built your automation around any of these things, right, If you have the Intuit infrastructure that is completely programmable, that cloud paradigms that you're talking about is mainly because of programmability, right, that people like that stuff. So we offer something very similar, the joint-value proposition. >> You're being that dev-ops kind of infrastructure-as-code mentality to systems design and architecture. >> Rajiev: Yeah. >> And it does allow you to bring the cloud operating model to your business. >> An aspect of the cloud operating model, right. There's multiple different things that people, >> Yeah maybe not every single feature, >> Rajiev: Right. >> But the ones that are necessary to be cloud-like. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Dave: That's kind of what the goal is. >> Let's talk about some customer examples. I think Domino's was on stage last year. >> Right. >> And they were mentioned again this morning about how they're leveraging AI. Are they a customer of Flash tech? Is that maybe something you can kind of dig into? Let's see how the companies that are using this are really benefiting at the business level with this technology. >> I think, absolutely, Domino's is one of our top examples of a Flash tech customer. They obviously took a journey to actually modernize, consolidate many applications. In fact, interestingly, if you look at many of the customer journeys, the place where we find it much much more valuable in this space is the customer has got a variety of workloads and he's also looking to say, "I need to be cloud ready. "I need to have a cloud-like concept, "that I have a hybrid cloud strategy today "or it'll be tomorrow. "I need to be ready to catch him and put him on cloud." And the customer also has the mindset that "While I certainly will keep my traditional applications, "such as Oracle and others, "I also have a very strong interest in the new "and modern workloads." Whether it is analytics, or whether it is even things like containers micro-services, things like that which brings agility. So while they think, "I need to have a variety "of things going." Then they start asking the question, "How can I standardize on a platform, "on an architecture, on something that I can "reuse, repeat, and simplify IT." That's, by far, it may sound like, you know, you got everything kind of thing, but that is by far the single biggest strength of the architecture. That we are versatile, we are multi-workload, and when you really build and deploy and manage, everything from an architecture, from a platform perspective looks the same. So they only worry about the applications they are bringing onboard and worry about managing the lifecycle of the apps. And so a variety of customers, so what has happened because of that is, we started with commercial or mid-size customers, to larger commercial. But now we are much more in enterprise. Large, many large IT shops are starting to standardize on Flash tech, and many of our customers are really measured by the number of repeat purchases they will come back and buy. Because once they like and they bought, they really love it and they come back and buy a lot more. And this is the place where it gets very exciting for all of us that these customers come back and tell us what they want. Whether we build automation or build management architecture, our customer speaks to us and says, "You guys better get together and do this." That's where we want to see our partners come to us and say, "We love this architecture but we want these features in there." So our feedback and our evolution really continues to be a journey driven by the demand and the market. Driven by the customers who we have. And that's hugely successful. When you are building and launching something into the marketplace, your best reward is when customer treats you like that. >> So to basically dovetail into what Siva was talking about, in terms of customers, so he brought up a very valid point. So what customers are really looking for is an entire stack, an infrastructure, that is near invisible. It's programmable, right? And it's, you can kind of cookie-cutter that as you scale. So we have an example of that. I'm not going to use the name of the customer, 'cause I'm sure they're going to be okay with it, but I just don't want to do it without asking their permission. It's a healthcare service provider that has basically, literally dozens of these Flash techs that they've standardized on. Basically, they have vertical applications but they also offer VM as a service. So they have cookie-cuttered this with full automation, integration, they roll these out in a very standard way because of a lot of automation that they've done. And they love the Flash tech just because of the programmability and everything else that Siva was talking about. >> With new workloads coming on, do you see any, you know, architectural limitations? When I say new workloads, data-driven, machine intelligence, AI workloads, do we see any architectural limitations to scale, and how do you see that being addressed in the near future? >> Rajiev: Yeah, that's actually a really good question. So basically, let's start with the, so if you look at Bare Metal VMs and containers, that is one factor. In that factor, we're good because, you know, we support Bare Metal and so does the entire stack, and when I say we, I'm talking about the entire Flash tech servers and storage and network, right. VMs and then also containers. Because you know, most of the containers in the early days were ephemeral, right? >> Yeah. >> Rajiev: Then persistent storage started happening. And a lot of the containers would deploy in the public cloud. Now we are getting to a point where customers are kind of, basically experimenting with large enterprises with containers on prem. And so, the persistent storage that connects to containers is kind of nascent but it's picking up. So there's Kubernetes and Docker are the primary components in there, right? And Docker, we already have Docker native volume plug-ins and Cisco has done a lot of work with Docker for the networking and server pieces. And Kubernetes has flex volumes and we have Kubernetes flex volume integration and Cisco works really well with Kubernetes. So there are no issues in that factor. Now if you're talking about machine learning and Artificial Intelligence, right? So it depends. So for example, Cisco's servers today are primarily driven by Intel-based CPUs, right? And if you look at the Nvidia DGXs, these are mostly GPUs. Cisco has a great relationship with Nvidia. And I will let Siva speak to the machine learning and artificial intelligence pieces of it, but the networking piece for sure, we've already announced today that we are working with Cisco in our AIRI stack, right? >> Dave: Right. >> Yeah, no, I think that the next generation workloads, or any newer workloads, always comes with a different set of, some are just software-level workloads. See typically, software-type of innovation, given the platform architecture is more built with programmability and flexibility, adopting our platforms to a newer software paradigm, such as container micro-services, we certainly can extend the architecture to be able to do that and we have done that several times. So that's a good area that covers. But when there are new hardware innovations that comes with, that is interconnect technologies, or that is new types of Flash models, or machine-learning GPU-style models, what we look at from a platform perspective is what can we bring from an integrated perspective. That, of course, allows IT to take advantage of the new technology, but maintain the operational and IT costs of doing business to be the same. That's where our biggest strength is. Of course Nvidia innovates on the GPU factor, but IT doesn't just do GPUs. They have to integrate into a data center, flow the data into the GPU, run compute along that, and applications to really get most out of this information. And then, of course, processing for any kind of real-time, or any decision making for that matter, now you're really talking about bringing it in-house and integrating into the data center. >> Dave: Right. >> Any time you start in that conversation, that's really where we are. I mean, that's our, we welcome more innovation, but we know when you get into that space, we certainly shine quite well. >> Yeah, it's secured, it's protected, it's move it, it's all kind of things. >> So we love these innovations but then our charter and what we are doing is all in making this experience of whatever the new be, as seamless as possible for IT to take advantage of that. >> Wow, guys, you shared a wealth of information with us. We thank you so much for talking about these Cisco-Pure partnership, what you guys have done with FlashStack, you're helping customers from pizza delivery with Domino's to healthcare services to really modernize their infrastructures. Thanks for you time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. >> For Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin, you're watching the Cube live from Pure Accelerate 2018. Stick around, we'll be right back.

>> Announcer: Live from the Bill Graham Auditorium in San Francisco, it's The Cube, covering PureStorage Accelerate 2018. Brought to you by PureStorage. (upbeat electronic music) >> Man: Graduated ASU. >> Welcome back to PureStorage Accelerate 2018. I am Lisa Martin with The Cube, sporting the clong of Prince, formerly known as, today because we are at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, a really cool concert venue that's been here since 1950 and I'm joined by Dave The Who Vellante today. >> Play the toast and tea. (laughs) >> Pretty groovy T-shirt there. And we're joined by a couple of guys, next we've got Axel Streichart, the senior director of business application solutions from Pure and John Meng, senior director of IT operations at Simpson Strong-Tie. Hi guys! >> Hi. >> Lisa: Welcome to The Cube! >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> So John, first question to you. Tell us about Simpson Strong-Tie. Who are you guys, obviously you're a Pure customer, but give us a little bit of an orientation to the business. >> Sure, so Simpson Strong-Tie, we're a public company based out of Pleasanton, California. We've been in business since about 1956, if I've got my history right, so we've been around for quite a long time. We're a manufacturing organization. Basically, if you're building a home or a deck or if you're needing to put two by fours together, our niche is that little connector, that bracket that connects those two by fours and we do pretty well in that business. Overall our revenue is just shy of a billion dollars, so a pretty decent sized organization. >> Dave: So Pure passed you. >> Yes, last year, you know. >> You okay with that or? >> I'm okay with that. (all laugh) >> So tell us about, from a business perspective, the need for PureStorage specifically with respect to your SAP journey. >> So a couple of years ago when I came on board, the business had made a decision that they were going to get off of their old ERP system onto a new ERP system. When I say old ERP system, I'm being a little respectful there. It's a homegrown application running on SQL which is basically, they lovingly called it Blue Screen because you go to fileshare and you double click on the executable that you need, for example, if you're doing accounts payable or accounts receivables or purchase orders or what have you, you double click on the executable you want, opens up a nice little blue screen and it's a DOS based blue screen and you tab around and enter all your information. They had been running on that application for about 30 years. >> Lisa: Is that all? (laughs) >> Yeah, so quite a while. >> Dave: It works. >> It works, right. If it ain't broke don't fix it, but it was developed by a single person and it was time that the company put on some bootstraps and hitched them up, so they went to market to decide on what ERP application they were going to move to and SAP won out. They had actually been running for a year on a test system hosted by SAP when I came on board, so the decision had already been made, the application wise from an ERP perspective, but the next step in our journey for Simpson, and my challenge, was how do we host this environment? Do we host it in a cloud, do we host it on-prem? And so as I took a, looking at our environment, a very distributed environment, I said, alright, well first and foremost, SAP is a centralized solution. Is there a way for us to create a single environment that our entire company could run on, not only for SAP but everything else, a mixed use environment? And I started having conversations with Pure. They actually let me talk to a couple of their existing customers who were very happy about their mixed use workload including ServiceNow who talked today, so definitely a shout out to them on the conversations we had back a couple of years ago. Anyways, Pure ended up being our foundation for currently our core tenant, which is SAP, but also the future tenant for everything else that we're going to throw on there. And it's been an incredible journey over these last couple of years with them. >> And why the decision to stay on-prem, versus go to the cloud? Was it a function of SAP really not being there in the cloud or your data, you didn't just want to shove your business into the public cloud? >> So there was definitely a lot of analysis that went into that. Just from a financial perspective, I worked with the CFO and we put together a 12 year ROI on cloud versus on-prem and just to kind of really give ourselves some understanding over time what the impact would be of renting versus owning and it was very clear that on-prem financially made sense. Then we had to talk about the business, what was the best for the business. We looked at it from a, when I came there, there was some, the project team looking at SAP had really already made their mind up. They wanted it off of IT. They wanted it in an environment that they trusted, so when I came on board I said, look this is something I've done before. We have experience, we have the in-house expertise, you just trust me that this is the right thing and let me show you how and that's where, honestly, a lot of the information that I was able to pull off of FlashStack, off of SAP, it's a certified solution, talking to ServiceNow I was able to prove to the business that look, hosting it internally made the most sense financially as well as for our business and what we were trying to achieve. >> Made you happy. >> Yeah and it's not just that, but this is a story we're hearing more often now. So customers actually trying this out in the cloud and realizing, number one, the cost, it's not that cost-efficient and effective as they were planning for and seeing, especially when you're making multiple copies of this SAP environments. The costs go through the roof and the other thing is also what a lot of customers then realize is how do you actually get your data and get your communication from your data center back to the cloud provider? You need a big pipe and this communication cost just to get the data out is huge, is sometimes huge. The other thing is SLAs. It sounds like a good thing, but in many cases, SLA's because they're not flexible, you're ending up quarter end you need help and they're saying, nope, talk to you in four days. It's not really acceptable. And the third one is, there's this whole concept around I don't really have to invest now into the knowledge, into the skill set, because I put it all in the cloud. It's not the reality. The reality, you still have to invest into the skills. Isn't that? >> Everything he has said is actually the conversations that we had in-house, absolutely. If you want to do a data migration from QA to Dev or Dev to Production or whatever your landscape is and how you want to move the data, oh, well, that's going to be a charge. Oh well, okay, well I need to spin up this extra project. Oh, well there's another charge. I mean, it's just constant nickel and diming and another key component that you hit on that I failed to mention was hosting it internally allowed us to control the end to end experience for our end users. When you're talking about hosting it in the cloud, your data is somewhere else and you can not control end to end. You can control it up to a certain extent, but then from there all you can rely on is the SLAs and, to his point, the SLAs are only what's on paper, they're not very flexible at all. >> So the business case didn't pan out for the cloud. >> Correct. >> But there's certainly attributes of the cloud that are attractive, so what are those attributes and how are you bringing those on-prem? >> So flexibility. Flexibility is huge for us, the ability to just quickly be able to spin things up and scale them back as needed. I kind of look of it as, look, there's a water line that you're going to use on a day in and day out basis for your organization. Maximize your investment there. On the peaks and valleys that you're going to have, that's where the cloud can really help and so, is cloud completely off the table for us? No, that's where we're going to be able to burst into that sort of scenario. If we need more compute, we need more spin cycles, whatever we need from the cloud, we can throw it up there and then bring it back down, so have much more controllable costs in our mind. >> So a major change in the application environment, migration, from an old platform. You had to freeze the app. Does that freeze the code? >> John: Yep. >> How long did you have to freeze the code for? >> So, when we're talking about, just making sure I understand your question. >> Your home-grown ERP, blue screen, C prompt to the SAP environment. >> Yeah, so the landscape as we have it today, we actually just went live on SAP early February and it's not company wide. It's only a certain branch. In its strength, the beauty of that previous application, it was very de-centralized and each branch where we have a high consolidation of users and workers, each branch had their own data center hosting their own ERP for their branch, so we could freeze their environment just during their time window. >> I see. >> Now the challenge for us today is as we start consolidating, those windows start to overlap, but that's honestly why we've invested in technologies like FlashStack and so forth that come with the redundancy built in so we can work on the environment without having to freeze it or bring it down. >> So you need the speed to compress those discontinuities. >> Yes, yes. >> Dave: In data. >> Absolutely. >> What about data protection? How do you, I know that's an area of expertise of yours. How do you approach data protection in this new environment? Are you doing anything differently? Where does Pure fit? >> It's actually a huge shift for us on how we do things. From a data protection standpoint, we're talking about disaster recovery, business continuity and so we have active passive data centers. We're utilizing what Pure has under the hood to be able to replicate in multiple ways. And that's the beauty of our setup that we've designed is the ability to replicate in multiple ways, because in a multi-tenant environment, yes, there are certain parts of the stack that one shoe will fit all sizes. I would say that PureStorage is that, but when you start getting to the details of each of the applications, they don't all play the same way when it comes to DR or it comes to replication or data protection and we will need to look at each one of those applications and design a data protection strategy around it as we import it in, so for SAP, we do have differencing of how we're going to protect that versus when we bring in our web servers, versus when we bring in SharePoint and other core applications to the business. >> So Axel, you mentioned, well actually it was John, you mentioned that you had the opportunity to talk to ServiceNow and maybe another customer of Pure as well when you were in this decision making process. I imagine ServiceNow's business is probably quite different from Simpson Strong-Tie, so what, Axel, I guess both of you, help us understand, what were some of the similar changes that, say, a ServiceNow faced that you were facing and then Axel, to your point, tell us a little bit about the SAP alliance that you have with Pure and how customers as big as ServiceNow and Simpson Strong-Tie are helping to evolve that relationship? >> Me first? >> Go for it. >> Alright, so one of the biggest strategies, the focus that I had when I was making the decision around hosting SAP, I really wanted to make sure I understood, did I have to go a siloed approach? Was I buying architecture specifically for SAP or could I do a multi-use workload? Multi-purpose was huge for me. I was really, I couldn't understand how, in 2016 when I was looking at this, I'm like, look, it's 2016, I know there's a solution out there that can solve this problem and so that's what I was challenging Pure and they're like, who do you want to talk to? And I said, "Well I want to talk to somebody "who's running SAP and I want to talk to somebody "who's running SAP in a mixed-workload environment." And that's where ServiceNow came into play. And when I was having conversations with them, I said, alright, so you're running mixed workload. Yes, okay, when you have an SAP performance problem, do you have to, is there a lot of effort to show that there's, where the problem in the performance is? And there was a pause on the phone and the guy actually giggled over the phone. I don't know how else to say it. And he's like, "Performance problems? "We don't have any." And so, when you hear that, especially when you're talking about SAP, which is a known beast of an application inside any environment and it will use whatever resource you throw at it and it won't play nice with other apps, when I heard that, I was like, okay, where do I sign? So it was basically that conversation that really said, alright, let's give this a try. The other thing, honestly, for us is SAP is our first tenant and as we start applying other applications to it, we already have our baseline established and we can watch as the other applications are thrown in and it's not impacting anything, SAP, or on their own. >> So FlashStack is going to be able to give you a foundation to not only scale your SAP infrastructure-- >> Absolutely. >> But also to expand to multiple workloads. >> Yeah, for example, some of our public web facing applications, we've already moved them in-house. We used to use a public service provider, a public cloud offering for this web service that I'm talking about. It would take, so you'd go out there and you'd say, you know what, I want a product catalog of all Simpson products and you hit the button. 45 minutes later, it's downloaded, 45 minutes. I took that workload and I put it in our data center. Three minutes. 45 minutes to three minutes. >> Lisa: Wow. >> And then another test was a web crawler, so we did a web crawler across that same web application to confirm when we moved it from one location to the other we didn't miss anything. In the old environment, running on a public cloud infrastructure, it took 20 minutes. 17 seconds on our own. And it was run from the same PC. There was no, it was pretty clear and honestly, when marketing felt that increase in performance and saw it and realized it, they bragged to the CFO and now the CFO's like, okay, when are we going to get this out of SAP? Well we have to get the whole company on SAP before we can really realize this investment, but they're very excited about the opportunities. >> And how long have you had the Pure infrastructure? >> We installed it probably about year and a half ago, because we had to get it prepared. We installed it about a year and a half ago. >> So you haven't had to do any upgrades yet. >> No, not major ones. We actually have our first major one this week. We're actually scheduling it, but one of the questions I was asked on an earlier panel was how due you handle outages with Pure and how has your experience been with support. Well, I'm sorry we haven't had to call support yet. I've heard great stories about it (Lisa laughs) and I know that our guys that are working with support right now to get our upgrades done, they've had nothing but praise, but honestly we haven't had a lot of interaction yet with their support, just because we haven't needed it yet. >> And you have an in-house development staff, application development team? >> Yes. >> Has their work flow changed at all in terms of being able to share data, share copies of data, are you there yet or? >> We're not there yet, but one of the goals of our environment, so we have two data centers and we have load balancers in front of the two data centers. When it comes to hosting our public web side of things, the goal is to have a green and a red environment where you develop on the red, green is your production and when it comes time, you just flip the switch and your development becomes your active. And so, basically, a lot of the nuances and strategies that you get out of public cloud, we're going to attain those using our private cloud infrastructure. >> Essentially use live data of the test environment-- >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> And then cutting over immediately. You couldn't have done that three, four, five years ago. >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> So Axel, we're just about out of time, but how common is John's story with Simpson Strong-Tie in terms of, we haven't had to call support yet. Are you hearing this resonate pretty pervasively in your SAP install base across industries? >> This is a very typical environment. I would call it almost green field, but most of the environments that we are dealing with are brown field, so customers are long-time SAP users and customers and they're going from, let's say, the Oracle environment into a HANA environment and the nice thing about this is that we are actually providing a platform that can help customers no matter where they are in their journey. If they are still in Oracle, they're already on HANA, they're moving onto AI, whatever it might be, they don't have to change anything on the infrastructure, per se, because there is no configuration or tuning necessary, whether it's Oracle, whether it's HANA, whether it's AI, so you're running it off the same platform. The other thing is that I want to mention is, because you asked me about our relationship with SAP. It's a very strong relationship, so we're actually working with SAP worldwide in their core innovation labs, so they have labs around the world where they develop new solutions together with hardware and software partners and they love to work with PureStorage because it is so simple and they're coming from a functional side. They don't care about the infrastructure at all. They're saying as long as it's simple and you can imagine they are pretty much the Switzerland of ERP. We actually recently published a white paper together with SAP around how to actually save license cost, SAP license cost, of up to 75%. Now you would ask yourself, why would SAP do that? Why would they promote something, push something, that actually cuts into their revenue? But for SAP it is more important to increase the adoption rate of HANA rather than the revenue that's behind it, so that's why we are publishing, and it's on the SAP website that you can download and you can see, together with PureStorage. It's an amazing story that we have. >> Let-- >> And honestly, that was part of why we chose Pure in the beginning, they're certified and now I didn't have to go to the business and try to convince them. It was all on paper for us. >> I can't help but notice that you brought a little kitty cat to the set, Axel. Tell us about this little stuffed animal. >> Maybe you heard it in the keynote this morning. We were talking about PureStorage is actually moving from their solution development towards engineered solutions. We want to actually put more application specific functionality and embed it directly into the array and one of the big challenges that a lot of customers have is how do I create copies, clones, and refreshes of my SAP environment? And we have customers it takes them sometimes nine days just for one copy, nine days. Why? Because it's a very complex and complicated end to end process, so we thought about why don't we take this entire process, automate this entire process, and embed it into our array, and we call this tool that we developed and that's available for everybody that, it's included in the maintenance. We call it Copy Automation Tool, CAT. >> The cat! >> That's the cat. (all laugh) >> And that's what we are, and so if people are asking, why is a cat, Copy Automation Tool. >> That's good. >> Very nice. >> I was like, where is this going? >> I like it. >> Brought it home, brought it home. >> Like you said. >> Do I get to keep this cat? Is this, oh. >> You can. >> Ah, very nice. >> This is pretty cool swag. Well Axel and John, thank you so much for stopping by and sharing with us the innovations that Pure and SAP are doing, how you are being successful, and now you are a reference customer for what you guys are achieving. >> Great story. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thanks guys, appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Yep. >> We want to thank you for watching The Cube. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante and cat. We are live from PureStorage Accelerate 2018. Stick around. Dave and I will be right back with our next guest. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE! Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> We're back, I'm Stu Miniman and we're here in the DEVNET Zone at Cisco Live 2018, beautiful Barcelona. Happy to welcome to the program, first time guest, Mike Bundy who is the head of Global Strategic Alliances with Pure Storage, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> As a first time guest, give us a little bit about your background, you're relatively new to Pure, but you know this ecosystem quite well. >> Absolutely, so, relatively new with Pure. Spent 21 years at Cisco leading various technology groups in the company. Most recently from there led the Global Enterprise Data Center sales force, so a lot of background, experience around cloud, virtualization, automation in the data center space, so very excited to be at Pure. >> When you talk about Pure, here at the Cisco show, I know it's FlashStack, but give us a little bit of the kind of the breadth and the depth of the relationship there. You hear a lot of themes talked about at this show, everything from IoT, just the future of where all these technologies are going, so where is the intersections? >> Yeah, so FlashStack is a partnership that Cisco and Pure have to deliver converged infrastructure in the marketplace. What differentiates us is really our ability to derive high, high performance. You'll definitely see value as you deploy just about any database application. It drives a much more economical, valuable solution to the customer base as a result of that. And we're poised to capture new trends in the marketplace with explosion of IoT, intelligence, whether it's deep learning, neural networks, or business intelligence, with the likes of SAP or various other applications deployed on Hadoop infrastructure. >> Want to unpack some of those, because you said a lot there. Our research from Wikibon coming into 2018, data's at the center of it all. I mean, talk to Cisco, data, majorly important. Not just moving it things, but how do I get value out of the data. Start with IoT, you mentioned in there, how does a company, I think a pure storage company, how does Pure have an impact in relationship on the IoT discussion. >> Right, so, IoT in itself is driving a huge explosion in terms of the amount of data. In two years, according to IDC, it'll be 20 times the amount of capacity on the internet will be the amount of data that's created, so for us, deploying a platform that allows you to really take data and look at it as a platform and how you use it is really one of our strengths of the company. Our software set is called Pure1 and it really takes a look and helps you handle and manage that data very differently than any of the other traditional storage solutions that have been in the marketplace. But it was all built on the foundation of Flash, so you get the scale and you get the performance that Flash brings at the same time. Very, very powerful, and we're glad to see trends driven by IoT to drive that explosion for us. >> FlashStack, talk a little bit about it. What is interesting to customers these days? The trend of converged infrastructure now has gone on for over eight years. There's the buzz of hyperconverge, there's cloud is kind of front and center, why is converged infrastructure in general, and FlashStack specifically so important today? >> If you break down the market in terms of where converged infrastructure fits, it's both in the hybrid cloud and the private cloud side of things. There's still tremendous growth in the private cloud world where we see a lot of deployments there. If you look at the solution, it's very cohesive with what Cisco has, from a UCS standpoint. It's a stateless platform, it's very simple to manage, it's very scalable, you can get 10 times the rack density from a storage and compute perspective with a FlashStack than you can the competitors'. So it's really an innovative, modernized, converged infrastructure stack. As you said, CI's been around for eight years, this FlashStack's been in the marketplace about two years and has had tremendous growth in that timeframe as a result. We continue to try to drive simplification, automation, a different consumption model, how you maintain it, from a cost perspective is different, so it has a very unique value proposition compared to other CIs in the marketplace. >> One of the founders of Wikibon, David Floyer, when the Flash wave started he said to companies, it's database, database, database, there's so much opportunity to really transform both the economics as well as the business productivity. It wasn't the first-use case that happened in converged infrastructure, but definitely somewhere Pure's focus has been. Talk about what are some of the results, what did customers see when they moved to CI for business-critical applications like database. >> If you look at the timing that it takes to develop an application, a lot of that is how easy are you able to grab the data, create a usable format of that, do your development test cases, and then move it back into production. So the way that the FlashStack and the Pure Flash arrays allow you to take that data, you don't have to necessarily copy it and create replicas, it's very fast and easy and we've seen developers cut down 25-30% of the development time on an SAP database or an Oracle database, right? So it's drastically different than what they've been used to in the past. >> Mike, you lived for years on the Cisco side of the equation and now you're partners. What's it like to be a Cisco partner these days? They've got dozens of partnerships on the storage side, so how do they make Pure feel special yet understand kind of the cooperative nature of our industry. >> I think what we're trying to make sure we do here is focus on the customer outcome, right? So we are really working day-in and day-out to make sure that whatever we do drives business value to the customer. And that is what separates the partnership from others. When you take a look at that, it's given us the ability to grow the amount of resources that Cisco and Pure can contribute into the marketplace. It also has allowed us to help develop new lines of business for some of our other partners in the ecosystem. It's very competitive, as you call out, but there's still a great partnership here and Cisco's been very supportive of our growth. >> It's been a few years since I've attended a Cisco Live myself, but feels that the attendees and the focus of the show has gone through a bit of a transformation. We're sitting here in the DEVNET Zone, lots of people here coding. I walked through the World of Solutions, it's not just networking, you know, networking's a big piece. What have you seen changing over the few years? How does that impact Pure and just personally, what do you look at this ecosystem? >> Going back to what I said earlier, it's all about driving value for the outcome of the customer. What is the business challenge you're solving, what is the opportunity they're seizing and how can we develop a more agile platform that allows their software teams to really take advantage of that. So really that's what we're focused on, is what can we build horizontally that makes the platform more cloud-friendly, more automated, and then you can drive down to specific vertical value propositions within that, whether it's automotive industry, airline industry, healthcare industry, et cetera. That's really where I've seen a transition from, it's not as much about speeds and feeds of the infrastructure, it's about the higher-level outcome for the customer business. >> When it comes to Pure's business in general, and FlashStacks specifically, any differences here in the European geographies compared to the United States that you could comment on? >> Not really. I think from a Flash adoption period, the adoption rate has been higher for all Flash arrays in the United States. As you move to Europe, we're seeing an acceleration of that here. What we saw, probably about two years ago in the United States, so there's actually a ton of excitement here now, in terms of the opportunity for the FlashStack and what Flash can do for that. >> It's interesting you mention for Flash, and even for converged infrastructure, there's still a large percentage of the market that hasn't kind of dove in. >> Correct. >> Any commentary as to what's holding people back or you know, some "aha" moments that you've had customers that, those that haven't gone for the simplicity of converged or hyperconverged, that they should get on board? >> I think if you look at Flash in general, it was focused on high IOPS, input/output performance requirements initially, virtualization, virtual desktops were very big, and then your higher-performance applications now. Now that you've seen what we've been able to drive in terms of full functionality across the platform, it's not just about Flash and performance, it actually is about a storage platform now. And the economics of the entire support are making it more palatable now to move other workloads. I think you'll continue to see this expansion, I think Gartner and IDC talk about the next three to five years, you'll see a much greater greater density of applications moving onto Flash versus what it was in the past. We're actually releasing very soon and we'll be integrating into FlashStack other platforms that we have around FlashBlade, which is real focused on unstructured data. Things that wasn't necessarily rows and columns from a block storage perspective. And I think you'll see that help drive some of this disruption and transition in that space. >> Mike, as we look into 2018, what should customers look to find from the Pure and Cisco partnership? >> Absolutely. We'll continue to drive more tools with FlashStack that allow you to more easily and rapidly deploy the system itself. We will also be looking toward new-use cases that are very relevant in this space. To capture the demands of the customer, so things around business intelligence, things around artificial intelligence, we'll scale that out. And you'll also look at seeing us drive toward more scalable, foundational elements of a storage platform. So those are some of the things that you'll definitely see from us moving forward. >> All right, well Mike Bundy, really appreciate all the updates on Pure, on FlashStack, and your partnership with Cisco. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from Cisco Live Europe 2018 in Barcelona, I'm Stu Miniman, you're watching theCUBE. (bright poppy music)

[Announcer] Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE! Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> We're back. I'm Stu Miniman and we're here in the DevNet Zone at Cisco Live 2018, beautiful Barcelona. Happy to welcome to the program first-time guest Mike Bundy, who is the head of global strategic alliances with Pure Storage. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> So, first-time guest. Give us a little bit about your background. You're relatively new to Pure, but you know this ecosystem quite well. >> Absolutely. Relatively new with Pure. Spent 21 years at Cisco leading various technology groups in the company. Most recently from there led the global enterprise data center sales force. A lot of background experience around cloud, virtualization, automation of the data center space, so, very excited to be at Pure. >> When you talk about Pure here at the Cisco show, I know it's FlashStack, but give us a little bit of the breadth and the depth of the relationships there. You hear a lot of themes talked about at this show, everything from IoT and just the future of where all these technologies are going. Where is the intersection? >> FlashStack is a partnership that Cisco and Pure have to deliver converged infrastructure in the marketplace. What differentiates us is really our ability to derive high, high performance. You'll definitely see value as you deploy just about any database application. It drives a much more economical, valuable solution to the customer base as a result of that. We're poised to capture new trends in the marketplace with the explosion of IoT intelligence, whether it's deep learning, neural networks, or business intelligence, with the likes of SAP or various other applications deployed on hadoop infrastructure. >> I want to unpack some of those, 'cause you said a lot, there. Our research from Wikibon, we see coming into 2018, I mean, data's at the center of it all. We talked to Cisco, data, majorly important. It's not just moving it things, but how do we get value out of the data? Start with IoT, you mentioned in there. How does a company, I think at Pure, it's a storage company. How does Pure have an impact and relationship on the IoT discussion? >> IoT in itself is driving a huge explosion in terms of the amount of data. In two years, according to IDC, it'll be 20 times the amount of capacity on the internet will be the amount of data that's created. For us, deploying a platform that allows you to really take data and look at it as a platform and how you use it is really one of our strengths at the company. Our software set is called Pure1, and it really takes a look and helps you handle and manage that data very differently than any of the other traditional storage solutions that have been on the marketplace. But it was all built on the foundation of Flash, so you get the scale and you get the performance that Flash brings at the same time. So, very, very powerful, and we're glad to see trends driven by IoT to drive that explosion for us. >> FlashStack, talk a little bit about it. What is interesting to customers these days? The trend of convergent infrastructure now has gone for over eight years. You know, there's the buzz of hyperconverge, there's cloud, is kind of front-and-center. Why is converged infrastructure in general, and FlashStack specifically, so important today? >> If you break down the market in terms of where converged infrastructure fits, it's both in the hybrid cloud and the private cloud side of things. There's still tremendous growth in the private cloud world where we see a lot of deployments, there. If you look at the solution, it's very cohesive with what Cisco has, from a UCS standpoint. It's a stateless platform. It's very simple to manage. It's very scalable. You can get 10 times the rack density from a storage and compute perspective with a FlashStack than you can the competitors. It's really an innovative, modernized converged infrastructure stack. As you said, CI's been around for eight years. The FlashStack's been on the marketplace about two years, and has had tremendous growth in that time frame as a result. We continue to try to drive simplification, automation, a different consumption model. How you maintain it from a cost perspective is different, so it has a very unique value proposition compared to other CIs in the marketplace. >> One of the founders of Wikibon, David Floyer, when the Flash wave started, he said to companies, "It's database, database, database." There's so much opportunity to really transform both the economics as well as the business productivity. It wasn't the first use case that happened in converged infrastructure, but definitely somewhere, Pure's focus has been. Talk about, some are what of the results? What did customers see when they moved to CI for business-critical applications like database? >> Key, key. If you look at the timing that it takes to develop an application, a lot of that is how easy are you able to grab the data, create a usable format of that, do your development test cases, and then move it back into production. The way that the FlashStack and the Pure Flash arrays allow you to take that data, you don't have to necessarily copy it and create replicas. It's very fast and easy. We've seen developers cut down 25%, 30% of the development time on an SAP database or an Oracle database, right? It's drastically different than what they've been used to in the past. >> All right, so, Mike, you've lived for years on the Cisco side of the equation. Now you're a partner. What's it like to be a Cisco partner these days? They've got dozens of partnerships on the storage side, so how do they make Pure feel special, understand the cooperative nature of our industry? >> I think what we're trying to make sure we do, here, is focus on the customer outcome. We are really working day in and day out to make sure that whatever we do drives business value to the customer. That is what separates the partnership from others. When you take a look at that, it's given us the ability to grow the amount of resources that Cisco and Pure can contribute into the marketplace. It also has allowed us to help develop new lines of business for some of our other partners in the ecosystem. It's very competitive, as you call out, but there's still a great partnership here. Cisco's been very supportive of our growth. >> It's been a few years since I've attended a Cisco Live myself, but feels that the attendees and the focus of the show has gone through a bit of a transformation. We're sitting here in the DevNet Zone. Lots of people here coding. I walked through the World of Solutions. It's not just networking, you know. Networking's a big piece. What have you seen changing over the few years? How's that impact Pure, and just personally, what do you look at this ecosystem? >> I think, going back to what I said earlier, it's all about driving value for the outcome of the customer. What is the business challenge you're solving, what is the opportunity they're seizing, and how can we develop a more agile platform that allows their software teams to really take advantage of that? Really, that's what we're focused on, is what can we build horizontally that makes the platform more cloud-friendly, more automated? And then you can drive down to specific vertical value propositions within that, whether it's automotive industry, airline industry, healthcare industry, et cetera. That's really where I've seen the transition from. It's not as much about speeds and feeds of the infrastructure. It's about the higher-level outcome for the customer business. >> When it comes to Pure's business in general, and FlashStack specifically, any differences in here in the European geographies compared to the United States that you could comment on? >> Not really. I think, from a Flash adoption period, the adoption rate has been higher for all Flash arrays in the United States. As you move to Europe, we're seeing an acceleration of that, here, of what we saw probably about two years ago in the United States. There's actually a ton of excitement here now, in terms of the opportunity for the FlashStack and what Flash can do for that. >> It's interesting, you mentioned for Flash and even for converged infrastructure, there's still a large percentage of the market that hasn't dove in. Any commentary as to what's holding people back, or some aha moments that you've had customers that, those that haven't gone for the simplicity of converged or hyperconverged, that they should get on board? >> I think if you look at Flash in general, it was focused on high IOPS, input/output performance requirements initially. Virtualization, virtual desktops were very big. And then, your higher-performance applications. Now that you've seen what we've been able to drive in terms of full functionality across the platform, it's not just about Flash and performance. It actually is about a storage platform, now, and the economics of the entire support are making it more palatable now to move other workloads. I think you'll continue to see this expansion. I think Gartner and IDC talk about the next three to five years, you'll see a much greater, greater density of applications moving on to Flash, versus what it was in the past. We're actually releasing very soon, and we'll be integrating into FlashStack other platforms that we have around FlashBlade, which is real focused on unstructured data, things that wasn't necessarily rows and columns from a block storage perspective. I think you will see that help drive some of this disruption and transition in that space. >> Mike, as we look into 2018, what should customers look to find from the Pure and Cisco partnership? >> Absolutely. We'll continue to drive more tools with FlashStack that allow you to more easily and rapidly deploy the system itself. We will also be looking toward new use cases that are very relevant in this space, to capture the demands of the customer. So, things around business intelligence, things around artificial intelligence, we'll scale that out. You'll also look at seeing us drive toward more scalable, foundational elements of a storage platform. Those are some of the things that you'll definitely see from us moving forward. >> Well, Mike Bundy, really appreciate all the updates on Pure, on FlashStack, and your partnership with Cisco. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from Cisco Live Europe 2018 in Barcelona. I'm Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE. (fast electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE! Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam and theCUBE ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to day two of live coverage with theCUBE here at Cisco live 2018 in Europe. We're in Barcelona, Spain. I'm John, for the co-founder of Silicon Angle. Co-host of the theCUBE, with Stu Miniman, analyst on wikibon,com. As well as Cube co-host many events certainly Stu is not a stranger to Cisco. Open-sourced. And overall, the discretion that digital is having on the enterprise. Our next guest is Michael Kay, global technologist of product strategy of theme software. Michael it's great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Hey John, hey Stu. >> So, you guys are here with Cisco Veeam, you guys have been a big success story we've coverd on theCUBE many times. You're up Cisco. What's the vibe here, what's going on in the show? >> So back in mid 2017, October 2017, we announced we were going to be on the global price list, and so obviously that this is different from last year in that we're having more conversations, people know what we're doing. For starters, asking how do we protect the network? How do we protect the ASA? Using the firewall and etc. It's very good to have those conversations with the enterprise guys. And they now understand we're able to protect their workload, their data. So, I imagine that it will be exactly the same when we go over to Cisco Live in the US, but this is obviously the first show that we've had where we are talking about availability with Cisco as a joint partner on their global price list. >> One of things that we always see is that with you guys, your logo is everywhere. You've got the big green Veeam. What's the relationship that you guys have with customers? Because you're playing a lot of great spaces. I mean, what's the main relationship in brand promise that Veeam has? >> So I guess from our point of view is that we come from SMB root, if you'd like. But over the years, over that last 10 years, we've developed that scalable product that allows us to protect the larger workload within the enterprise. We also have cloud offerings to enable our service provider partners. So, exactly that, we want to be able to play and protect data in whatever facet that needs to be. So, whether it be cloud, whether it be on-premises, SMB, commercial, enterprise, we want to be able to protect all of those workloads. >> So Michael, one of the things we've been talking about here at the show, you won't just go look at world's agents. It's a big ecosystem and it's been changing. Cisco has got a lot of pieces of big movement software that's happening to cloud and data center. They have dozens of storage relationships and that's where Veeam ties in a lot. Maybe gives a little bit of an overview, kind of the breath and depth of the relationship where you play in relation to UCS, Converged, Hyper Converged, all those pieces. >> Yeah so I guess Converged first. If we look at the majority of the data centers and the customers that we speak to there is still very much, there is a large footprint of Converged infrastructure where that be FlexPod, VersaStack, Pure FlashStack, or Vblock from a DeliMC point of view. And the good thing where we come in is that we have storage integrated in all of them. So, regardless of like, compute, however it brings a nice simplicity model to the customer from that stack. But for us to just slot into that and be able to leverage the storage integrations and to be able to take an efficient snapshot of those virtual machines and push them onto a, maybe Cisco 2600, that modular, scalable server that will both compute and high density storage really gives us a best of both worlds in terms of plugging it into that fabric interconnector. Making is converge backup story or converge available story. >> Yeah so, you mentioned a lot of options out there. Still, most customers, there are more customers that aren't doing some flavor of Converged drive or Converged than are - there is a lot of buzz behind the Hyper Converged piece of it. What are you hearing from customers? You know, you've said there's a lot of kind of CI versus HI that numbers show that out. I mean, there's a lot more solutions out there. It should be in the market a lot longer. But you know, where are the customers? What are some of the decision points and how has your organization held on them? >> So I guess where we are seeing things that are HyperFlex, where we also have storage integration there from a protection point of view. Seeing many of them feed into that main data center. So, we're protecting the data, we're using our replication engine to push data into that larger data center for hot DR or high ability type solution. And I think that's where we're seeing it. But we are also seeing it more HyperFlex or more HCI come into that main data center for some certain verticals from that point of view. >> Okay, so if I could just unpack what you're saying there, you know, mostly HCIs have been kind of the robust, smaller environments where you know, traditional three tier or CI has been there but we're starting to see that. That blurring of the lines between what is there. >> Yeah, people are definitely bringing that HCI, that simplicity, that scalable simplicity model into their main data center as it kind of merges with that converged offering right? So. >> Yeah, the other thing that's very clear, the Veeam show last year when we covered it really customers trying to bake out their cloud strategy. You know, how does that tie into all this discussion here? Cisco is talking a lot about multicloud, that's really the management plain, how do you see that from an availability solution? >> Yeah, okay, so yesterday I sat in the Keynote and reading some of the stuff, we had our sales kick off last week and some of our stuff really resonates with our message as well that's out there. So the whole multicloud, our tagline is around any app, any data, any cloud. So it kind of resonates with what Cisco is saying. And that's obviously a good thing. But, so whether that be the public cloud, whether it's to enable our service providers to leverage the Cisco technology plus Veeam to offer a service out to our existing Veeam customers. The On-Premise's solution. Or whether that'd just be on-premises they sense that we just talked about whether Converged or whether HCI top plate. >> What the big thing you guys learned at your sale's kick-off because we always wonder what goes on in these sale's kick-off. People like cheering, their making their quota, business is good, but they listen to customers. What's the big used cases that you guys are really doing well with Cisco on? I mean that's ultimately the pattern that has kind of emerged. There is always a best product. What's the hot, used case for you guys? >> So I think one of our biggest things is about how do we partner with the likes of Cisco. How do we leverage that relationship to bring more Cisco validated designs, reference architectures, from a technical point of view up. So when the good door, the numbers being rah-rah as you're in the sale's kick-off but ultimately it's about the vision. How do we go forward with that partnership? Being on that price list is really going to help us get into some of those accounts, from that point of view. But also, we've got, from a technical point of view, I know that we've got the design, we've got the model behind this. >> Yeah, when did you guys get onto the price list? Recently? >> Uh, I believe it was October. >> So just recently? >> So really recently. >> Some deals are just going to be flying in. Right? (laughs) >> Hopefully, right. >> What's the biggest challenge that you find with Veeam's customers? Because you guys have certainly done really well. Again, we've covered your success on theCUBE many times with other events, like Vmworld and others. What's the ah ha moment for the customers with Veeam? Is it just the easiest solution? Is it a technical paid point they saw? What's that moment when the customer really gets it? >> So, I think the simplicity, that easy-to-use, easy to deploy, regardless whether you're three, six tier host shop or whether you're a multi 10,000 VM type enterprise estate. It's being able to use that same tool-set to protect all the way through. That's really simple. We really want to keep that user interface really easy to consume, and use, and scale. So that's one of the key areas that I've seen that we're playing in. >> Alright, so it's 2018 now, we've got a looming, headwind that a lot of customers we are concerned about, haven't heard a lot about it at this show, but GDPR, that's definitely something on everybody's mind. Is this another Y2K that's going to slow down ID bind or are there engagements? How does Veeam work with customers? What's it going to do with the landscape of IT this year? >> So we were, we've been looking at GDBR Compliance and our messaging in those has been, we've been really working on how we start mentioning this and marketing this out from a Veeam perspective. So we're not going to keep, we're not going to get anyone GDBR compline. But what we are going to do is help you understand where that data is, how long has it been kept for, where is it kept, where it's stored, et cetera. So update three that we've released just before Christmas it was around location tag in. So if that back-up comes into a certain GO then we want to be able to tag that, and that tag stays with that back-up data wherever it goes. Then we've got Veeam ONE, the monitors and reports against that. So you know whether you've violated GBDR compliance or a violation of where that data should have be located. But it's one of the things that it's not a day that kind of goes back the moment where I'm not speaking to someone about GDPR. And obviously, it's really, it's coming around very fast. May this year, is when it comes into force. >> Are people shaking in their boots? I mean, I'm hearing, like, a lot of people really nervous. I mean it's kind not has been played up. Certainly the press has been covering it but I mean the Y2K problem, you remember those glory days, you know, the millennial, you know that bug never really happened. But GDPR is a freaking, hard-core enforcement. And the penalties are stiff. >> Yeah. >> I mean it's ridiculous. >> That's a big percentage of your gross income. Right, the people that I speak to are definitely aware and concerned that they need to be in this particular state by the time we get to May. It's not about waiting until that date in May. It's about how do we do it now and start understanding it a bit more about our data. Cisco yesterday, on the main stage said, "it's all about data." And absolutely resonates exactly with what we want to do. We want to be able to do more with that but also we need to understand what that data is and how long do we keep them for. Or why we're keeping it? And ask those questions to these new data protection officers, data-- >> Well people are having more data driven strategies and we were commenting yesterday. We didn't kind of, we didn't hear much here about that Cisco not using that data driven. Is it just not a real big data show or not a lot of AI here yet but if you got data driven, you better have data protection, right? I mean, you can't have both. >> They kind of go hand-in-hand, right? And I think that's another thing where we're coming into the fold. Is that we've got features in our tool-set that allows us to spin up that data, in an isolated network. We had to run test against them. Run compliance checks against them. To make sure that, one, the back-up comes up. So, when you're not waiting until that problem hits. So you can bring it up but also test against updates, et cetera. >> Alright, so here is a question for you. So I'm a customer, pretend I'm a customer. Okay, "Well you know, I really am on-premises, on-prem." Stu, depend on how you want to argue that point. Well Stu and I argued about it yesterday about on-prem versus on-Premises. I'm on-premises, I'm getting my cloud operation. I've got my data protection. But I really got to get into the cloud. I've got some stuff in the cloud now. Cloud is my mision. I'm going to be moving to the cloud in a very big way. How does Veeam help me? >> So, we want to bring the technology that you've been using on-premises, hopefully, maybe Veeam, and we want to take that same, easy-to-use concept, that same UI that you've using and really, hopefully you've seen it as a simplistic approach to your data. We're taking the headache out of the data protection story. But if you are pushing into those public clouds, being able to give you a seamless way-- >> So same dashboard, same-- >> Similar tool-sets, exactly that. And being able to protect that. >> Across multiple clouds as well? Because multicloud is hot. >> Yeah, exactly, we want to be able to be like we are within virtualization. Being able to protect any workload on VMWare, Hyper-V, et cetera. We also want to be able to protect any of those public clouds. From using the same tool-set to be able to protect that same file format that we're backing up to, same fundamentals that we have. >> I want to get your view on Cisco Live here. You're in on Keynote, you go to number shows, you know, this show used to be, it was hard-core networking, it was all networking. CCIEs and everything. We're sitting here in the DevNet zone. They've got developers, got good storage ecosytsems here. How do you look at the audience here compared to say, a VM world or some of the other partner activities that you go to? >> So I think like couple of years ago, they were kind of saying that you need to broaden your knowledge as an IT consultant, IT person, within a company. You have to expand your technologies. You can't just be the networking guy. You can't just be the storage guy. And I think that we're, I don't know if you guys see it, but definitely seeing more broaden people like, again, like I said there, the people that I'm having conversations with at the booth, they're all aware of what we do now. So, they have clearly broaden their knowledge away from that networking. But, also with the likes of the DevNet. So like being able to code, and all of the API driven type stories that we hear. It's also being able to leverage that and push that into whatever that data center needs to be from an automation orchestration point of view. So, and everyone plays a part in that. Whether it's the storage, whether it's the availability, whether it's the compute vendors, whether it's the virtualization. Everyone has a part to play in that, that automation orchestration piece. >> Awesome. Well how has your experience with the show has been as a European flavor year, what's your take away? >> Um, I guess-- >> John: Customer action, good partners? >> Yeah, I mean, I'm speaking to your Cisco reps. Kind of seeing it from a Veeam point of view in your region. Understand a bit more about around GDBR. GDBR is coming in. So there is no way of getting around that. Understand what tools can actually help you be more compliant. Also, look at, I've spoken to a number of people around that conversion, HCI piece, and they weren't aware around the integration. So, go away and see if we do fit in that integration piece. Existing customers go away and find out that information, and yeah. >> So what's the difference between an North American customer and an European customer? Do they have little nuances? Do they have regional issues by sovereignty in countries? Is there a buyer behavior from a Veeam customer standpoint? Difference between a customer in North America versus Europe? >> So, I'm mostly over in Europe but the customers that we speak to over in the US, that's the most concerning part around that GDBR piece, there is still, I have that understanding of what GDBR is doing. If they are holding data. Especially these larger enterprises. They are going to be holding data for those European countries. So they need to be compliant that way. And that's the misunderstanding maybe from some of the people. >> So European are more savvier on the compliance side? >> From the people that I have spoken to they know that it affects them because they're in country and holding that data. However, it affects everyone. It's a global compliance if you're holding data from anyone. >> I think in North America they kicked the can down the road. Oh wow, GDBR's upon Europe. Alright, Europeans are very savvy on compliance. That's a huge issue, data drive, data protection. We're here inside theCUBE with Veeam software. I'm John Furrier and Stu Mimiman live from Barcelona for Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. More coverage after this short break. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's the Cube, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam, and the Cube's ecosystem partners. >> Hello and welcome back to the Cube's exclusive coverage of Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. Kicking off 2018 here in Europe is Cisco's annual event. I'm John Furrier, the cohost of the Cube, with Stu Miniman, analyst at Wikibon. Our next guest is Todd Brannon, who's the marketing director at Cisco, welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you. >> Great, thanks for coming on. >> Absolutely. >> You guys announced HyperFlex before the show. >> We did. >> And a lot of cloud happening here in the keynote. Seeing IOT, well security number one obviously. Security, that's always going to be number one, but the other themes are obviously IOT and multi-cloud. >> Todd: Multi-cloud. >> Huge conversations, both developing rapidly in kind of it's own way. >> Well that's crucial for us 'cause we talk about HyperFlex 3.0, a lot of cool features that we're building into that, but the scope for us is much, much broader because of the multi-cloud piece. That's reality for our customers. They've told us very, very clearly, I'm going to use multiple public clouds, but I'm also going to have to get my on-prem side of it. So we tell 'em, absolutely, good multi-cloud starts at home with platforms like, with HyperFlex, and that's exactly the way we've brought it together. So we talk about a kind of a very modest aspiration with this is we want to help customers power any application, on any cloud, on any scale. >> Well take a minute before we get started, help us with some questions. What is HyperFlex 3.0 for the folks watching? What is it? >> So we introduced HyperFlex as our hyper converged platform built on UCS. We acquired a company called Springpath. They brought in a purpose-built, log-structured file system for the cluster and we combined these things together to create HyperFlex. So it's really unique in the sense that, well let me back up, I'd say a lot people ignore how crucial a file system and a network are to a clustered system. It kind of goes without saying, but a lot of the focus has been on, okay what's the individual node in that stack look like, but we look at it much more at the cluster level. And so, our uniqueness is that we've engineered all of this thing together. So we brought that out in 2016, last year really we focused on performance, 40 gig, all-flash, open up the network pipes and then this year is really about our multi-cloud integration and then additional features that we're bringing in to support more workloads, Hyper-V support, containers. So 3.0 is really just filling in a lot of features that we need to really make this a ideal platform for multi-cloud. >> Todd, we've tracked UCS since the early days. UCS really created and led the whole converged infrastructure ten. >> When we heard about CI though, it's really about simplification. It's infrastructure, it's that next step. Hyper converged, a lot of the things you were talking about there, it's about cloud and the underlying platform, and while CI can be used for that, seems like a different discussion. Can you give us a little bit compare/contrast as to what you see? >> Absolutely. Well, I mean, the conversion infrastructures, you know, we started that way back in the day with Vblock and VCE, and then FlexPod, VersaStack, FlashStack, there's lots of different storage partnerships that we have we can bring customers. And private cloud has been a big workload for those infrastructure components. You know, it's really just a storage question of how you want to address that component, but it all revolves around the operating model. So our mission is, look, we've got a huge install basic customers are used to acquiring and deploying pre-engineered chunks of infrastructure like a Vxblock or a FlexPod, what have you, we need to continue to serve them, while they also evaluate where hyper convergence might fit in the equation as well, and how do we offer those both up with a common set of policy and management, with UCS management, with Intersight. So we think that these are going to coexist for quite some time and customers are going to have to decide how they want to use those different types of infrastructure, but ultimately, it's just about the workload. >> Cisco and it's storage partners have billions of reasons why they're going to keep selling CI's for a while. >> Certainly, yep. >> Help connect the dots though. You talked about that operating model in the keynote this morning, big focus on multi-cloud, >> Todd: Certainly. >> And things like, we talked to AppD at AWS re:Invent, how does the public cloud mesh with these other solutions. >> So, one of the things that we're announcing here at the show is the cloud, our Cisco container platform. That's an example of how we're going to work with Google to create an integrated stack, focused initially around Kubernetes, and we have HyperFlex as an infrastructure component under that, and that's, for people that are really accelerating their application development or maybe they're modernizing older workloads with containers, we're going to provide that element. But the true multi-cloud functionality is what we do with things like CloudCenter. So that was our CliQr acquisition, allows us to profile workloads, take 'em out to the cloud, multiple public clouds. So for us, when we talk about HyperFlex as a platform for multi-cloud it's those integrations with CloudCenter, but then also AppD, which is hugely important because like we were talking about earlier, you've got applications now that are distributed across on-prem and multiple public clouds potentially. So maybe you got a front end out in the public cloud, customer data or business logic on-prem, how do you keep track of the performance of that collection of functions and systems that are running independently and you have to do that with something like AppD. So we have a lot of the software components to help customers really get their multi-cloud going. >> So bringing it back to HyperFlex, my understanding, not just virtual environment anymore, you're also doing containers and that tied into that multi-cloud piece. >> So, a couple important things with this 3.0 release. We're bringing for Hyper-V, for customers who want to do different hypervisors, and then we developed a persistent storage plug-in into the file system for those stateful workloads that are going to be in containers. So again, with Kubernetes, as developers want to go out and do pod requests, basically self-service volumes on the HyperFlex storage environment, that's huge. And so we've opened it up to two more classes of workloads right there. >> I mean, what aren't you doing? Got these centralized apps. Is there going to be a Cisco coin in the future? (laughs) >> I think -- >> There's a rumor going around. >> So yeah, I can't speak to our cryptocurrency strategy. That's out of my domain. >> Probably coming, these centralized apps, again, on the horizon, another future thing you guys are positioned for. In all seriousness though, I want to put a plug in for Stu's Wikibon team. They came out with a true private cloud report recently last year, really kind of the only ones looking at it this way, but it really is interesting. I want to get your comment to this because we go to 100 of events a year, last year was over 100, I think, 30, and what we've observed is the same thing that's happening here. DevNet's got a lot of attraction. You've got DevNet Create, more of an open-source, cloud native focus. >> Todd: Sure. >> You're seeing the enterprises getting their act done at home, inside the premise. >> Todd: That's right. >> So it's not so much they're moving to cloud. Yeah, some stuff's going in the cloud, but they're kind of cleaning up the house first, going cloud ops on premise. >> That's right. >> And then, as a preparation to all the spend and all the intention is really on the private cloud, what they call true private cloud. Do you see the same thing? >> Absolutely. >> And is that a stepping stone to the cloud? >> Absolutely, and that's exactly, that's informed everything we've done here in this latest, this past year really, of development around HyperFlex is our IT customers telling us, look I've got the developer as my new constituent. As much as I need to maintain shrink wrapped apps or legacy workloads for the core business, the developer is really my customer now and I have to provide infrastructure on-prem that behaves like the cloud in terms of infrastructure as code and being able to do things like we're doing with this Kubernetes environment, where the developers can withdraw the resources they need, turn 'em back in and the IT team can get out of the way. That's hugely important. >> I think we're observing on our opening this morning when we were commenting on the keynote and some of the trends here is that Cisco is moving up the stack pretty rapidly over the years, this year more than ever, you can start to see a clear line of sight that it's not just network plumbing, although that's pretty critical. But with Kubernetes and the growth, you mentioned Google, it's pretty interesting, a renaissance is going on in the software world, certainly with open-source, you have app developers, which are like just classic building software apps, then you got engineering, software engineering. So I use that that term software engineering as a throwback to the age when I graduated with my CS degree, that was what you called yourself when you got a job. You were a software engineer. You have network engineers, so you're seeing a line of under the hood engineering with software and networks and whatnot. And then, above Kubernetes you're seeing, just hey I just want a program, just give me some functions. >> Absolutely, and it's the IT generalist that are emerging as the heroes here that have to understand, okay, how do I build that on-prem platform, how do I have the capability to get my developers out to the public cloud, as in when they need to and it makes sense, or potentially bring things back. And you're right, and then on the development side they don't want to have to worry about the mechanics of that. So to the degree we can enable our IT customer to provide that service, but also simplify that for them is essential. >> Talk about your posture to those two different personas because you guys just provide the network in the old days and app developers programmed on them. They get some storage or perusing some storage. Now you got to lean in towards the network engineers, which are now software engineers under the hood, and then you got to lean in to the app developers and enable them to be successful. How are you attacking those, not attacking, how are you servicing and leaning into those groups. >> We brought the storage and computing experts into the fold with UCS, nine years ago, but now when you look at our acquisition of AppD, that's where we really start to take care of the application owner, be it the developer or the business owner for the application and allowing them to kind of see across on-prem, out in the public cloud, how do I ensure that I'm going to stay out of trouble, and if something goes wrong I know exactly where in that constellation of services the problem resides. So AppD is critical in that sense because -- >> So they fill a big hole. >> Absolutely, because that's how we can, all this comes together to power our workload, power business service. Applications are the heart of new business. >> Todd, what about from a training perspective? Cisco Live's always been a show where people get their certifications, they build their careers on this stuff. It's changing so fast. How are you keeping, the training tracks, and giving that career help to all the people that do this for a living. >> We're adding the pillars for all the things we're talking about, the multi-cloud software portfolio, new infrastructure components, like HyperFlex. Those are all being built into our training regimen and also our training partners, so they can take that out and scale it for us. >> All right, so you went and just connected the dots on what I was finishing up for network engineers, software engineers, under the hood, app developers, AppD, you guys have a good solid footing there, good approach. Multi-cloud, is that the Kubernetes? Is that the secret sauce to multi-cloud in your opinion? And/or how do you guys look at multi-cloud and how do you talk to your customers about it? >> Well we talk about, the data is pretty clear, customers want to be able to use multiple public clouds and they want to be able to evaluate them. So I think the center of our strategy, we have our multi-cloud portfolio, how we organize all these things. The cloud consume pillar of that is really comprised of AppD, which we talked about, but also CloudCenter. And so CloudCenter is a tool that allows our customers basically profile an application and then go understand what's it going to cost me and what are the different attributes of these public cloud services, and which one matches up the best. So I'd say that's the center of the strategy. Obviously, particularly around containers, but more workloads in the future, Kubernetes becomes a much bigger -- >> So orchestration is pretty key. >> Yeah, orchestration's essential and it's not just in a pure software context, but how do we hook down into infrastructure. So we've already built this programmable infrastructure, so how do we expose those knobs and dials to orchestration engines so that we're not just virtualizing, but we're actually optimizing the infrastructure they need. >> That's the beautiful thing about service and function-based software. Okay, so now I've heard about this dCloud. What is dCloud? >> So dCloud's basically a demo environment that our engineering team can use and our partners can use to demo software. So, for example, we launched our cloud management platform for UCS and HyperFlex last fall, we call it Intersight. So software like that, you know software becomes central to our strategy, dCloud becomes the way that we show that. >> Customers can come in and play on that and partners? >> Partners and our sales teams can take customers through it. >> But not customers. >> I don't believe there's an end user entrance to that yet. >> So it's like a sandbox for the cloud. >> But I could be wrong. I'm not a dCloub expert. >> So for the folks watching, what's different this year at Cisco Live in Europe from other shows? Is there anything that stands out to you around this year? >> Definitely the multi-cloud theme and we're hearing that from customers. They don't, there's always been the question of what type of infrastructure should I provision for different workloads, but it's really moved that past that to here's the workload spectrum I need to support. What are the tools you're going to give me for that on-prem? How can you help me get to the cloud? And I think the other thing, more narrowly speaking, hyper convergence is really turning the corner in terms of adoption. So when we first, we weren't the first ones to arrive at the hyper convergence party in the industry by any means, but we brought the keg. So when we showed up the party kind of got started. We think we brought the complete answer and now we're seeing as more and more workloads can go onto a HCI platform, the adoption's starting to, and we're seeing large organizations bring it on, both in the core and out at the edge. So those are a couple big changes -- >> Todd, any bold predictions? Will Cisco be number three in HCI by the end of 2018? >> Todd: Yes, 'cause we already are. >> Okay. (laughs) >> We already are. So, today it's a three horse race right now. So it's Dell, Nutanix, Cisco in the latest IDC numbers. So I think by the end, I'd like to see number two within a type of a timeframe. I'll give you number two within six quarters, how about that? >> And Stu wants to know what are you going to do with all that cash that you bring over from, to the US? (laughs) >> John: What are you going to buy? >> Your patriotion, yeah. >> I heard Chuck talking about investing in employees so I hope to get some of that, or no. No guys, I think Chuck's already kind of laid it out. We got our investors, we've got potential things we can do, bringing in new technology, so he's really laid that out. >> Todd, final question for you at the end of the segment. >> Sure. >> As the personnel change, excitedly, the infrastructure of the cloud and the evolution of the renaissance that's coming with software, DevNet, DevNet Create, doing some great stuff as an indicator of what's coming, >> Sure. >> How is the roll of the network, your target customer, who's been loyal Cisco net MVP all these years and you got storage guys, interdisciplinary has been a big thing, what skill sets do you see evolving for that Cisco hero out there? What the trend that you can talk to? >> It's the ability to automate. It's the ability to take advantage of some of the technologies we're bringing in terms of assurance. It's how do you bring all of that insight that resides in the network, in the telemetry and that data, how do you bring that out and use it in a way that can help the business. I think for our core audience, for those folks you talk about, it's how do I become much more adept at bringing these pieces together in an automated way, but then how do take advantage of some of the things that are available to me now in terms of bringing the power of analytics, AI, into an IT context and take advantage of those things for all the different things you can imagine, security, assurance, et cetera. >> So the big thing then, just to summarize, if I hear you correctly, the difference this year is that you got AppD, and you got end to end DevOps. >> I think it's our multi-cloud story has really jelled over the past year, and now we're bring it in to the context of on-prem infrastructure in addition to the public cloud side of it, so I think that's the, that's big news from data center side. >> Todd Brannon who's the marketing director at Cisco here inside the Cube. We are in Barcelona, live coverage, two days, wall to wall. I'm John Furrier for Stu Miniman. More live coverage at the Cube after this short break. (synthesizer beat)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's the CUBE covering Pure Accelerate 2017. (upbeat music) Brought to you by Pure Storage. (sparse percussion fading) >> Welcome back to San Francisco. We're at Pier 70, and this is Pure Accelerate. And this is the CUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host David Floyer. First segment of the day. Welcome! >> Thank you. >> Dave: Todd Graham is here. He's the Vice President of IT Infrastructure at ScanSource, Inc. >> Thank you. >> Dave: Axel Streichardt, who's the Director of Business Applications Solutions at Pure Storage. Gentlemen, welcome to the CUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thanks. >> Okay, so let's get right into it. Well, if we start with ScanSource, what does ScanSource do? Set up the interview with just a little background. >> Sure, so we are an international technology distribution company. We have been around since 1994, public since 1994. Today we're in the US, North, we're in Europe, Latin America, and we are quickly growing to 45 to 47 locations around the globe. We focus, very vertically focused, on technology such as telecommunications. Recently we bought a telecommunications services master agency, so we can deal with service and connectivity. Point of sale and barcode is our original business unit. And we do Voice over IP phone systems, videoconferencing, and those types of technologies today. >> You said you started in '94 and you been public since '94. So you started with an IPO? (panelists laughing) >> It was very early. That's correct. (panelists laughing) >> Wow, that's amazing. I'd love, I got to talk to you afterwards. (panelists laughing) >> That's right. That's right. >> That's like Bitcoin or something. Okay, and then maybe we could set up to the segment here. Axel, I saw you speaking here earlier to an audience. >> Axel: Right. >> Maybe describe the discussion that we're going to have here about cloud. >> We, of course, focusing a lot on the different flavors of cloud and the different deployment models that SAP customers are considering today, right? So it could be on premise. Do you want to do it in a hybrid cloud? Do you want it in a public cloud? And we see that, initially, a lot of customers were thinking and considering public cloud as the solution for SAP workloads. And it is interesting that, in recent months, we actually see that from this initial, let's say, movement we see a lot of customers actually reconsidering and coming back, right? And they're seeing that the economics, the flexibility, the agility that they were thinking about when moving certain SAP workloads to the cloud is actually not really the reality. And the reality caught up with them. And they see that the value that they get from Pure Storage actually to run SAP workloads on Pure Storage make way more sense from an economical and also from an agility perspective, right? And we also see that IDC and some other analysts, even SAP themselves, they are actually saying that probably 60%-70% of all SAP workloads will stay on premise. They will not go into a public cloud or cloud deployment. >> Okay, so, Todd. So tell us about, so you're a ERP customer, SAP customer. You decide to move into the cloud. Maybe tell us about that journey. You moved in, and the pendulum swung back. So add some color to. >> Yeah, we were migrating away from our legacy ERP environment and moving to SAP. It was a greenfield opportunity, so we felt like it was the right time to move into the cloud. We looked very heavily at our internal expertise from an applications standpoint as well as an infrastructure standpoint and felt that this would be the right opportunity to move to that infrastructure as a service, application as a service model. And then we could take time to take our center of excellence team around SAP and do knowledge transfer between the cloud organization, the managed organization, and use it as a ramp for us to educate ourselves more around SAP. Some of the other driving factors were simply. Why do we want to go to the cloud? The elasticity, the ease of deployment, the things that we firmly believed at the time were the right decision. And we felt like it could be done quicker by moving to the cloud to do that. >> Okay, so you moved to the cloud, and then it wasn't the experience that you thought it would be. It was >> Todd: Correct. >> Axel mentioned a bunch of factors. The agility wasn't there. The cost wasn't there. Maybe add some color to that as well. >> Yeah, absolutely, we felt like, with the growth of our company through acquisitions, that speed of deployment was going to be key in the future. And we quickly learned that that was not necessarily the case. Everything became request-driven, SLA-driven, versus actually worrying about what was happening within our application itself. And so we just became another customer that was submitting tickets, if you will, in that environment. Stability and performance, we saw some real impacts to the environment that were actually end-user-affecting, which really began to force us to look for some different solutions. >> Okay. So, David, you just participated in a study. We call it the True Private Cloud. >> David: Right. >> So what was happening was it was a lot of cloud washing going on. >> Right. >> And with Private Cloud, we said, "Well, you know, essentially what people want is "to be able to substantially mimic "the public cloud on private." So they can get back that control and address some of the problems. >> That's right. >> So maybe pick it up from there and talk a little bit about. >> Sure, so yes, this, this is reports that we've done on the amount of spend that'll go to hyper-converged types of products and bring it back in-house and offer the same sort of facilities to the end users as you get from a public cloud but in a private cloud itself. So is that how you've done it? Did you take a package, or how did you go, how did you take your work from the public cloud back into the private cloud? >> So part of that was, we did the initial cost analysis of where we were at. And that was one of the main drivers behind, we really can do this in-house ourselves. That's when we began looking at partners that could help us. It was a perfect time that it had set up within our refresh strategy around our traditional storage and compute environment for us to really look at what the cost factors were. Could we improve the performance and the stability of that environment and improve that service to our end users? And so those are the decisions that we made, right? And then we said, "It's time for us to bring that back in." We can have control. And one of the biggest things, and it was really more than control, it was that we understood our environment. And that was the biggest thing that we saw a challenge with, was trying to convey the importance of what was happening within our deployment of SAP to the managed services provider. >> So what led you to the Pure decision? Like David said, you got some kind of converged infrastructure, whatever, the metaphor for mimicking public cloud. What led you to Pure? And we could talk about what the solution was. >> Yeah, one of the things was just the simplicity of Pure. At first, when we heard the story, we weren't sure we really believed it. We were like, "This is, this is entirely too simple." The evergreen model was very intriguing to us at the time, because we had been in that traditional storage and compute environment where, every three years, we had a massive project and do a forklift upgrade with choose any of the providers. And it was, is what we were doing. We were looking to set ourselves up for SAP HANA in the future. We wanted to build an infrastructure that would allow us to get there. And in all of the due diligence that we did, Pure came out on top with that, with a lot of the story around their compression and dedupe capabilities. Performance around IO was just extremely compelling at the time. >> So you got to love this story. >> Absolutely. >> I mean, you hear this a lot from customers? Is this a unique situation maybe? >> Yeah, we see this a lot from customers. Actually by moving SAP workloads, mission-critical workloads, now to Pure Storage. And what really, it's not just about the evergreen and the simplicity, right? What also resonates very well with customers today is our story around the data platform, right? So that's not about storage anymore. It's really about providing a foundation for certain SAP workloads, and you can seamlessly go from, let's say, typical Oracle SAP deployment, and you can start with HANA deployments. Actually, by using our solution, you can actually reducing the cost by up to 75%, right? So these are all compelling reasons, and this all without any configuration changes or any setups that you need specifically for SAP workloads, right? It is so simple that you can run various SAP workloads on the same platform. And to move this, actually, to another angle is, What if in the future you want to do analytics, big data, internet of thing? Again, it's the same platform, it's the same foundation that you can run all these various SAP workloads on. And I think this is a very compelling story. >> And it's interesting for us. It's not just SAP workloads that are running in that environment. >> Oh, really? >> We're, it's, it's a mixed environment, so we're running everything else on top of that FlashStack today. >> Dave: Well, you've done a lot of work. >> Axel: Sure, yes. >> Well, I've got one other question I'd like to ask you about landscapes. See, you're a big international set of companies that you are servicing. So from a landscape point of view, did you want to centralize that onto one landscape or multiple landscapes? And I would have thought that's an area as well where using Flash was a great advantage that you could actually. >> It is centralized today. And then as we grow, we are giving consideration to, Will we have multiple instances across the globe. But today it is centralized and will be so probably for the next 24 months. >> But what you described earlier, Todd, was this horizontal infrastructure layer that could support mixed workloads. But there's got to be some kind of software, something in the middle that supports that as well. Did you have to write something to >> Orchestrate >> To support that >> Was it, yeah, some kind of orchestration or management, stack. >> No, today it was all, everything that we're doing today is within the Pure UI or within Wmware and UCS Manager today. >> Dave: Okay, well that'll get you pretty far. >> Yeah, yeah. Yeah. >> So where do you, what do you take away from this in terms of where this market's going? You talked about analysts generally say that most SAP workload's going to stay on prem. I think we would generally agree with that. >> Yes. Yeah. >> It's going to be a long slog before they're ready for the cloud. At least the core, mission-critical stuff, right? Okay, so that says there's real pressure on IT organizations to mimic substantially that public cloud experience. Are we there today? With a lot more work to be done? I'd like both of your inputs on that. >> Right, and that's the beauty of it. We're actually providing it, at Pure, the various flavors of cloud. So if customers want to actually go from physical to virtual, we are supporting this, because you can actually run your virtual SAP workloads seamlessly on our storage array. At the same time, if you're already then moving to the next level and you want to have a private cloud environment, right? So we have all the components and capabilities actually built into our product that you can do things like self-service, right? You can have chargeback. You can have all the deployment, right? So all of these features that actually make up a private cloud environment, so we have them in our mix already, right? So we more or less have everything ready for customers today. And if they want to actually go to a hybrid cloud, that's why I'm saying. 30%, maybe, to 40% of SAP workloads might go into a cloud, into a public cloud or a hybrid cloud environment. And we're actually also providing this hybrid cloud capability that you can move workloads seamlessly to an Azure, to an AWS, or to Google Cloud. So we just heard this morning we have this capability to move certain workloads seamlessly from on premise, from on premise Pure, onto AWS, for instance. So we have all the ingredients, so throughout this entire journey that the customer wants to go through, that they can actually move along with this one data platform, and that makes it. >> So, Todd, how do you decide now, knowing what you know, what goes where, what to put in the public cloud, what to put on prem, what's eventually going to be hybrid? >> Well, and we have adopted a strategy of Cloud First, which means, Will the workload or will the application fit in that as-a-service model? Does it necessarily mean that we're going to put everything there? We still believe that most mission-critical, anything around the RP, will most likely remain in-house. And one of the main differences that we saw was the availability in uptime that the Pure system gives us around what we could see that the manu-services providers could provide. And downtime is really not tolerated, and it's one of those things that we need. And when it's down, we've got to have things back up, and we need the availability to our end users. And as we expand across the globe, we're becoming more of a 7 by, maybe today we're a 6 by 20. We're not fully 7-by-24 shop yet. But we're getting to that, and so we're looking at the infrastructure that will help us achieve that goal. >> So you're looking at cloud as an operating model more so than a destination. Is that right? >> Todd: That's correct. That's correct. >> And of course, there's the destination aspect of it, which is a function of, what, performance and cost, and. What do you look at? What are the determinants there? >> Yeah, so performance is obviously key for us. Cost is always an important factor, but it's probably number 3 or 4 on the list, right? Availability, uptime, and performance are our key. And if we can get those, we can get the support and the availability that we need, then maybe it makes sense, right? If it's a web application, if it's something that's very straightforward, again, one of the biggest reasons that we go back to bringing it in-house is we truly understood the environment and how things fit together. Whereas in that manu-services environment, it was very difficult to do that. >> And what about security? We haven't talked much about security today. But where does that fit in in your cloud decision? >> David: Especially internationally, the different rules in different countries, for example. >> Yeah, internationally, it's a challenge with all of the data privacy laws and the things that are country-specific, and we're learning a lot of that in Latin America as well (David chuckling) as we begin to move into those markets. But security is absolutely top of mine. We will work with those cloud services providers, but we've talked to a lot of folks along the AWS and the Azure route. And we're comfortable with where the security around the cloud is going. We're talking to a lot of new cloud security brokers to understand what they can bring to the table as well. And it's not just an IT discussion. It's a legal discussion, right >> Right. >> We're having those legal teams come back to us and say, "Well, what does this mean?" Right? Where is the data going to live? And is it going to fit within our retention models and all of the things that we have in place today? >> Alright, good. Okay, we got to leave it there. But Axel, I'll give you the last word. >> The last word? Pure Accelerate. Give me the bumper sticker. >> So we are really excited to have, actually, a confirmation from a customer side to see that the strategy and the direction that we're going here at Pure is exactly on par with what customers are actually demanding and what they want when it comes to SAP or mission-critical workloads. So I'm really glad that we're hearing this now from a customer and get the confirmation from a customer. So I'm just really super duper excited to have Todd here with us to hear from, directly from a customer. >> Excellent. Alright, Cloud First. The CUBE, we hope you're first, we're first on your playlist. Gentlemen, thank you very much for coming on the CUBE. >> Thank you. Thank you. >> I appreciate it. Alright, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. (upbeat percussion music)

>> Narrator: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Pure Accelerate 2017. Brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Welcome back to Pier 70 in San Francisco, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, and we're here covering Pure Accelerate 2017. Andy Vandeveld is here. He's the Vice President of Strategic Alliances at Veeam, and Rajiev Rajavasireddy. I'm going to do that again, Rajavasireddy. >> Awesome. >> Did I get it? >> Love it. >> VP of Solutions at Pure. I thought I had it, Rajiev. >> You were so close. >> Alright, next time. I hope you come back so I can get it right. Anyway, welcome to theCUBE. Andy, good to see you again. I tweeted out today, I was joking, Veeam is like theCUBE. They're everywhere. You guys have been having great fun, hosting parties. Of course you're here now. We heard you up on the main stage today. So, let's start with the partnership. What are you guys doing with Veeam? >> So, we get a lot of requests from the field to partner more closely with Veeam. So, we have a lot of common customers. If you look at basically where we come from and where Veeam comes from, both of us have virtualization as a common thread. And the traditional backup software had to come into virtualization after the fact, so retro (mumbles) virtualization, whereas if you look at where Veeam started with virtualization, if you look at Pure it's a similar history, right? So, we came during the virtualization phase where people were trying to 100% virtualized data centers. So, both of us have this affinity for simplicity, virtualization centric, and efficiency and performance. Obviously, Pure is all about performance. So, there is a lot of natural synergies between Veeam and what Pure does. >> And we talk about this all the time, backup. For years, this has been a bolt on. It's been an afterthought. It's been one size fits all. I've written a lot about some of the challenges with backup. Now, talk about the announcement that you're making. Snapshots are not backups, right? >> Rajiev: That's right. >> But, they could be a critical enabler. So talk about the announcement and exactly what you guys are doing. >> Yeah, so as Rajiev was saying, we hear a lot from customers and a lot from partners about the customers wanting native snapshot integration with Pure Storage. So, that's what we announced today. We're in the lab. We're working through development right now. We provided the APIs to Pure, and our target is to get full snapshot integration out in GA sometime shortly after our Version 10 hits the market. >> Okay, and this is starting with block, and then eventually is files in the road map. >> So basically, as Andy was mentioning, we have the SDK. We have to sign the non disclosures, usual non disclosures with each other, and we have Veeam's SDK. So, our engineering is working on it, and we're planning to get this out, snapshot based integration with Veeam. And we're also in parallel working on solutions for FlashBlade along with Veeam as well. >> Okay, so I want to definitely talk about solutions, because that's important, and that's obviously your title. What about, what are the real use cases that you guys are seeing that you're going after? Let's start there and then we'll get into solutions. >> Rajiev: You want to take or do you want me to take? >> Andy: Yeah, go ahead. >> Sure. So obviously, the no brainer, virtual server, virtual desktops, Veeam is very strong. Pure has a ton of that in their customer base, and those are basically low hanging fruit for both of us. >> Alright. Others that you feel like will emerge over time? >> Pretty much. I mean if you really think about it, even databases-- >> Host: Right, I was going to say-- >> It runs well, but they run in VMs, and so we do those backups as well. So, there's a lot of databases that are on Pure, as well. >> Are you doing much, does Veeam do much in Oracle? Is that a big market for you or not so much yet, or is it emerging? >> Oracle Database is certainly a backup source for us, but in terms of applications I think we look at more of how do we facilitate the movement of those virtual machines and the backing up and the availability of those virtual machines from the storage perspective. So, we'll move into the application layer as we go along, and as we make more and more of our push into the enterprise, but I think right now it's focused on how do we take the virtual machines and the files in the storage environments and orchestrate those across the various environments that customers are finding themselves in, whether it's on premise, whether it's in the cloud, some combination of the both of them. >> Well, that's fundamental to the strategy, kind of like snoop, multi cloud. (Rajiev laughs) >> Good reference. >> Rajiev let's talk about... Inside joke. We won't bore our audience. Maybe we'll tweet out a picture, show you what we mean. Anyway Rajiev, let's talk about solutions. What are solutions to you and Pure, and what specific solutions are you working on? >> So basically, if you look at our portfolio of offerings, we have FlashArray, which is a block based array, which is (mumbles) and fiber channel as protocols. Then we have FlashBlade, which we did earlier this year, and FlashBlade is targeting next gen applications, so a very large customer is using us for artificial intelligence and machine learning. We are targeting applications like IoT, big data analytics. So, all the cool stuff, the next gen workloads, that's where FlashBlade is targeted. We're doing file and object. So just today we GAd our S3 implementation on FlashBlade, and we have NFS support, and we also have native, not native, but SMB support with FlashBlade. So, that's targeting the next gen workload, the file and object workloads, sorry, FlashBlade is, and FlashArray is targeting the block workloads. And then we have a partnership with Cisco. It's a jointly branded converged infrastructure we call FlashStack. So, these are all the portfolios that we have. And as you can tell, the solutions on the FlashArray side are mostly, if you will, virtual servers, virtual desktops, databases, Oracle, SQL, and of that nature, and they're already talking about the FlashBlade application. FlashStack can incorporate FlashArray as well as FlashBlade. >> Okay, and then in talking to some of the Veeam customers over the last several weeks, many of them lacked, before they found you guys, a disaster recovery strategy, and they sort of got one by default. Does that fit in terms of what you guys are doing together? Do you find that similar in the Pure customer base? Wondering if you could talk about DR for a moment. >> Yeah, DR is definitely a strong solution and value proposition that we can bring together. Customers need that. As we move more and more into the enterprise, that becomes so mission critical for that enterprise class of customers. Not only do they want the availability, but in the event of some disaster they want to have that ability to recover. I think doing the native snapshot integration gives us an even stronger solution to take into the DR market, whether it's DR on premise, DR as a service with service providers, whatever that mix is, it really does give us that more robust solution, and I think that's in addition to the other value propositions and other use cases that Rajiev talked about. That is a big one. >> Rajiev, maybe you can talk about the nature of the partnership. We talked about there's some engineering integration going on. What about the go to market? What's going on in the channel? >> So basically, again, there's a lot of synergies there. So, we have a direct sales force, and so does Veeam, but we are 100% go through the channel, and so does Veeam. And it turns out a lot of our channel partners are also Veeam's channel partners, and there is scope for us to do incentive programs and so on and so forth. So, there's a lot of synergy right there. Combine that with Cisco and the FlashStack, both of us have Cisco as a partner, and it turns out Cisco's channel partners are pretty much near 100% overlap with ourselves. And I'll let Andy speak for Veeam, but I suspect there's a lot of the same partners that also sell Veeam. >> Yeah, I think that's another aspect of the relationship that really when we started looking at what's the next integration that we're going to do, this was an important one for us, and we'll soon go to market. It just seemed so aligned, and it was aligned with not just between ourselves, but with that common partner in Cisco and the reseller communities around all of our businesses. So, that was a real point of interest for us in deciding to do this integration. Not only were you hearing it from customers, but the infrastructure, the ecosystem, of partners was something that we just readily take advantage of. >> Well, it's no secret that you guys both compete with Dell EMC, and obviously a merger of that size has to have an effect on the channel. How have you specifically been able to take advantage of that, or have you been, and has it been substantial? >> Of course, right? Anytime you have mergers of that size there's some level of uncertainty in the channel market. Customers don't deal with uncertainty well. When you combine two big companies that have a lot of overlapping products, there's always that, and so we've definitely made the A out of that. >> So, you've specifically picked up channel partners that say like, "Hey, I really want to give you guys a look," that might not have before? >> So basically, that is part of what we've done. The other part is also the existing channel, I mean there are some channel partners who sell both portfolios. A lot of channel partners have multiple portfolios. >> And so what's that? A mix, a share shift, a mix in the... >> Rajiev: It's a combination I would say. >> Okay, how about you guys? >> Yeah, I would say the same thing. Eventually they're going to figure it out and they're going to get it right. Everybody should expect that. But in the meantime there has been some disruption, and I think partners are looking around and saying, "Where am I going to make my money? "Are the assets in that portfolio "of those two merged companies going to even still exist?" And as that all starts to get, it works its way out, there's a gap in time, and I think that we've been able to fill that gap from a data protection standpoint. Pure has been able to fill that from a storage standpoint. And we're taking advantage of this opening that we've got. >> And it's interesting, I want to talk more about the channel, in the context of solutions, Rajiev, because if you look at the channel and the way it's evolving, you've got the box sellers. We love them. That's probably where most of the business still is even today. But, that business is declining, and we know that. Those channel partners, they had great businesses. They still do. They've got boats and mansions and whatever else, but that business is in decline. The margins are under pressure. And then you've got the solution folks, and this is where I want to get your feedback. Solutions used to be defined as SAP, Oracle, VMware. Now you're talking about these emerging solutions around data, analytics, IoT, machine learning, a whole new set of solutions players, and then of course there's the cloud, the cloud service providers, and ISVs. It seems like the channel is in flux in a big way. So, to the extent that a company like EMC, and maybe we saw this somewhat with IBM as well when they sold off x86 and BNT, to the extent that their channel is in any kind of uncertainty, how do you see the channels shaping and emerging, and how are you taking advantage of... First of all, is what I described accurate, and how are you guys taking advantage of it? >> Absolutely. You know, there's also another trend that you didn't talk about. I mean cloud. It's the elephant in the room. The cloud is here, and people want to look at what they want to do with the cloud when we talk about customers. It is a challenge as well as an opportunity for channel partners, right? So basically, if you look at, for example, what we're doing with FlashStack and with Veeam, we are still providing infrastructure, and infrastructure by itself is not a solution. If you look at what the IT folks are dealing with is their developers. So, you can go to the cloud, and you can actually go ahead, the developers can go ahead and provision themselves VMs and everything else very quickly. They don't even know what infrastructure is running underneath it. Now, the challenge for the IT folks is to see how they can provide a similar experience to their user base, and a lot of the times it could be developers. So, it's incumbent on us, and Veeam, and everybody else to provide an infrastructure that also ties in. When you say solutions, there's tiers of solutions. You need to have automation orchestration. They're solutions. You need to have management solutions that still provide infrastructure, and then you have applications that run on top of that infrastructure. So, the channel partners have a lot of scope to actually add services. And if you really think about channel folks, I mean the good ones, they always want to make money on services, not on pushing boxes, like you called earlier. >> Host: That's where they get their margin. >> And it's a great opportunity for them. >> Margins, stickiness, loyalty, I mean all that stuff. And the fact that the definition of a solution is evolving is an opportunity for those players who can move really fast. >> And we see our channel partners trying to do a good job in that space right now and evolving there. >> Both of you, when you look at that mix that I talked about, I said 70% are sort of box sellers. Well, you guys don't sell boxes, but you know what I mean. Is your mix weighted more toward solutions in your companies? >> Yeah, I would say we kind of measure it more on on-prem versus cloud, or some sort of subscription managed service environment. But, we definitely see the higher growth coming from those non on-prem environments. And I think that's a place where the more advanced resellers are spinning up services. And we're following that trend. We're seeing that trend right before our eyes. >> And yesterday we had our global partner forum here, and Hatfield, our COO, was on stage, and he basically highlighted what we call the scarcity model. We don't sign up thousands of channel partners. We sign up a few channel partners who will add real value, and we make sure that they're doing just as well as we're doing. So, if you look at Pure, right, we have about, I think the official number is north of 3,300 or so customers, but our revenue is very high relative to that. So, we are selling to enterprise customers who need... You add a lot of value. You have to sell solutions. You just can't sell a box and be done with it. >> Yeah, I think that's a really important point. Alright gents, we got to leave it there. Thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. Good to see you guys. >> Yeah. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Alright, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. This is theCUBE; we're live from Pier 70 in San Francisco at Pure Accelerate. We'll be right back. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Pure Accelerate 2017. Brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Welcome back to Pier 70 in San Francisco everybody. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Stu Miniman and this is theCube. We go out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. A lot going on here at Pure Accelerate 2017. Siva Sivakumar is here as the Senior Director of Data Center Solutions at Cisco, and Mayur Dewaikar is the Product Management Lead for Converge at Pure Storage. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Glad to be here. We've heard a lot this morning about Converge, the Cisco partnership. We just had a couple customers on that are doing FlashStack. So Siva, let's start with you. Thoughts on Accelerate? >> This is probably the coolest event I've been in many years. >> Different venue, right? >> The ambience, the venue, and the fact that Warriors won last night, it's just joy, it's awesome today. >> Dave: Oh, you want to talk hoops for a little bit? You know, we can do that if you guys. We're Patriots fans so we know. We're not just winning fans. Two out of the last three, it's good. It's good to be a winner, isn't it. >> Yep, absolutely. >> Well, Mayur, give us your thoughts on Converge. You guys are talking about Converge a lot today in FlashStack. We just heard from some customers. Talk about the strategy. What are you guys trying to accomplish there. >> Yeah, so we launched the FlashStack program about three years ago and what we were starting to see in the industry was that there was a very clear preference from customers to buy full stack solutions. So we thought that was an opportunity for us to take our storage business and move it into an adjacent market, which was Converge. And we thought we had really addressed a lot of the storage pain points that people were seeing with the existing Converge solution so with our flash performance and the simplicity that Pure brings to the table, we thought we had an opportunity really to team up with Cisco and build a solution that can be sufficiently differentiated and something that people would really love to try out. >> Mayur, I wonder if you could help clarify something. A lot of times people hear converge and they think coming together. When I think about the solutions that both Cisco, UCS, and Pure, there's lots of software and it's really a distributed-type scalable architecture so how am I both converged and scalable? >> So what we're basically doing is we are trying to, we're bringing best of breed solutions together, right. So I think there's a lot of synergy between the way UCS is architectured and Pure is architectured. So we're both stateless architectures on the compute side and the storage side and what we're doing as part of the Pure Storage for or FlashStack Converge program is that we're really doing these things together with a unified management platform, which really brings everything together. So it really simplifies the deployment, it simplifies the day-to-day management of the entire stack, which is really what people are looking for. >> Yeah, so Siva, we've heard a lot today about Converge, we heard some comments about hyper-converge. What's the difference between converged and hyper-converged? >> I think if you look at the evolution in the industry, these are big ships or the big ways customers want to consume. The genesis of all the work around convergence, if you will, that started it all was the customer started to realize, "I have bigger problems to solve from an IT perspective. "I would rather not solve infrastructure "problems all by myself. "I want the vendors to solve this. "I want the vendors to give me an experience "that is far more turnkey so I invest my time "and resource on higher artifacts" that are more in a business critical from their perspective. That truly allowed us to look into convergence as a strategy and bring together certain use cases and value propositions that is very critical to IT. High availability, scalability, multi-side deployment, which are all critical for an IT to solve. We solve it first ourself as a joint architecture. We validate that and then we provide blueprints that both our customers can choose in and our partners can choose. We had a very big channel partner community. Lot of our partners leverage the work we do to deliver great value to our customers. While Convergence was heavily centered around heavy-based storages that the market was absorbing, the evolution of storage to include more in the software-defined work, created another set of categories that allows customers to say, you know what, my interest is much more on the simplification and start small and those types of models, it propped a new industry at a new paradigm in the industry. From our perspective, there's a huge value in convergence. It's a 7 billion dollar business and IDC thinks it continues to grow. And we absolutely believe we have a purpose built on a ground-up platform that was built for Flash, that's the Pure Storage architecture, is truly here and truly is a big part of our strategy-building dive. And of course, as more use cases are coming to the compute side, we are here to embrace technologies like hyper-convergence because that's obviously something that's great for a software vendor to embrace as well. >> So from your standpoint, I think of you guys as software heavy, software led, but you're not participating in the so-called hyper-converge. Is that because you don't want to own that part of the stack, you'd rather partner for it. What's your point of view there? >> Yeah, so I think from our standpoint, we believe that there is basically use cases both for hyper-converge and converge infrastructure, right. We believe that with the program we have at Cisco, we can basically provide a very good, a very compelling solution of FlashStack. And Cisco already has a solution in hyperflex that addresses the hyper-converge use case and we really see both of these co-existing in a lot of customer environments that are use cases where NCI absolutely shines and then there are use cases where we believe FlashStack is really the right solution. >> But it's interesting you haven't sort of chased that trend, you're more focused on your areas and you're doing very well with it. Is that fundamental to the strategy or is it just sort of you guys are focused elsewhere. >> Yeah, so I think for us, for Pure Storage, I think we are looking at the Converged market really as there is a lot of existing business there that can be had. Which is really tied to legacy storage platforms coming up for refresh as part of the Converged infrastructure deployments people already have. So that in itself is a fairly large opportunity for us and we believe that with the messaging we have, which is you can consolidate a lot of your workloads on FlashStack. I think the platform that FlashStack is providing is really very well-suited for the use cases that Pure Storage has traditionally played in. Which is really the enterprise workloads, in my opinion. >> Is it fair to say that Convergence 1 data, and of course Cisco was heavily involved in Convergence 1.0, you kind of arguably created it along with some partners, but is it fair to say it was just too complex for a lot of customers? And are you trying to take that to the next level? Can you add some color to that? >> Yeah, I can answer that. I think Convergence 1.0 was truly about idea operational simplification. Because they truly wanted to consume these best-of-breed technologies without having to deal with so much of technology consumption itself but as a system-level consumption. But apparently what happened in the industry is obviously the evolution of cloud. Cloud brought a completely different paradigm of how you consume an infrastructure in itself. I mean, email is an infrastructure now because you buy from a cloud winner, you get your VM in an email. So that's a very different way of consumption model which created additionally requirements for more simplification. The turnkey experiences and things like that led to another category. But if you look at FlashStack, what we are doing is we are bringing this simplification model into FlashStack as well. We recognize, while building the best-of-breed is a great idea, and great market for itself, simplification is never lost. People love that as well. So we're looking at bringing together as close to a single pane of glass as possible with such strong technology play to deliver some of the simplification in this model as well. So you're truly trying to bridge the gap and offering something that customers really want to see. >> Yeah, simplification's definitely a big piece of that wave of both converged and hyper-converged. When I think back, when we launched all of these solutions, it was, okay, that Day Zero, I should be able to speed that up and the Day One, the stuff afterwards, we should be able to make that easier. How are you measuring that these days? Any customers you can speak to as to how they dramatically shift that, kind of keeping the lights on versus really being able to focus on the business. >> Yeah, so I think if you really look at a Converged stack, there is three distinct pieces in it, right. So there's compute, storage, networking. And I think Cisco did a phenomenal job with the UCS and UCS manager platforms in helping really put a cookie cutter approach on deploying compute. So if you look at what was remaining, networking was always kind of the low-hanging fruit. Storage was very complex. So with Pure coming in to the picture, we have really simplified the overall deployment and management of storage. So we were talking from days down to a few hours to get storage going and get the entire FlashStack infrastructure going as a result. And then what we're doing is, we're using a lot of existing tools that exist in the ecosystem. So great example of that is UCS Director which is being used very prominently by customers to deploy their entire data centers. We are integrating with that and in addition to that, we're also integrating with a lot of hypervisor level tools like Recenter or hyper v-level tools. And the benefit is that customers are getting to use the tools that they're already used to with the simplicity of UCS and Pure to really simplify the overall deployment and also management of the entire stack. >> So really, the problem you're solving is one of IT labor intensity, right. IT labor is too much IT labor, it's too non-differentiated, it's too expensive. Is that fair? >> Well, yeah. So fundamentally what we are solving is providing you a platform. A platform and an experience that IT wants, IT desires, but that also is optimized so that it can easily provide a platform experience but then the workload and the diversification you see in the market and the one side is an article database. You don't touch for four years kind of a thing. On the other hand, you have a container which you use for two seconds. So you really have a complete range of use cases. Each demand something different from a platform. Our strategy and our goal is to provide a single cohesive platform that uniformly works across all of these use cases from an IT operations and management standpoint. You realize the challenge is quite complex but the solution is a huge value for our customers and that's really our journey in solving this problem. >> Can you share any, what should we expect to see from a kind of joint-engineering deployment going forward. We heard in the keynote this morning, said some really you know, the cloud native, AI, ML type deployments. We're talking less about virtualization, more about containers and microservices. Where should we look to Cisco and Pure in the future? >> So, I think there's an interesting demo on the floor. It really talks about something that's cutting edge. NVMe over Fabric, so the next big innovation from Pure is NVMe, all NVMe, right. That is, obviously, no performance goals there. It's absolutely a screaming box. We have a Cisco adaptor technology that can deliver high performance, low-latency iO transport on top of a fabric, on top of an Ethernet fabric to talk ENVme from the host. Just the power of how much you can do iO subsystem from a compute perspective onto the network and talking to the storage and the ability to bring a superclass performance on a storage perspective is absolutely a next generation cutting edge and vendors like this coming together truly solves the industry's next big problem. Who better to solve a fabric, network, bandwidth issue than Cisco? Partnering with best-of-breed from the storage. Then that's one, just sort of a technology and architectural play if you will. But on a use-case workload type of scenarios, we've done a lot of the traditional use cases quite a bit in the databases and the VDIs of the world. But we are now looking at the next generation of use cases. Containers, microservices. How do I make the docker environment integrate seamlessly with the FlashStack? Now, this is already different, this is a very different paradigm. How do I enable FlashStack to be very simple to consume kubernetes. Because these are use cases where the developer who is much more focused on clouds does not really think there is an infrastructure underneath. He doesn't even care about it. So we need to give him that experience so that it's a seamless way of deploying and managing these DevOps environments as well. So that's the next wave of work we are doing is to provide that agility factor coming out of the FlashStack. and if conditional architecture is being built for this, it obviously helps. >> And you see NVMe over Fabric as kind of one of those foundational aspects, right. >> That'll be another architectural cog in the same context of what we are trying to do. >> Are you, with FlashStack, able to preserve that same experience for customers? The Evergreen experience, the never have to migrate your day, I mean all that wonderful stuff. Does that translate into the partnership? >> We are. So, we are taking a lot of the same goodness we have with the storage platform and we're extending that into FlashStack. So we have, very similar to Pure, you can almost non-disruptively upgrade pretty much everything in the UCS stack and we have special programs now with Cisco to which we can provide people the option to also get new gear every couple of years. Very similar to the Evergreen Storage Program we have through Pure Storage. >> So is it fair to say, well, first of all, is that unique to Pure or is that something that Cisco sort of has innovated on? >> It's, from a storage perspective, Pure, I think truly created the easy button for storage which is nonexistent. It's one of the hardest problems to solve. >> But what about the other pieces? >> And Cisco obviously pioneered the fabric-based stateless compute, which is still a standard in the industry of how to do the easy button for compute is truly what we brought to the table that really revolutionized the industry. I absolutely think that's where the architecture individually are building technology that are great. When you combine that and jointly engineer the solution and provide the turnkey value for the customer then the absolute value is manifested in a very big way. And I think that's our journey. We are hear, obviously we are hearing a lot of great customers coming in but the more customers we hear, the more we learn. >> But you've substantially sort of recreated that experience to a great degree. >> Siva: Absolutely, absolutely. >> I think that's a huge differentiator for Pure. You don't hear a lot of other companies talking about it and when you talk to your customers, they always point to that. You know, the migrations are just such a painful, horrible experience. >> Yep. >> So, good stuff. Alright, we have to leave it there, gents. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. >> Mayur: Thank you. >> Pleasure, thank you. >> Alright, take care. Keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from Pure Accelerate 2017. Be right back.

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE! Covering Pure Accelerate 2017. Brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Welcome to Pier 70 in San Francisco, everybody. I'm Dave Vellante with my cohost Stu Miniman, and this is Pure Accelerate 2017. Pure Storage in 2009 started a big wave of flash migrations, and the company's strategy was to specifically go after the large EMC Install base of older Symmetrix, mainframe class storage, and even to a certain extent VNX and Clariion, if anyone remembers those terms, the Install base. Pure's ascendancy was really a function of shifting from spinning disk to flash. Fast forward seven, eight, nine years later, and Pure is talking about big data and AI and machine learning and IoT, and is really trying to completely transform not only the storage industry but itself as a leading player. The last time an independent storage company hit a billion dollars is about 20 years ago, a company called NetApp. Pure is trying to be the next to be a billion dollar company. Stu Miniman, lot of action goin' on here, used to be back in the day, I bought EMC for block, NetApp for file. Pure is trying to change that. >> Yeah, and Dave, you know storage, we've talked about it when Dell bought EMC. What did that mean to the whole storage industry? I wrote an article when it happened and said it's the end of the storage industry as we know it. When I came in here, it was like, oh, we're going to be talking about storage. You mentioned NetApp; I was at a NetApp event last week, and they said, "Storing is boring." It's really about the data, it's about the new applications. I really liked in the keynote they were talking about new use cases, new applications, how do they fit into that multi-cloud world, really interesting to hear Scott Dietzen, who we've known since this company was in stealth, laying out where the company is. They've got over 33 hundred customers, lot of SaaS applications, they're talking a lot about the machine learning and the AI pieces that are in here, but at the end of the day, I mean Dave, this is their primary business is a storage array replaces, as you said, the traditional EMC boxes that used to be sold. So how much of this is still kind of an update on what the legacy is doing, how much are they ready for the future? I'm excited to dig in with some real customers here. Pure has a good movement, good customer base, I've always had some good smart people with good tech, the Puritans as they call them, all wearing orange here. So, a cool venue and excited to dig in. >> Well, it's one of the fastest-growing companies in the storage business and in the IT business, and the way that Pure has gotten there isn't, you know, in its early days it never really talked much about so-called software-defined, it just did it. One of the problems that Pure attacks is the problem of migration. David Floyer and Wikibon have written extensively about the cost of migration, the pain of migration. It was almost just assumed, well you know, if I'm buying storage I'm going to have to migrate, and I'm going to spend 50, a hundred, sometimes many hundreds of thousands of dollars migrating my workloads from older arrays to newer arrays. Pure Storage has this Evergreen concept, where through the use of software and software-defined technologies, it's able to upgrade new customers quote-unquote seamlessly, there's that overused word again, but it's able to deliver essentially storage as a service even though you're putting an appliance on their site. So it's a radically different model. They've announced some things today, for instance like three site data replication, which is very very complicated. Trying to simplify that, so a lot of really novel ideas. Again I come back to their ascendancy. It was really based, Stu, upon attacking the slow, expensive spinning disk using its data reduction technology to create parity between the cost of spinning disk and the cost of flash, something David Floyer predicted back in 2009 would happen by 2014 for the high-spin speed. Now with FlashBlade, which is essentially the file-based system that Pure has, they're going after that same mantra with higher-capacity spinning disks, really going after the NetApp base. >> Yeah, and Dave, you mentioned that Pure could be the most recent billion dollar storage company. The company that might actually beat them to that is Nutanix. Now of course, Nutanix sells more than just storage. They're hyper-converged infrastructure, which means the compute that they're also selling, that's being used there, so it's not quite apples to apples, but the last quoter Nutanix had, about 10 million dollars more in revenue than Pure did; they also had IPOed. In that hyperconverge trend, one of the things that I saw early on on that, Dave, was attacking that migration cost. Hyperconverge, like what Pure does, a software layer, you create a pool of architectures, I can add in nodes, I can change configurations, I can update without the traditional way that we used to do it in storage, which was buy that box, take months to get it in there, load it up, transfer it over, retest it, you know all of those things that really kept your time-to-value on storage down, and that's something that Pure and all the hyper-converged players have been attacking, that kind of legacy mindset that we had in storage for so long. >> Yeah, and of course Pure's approach to converged is in partnership with Cisco and presumably others, I'm not actually sure about that, but Cisco's the main partner there with FlashStack, that's their converge play. They kind of do a knock on hyper-converged, kind of de-positioning it as sort of low-end, sort of contained, within small remote offices, whereas they're positioning FlashStack as the scalable internet infrastructure. Pure does very well with SaaS companies, they do, they're increasingly doing better with Fortune 500, they've still got a long way to go there. About 80% of their business is U.S., so there's a lot of upside internationally. We're talking about a company that'll be a billion dollars in their fiscal 2018, which is fundamentally the year we're in now, they've got about a 2.4 billion dollar market cap, they're growing at about 30% a year. And very interestingly, they had mid-60% gross margins at one point last year, they had like 69.6% gross margin, which is unheard of, you know, we haven't really seen this since back in the heydays of NetApp and EMC. The question is, is that sustainable? And of course the big question that we have today, and we're going to talk to Scott Dietzen, nickname Dietz, lot of nicknames here at Pure Storage, about is the concept of a large independent storage company. That concept is going away, it's like extinct except for one company really, NetApp is the only billion-dollar storage company left. It's been 20-plus years, maybe even 25 years since that's occurred. What are your thoughts on that, Stu? You know, I wrote a piece maybe eight years ago, Can EMC Remain Independent, recognizing that most of EMC's value was coming from Vmware and of course EMC could not remain independent. Do you think a company like Pure can unseat the leaders of Dell, EMC, HPE, IBM, and remain an independent storage company? >> Well, one of the things I always look at is what is, where are they going to hit their plateau? They're reaching towards billion dollars and they do continue to grow. I think that Pure still has plenty of headroom, but how long does it take them, Dave, to get to three or five billion dollars? The reason I throw out that number is that's probably how much storage Amazon's doing today. You know, look at Amazon, it's a 15 billion dollar company, somewhere between 15 and 30% of Amazon's business, and nobody in the storage business talks about that because it just ties to my applications. So I want to follow the applications, follow the data. It's good to hear that Pure is getting in with a lot of SaaS providers. From Wikibon data, 2/3 of the public cloud data, I'm sorry, of the public cloud revenue, is SaaS providers, so absolutely here come these like Pure, SolidFire sold, before when they were an independent company, sold to lots of service providers as well as SaaS providers. Kaminario, a Massachusetts-based flash company, sells to I believe it's about half of their business, is selling to the SaaS providers because these are companies that look at, okay I need to own how I scale my environment, own those economics, and need to grow that. And just one more piece on that economics, Dave. Look at that kind of multi- or hybrid cloud world. I bristle a little bit when I hear Scott Dietzen kind of almost say, public cloud, it's in the corner. about 20% of the use cases fit in that environment, yeah we'll do snaps to Amazon, we'll do some other things. But you don't put the public cloud in the corner and just say, oh, 20% of the market's there. 'Cause that's today, and it is still growing 50, 75, 100% depending on which public cloud you're talking about. We think that there's still plenty of upside, and when does that become a headwind that will slow the growth of what Pure's doing? You see a lot of the other software storage companies out there say how do they become software? When we were at the Veeam show, Dave, how did, they really were, we're going to live in Azure. We're going to partner with AWS, and they don't really care. Pure very much, their growth, their revenue, and their margins today are all built that they're going to be selling gear with that, yes they have the Purity 1 software and they have some cloud plays, but very much seems to be saying that public cloud's not the direction. I'm sure Scott will probably give us a little more nuance there, but you know, that legacy change to new distributed architectures has been a tailwind for Pure, and when will cloud be something that will push against their growth? >> Well, we're going to ask Scott Dietzen about that, and you're right on, I mean public cloud clearly is growing, I mean it's growing like crazy, particularly the SaaS component of that. Now of course, that can be a tailwind for Pure because they do sell to SaaS companies. They even, Scott even had a slide up there today showing Google, Uber, Facebook, AWS. Did you infer like I did that they were implying that they were selling to those companies, or? >> No, no no, I saw because in the last quarterly report they talked about basically the number four through a thousand. >> Dave: Four to a thousand. >> Dave: Right. >> So they're not selling to the top three, that they're clear on. >> So, okay, so the top three would be Amazon, Google, and Microsoft-- >> Right. >> But then there's Facebook, and Uber, possibly they could sell to those companies, Spotify is a SaaS company, so that SaaS part of the market is growing like crazy. Now the other point is, Wikibon released a study. We've been talking about it for the last couple of weeks in theCUBE around the true private cloud market forecast. True private cloud is an on-prem infrastructure that substantially mimics the public cloud at a much lower cost. We came up with this notion of true private cloud because there was so much cloudwashing going on, which really was virtualization. Now, the true private cloud is growing actually faster than any other cloud segment, now from a smaller base, granted. But we see about a 230 billion dollar TAM over the next 10 years evolving. Now, the most important part of this, and Scott Dietzen touched upon this in the morning, as did Hat, using some nicknames again, that companies are really focused on lowering their IT labor costs, and we see 150 billion dollars, approximately, of IT labor moving out of nondifferentiated heavy lifting, into what we sometimes call vendor R&D. In the form of cloud, or on-prem products, appliances, and other software frameworks that can automate and eliminate this low-value provisioning and patching and LUN management. So, Stu, you were very much involved in that true private cloud report, that market's exploding. I mean, to me, it's all about TAM expansion for Pure. They're a billion dollar company, roughly, they're participating in a 30 or 40 billion dollar market, so they have a long way to go. >> Yeah, absolutely. Because really, Dave, it's about the application. It is not a winner-takes-all environment. When you look at multicloud, it's what applications, and even we start teasing apart pieces of my applications and where they live. So, I look at, there was a nice logo slide that Pure put up, and you say okay, Hulu is a customer. Well, is Pure helping with their CDN? I really doubt it. You know, you look at Workday. Workday, up on stage at Amazon Reinvent talking about how they partnered with Amazon. So what applications is Pure winning, which ones are their customers using the public cloud for, and how does all of that sort out? Absolutely, true private cloud is really that reinvention of the data center, that flipping, if you will, of I mean Dave, you probably know better than me, that saying that IT spends 80 or 90 percent of their budget on keeping the lights on. How do we flip that so we can spend money on innovating, driving the business forward, stop spending on one of our favorite terms, undifferentiated heavy lifting and move to innovate and drive the business, and have IT serving those applications and serving the things that help me differentiate from the competition and move faster. Because, absolutely I'm sure something we'll hear this show, is it's that agility and that speed is what companies need, and Pure with their six nines of availability and that if you buy it today you're future-proof, if you will, is going to help customers say that they can have a platform that they buy today and know it's going to serve them well in the future. >> Well, Mark Benioff I think was the first that I heard said it, or it might've been Peter Burns, I can't remember, but basically there're going to be many more SaaS companies coming out of non-tech companies than tech companies. That to me, Stu, is a big, big tailwind for a company like Pure who's software first, software-defined, knows how to sell to SaaS companies. The other thing is, Pure's the latest company. They didn't say this but they certainly, one could infer it, the latest company to basically say tape is dead. So it used to be offsite backup the tape, now they're talking the flash to flash to cloud as the long-term retention. So a lot of really interesting things going on here. The venue is actually quite amazing, it's at Pier 70, this place is going to get torn down right after this show, it's a place that used to be an old steel mill that used to make battleships here, about two battleships a year during World War II. >> Yeah, the new Warriors facility is going to be here in Dogpatch soon, and I know everybody's super excited about that. >> Yeah, well, yeah, a lot of purple hats here, a lot of excited Warriors fans. >> All right, we'll be back, we've got day-to-day all day, wall-to-wall coverage of Pure Accelerate, #PureAccelerate. This is theCUBE, I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman, we'll be right back with Scott Dietzen right after this short break. (upbeat electronic chords)