(upbeat music) >> We're back in Boston, theCUBE's coverage of Re:Inforce 2022. My name is Dave Vellante. Dave Hatfield is here. He's the co-CEO of Lacework. Dave, great to see again. Hat. >> Thanks Dave. >> Do you still go by Hat? >> Hat is good for me. (Dave V laughing) >> All right cool. >> When you call me David, I'm in trouble for something. (Dave V Laughing) So just call me Hat for now. >> Yeah, like my mom, David Paul. >> Exactly. >> All right. So give us the update. I mean, you guys have been on a tear. Obviously the Techlash, >> Yep. >> I mean, a company like yours, that has raised so much money. You got to be careful. But still, I'm sure you're not taking the foot off the gas. What's the update? >> Yeah no. We were super focused on our mission. We want to de deliver a cloud security for everybody. Make it easier for developers and builders, to do their thing. And we're fortunate to be in a situation, where people are in the early innings of moving into the cloud, you know. So our customers, largely digital natives. And now increasingly cloud migrants, are recognizing that in order to build fast, you know, in the cloud, they need to have a different approach to security. And, you know, it used to be that you're either going be really secure or really fast. And we wanted to create a platform that allowed you to have both. >> Yeah. So when you first came to theCUBE, you described it. We are the first company. And at the time, I think you were the only company, thinking about security as a data problem. >> Yeah. >> Explain what that means. >> Well, when you move to the cloud, you know, there's literally a quintillion data sets, that are out there. And it's doubling every several days or whatever. And so it creates a massive problem, in that the attack surface grows. And different than when you're securing a data center or device, where you have a very fixed asset, and you kind of put things around it and you kind of know how to do it. When you move to the shared ephemeral massive scale environment, you can't write rules, and do security the way you used to do it, for a data centers and devices. And so the insight for us was, the risk was the data, the upside was the data, you know? And so if you can harness all of this data, ingest it, process it, contextualize it, in the context of creating a baseline of what normal is for a company. And then monitor it constantly in real time. Figure out, you know, identify abnormal activity. You can deliver a security posture for a company, unlike anything else before. Because it used to be, you'd write a rule. You have a known adversary or a bad guy that's out there, and you constantly try and keep up with them for a very specific attack service. But when you move to the cloud, the attack service is too broad. And so, the risk of the massive amount of data, is also the solution. Which is how do you harness it and use it with machine learning and AI, to solve these problems. >> So I feel like for CISOs, the cloud is now becoming the first line of defense. >> Yep. The CISOs is now the second line. Maybe the auditing is the third line. I don't know. >> Yeah. >> But, so how do you work with AWS? You mentioned, you know, quadrillion. We heard, I think it was Steven Schmidt, who talked about in his keynote. A quadrillion, you know, data points of a month or whatever it was. That's 15 zeros. Mind boggling. >> Yeah. >> How do you interact with AWS? You know, where's your data come from? Are you able to inspect that AWS data? Is it all your own kind of first party data? How does that all work? >> Yeah, so we love AWS. I mean we ultimately, we started out our company building our own service, you know, on AWS. We're the first cloud native built on the cloud, for the cloud, leveraging data and harnessing it. So AWS enabled us to do that. And partners like Snowflake and others, allowed us to do that. But we are a multi-cloud solution too. So we allow builders and customers, to be able to have choice. But we'd go deep with AWS and say, the shared responsibility model they came up with. With partners and themselves to say, all right, who ultimately owns security? Like where is the responsibility? And AWS does a great job on database storage, compute networking. The customer is responsible for the OS, the platform, the workloads, the applications, et cetera, and the data. And that's really where we come in. And kind of help customers secure their posture, across all of their cloud environments. And so we take a cloud trail data. We look at all of the network data. We look at configuration data. We look at rules based data and policies, that customers might have. Anything we can get our hands on, to be able to ingest into our machine learning models. And everybody knows, the more data you put into a machine learning model, the finer grain it's going to be. The more insightful and the more impactful it's going to be. So the really hard computer science problem that we set out to go do seven years ago, when we founded the company, was figure out a way to ingest, process, and contextualize mass amounts of data, from multiple streams. And the make sense out of it. And in the traditional way of protecting customers' environments, you know, you write a rule, and you have this linear sort of connection to alerts. And so you know, if you really want to tighten it down and be really secure, you have thousands of alerts per day. If you want to move really fast and create more risk and exposure, turn the dial the other way. And you know, we wanted to say, let's turn it all the way over, but maintain the amount of alerts, that really are only the ones that they need to go focus on. And so by using machine learning and artificial intelligence, and pulling all these different disparate data systems into making sense of them, we can take, you know, your alert volume from thousands per day, to one or two high fidelity critical alerts per day. And because we know the trail, because we're mapping it through our data graph, our polygraph data platform, the time to remediate a problem. So figure out the needle in the haystack. And the time to remediate is 90, 95% faster, than what you have to do on your own. So we want to work with AWS, and make it really easy for builders to use AWS services, and accelerate their consumption of them. So we were one of the first to really embrace Fargate and Graviton. We're embedded in Security Hub. We're, you know, embedded in all of the core platforms. We focus on competencies, you know. So, you know, we got container competency. We've got security and compliance competencies. And we really just want to continue to jointly invest with AWS. To deliver a great customer outcome and a really integrated seamless solution. >> I got a lot to unpack there. >> Okay. >> My first question is, what you just described, that needle in the haystack. You're essentially doing that in near real time? >> Yep. >> Or real time even, with using AI inferencing. >> Yeah. >> Describe it a little better. >> You're processing all of this data, you know, how do you do so efficiently? You know. And so we're the fastest. We do it in near real time for everything. And you know, compared to our competitors, that are doing, you know, some lightweight side scanning technology, and maybe they'll do a check or a scan once a day or twice a day. Well, the adversaries aren't sleeping, you know, over the other period of time. So you want to make it as near real time as you can. For certain applications, you know, you get it down into minutes. And ideally over time, you want to get it to actual real time. And so there's a number of different technologies that we're deploying, and that we're putting patents around. To be able to do as much data as you possibly can, as fast as you possibly can. But it varies on the application of the workload. >> And double click in the technology. >> Yeah. >> Like tell me more about it. What is it? Is it a purpose-built data store? >> Yeah. Is it a special engine? >> Yeah. There's two primary elements to it. The first part is the polygraph data platform. And this is this ingestion engine, the processing engine, you know, correlation engine. That has two way APIs, integrates into your workflows, ingests as much data as we possibly can, et cetera. And unifies all the data feeds that you've got. So you can actually correlate and provide context. And security now in the cloud, and certainly in the future, the real value is being able to create context and correlate data across the board. And when you're out buying a bunch of different companies, that have different architectures, that are all rules based engines, and trying to stitch them together, they don't talk to each other. And so the hard part first, that we wanted to go do, was build a cloud native platform, that was going to allow us to build applications, that set on top of it. And that, you know, handled a number of different security requirements. You know, behavior based threat detection, obviously is one of the first services that we offered, because we're correlating all this data, and we're creating a baseline, and we're figuring out what normal is. Okay, well, if your normal behavior is this. What's abnormal? So you can catch not only a known bad threat, you know, with rules, et cetera, that are embedded into our engines, but zero day threats and unknown unknowns. Which are the really scary stuff, when you're in the cloud. So, you know, we've got, you know, application, you know, for behavioral threat detection. You have vulnerability management, you know. Where you're just constantly figuring out, what vulnerabilities do I have across my development cycle and my run time cycle, that I need to be able to keep up on, and sort of patch and remediate, et cetera. And then compliance. And as you're pulling all these data points in, you want to be able to deliver compliance reports really efficiently. And the Biden Administration, you know, is issuing, you know, all of these, you know, new edicts for regulations. >> Sure. Obviously countries in, you know, in Europe. They have been way ahead of the US, in some of these regulations. And so they all point to a need for continuous monitoring of your cloud environment, to ensure that you're, you know, in real time, or near real time complying with the environments. And so being able to hit a button based on all of this data and, you know, deliver a compliance report for X regulation or Y regulation, saves a lot of time. But also ensures customers are secure. >> And you mentioned your multi-cloud, so you started on AWS. >> Yeah. >> My observation is that AWS isn't out trying to directly, I mean, they do some monetization of their security, >> Yep. >> But it's more like security here it is, you know. Use it. >> Yeah. >> It comes with the package. Whereas for instance, take Microsoft for example, I mean, they have a big security business. I mean, they show up in the spending surveys. >> Yeah. >> Like wow, off the charts. So sort of different philosophies there. But when you say you're Multicloud, you're saying, okay, you run on AWS. Obviously you run on Azure. You run on GCP as well. >> Yeah. Yep. >> We coin this term, Supercloud, Dave. It's it's like Multicloud 2.0. The idea is it's a layer above the clouds, that hides the underlying complexity. >> Yep. >> You mentioned Graviton. >> Yep. >> You worry about Graviton. Your customer don't, necessarily. >> We should be able to extract that. >> Right. But that's going to be different than what goes on Microsoft. With Microsoft primitives or Google primitives. Are you essentially building a Supercloud, that adds value. A layer, >> Yeah. >> on top of those Hyperscalers. >> Yeah. >> Or is it more, we're just going to run within each of those individual environments. >> Yeah. No we definitely want to build the Security OS, you know, that sort of goes across the Supercloud, as you talk about. >> Yeah. >> I would go back on one thing that you said, you know, if you listen to Andy or Adam now, talk about AWS services, and all the future growth that they have. I mean, security is job one. >> Yeah. Right, so AWS takes security incredibly seriously. They need to. You know, they want to be able to provide confidence to their customers, that they're going to be able to migrate over safely. So I think they do care deeply it. >> Oh, big time. >> And are delivering a number of services, to be able to do it for their customers,. Which is great. We want to enhance that, and provide Multicloud flexibility, deeper dives on Kubernetes and containers, and just want to stay ahead, and provide an option for companies. You know, when you're operating in AWS, to have better or deeper, more valuable, more impactful services to go layer on top. >> I see. >> And then provide the flexibility, like you said, of, hey look, I want to have a consistent security posture across all of my clouds. If I choose to use other clouds. And you don't, the schema are different on all three. You know, all of the protocols are different, et cetera. And so removing all of that complexity. I was just talking with the CISO at our event last night, we had like 300 people at this kind of cocktail event. Boston's pretty cool in the summertime. >> Yeah. Boston in July is great. >> It's pretty great. They're like going, look, we don't want to hire a Azure specialist, and a AWS specialist, and you know, a GCP specialist. We don't want to have somebody that is deep on just doing container security, or Kubernetes security. Like we want you to abstract all of that. Make sense of it. Stay above it. Continue to innovate. So we can actually do what we want to do. Which is, we want to build. We want to build fast. Like the whole point here, is to enable developers to do their job without restriction. And they intuitively want to have, and build secure applications. And, you know, because they recognize the importance of it. But if it slows them down. They're not going to do it. >> Right. >> And so we want to make that as seamless as possible, on top of AWS. So their developers feel confident. They can move more and more applications over. >> So to your point about AWS, I totally agree. I mean, security's job one. I guess the way I would say it is, from a monetization standpoint. >> Yeah. >> My sense is AWS, right now anyway, is saying we want the ecosystem, >> Yeah. >> to be able to monetize. >> Yeah. >> We're going to leave that meat on the bone for those guys. Whereas Microsoft is, they sometimes, they're certainly competitive with the ecosystem, sometimes. End point. >> Yeah. >> They compete with CrowdStrike. There's no question about it. >> Yeah. >> Are they competitive with you in some cases? Or they're not there yet. Are you different. >> Go talk to George, about what he thinks about CrowdStrike and I, versus Microsoft. (Dave V laughing) >> Well, yeah. (Dave H laughing) A good point in terms of the depth of capability. >> Yeah. >> But there's definitely opportunities for the ecosystem there as well. >> Yeah. But I think on certain parts of that, there are more, there's higher competitiveness, than less. I think in the cloud, you know, having flexibility and being open, is kind of core to the cloud's premise. And I think all three of the Hyperscalers, want to provide a choice for customers. >> Sure. >> And they want to provide flexibility. They obviously, want to monetize as much as they possibly can too. And I think they have varying strategies of those. And I do think AWS is the most open. And they're also the biggest. And I think that bodes well for what the marketplace really wants. You know, if you are a customer, and you want to go all in for everything, with one cloud. All right, well then maybe you use their security stack exclusively. But that's not the trend on where we're going. And we're talking about a $154 billion market, growing at, you know, 15% for you. It's a $360 billion market. And one of the most fragmented in tech. Customers do want to consolidate on platforms. >> Absolutely. >> If they can consolidate on CSPs, or they consolidate on the Supercloud, I'm going to steal that from you, with the super cloud. You know, to be able to, you know, have a consistent clarity posture, for all of your workloads, containers, Kubernetes, applications, across multiple clouds. That's what we think customers want. That's what we think customers need. There's opportunity for us to build a really big, iconic security business as well. >> I'm going to make you laugh. Because, so AWS doesn't like the term Supercloud. And the reason is, because it implies that they're the infrastructure, kind of commodity layer. And my response is, you'll appreciate this, is Pure Storage has 70% gross margin. >> Yeah. Yep. >> Right. Look at Intel. You've got Graviton. You control, you can have Intel, like gross margin. So maybe, your infrastructure. But it's not necessarily commodity, >> Yeah. >> But it leaves, to me, it leaves the ecosystem value. Companies like Lacework. >> Amazon offers 220 something services, for customers to make their lives easier. There's all kinds of ways, where they're actually focusing on delivering value, to their customers that, you know, is far from commodity and always will be. >> Right. >> I think when it comes to security, you're going to have, you're going to need security in your database. Your storage. Your network compute. They do all of that, you know, monetize all of that. But customers also want to, you know, be able to have a consistent security posture, across the Supercloud. You know, I mean, they don't have time. I think security practitioners, and security hiring in general, hasn't had unemployment for like seven or 10 years. It's the hardest place to find quality people. >> Right. >> And so our goal, is if we can up level and enable security practitioners, and DevSecOps teams, to be able to do their job more efficiently, it's a good thing for them. It's a win for them. And not having to be experts, on all of these different environments, that they're operating in. I think is really important. >> Here's the other thing about Supercloud. And I think you'll appreciate this. You know, Andreesen says, all companies are software companies. Well, all companies are becoming SAS and Cloud companies. >> Yeah. >> So you look at Capital One. What they're doing with on Snowflake. You know, Goldman what they're doing with AWS. Oracle by Cerner, you know that. So industries, incumbents, are building their own Superclouds. They don't want to deal with all this crap. >> Yeah. >> They want to add their own value. Their own tools. Their own software. And their own data. >> Yeah. >> And actually serve their specific vertical markets. >> Yeah. A hundred percent. And they also don't want tools, you know. >> Right. >> I think when you're in the security business. It's so fragmented, because you had to write a rule for everything, and they were super nuanced. When you move to a data driven approach, and you actually have a platform, that removes the need to actually have very nuanced, specific expertise across all these different. Because you're combining it into your baseline and understanding it. And so, customers want to move from, you know, one of the biggest banks in North America, has 550 different point solutions for security. Thousands of employees to go manage all of this. They would love to be able to consolidate around a few platforms, that integrate the data flows, so they can correlate value across it. And this platform piece is really what differentiates our approach. Is that we already have that built. And everybody else is sort of working backwards from Legacy approaches, or from a acquired companies. We built it natively from the ground up. Which we believe gives us an advantage for our customers. An advantage of time to market speed, efficacy, and a much lower cost. Because you can get rid of a bunch of point solutions in the process. >> You mentioned Devs. Did you, you know, that continuous experience across clouds. >> Yep. >> Do you have like the equivalent of a Super PAs layer, that is specific to your use case? Or are you kind of using, I mean, I know you use off the shelf tooling, >> Yep. >> you allow your developers to do so, but is, is the developer experience consistent across the clouds? That's really what I'm asking? >> Well, I think it is. I mean, I was talking to another CEO of a company, you know, on the floor here, and it's focusing on the build side. You know we focus on both the build and the run time. >> Right. >> And we were talking about, you know, how many different applications, or how fragmented the developer experience is, with all the different tools that they have. And it's phenomenal. I mean, like this, either through acquisition or by business unit. And developers, like to have choice. Like they don't like to be told what to do or be standardized, you know, by anybody. Especially some compliance organization or security organization. And so, it's hard for them to have a consistent experience, that they're using a bunch of different tools. And so, yeah. We want to be able to integrate into whatever workload, a workflow a customer uses, in their Dev cycle, and then provide consistent security on top of it. I mean, for our own company, you know, we got about a thousand people. And a lot of them are developers. We want to make it as consistent as we possibly can, so they can build code, to deliver security efficacy, and new applications and new tools for us. So I think where you can standardize and leverage a platform approach, it's always going to be better. But the reality is, especially in large existing companies. You know, they've got lots of different tools. And so you need to be able to set above it. Integrate with it and make it consistent. And security is one of those areas, where having a consistent view, a consistent posture, a consistent read, that you can report to the board, and know that your efficacy is there. Whatever environment you're in. Whatever cloud you're on. Is super, super critical. >> And in your swim lane, you're providing that consistency, >> Yep. >> for Devs. But you're right. You've got to worry about containers. You got to worry about the run time. You got to worry about the platform. The DevSecOps team is, you know, becoming the new line of defense, right? I mean, security experts. >> Absolutely. Well, we have one customer, that we just have been working with for four years ago. And it's, you know, a Fortune, a Global 2000 company. Bunch of different industries grew through acquisition, et cetera. And four years ago, their CTO said, we're moving to the cloud. Because we want to drive efficiency and agility, and better service offerings across the board. And so he has engineering. So he has Dev, you know. He has operations. And he has security teams. And so organizationally, I think that'll be the model, as companies do follow entries in to sort of, you know, quote. Become software companies and move on their digital journeys. Integrating the functions of DevSecOps organizationally, and then providing a platform, and enabling platform, that makes their jobs easier for each of those personas. >> Right. >> Is what we do. You want to enable companies to shift left. And if you can solve the problems in the code, on the front end, you know, before it gets out on the run time. You're going to solve, you know, a lot of issues that exist. Correlating the data, between what's happening in your runtime, and what's happening in your build time, and being able to fix it in near realtime. And integrate with those joint workflows. We think is the right answer. >> Yeah. >> Over the long haul. So it's a pretty exciting time. >> Yeah. Shift left, ops team shield right. Hat, great to see you again. >> Good to see you, Dave. >> Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks a lot. >> All Right. Keep it right there. We'll be back. Re:Inforce 2022. You're watching theCUBE from Boston. (calming music)

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante >> In its early days, robotic process automation emerged from rudimentary screen scraping, macros and workflow automation software. Once a script heavy and limited tool that largely was used to eliminate mundane tasks for individual users, and by the way still is, RPA's evolved into an enterprise-wide mega trend that puts automation at the center of digital business initiatives. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights, powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we present our quarterly update of the trends in RPA and automation and share the latest survey data from enterprise technology research. RPA has grown quite rapidly and the acronym is becoming a convenient misnomer in a way. I mean the real action in RPA has evolved into enterprise-wide automation initiatives. Once exclusively focused really on back office automation and areas such as finance, RPA has now become an enterprise initiative as many larger organizations especially, move well beyond cost savings and outside of the CFO's purview. We predicted in early "Breaking Analysis" episodes that productivity declines in the US and Europe especially, would require automation to solve some of the world's most pressing problems. And that's what's happening. Automation today is attacking not only the labor shortage but it's supporting optimizations in ESG, supply chain, helping with inflation challenges, improving capital allocation. For example, the supply chain issues today, think about what they require. Somebody's got to do research, they got to figure out inventory management, they got to go into different systems, do prioritizations, do price matching, and perform a number of other complex tasks. These are time consuming processes. Now the combination of RPA and machine intelligence is helping managers compress the time to value and optimize decision making. Organizations are realizing that a digital business goes beyond cloud and SaaS, and puts data, AI and automation at the core leveraging cloud and SaaS but reimagining entire workflows and customer experiences. Moreover, low code solutions are taking off and dramatically expanding the ability of organizations to make changes to their processes. We're also seeing adjacencies to RPA becoming folded into enterprise automation initiatives. And that trend will continue for example Legacy software testing tools. This is especially important as companies SaaSify their business and look for modern testing tools that can keep pace with their transformations. So the bottom line is, RPA or intelligent automation has become a strategic priority for many companies. And that means you got to get the CIO involved to ensure that the governance and compliance edicts of the organization are appropriately met. And that alignment occurs across the technology and business lines. A couple of years ago, when we saw that RPA could be much much more than what it was at the time, we revisited our total available market or TAM analysis. And in doing so, we felt there would be a confluence of automation, AI, and data and that the front and back office schism would converge. That is shown here. This is our updated TAM chart, which we shared a while back with a dramatically larger scope. We were interested that, just a few days ago by the way Forrester put out a new report, picked up by Digital Nation, that the RPA market would reach 22 billion by 2025. Now, as we said at the time our TAM includes the entire ecosystem including professional services as does Forrester's recent report and the projections they're in. So see that little dotted red line there, that's about at the 22 billion mark. We're a few years away but we definitely feel as though this is taking shape the way we had previously envisioned. That is to say a progression from back office blending with customer facing processes becoming a core element of digital transformations and eventually entering the realm of automated systems of agency where automations are reliable enough and trusted enough to make realtime decisions at scale for a much, much wider scope of enterprise activities. So we see this evolving over the 2020s or the balance of this decade and becoming a massive multi hundred billion dollar market. Now, unfortunately for later investors, this enthusiasm that I'm sharing around automation has not translated into price momentum for the stocks in this sector. Here are the charts, the stock charts for four RPA related players with market values inserted in each graphic. We've set the cross hairs approximately at the timing of UiPath's IPO. And that's where we'll start. UiPath IPOed last April and you can see the steady decline in its price. UiPath's Series F investors got in at $30 billion valuation, so that's been halved, more than half. But UiPath is the leader in this sector as we'll see in a moment. So investors are just going to have to be patient. Now, you know the problem with these hot tech companies is the cat gets let out of the bag before the IPO because they raise so much private money, it hits the headlines and then, at the time you had zero interest rates, you had the tech stock boom during the pandemic, so you're just going to have to wait it out to get a nice return if you got in sort of post IPO. You know, which... I think this business will deliver over the long term. Now, Blue Prism is interesting because it's being bought by SS&C Technologies after a bidding war with Vista. So that's why their stock has held up pretty reasonably. Vista's PE firm, which owns TIBCO and was going to mash it, Blue Prism that is, together with TIBCO. That was a play I always liked because RPA is going to be integrated across the board. And TIBCO is an integration company, and I felt it was in a good position to do that. But SS&C obvious said, "Hey, we can do that too." And look, they're getting a proven RPA tech stack for 10% of the value of UiPath. Might be a sharp move, we'll see. Or maybe they'll jack prices and squeeze the cashflow, I honestly have no idea. And we shelled the other two players here who really aren't RPA specialists. Appian is a low code business process development platform and Pegasystems of course, we've reported on them extensively. They're a longtime business process player that has done pretty well. But both stocks have suffered pretty dramatically since last April. So let's take a look at the customer survey data and see what it tells us. The ETR survey data shows a pretty robust picture frankly. This chart depicts the net score or customer spending momentum on that vertical axis and market share or pervasiveness relative to other companies and technologies in the ETR dataset, that's on the horizontal. That red dotted line at the 40% mark, that indicates an elevated spending level for the company within this technology. The chart insert you see there shows how the company positions are plotted using net score and market share or Ns. And ETR's tool has a couple of cool features. We can click on the dot and it allows you to track the progression over time, in this case going back to January, 2020 that's the lines that we've inserted here. So we'll start with Microsoft and we'll get that over with. Microsoft acquired a company called Softomotive for a reported a hundred million dollars thereabout, it's a little more than that. So pretty much a lunch money for Mr. Softy. So Microsoft bought the company in May and look at the gray line where it started showing up in the October ETR surveys at a very highly elevated level, typical Microsoft, right? I mean, a lot of spending momentum and they're pretty much ubiquitous. And it just stayed there and it's gone up and to the right, just really a dominant picture. But Microsoft Power Automate is really kind of a personal productivity tool not super feature rich like some of the others that we're going to talk about, it's just part of the giant Microsoft software estate. And there's a substantial amount of overlap between, for example, UiPath's and Automation Anywhere's customer bases and Power Automate users. And it's speaking with the number of customers. They'll say, "Yeah, we use Power Automate," but they see enterprise automation platforms as much more feature rich and capable and they see a role for both. But it's something to watch out for because Microsoft can obviously take a bite out of virtually any platform and moderate the enthusiasm for it. But nonetheless, these other firms that we're mentioning here, the two leaders, they really stand out, UiPath and Automation Anywhere. Both are elevated well above that 40% line with a meaningful presence in the data set. And you can see the path that they took to get to where they are today. Now we had predicted in 2021 in our predictions post that Automation Anywhere would IPO in 2021. So we predicted that in December of 2020 but it hasn't happened yet. The company obviously wasn't ready, and it brought in new management. We reported on that, Chris Riley as the Chief Revenue Officer, and it made other moves to show up their business. Now let me say this about Riley. I've known him him for years, he's a world class sales leader, one of the best in the tech business. And he knows how to build a world class go to market team, I guarantee that's what he's doing. I have no doubt he's completely reinventing his sales team, the alliances, he's got a lot of experience of that when he was at EMC and Dell and HPE, and he knows the channel really well. So I have a great deal of confidence that if Automation Anywhere's product is any good, which the ETR data clearly shows that it is, then the company is going to do very well. Now, as for the timing of an IPO, look, with the market choppiness, who knows? Automation Anywhere, they raised a ton of dough and it was last valued around... In 2019, it was just north of 7 billion. And so if UiPath is valued at 15 billion, you could speculate that Automation Anywhere can't be valued at much more than 10 billion, maybe a little under, maybe a little over. And so they might wait for the market volatility to chill out a little bit before they do the IPO or maybe they've got some further cleanup to do and they want to get their metrics better, but we'll see. Now to the point earlier about Blue Prism, look at its position on the vertical axis, very respectable. Just a finer point on Pega. We've always said that they're not an RPA specialist but they have an RPA offering and a presence in the ETR data set in this sector. And they got a sizeable market cap so we'd like to include them. Now here's another look at the net score data. The way net score works is ETR asks customers, are you adopting a platform for the first time? That's that lime green there. Are you accelerating spending on the platform by 6% or more relative to last year, or sometimes relative to some other point in time, this is relative to last year. That's the forest green. Is your spending flat or is it, that's the gray, or is it decreasing by 6% or worse? Or are you churning? That's that bright red. You subtract the reds from the greens and you get net score which is shown for each company on the right along with the Ns in the survey. So other than Pega, every company shown here has new adoptions in the double digits, not a lot of churn. UiPath and and Automation Anywhere have net scores well over that 40% mark. Now, some other data points on those two, ETR did a little peeling of the onion in their data set and I found a couple of interesting nuggets. UiPath in the Fortune 500 has a 91% net score and a 77% net score in the Global 2000. So significantly higher than its overall average. This speaks to the company's strong presence in larger companies and the adoption and how larger companies are leaning in. Although UiPath's actually still solid in smaller firms as well by the way but... Now the other piece of information is, when asked why they buy UiPath over alternatives customers said a robust feature set, technical lead and compatibility with their existing environment. Now to Automation Anywhere. They have a 72% net score in the Fortune 500, well above its average across the survey, but 46% only in the Global 2000 below its overall average shown here of 54. So we'd like to see a wider aperture in the Global 2000. Again, this is a survey set, who knows, but oftentimes these surveys are indicative. So maybe Automation Anywhere just working that out, more time, figuring out the go to market in the Global 2000 beyond those larger customers. Now, when asked why they buy from Automation Anywhere versus the competition customers cited a robust feature set, just like UiPath, technological lead, just like UiPath, and fast ROI. Now I really believe that both for Automation Anywhere and UiPath, the time to value is much compressed relative to most technology projects. So I would highlight that as well. And I think that's a fundamental reason, one of the reasons why RPA has taken off. All right let's wrap up. The bottom line is this space is moving and it's evolving quickly, and will keep on a fast pace given the customer poll, the funding levels that have been poured into the space, and, of course, the competitive climate. We're seeing a new transformation agenda emerge. Pre COVID, the catalyst was back office efficiency. During the pandemic, we saw an acceleration and organizations are taking the lessons learned from that forced March experience, the digital I sometimes call it, and they're realizing a couple things. One, they can attack much more complex problems than previously envisioned. And two, in order to cloudify and SaaSify their businesses, they need to put automation along with data and AI at the core to completely transform into a digital entity. Now we're moving well beyond automating bespoke tasks and paving the cow path as I sometimes like to say. And we're seeing much more integration across systems like ERP and HR and finance and logistics et cetera, collaboration, customer experience, and importantly, this has to extend into broader ecosystems. We're also seeing a rise in semantic workflows to tackle more complex problems. We're talking here about going beyond a linear process of automation. Like for instance, read this, click on that, copy that, put it here, join it with that, drag and drop it over here and send it over there. It's evolving into a much more interpreter of actions using machine intelligence to watch, to learn, to infer, and then ultimately act as well as discover other process automation opportunities. So think about the way work is done today. Going into various applications, you grab data, you trombone back out, you do it again, in and out, in and out, in and out of these systems, et cetera, NASM, and replacing that sequence with a much more intelligent process. We're also seeing a lot more involvement from C-level executives, especially the CIO, but also the chief digital officer, the chief data officer, with low code solutions enabling lines of business to be much more involved in the game. So look, it's still early here. This sector, in my view, hasn't even hit that steep part of the S-curve yet, it's still building momentum with larger firms leading the innovation, investing in things like centers of excellence and training, digging in to find new ways of doing things. It's a huge priority because the efficiencies that large companies get, they drop right to the bottom line and the big ER the more money that drops. We see that in the adoption data and we think it's just getting started. So keep an eye on this space. It's not a fad, it's here to stay. Okay, that's it for now. Thanks to my colleagues, Stephanie Chan who helped research this week's topics and Alex Myerson on the production team who also manages the Breaking Analysis Podcast, Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight, helped get the word out on social. Thanks guys. Your great teamwork, really appreciate that. Now remember, these episodes, they're all available as podcasts, wherever you listen just search "Breaking Analysis Podcast". Check out ETR's website at etr.ai. And we also publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You can get in touch with me directly, david.vellante@siliconangle.com is my email. You can DM me @dvellante or comment on our LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Have a great week, stay safe, be well, and we'll see you next time. (outro music)

(bright music) >> The challenges of legacy data warehouses and traditional business intelligence systems, they've been well-documented. They're built on rigid infrastructure, and they're managed by really specialized gatekeepers. Data warehouses of the past were, as one financial customer once said to me, like a snake swallowing a basketball, imagine that. The amount of data ingested into a data warehouse has just overwhelmed the system. Every time Intel came out with a new microprocessor, practitioners, they would chase the chip in an effort to try to compress the overly restrictive elapsed time to insights, and this cycle repeated itself for decades. Cloud data warehouses, generally, and Snowflake, specifically, changed all this. Not only were resources virtually infinite, but the ability to separate, compute from storage, it actually turned off the compute when you weren't using it, permanently altered the cost, the performance, the scale and the value equation. But as data makes its way into the cloud and is increasingly democratized as a shared resource across clouds and at the edge, practitioners have to bring Sec DevOps mindsets to securing their cloud data warehouses. Hello, and welcome to this week's Wikibon, "theCUBE Insights," powered by ETR. In this "Breaking Analysis," we take a closer look at the fundamentals of securing Snowflake and to do so, we welcome two guests into the program. Ben Herzberg is an experienced hacker and developer and an expert in several aspects of data security. He's currently working as the Chief Data Scientist at Satori, and he's joined by his colleague, Yoav Cohen, who is a technology visionary, and currently serving as CTO at Satori Cyber. Gentlemen, welcome to "theCUBE," great to see you. >> Great to be here. >> Thanks for having us, Dave. >> Now, these two individuals have co-authored a book on Snowflake Security. It's a comprehensive guide to what you need to know as a data practitioner using Snowflake. So guys, congratulations on the book. It's really detailed, packed with great information, best practices and practical advice and insights all in one place, so really good work. So, before we get into the discussion, I want to share some ETR survey data just to set the context. We're seeing cybersecurity and data, they're colliding in a really important way. And here's some data points that we've shared before from ETR's latest drill down survey. They asked more than 1200 respondents. We're talking CIOs, CSOs and IT professionals, "Which organizational priorities "will be most important in 2022?" And these were the top seven. There were a lot of others, but these were the most important. So, it's no surprise that security is number one, although, as we shared in our predictions post, the magnitude of its relative importance, it does vary by the degree of expertise within the organization. The Delta is maybe not as significant, for example, in large companies, and you can see where analytics and data fit. And we've tied these two domains together and picked up on a term that our two guests have used, in fact, you guys may have even coined it, called DataSecOps, which, to me, is the idea that you bring Agile DevOps practices to data operations and built-in security as part of the full cycle of managing, creating the data, using the data, accessing the data, not a bolt on, but it's fundamental, so guys, what do you make of this data, and what's your point of view on DataSecOps? >> So, definitely aligns with what we're seeing on the ground in the market. In between what you saw there, you had cybersecurity and data warehousing. In the middle you had cloud migration, and that's basically what's pushing companies to invest in both security and data and warehousing, because the cloud changed the game for cybersecurity. The tools that we use before are not the same tools that we need to use now. And also, it unlocks a lot of performance value and capabilities around data warehousing. So, all of that comes together to a big trend in the industry for investment, for replacement, and definitely we're seeing that on the Snowflake platform, which is doing really, really well recently. >> Yeah, well thank you, Yoav. And to that point, I want to share another data point and then dive in, maybe Ben, you can comment. And I want to address, why are we always talking about Snowflake? Of course, it's a hot company. Everybody knows that. You can see it in the company's financials, but the ETR survey data tells a really compelling story about the company. Here's a chart from the most recent ETR January survey. And so, you can see at the, at the top, that blue line, it represents net score or spending momentum, and the darker line at the bottom represents presence or pervasiveness in the survey sample. Just a background, there are 165 Snowflake customers that responded to this past survey. 10% of companies within the Fortune 500 were in the sample, and around 4% of Global 2000 companies participated. Just under 30% of the respondents were C-Suite executives, and about 20% were analysts or engineers or data specialist with around half were VP, director, manager roles that fat middle, with a very broad mix of industries, and there was a bias toward larger companies. Now, back to the chart, that net score for a moment, is that top line, is derived by asking customers, "Are you adopting Snowflake new in 2022?" That's the 27% lime green number. "Will you be spending 6% or more on Snowflake, "relative to 2021?" That's the 57% forest green. "Is your spending flat?" That's the gray. "Is it down by 6% or worse?" That's the other, the pink area. "Are you leaving the platform?" That's the bright red, and that's a zero defection, so there's none there. So you subtract the reds from the greens, and you get net score, which calculates out to 83% in his pet survey. But what's remarkable is that Snowflake has held this elevated score for more than 12 quarterly surveys. It's in the stratosphere among the many thousands and thousands of companies in the ETR survey. Remember, anything above that 40% line is elevated and Snowflake is like glued to the ceiling. So the bottom line shows that the company's market presence continues to grow, that darker line at the bottom, and that green shade shows us that the pace of last quarter is actually accelerating. Snowflake is becoming ubiquitous, and customers are becoming intimately familiar with its platform, and it's scaling like we've never seen before, and it's building a pretty hard to penetrate fortress, we think, and an ecosystem. Ben, I wonder, in your view, what accounts for Snowflake's performance? >> Okay, so I would say that we can spend a full session just about such thing, so I'll try to say what I think. I think, first of all, it does what it says on the box. You get from zero to being able to have a data warehouse easily, you have a very rich support of capability and features that you need for a cloud data warehouse. Your multi-cloud, you're not dependent on one of the big public clouds, and it's fast and scalable, and you don't need to worry yourself with the infrastructure behind. You don't need to, God-forbid, add any indexes or do things like that. You don't need to do that, at least not often, indexes never, but other maintenance. And the innovation rate, they innovate fast. They add a lot of new capabilities, like the move to unstructured data, like a lot of security and governance capabilities, high innovation rate as well. >> Okay, good, and we'll talk about that move. So let's get deeper into the topic now on securing Snowflake. My first question is look, Snowflake, when you talk to practitioners and customers, they get pretty high marks on security, largely because of the simplicity, so why did you feel the need to write a book on the subject? >> So, definitely Snowflake is investing a lot of effort and putting a lot of emphasis on security. However, it's connected to the cloud service, and like any other cloud service, there is a shared responsibility model between Snowflake and its customers when it comes to fully securing their data cloud. So Snowflake can build amazing features, but then customers have to really adopt them, implement them in the best way. One of the things that we've seen by working with Snowflake customers is that we typically interact with data engineers, but then they have to implement security features and security capability. We thought writing a book about the topic would help these customers to understand the features better, benefit from them better and really structure their implementation and decide what's most important to implement at every step of their journey. >> Yeah, and I think that when I was researching this topic, I could find a lot of good information on the web, but I kind of had to hunt and peck for it. It was really sort of dispersed, and you put the information all in one place. You have a nice table of contents, so I can just zip right to where I want to go, so that was quite useful, I thought. What are the very basic fundamentals of securing Snowflake? In other words, I'm interested in, you get this world of flexible, it's globally distributed. You get democratizing data. How do you really make sure that only those folks that should have access, do have access? I mean really, let's talk about that a little bit. >> Oh, I think that, of course there are a lot of different aspects, but I think that I would start with the big blocks. For example, when you get a Snowflake account out of the box, it's open to the world in terms of network. I would start by limiting that. That should be easy for an organization. It's a couple of commands, and you've lowered your risk significantly, both security and compliance. Then, one of the common things that you can get a good improvement in a decrease of your risk is around those indications. For example, do you have applications that are accessing Snowflake using user password? Okay, change that to using a key. Do you have users with username, password? Change that to Okta integration or your IDP integration. So I would start with the big blocks that can remove most of my risk, and then of course, there is a lot to do from getting to the data warehouse and to auditing and monitoring. >> Okay, thank you for that. But, Yoav, how are these fundamentals that we just heard from Ben, how are they different? Isn't this kind of common sense? What's unique about Snowflake? >> So, a couple things, first of all, security, we love to say that it's 80% good security hygiene. You have to make sure that your basics are locked and tightly configured and that brings a lot of value. But two points to consider, first of all, all of these types of controls are pretty static in the sense that once you get in, you get in, and then you have pretty broad access, and we'll talk about authorization concepts and everything, perhaps today, but these are really static gatekeepers around your data. Once you have access, then it's really free for all. When you compare it to other types of environments and what we're seeing in other domains, maybe a move to more dynamic type of controls, elevated access or elevated additional authentication steps before you get elevated access. And what we're thinking is that beyond those static controls, the market is going to move towards implementing more dynamic, more fine-grain control, especially because in Snowflake, but any other data warehouse or large-scale data store, which becomes an aggregation point of data in the company, and we work with really big companies, and they bring in data from multiple jurisdiction from across the world, so they can get an overview of the business and run the business in a much more efficient way, but that really creates a pressure point when it comes to securing that data. >> Okay, Ben, you touched on this a little bit. I want to kind of dig deeper. So, Snowflake takes a layered approach, of course, it's sensible, and the layers, network, which talked about identity, access and encryption. and so, with any cloud, as you guys mentioned, it's a shared responsibility model. So I want to break that down a bit, and let's start with the network. So my responsibility, as a customer, I'm going to be responsible to set up the DNS. How much public internet access am I going to have for other users and apps. So how should practitioners think about their end of the bargain on the network? What do they need to know? >> At the network level, as I mentioned before, a new account is open network-wise, it's open to the world. And one of the first thing I would do would be to set a network policy on the account to limit network access to that account. And of course, in many organizations, you would want to configure that with private link to your cloud environment, but that would be step two. (laughs) First step is simply set the network policy to make sure that it's not open to the public. >> Yeah, and that seems pretty straightforward, but let's talk about identity, 'cause it feels like that's where it starts to get tricky. You got to worry about setting up roles and managing users. You could even configure row and column base access, as I understand it, and I imagine access is where it really gets confusing for a lot of people, especially when you're crossing domain identities. Like for example, isn't a role-based security, let's land on that for a minute, I think you called it hierarchy hell in the book, so what should we think about in regards to identity? >> Well, first of all, it's hierarchy hell, in the book, it says that you can use hierarchy, but you should avoid getting to a hierarchy hell. Basically, we've seen that with several Snowflake customers where the ability to set roles in a hierarchy model, to set a role that inherits privileges from another role, that inherits privileges from other roles and maybe, of course, used in a good way, but it also in some of the cases, it leads to complexities and to access not being deterministic, at least not obvious to the person who gives access, who is usually the data engineer. So, whenever you start having a complex authorization model, whenever I want to give Yoav access to a certain data set, and because things are complex, I also, by mistake, give him access to the salary information of the company, that's when things become tricky. If your roles are messy and complex, then it may lead to data exposure within the organization or outside the organization. >> How do you find Snowflake's integrations? Like if I want to use Okta or I want to use a CyberArk, I mean, how would you grade them on their ability to integrate with popular third party platforms? >> So, I would say pretty high, actually. We haven't encountered many customers who haven't configured any of these... nowadays, really basic security integration, and it really, really helps, setting that good identity management foundation for the platform. So they're investing a lot in that area, and we've been following them for a couple of years now, and it's really, really coming along nicely. >> All right, let's talk about encryption. I mean, that seemed pretty straightforward. Correct me if I'm wrong. I think Snowflake auto rotates the keys every 30 days. It really seems like your responsibility there is monitoring, making sure you're in compliance. You got good log data or access to good log data. Is that right? >> So, this really depends. So, for the average company, I would say, yes. For some of the companies with higher security requirements or compliance requirements or both, sometimes there are issues like companies that do not want to have the data stored in clear text, in Snowflake, even encrypted as in the data warehouse encryption or the account encryption, even if someone accidentally gets access to the table, they want them not to be able to pull the data in clear text, and then it gets slightly more complicated. You have different ways of tackling this, but for the average company or companies who do not have such requirements, then everything in Snowflake is encrypted in transit and addressed, and of course, there are more advanced features for higher requirements. >> Okay, I'm interested in what you guys think of some of the more vulnerable aspects that Snowflake customers should really be aware of. Imagine I'm saying, "Guys, let's run a pen test. "Okay, make sure I have no open chest wounds, "but really try to fool me." What would you attack? Where should I be extra cautious? >> So, I would start with where data resides. And, if you look at the Snowflake architecture, there's a separation between storage and compute, but that also means storage is accessible without going through the compute. That can create opportunities for hackers to go and try and find access where access shouldn't be had. That's where I would focus on. >> I want to ask you about Virtual Private Snowflake. It seems to me, if I have sensitive data, if I don't use Virtual Private Snowflake, I feel like I'm increasing my risk that a security incident at the shared cloud services layer could impact multiple customers, and is this a valid concern? How should we think about reducing that risk, and when should I use that higher level of security? >> So, I think first of all, to the best of my knowledge, I'm not a Snowflake employee, but to the best of my knowledge, Virtual Private Snowflake is used by a minority of the customers, a small minority of the customers. There are other more popular ways within Snowflake, like private link, for example, I would say, to enhance your security and your account segregation. But I wouldn't say that simply because the platform is multi-tenant, it is vulnerable. Of course, in many cases, your security or compliance requirements requires you to eliminate even this risk, but I wouldn't say that there are a lot of other platforms in different areas that are multi-tenant and-- >> And probably better than your on-prem, your average on-prem installation. >> Probably, probably. >> Okay, so I buy that. >> I would say on that, that maybe a shared environment is a higher value target for hackers. So if you're on a shared environment with thousands of other customers, if I'm a hacker, I would go there, 'cause then I get data for thousands of customers instead of try to focus on just one target and getting data for just one company. I think that's the most significant advantage. And obviously, Snowflake are investing a lot in making all of their environments very, very secure, and from our interactions with large Snowflake customers, we know that Snowflake are going above and beyond in making sure these environments are secure. >> Yeah, that's good, that's good news, because if I don't have to spend up, I can put the budget elsewhere. How do you guys think Snowflake's recent moves... They're making a couple of big moves. They've recently added unstructured data. They used to have semi-structured data. They're going after the data science and data lake functionality. Do those kinds of moves, I guess they're two different things, but does that change the way that security pros should think about protecting their Snowflake environment? >> I would say that Snowflake is moving fast with adding new functionality, well fast, but not too fast. They're releasing it in a controlled way. I would say that for new capabilities, of course, in some cases there are new attack vectors or new risks and obviously, securing different types of data may bring new challenges, but the basics, I think, remains the same. The basics of the network, identity authentication, authorization and auditing monitoring. I would say they will be the same and perhaps new features or capability will need to be used. And the largest issue, as data democratization is growing within organizations, and more and more people are using your data cloud, that also needs to be addressed. >> All right, finally, I want to end, I want to talk a little bit about futures. Have you guys talked in your book about multi-cloud as a way to reduce your reliance on a single vendor? And of course, it happens through M and A, and that's cool. We've talked a lot about multi-cloud, and we've been using this term that we coined, called supercloud, and it references an abstraction layer that exists on top of, and floats across, if you will, multiple clouds, and it hides some of that underlying complexity, and we feel like Snowflake is a good example of a company that's moving in that direction, building value on top of all that hyperscale infrastructure. So I wonder how you see Snowflake's moves in that direction would impact the way you think about DataSecOps. >> So definitely, we also see the trend of companies adopting more and more types of cloud and cloud technologies. They're in one cloud today. They want to move to a second one, almost every company that I talk to have, nowadays, a multi-cloud strategy. With respect to Snowflake, they basically have it figured out, because they are an overlay, like a supercloud, super data cloud, that is spread across any cloud, and you can basically pick and choose where you want to put your data for what use cases, and that's really, really helpful, because then you don't have to manage the complexity of multiple solutions for multiple areas of the business. We see this also in other areas where companies are saying, "Hey, I prefer to not use a specific cloud technology "for that purpose, but use a vendor that can cover my needs "across the clouds," definitely on the security side, where they want one throat to choke, so to speak, but they want to control things on a central place. As Ben mentioned before, complexity is the enemy of security and having those multi-cloud operations, from a security perspective, definitely adds complexity, which adds risks, so simplifying that is really, really helpful. >> Hey, thank you for that, and thank you guys for coming on today. Why don't you give us a little bumper sticker on Satori. What do you guys do? Give us the quick commercial. >> So, we help companies secure access to their data on platforms like Snowflake and others. We build really innovative technology that decouples security controls from the actual data layer. So if you think about it, where you can put controls to govern how people access data. You can put it inside the database. You can put it somewhere on the client. We've actually invented a technology that can do that in the middle, so you don't have to coalesce and mix your security concerns with your data. You don't have to go to your clients' users' end-points, laptops and put technology there. We set technology that fits in the middle, that decouples that aspect of your DataSecOps operations, and really helps companies implement those security controls much faster, because it's detached from the rest of their operation. >> Nice thought, leaning into that simplicity trend that you talked about. Okay guys, that's all the time we have today. Really, I want to thank Ben and Yoav for coming on "theCUBE." It was really great to have you. I'd love to welcome you back at some point. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Thank you, it was a pleasure >> All right, remember these episodes, these episodes are all available as podcasts, wherever you listen. All you got to do is search breaking analysis podcasts. Check out ETR's website at ETI.ai. We also publish full report every week on Wikibon.com and SiliconAngle.com. You can get in touch with me. Email me, David.Vellante@SiliconANGLE.com @DVellante or comment on our LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for "theCUBE Insights," powered by ETR. Have a great week, stay safe, be well, and we'll see you next time. (bright music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> The pandemic has changed the way we think about and predict the future. As we enter the third year of a global pandemic, we see the significant impact that it's had on technology strategy, spending patterns, and company fortunes Much has changed. And while many of these changes were forced reactions to a new abnormal, the trends that we've seen over the past 24 months have become more entrenched, and point to the way that's coming ahead in the technology business. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we welcome our partner and colleague and business friend, Erik Porter Bradley, as we deliver what's becoming an annual tradition for Erik and me, our predictions for Enterprise Technology in 2022 and beyond Erik, welcome. Thanks for taking some time out. >> Thank you, Dave. Luckily we did pretty well last year, so we were able to do this again. So hopefully we can keep that momentum going. >> Yeah, you know, I want to mention that, you know, we get a lot of inbound predictions from companies and PR firms that help shape our thinking. But one of the main objectives that we have is we try to make predictions that can be measured. That's why we use a lot of data. Now not all will necessarily fit that parameter, but if you've seen the grading of our 2021 predictions that Erik and I did, you'll see we do a pretty good job of trying to put forth prognostications that can be declared correct or not, you know, as black and white as possible. Now let's get right into it. Our first prediction, we're going to go run into spending, something that ETR surveys for quarterly. And we've reported extensively on this. We're calling for tech spending to increase somewhere around 8% in 2022, we can see there on the slide, Erik, we predicted spending last year would increase by 4% IDC. Last check was came in at five and a half percent. Gardner was somewhat higher, but in general, you know, not too bad, but looking ahead, we're seeing an acceleration from the ETR September surveys, as you can see in the yellow versus the blue bar in this chart, many of the SMBs that were hard hit by the pandemic are picking up spending again. And the ETR data is showing acceleration above the mean for industries like energy, utilities, retail, and services, and also, notably, in the Forbes largest 225 private companies. These are companies like Mars or Koch industries. They're predicting well above average spending for 2022. So Erik, please weigh in here. >> Yeah, a lot to bring up on this one, I'm going to be quick. So 1200 respondents on this, over a third of which were at the C-suite level. So really good data that we brought in, the usual bucket of, you know, fortune 500, global 2000 make up the meat of that median, but it's 8.3% and rising with momentum as we see. What's really interesting right now is that energy and utilities. This is usually like, you know, an orphan stock dividend type of play. You don't see them at the highest point of tech spending. And the reason why right now is really because this state of tech infrastructure in our energy infrastructure needs help. And it's obvious, remember the Florida municipality break reach last year? When they took over the water systems or they had the ability to? And this is a real issue, you know, there's bad nation state actors out there, and I'm no alarmist, but the energy and utility has to spend this money to keep up. It's really important. And then you also hit on the retail consumer. Obviously what's happened, the work from home shift created a shop from home shift, and the trends that are happening right now in retail. If you don't spend and keep up, you're not going to be around much longer. So I think the really two interesting things here to call out are energy utilities, usually a laggard in IT spend and it's leading, and also retail consumer, a lot of changes happening. >> Yeah. Great stuff. I mean, I recall when we entered the pandemic, really ETR was the first to emphasize the impact that work from home was going to have, so I really put a lot of weight on this data. Okay. Our next prediction is we're going to get into security, it's one of our favorite topics. And that is that the number one priority that needs to be addressed by organizations in 2022 is security and you can see, in this slide, the degree to which security is top of mind, relative to some other pretty important areas like cloud, productivity, data, and automation, and some others. Now people may say, "Oh, this is obvious." But I'm going to add some context here, Erik, and then bring you in. First, organizations, they don't have unlimited budgets. And there are a lot of competing priorities for dollars, especially with the digital transformation mandate. And depending on the size of the company, this data will vary. For example, while security is still number one at the largest public companies, and those are of course of the biggest spenders, it's not nearly as pronounced as it is on average, or in, for example, mid-sized companies and government agencies. And this is because midsized companies or smaller companies, they don't have the resources that larger companies do. Larger companies have done a better job of securing their infrastructure. So these mid-size firms are playing catch up and the data suggests cyber is even a bigger priority there, gaps that they have to fill, you know, going forward. And that's why we think there's going to be more demand for MSSPs, managed security service providers. And we may even see some IPO action there. And then of course, Erik, you and I have talked about events like the SolarWinds Hack, there's more ransomware attacks, other vulnerabilities. Just recently, like Log4j in December. All of this has heightened concerns. Now I want to talk a little bit more about how we measure this, you know, relatively, okay, it's an obvious prediction, but let's stick our necks out a little bit. And so in addition to the rise of managed security services, we're calling for M&A and/or IPOs, we've specified some names here on this chart, and we're also pointing to the digital supply chain as an area of emphasis. Again, Log4j really shone that under a light. And this is going to help the likes of Auth0, which is now Okta, SailPoint, which is called out on this chart, and some others. We're calling some winners in end point security. Erik, you're going to talk about sort of that lifecycle, that transformation that we're seeing, that migration to new endpoint technologies that are going to benefit from this reset refresh cycle. So Erik, weigh in here, let's talk about some of the elements of this prediction and some of the names on that chart. >> Yeah, certainly. I'm going to start right with Log4j top of mind. And the reason why is because we're seeing a real paradigm shift here where things are no longer being attacked at the network layer, they're being attacked at the application layer, and in the application stack itself. And that is a huge shift left. And that's taking in DevSecOps now as a real priority in 2022. That's a real paradigm shift over the last 20 years. That's not where attacks used to come from. And this is going to have a lot of changes. You called out a bunch of names in there that are, they're either going to work. I would add to that list Wiz. I would add Orca Security. Two names in our emerging technology study, in addition to the ones you added that are involved in cloud security and container security. These names are either going to get gobbled up. So the traditional legacy names are going to have to start writing checks and, you know, legacy is not fair, but they're in the data center, right? They're, on-prem, they're not cloud native. So these are the names that money is going to be flowing to. So they're either going to get gobbled up, or we're going to see some IPO's. And on the other thing I want to talk about too, is what you mentioned. We have CrowdStrike on that list, We have SentinalOne on the list. Everyone knows them. Our data was so strong on Tanium that we actually went positive for the first time just today, just this morning, where that was released. The trifecta of these are so important because of what you mentioned, under resourcing. We can't have security just tell us when something happens, it has to automate, and it has to respond. So in this next generation of EDR and XDR, an automated response has to happen because people are under-resourced, salaries are really high, there's a skill shortage out there. Security has to become responsive. It can't just monitor anymore. >> Yeah. Great. And we should call out too. So we named some names, Snyk, Aqua, Arctic Wolf, Lacework, Netskope, Illumio. These are all sort of IPO, or possibly even M&A candidates. All right. Our next prediction goes right to the way we work. Again, something that ETR has been on for awhile. We're calling for a major rethink in remote work for 2022. We had predicted last year that by the end of 2021, there'd be a larger return to the office with the norm being around a third of workers permanently remote. And of course the variants changed that equation and, you know, gave more time for people to think about this idea of hybrid work and that's really come in to focus. So we're predicting that is going to overtake fully remote as the dominant work model with only about a third of the workers back in the office full-time. And Erik, we expect a somewhat lower percentage to be fully remote. It's now sort of dipped under 30%, at around 29%, but it's still significantly higher than the historical average of around 15 to 16%. So still a major change, but this idea of hybrid and getting hybrid right, has really come into focus. Hasn't it? >> Yeah. It's here to stay. There's no doubt about it. We started this in March of 2020, as soon as the virus hit. This is the 10th iteration of the survey. No one, no one ever thought we'd see a number where only 34% of people were going to be in office permanently. That's a permanent number. They're expecting only a third of the workers to ever come back fully in office. And against that, there's 63% that are saying their permanent workforce is going to be either fully remote or hybrid. And this, I can't really explain how big of a paradigm shift this is. Since the start of the industrial revolution, people leave their house and go to work. Now they're saying that's not going to happen. The economic impact here is so broad, on so many different areas And, you know, the reason is like, why not? Right? The productivity increase is real. We're seeing the productivity increase. Enterprises are spending on collaboration tools, productivity tools, We're seeing an increased perception in productivity of their workforce. And the CFOs can cut down an expense item. I just don't see a reason why this would end, you know, I think it's going to continue. And I also want to point out these results, as high as they are, were before the Omicron wave hit us. I can only imagine what these results would have been if we had sent the survey out just two or three weeks later. >> Yeah. That's a great point. Okay. Next prediction, we're going to look at the supply chain, specifically in how it's affecting some of the hardware spending and cloud strategies in the future. So in this chart, ETRS buyers, have you experienced problems procuring hardware as a result of supply chain issues? And, you know, despite the fact that some companies are, you know, I would call out Dell, for example, doing really well in terms of delivering, you can see that in the numbers, it's pretty clear, there's been an impact. And that's not not an across the board, you know, thing where vendors are able to deliver, especially acute in PCs, but also pronounced in networking, also in firewall servers and storage. And what's interesting is how companies are responding and reacting. So first, you know, I'm going to call the laptop and PC demand staying well above pre-COVID norms. It had peaked in 2012. Pre-pandemic it kept dropping and dropping and dropping, in terms of, you know, unit volume, where the market was contracting. And we think can continue to grow this year in double digits in 2022. But what's interesting, Erik, is when you survey customers, is despite the difficulty they're having in procuring network hardware, there's as much of a migration away from existing networks to the cloud. You could probably comment on that. Their networks are more fossilized, but when it comes to firewalls and servers and storage, there's a much higher propensity to move to the cloud. 30% of customers that ETR surveyed will replace security appliances with cloud services and 41% and 34% respectively will move to cloud compute and storage in 2022. So cloud's relentless march on traditional on-prem models continues. Erik, what do you make of this data? Please weigh in on this prediction. >> As if we needed another reason to go to the cloud. Right here, here it is yet again. So this was added to the survey by client demand. They were asking about the procurement difficulties, the supply chain issues, and how it was impacting our community. So this is the first time we ran it. And it really was interesting to see, you know, the move there. And storage particularly I found interesting because it correlated with a huge jump that we saw on one of our vendor names, which was Rubrik, had the highest net score that it's ever had. So clearly we're seeing some correlation with some of these names that are there, you know, really well positioned to take storage, to take data into the cloud. So again, you didn't need another reason to, you know, hasten this digital transformation, but here we are, we have it yet again, and I don't see it slowing down anytime soon. >> You know, that's a really good point. I mean, it's not necessarily bad news for the... I mean, obviously you wish that it had no change, would be great, but things, you know, always going to change. So we'll talk about this a little bit later when we get into the Supercloud conversation, but this is an opportunity for people who embrace the cloud. So we'll come back to that. And I want to hang on cloud a bit and share some recent projections that we've made. The next prediction is the big four cloud players are going to surpass 167 billion, an IaaS and PaaS revenue in 2022. We track this. Observers of this program know that we try to create an apples to apples comparison between AWS, Azure, GCP and Alibaba in IaaS and PaaS. So we're calling for 38% revenue growth in 2022, which is astounding for such a massive market. You know, AWS is probably not going to hit a hundred billion dollar run rate, but they're going to be close this year. And we're going to get there by 2023, you know they're going to surpass that. Azure continues to close the gap. Now they're about two thirds of the size of AWS and Google, we think is going to surpass Alibaba and take the number three spot. Erik, anything you'd like to add here? >> Yeah, first of all, just on a sector level, we saw our sector, new survey net score on cloud jumped another 10%. It was already really high at 48. Went up to 53. This train is not slowing down anytime soon. And we even added an edge compute type of player, like CloudFlare into our cloud bucket this year. And it debuted with a net score of almost 60. So this is really an area that's expanding, not just the big three, but everywhere. We even saw Oracle and IBM jump up. So even they're having success, taking some of their on-prem customers and then selling them to their cloud services. This is a massive opportunity and it's not changing anytime soon, it's going to continue. >> And I think the operative word there is opportunity. So, you know, the next prediction is something that we've been having fun with and that's this Supercloud becomes a thing. Now, the reason I say we've been having fun is we put this concept of Supercloud out and it's become a bit of a controversy. First, you know, what the heck's the Supercloud right? It's sort of a buzz-wordy term, but there really is, we believe, a thing here. We think there needs to be a rethinking or at least an evolution of the term multi-cloud. And what we mean is that in our view, you know, multicloud from a vendor perspective was really cloud compatibility. It wasn't marketed that way, but that's what it was. Either a vendor would containerize its legacy stack, shove it into the cloud, or a company, you know, they'd do the work, they'd build a cloud native service on one of the big clouds and they did do it for AWS, and then Azure, and then Google. But there really wasn't much, if any, leverage across clouds. Now from a buyer perspective, we've always said multicloud was a symptom of multi-vendor, meaning I got different workloads, running in different clouds, or I bought a company and they run on Azure, and I do a lot of work on AWS, but generally it wasn't necessarily a prescribed strategy to build value on top of hyperscale infrastructure. There certainly was somewhat of a, you know, reducing lock-in and hedging the risk. But we're talking about something more here. We're talking about building value on top of the hyperscale gift of hundreds of billions of dollars in CapEx. So in addition, we're not just talking about transforming IT, which is what the last 10 years of cloud have been like. And, you know, doing work in the cloud because it's cheaper or simpler or more agile, all of those things. So that's beginning to change. And this chart shows some of the technology vendors that are leaning toward this Supercloud vision, in our view, building on top of the hyperscalers that are highlighted in red. Now, Jerry Chan at Greylock, they wrote a piece called Castles in the Cloud. It got our thinking going, and he and the team at Greylock, they're building out a database of all the cloud services and all the sub-markets in cloud. And that got us thinking that there's a higher level of abstraction coalescing in the market, where there's tight integration of services across clouds, but the underlying complexity is hidden, and there's an identical experience across clouds, and even, in my dreams, on-prem for some platforms, so what's new or new-ish and evolving are things like location independence, you've got to include the edge on that, metadata services to optimize locality of reference and data source awareness, governance, privacy, you know, application independent and dependent, actually, recovery across clouds. So we're seeing this evolve. And in our view, the two biggest things that are new are the technology is evolving, where you're seeing services truly integrate cross-cloud. And the other big change is digital transformation, where there's this new innovation curve developing, and it's not just about making your IT better. It's about SaaS-ifying and automating your entire company workflows. So Supercloud, it's not just a vendor thing to us. It's the evolution of, you know, the, the Marc Andreessen quote, "Every company will be a SaaS company." Every company will deliver capabilities that can be consumed as cloud services. So Erik, the chart shows spending momentum on the y-axis and net score, or presence in the ETR data center, or market share on the x-axis. We've talked about snowflake as the poster child for this concept where the vision is you're in their cloud and sharing data in that safe place. Maybe you could make some comments, you know, what do you think of this Supercloud concept and this change that we're sensing in the market? >> Well, I think you did a great job describing the concept. So maybe I'll support it a little bit on the vendor level and then kind of give examples of the ones that are doing it. You stole the lead there with Snowflake, right? There is no better example than what we've seen with what Snowflake can do. Cross-portability in the cloud, the ability to be able to be, you know, completely agnostic, but then build those services on top. They're better than anything they could offer. And it's not just there. I mean, you mentioned edge compute, that's a whole nother layer where this is coming in. And CloudFlare, the momentum there is out of control. I mean, this is a company that started off just doing CDN and trying to compete with Okta Mite. And now they're giving you a full soup to nuts with security and actual edge compute layer, but it's a fantastic company. What they're doing, it's another great example of what you're seeing here. I'm going to call out HashiCorp as well. They're more of an infrastructure services, a little bit more of an open-source freemium model, but what they're doing as well is completely cloud agnostic. It's dynamic. It doesn't care if you're in a container, it doesn't matter where you are. They recently IPO'd and they're down 25%, but their data looks so good across both of our emerging technology and TISA survey. It's certainly another name that's playing on this. And another one that we mentioned as well is Rubrik. If you need storage, compute, and in the cloud layer and you need to be agnostic to it, they're another one that's really playing in this space. So I think it's a great concept you're bringing up. I think it's one that's here to stay and there's certainly a lot of vendors that fit into what you're describing. >> Excellent. Thank you. All right, let's shift to data. The next prediction, it might be a little tough to measure. Before I said we're trying to be a little black and white here, but it relates to Data Mesh, which is, the ideas behind that term were created by Zhamak Dehghani of ThoughtWorks. And we see Data Mesh is really gaining momentum in 2022, but it's largely going to be, we think, confined to a more narrow scope. Now, the impetus for change in data architecture in many companies really stems from the fact that their Hadoop infrastructure really didn't solve their data problems and they struggle to get more value out of their data investments. Data Mesh prescribes a shift to a decentralized architecture in domain ownership of data and a shift to data product thinking, beyond data for analytics, but data products and services that can be monetized. Now this a very powerful in our view, but they're difficult for organizations to get their heads around and further decentralization creates the need for a self-service platform and federated data governance that can be automated. And not a lot of standards around this. So it's going to take some time. At our power panel a couple of weeks ago on data management, Tony Baer predicted a backlash on Data Mesh. And I don't think it's going to be so much of a backlash, but rather the adoption will be more limited. Most implementations we think are going to use a starting point of AWS and they'll enable domains to access and control their own data lakes. And while that is a very small slice of the Data Mesh vision, I think it's going to be a starting point. And the last thing I'll say is, this is going to take a decade to evolve, but I think it's the right direction. And whether it's a data lake or a data warehouse or a data hub or an S3 bucket, these are really, the concept is, they'll eventually just become nodes on the data mesh that are discoverable and access is governed. And so the idea is that the stranglehold that the data pipeline and process and hyper-specialized roles that they have on data agility is going to evolve. And decentralized architectures and the democratization of data will eventually become a norm for a lot of different use cases. And Erik, I wonder if you'd add anything to this. >> Yeah. There's a lot to add there. The first thing that jumped out to me was that that mention of the word backlash you said, and you said it's not really a backlash, but what it could be is these are new words trying to solve an old problem. And I do think sometimes the industry will notice that right away and maybe that'll be a little pushback. And the problems are what you already mentioned, right? We're trying to get to an area where we can have more assets in our data site, more deliverable, and more usable and relevant to the business. And you mentioned that as self-service with governance laid on top. And that's really what we're trying to get to. Now, there's a lot of ways you can get there. Data fabric is really the technical aspect and data mesh is really more about the people, the process, and the governance, but the two of those need to meet, in order to make that happen. And as far as tools, you know, there's even cataloging names like Informatica that play in this, right? Istio plays in this, Snowflake plays in this. So there's a lot of different tools that will support it. But I think you're right in calling out AWS, right? They have AWS Lake, they have AWS Glue. They have so much that's trying to drive this. But I think the really important thing to keep here is what you said. It's going to be a decade long journey. And by the way, we're on the shoulders of giants a decade ago that have even gotten us to this point to talk about these new words because this has been an ongoing type of issue, but ultimately, no matter which vendors you use, this is going to come down to your data governance plan and the data literacy in your business. This is really about workflows and people as much as it is tools. So, you know, the new term of data mesh is wonderful, but you still have to have the people and the governance and the processes in place to get there. >> Great, thank you for that, Erik. Some great points. All right, for the next prediction, we're going to shine the spotlight on two of our favorite topics, Snowflake and Databricks, and the prediction here is that, of course, Databricks is going to IPO this year, as expected. Everybody sort of expects that. And while, but the prediction really is, well, while these two companies are facing off already in the market, they're also going to compete with each other for M&A, especially as Databricks, you know, after the IPO, you're going to have, you know, more prominence and a war chest. So first, these companies, they're both looking pretty good, the same XY graph with spending velocity and presence and market share on the horizontal axis. And both Snowflake and Databricks are well above that magic 40% red dotted line, the elevated line, to us. And for context, we've included a few other firms. So you can see kind of what a good position these two companies are really in, especially, I mean, Snowflake, wow, it just keeps moving to the right on this horizontal picture, but maintaining the next net score in the Y axis. Amazing. So, but here's the thing, Databricks is using the term Lakehouse implying that it has the best of data lakes and data warehouses. And Snowflake has the vision of the data cloud and data sharing. And Snowflake, they've nailed analytics, and now they're moving into data science in the domain of Databricks. Databricks, on the other hand, has nailed data science and is moving into the domain of Snowflake, in the data warehouse and analytics space. But to really make this seamless, there has to be a semantic layer between these two worlds and they're either going to build it or buy it or both. And there are other areas like data clean rooms and privacy and data prep and governance and machine learning tooling and AI, all that stuff. So the prediction is they'll not only compete in the market, but they'll step up and in their competition for M&A, especially after the Databricks IPO. We've listed some target names here, like Atscale, you know, Iguazio, Infosum, Habu, Immuta, and I'm sure there are many, many others. Erik, you care to comment? >> Yeah. I remember a year ago when we were talking Snowflake when they first came out and you, and I said, "I'm shocked if they don't use this war chest of money" "and start going after more" "because we know Slootman, we have so much respect for him." "We've seen his playbook." And I'm actually a little bit surprised that here we are, at 12 months later, and he hasn't spent that money yet. So I think this prediction's just spot on. To talk a little bit about the data side, Snowflake is in rarefied air. It's all by itself. It is the number one net score in our entire TISA universe. It is absolutely incredible. There's almost no negative intentions. Global 2000 organizations are increasing their spend on it. We maintain our positive outlook. It's really just, you know, stands alone. Databricks, however, also has one of the highest overall net sentiments in the entire universe, not just its area. And this is the first time we're coming up positive on this name as well. It looks like it's not slowing down. Really interesting comment you made though that we normally hear from our end-user commentary in our panels and our interviews. Databricks is really more used for the data science side. The MLAI is where it's best positioned in our survey. So it might still have some catching up to do to really have that caliber of usability that you know Snowflake is seeing right now. That's snowflake having its own marketplace. There's just a lot more to Snowflake right now than there is Databricks. But I do think you're right. These two massive vendors are sort of heading towards a collision course, and it'll be very interesting to see how they deploy their cash. I think Snowflake, with their incredible management and leadership, probably will make the first move. >> Well, I think you're right on that. And by the way, I'll just add, you know, Databricks has basically said, hey, it's going to be easier for us to come from data lakes into data warehouse. I'm not sure I buy that. I think, again, that semantic layer is a missing ingredient. So it's going to be really interesting to see how this plays out. And to your point, you know, Snowflake's got the war chest, they got the momentum, they've got the public presence now since November, 2020. And so, you know, they're probably going to start making some aggressive moves. Anyway, next prediction is something, Erik, that you and I have talked about many, many times, and that is observability. I know it's one of your favorite topics. And we see this world screaming for more consolidation it's going all in on cloud native. These legacy stacks, they're fighting to stay relevant, but the direction is pretty clear. And the same XY graph lays out the players in the field, with some of the new entrants that we've also highlighted, like Observe and Honeycomb and ChaosSearch that we've talked about. Erik, we put a big red target around Splunk because everyone wants their gold. So please give us your thoughts. >> Oh man, I feel like I've been saying negative things about Splunk for too long. I've got a bad rap on this name. The Splunk shareholders come after me all the time. Listen, it really comes down to this. They're a fantastic company that was designed to do logging and monitoring and had some great tool sets around what you could do with it. But they were designed for the data center. They were designed for prem. The world we're in now is so dynamic. Everything I hear from our end user community is that all net new workloads will be going to cloud native players. It's that simple. So Splunk has entrenched. It's going to continue doing what it's doing and it does it really, really well. But if you're doing something new, the new workloads are going to be in a dynamic environment and that's going to go to the cloud native players. And in our data, it is extremely clear that that means Datadog and Elastic. They are by far number one and two in net score, increase rates, adoption rates. It's not even close. Even New Relic actually is starting to, you know, entrench itself really well. We saw New Relic's adoption's going up, which is super important because they went to that freemium model, you know, to try to get their little bit of an entrenched customer base and that's working as well. And then you made a great list here, of all the new entrants, but it goes beyond this. There's so many more. In our emerging technology survey, we're seeing Century, Catchpoint, Securonix, Lucid Works. There are so many options in this space. And let's not forget, the biggest data that we're seeing is with Grafana. And Grafana labs as yet to turn on their enterprise. Elastic did it, why can't Grafana labs do it? They have an enterprise stack. So when you look at how crowded this space is, there has to be consolidation. I recently hosted a panel and every single guy on that panel said, "Please give me a consolidation." Because they're the end users trying to actually deploy these and it's getting a little bit confusing. >> Great. Thank you for that. Okay. Last prediction. Erik, might be a little out of your wheelhouse, but you know, you might have some thoughts on it. And that's a hybrid events become the new digital model and a new category in 2022. You got these pure play digital or virtual events. They're going to take a back seat to in-person hybrids. The virtual experience will eventually give way to metaverse experiences and that's going to take some time, but the physical hybrid is going to drive it. And metaverse is ultimately going to define the virtual experience because the virtual experience today is not great. Nobody likes virtual. And hybrid is going to become the business model. Today's pure virtual experience has to evolve, you know, theCUBE first delivered hybrid mid last decade, but nobody really wanted it. We did Mobile World Congress last summer in Barcelona in an amazing hybrid model, which we're showing in some of the pictures here. Alex, if you don't mind bringing that back up. And every physical event that we're we're doing now has a hybrid and virtual component, including the pre-records. You can see in our studios, you see that the green screen. I don't know. Erik, what do you think about, you know, the Zoom fatigue and all this. I know you host regular events with your round tables, but what are your thoughts? >> Well, first of all, I think you and your company here have just done an amazing job on this. So that's really your expertise. I spent 20 years of my career hosting intimate wall street idea dinners. So I'm better at navigating a wine list than I am navigating a conference floor. But I will say that, you know, the trend just goes along with what we saw. If 35% are going to be fully remote. If 70% are going to be hybrid, then our events are going to be as well. I used to host round table dinners on, you know, one or two nights a week. Now those have gone virtual. They're now panels. They're now one-on-one interviews. You know, we do chats. We do submitted questions. We do what we can, but there's no reason that this is going to change anytime soon. I think you're spot on here. >> Yeah. Great. All right. So there you have it, Erik and I, Listen, we always love the feedback. Love to know what you think. Thank you, Erik, for your partnership, your collaboration, and love doing these predictions with you. >> Yeah. I always enjoy them too. And I'm actually happy. Last year you made us do a baker's dozen, so thanks for keeping it to 10 this year. >> (laughs) We've got a lot to say. I know, you know, we cut out. We didn't do much on crypto. We didn't really talk about SaaS. I mean, I got some thoughts there. We didn't really do much on containers and AI. >> You want to keep going? I've got another 10 for you. >> RPA...All right, we'll have you back and then let's do that. All right. All right. Don't forget, these episodes are all available as podcasts, wherever you listen, all you can do is search Breaking Analysis podcast. Check out ETR's website at etr.plus, they've got a new website out. It's the best data in the industry, and we publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You can always reach out on email, David.Vellante@siliconangle.com I'm @DVellante on Twitter. Comment on our LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube Insights powered by ETR. Have a great week, stay safe, be well. And we'll see you next time. (mellow music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCUBE conversation. >> Everyone welcome to this special CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in our Palo Alto studios. During this time of the pandemic, we're doing a lot of remote interviews, supporting a lot of events. theCUBE virtual is our new brand because there's no events to go to, but we certainly want to talk to the best people and get the most important stories. And today I have a great segment with a world-class entrepreneur, Ajeet Singh co-founder and executive chairman of ThoughtSpot. And they've got an event coming up, which is going to be coming up in December 9th and 10th. But this interview is really about what it takes to be a world-class leader and what it takes to see the future and be a visionary, but then execute an opportunity because this is the time that we're in right now is there's a lot of change, data, technology, a sea change is happening and it's upon us and leadership around technology and how to capture opportunities is really what we need right now. And so Ajeet I want to thank you for coming on to theCUBE conversation. >> Thanks for having me, John. Pleasure to be here. >> For the folks watching, the startup that you've been doing for many, many years now, ThoughtSpot you're the co-founder executive chairman, but you also were involved in Nutanix as the co-founder of that company as well. You know, a little about unicorns and creating value and doing things early, but you're a visionary and you're a technologist and a leader. I want to go in and explore that because now more than ever, the role of data, the role of the truth is super important. And as the co-founder, your company is well positioned to do that. I mean, your tagline today on the website says insight is the speed of thought, but going back to the beginning, probably wasn't the tagline. It was probably maybe like we got to leverage data, take us through the vision initially when you founded the company in 2012. What was the thinking? What was on your mind? Take us through the journey. >> Yeah. So as an entrepreneur, I think visionary is a very big term. I don't know if I qualify for that or not, but what I'm really passionate about is identifying very large markets, with very, very big problems. And then going to the white board and from scratch, building a solution that is perfectly designed for the big problem that the market might be facing from scratch. And just an absolute honest way of approaching the problem and finding the best possible solution. So when we were starting ThoughtSpot, the market that we identified was analytics, analytics software. And the big problem that we saw was that while on one hand, companies were building very big data lakes, data warehouses, there was a lot of money being spent in capturing and storing data how that data was consumed by the end-users, the non-technical people, the sales, marketing, HR people, the doctors, the nurses, that process was not changing. That process was still stuck in old times where you have to ask an analyst to go and build a dashboard for you. And at the same time, we saw that in the consumer space, when anyone had a question they wanted to learn about something, they would just go to Google and ask that question. So we said, why can't analytics be as easy as Google? If I have a question, why do I have to wait for three weeks for some data experts to bring some insights to me for most simple questions, if I'm doing some very deep analysis, trying to come up with fraud algorithms, it's understood, you know, you need data expert. But if I'm just trying to understand how my business is doing, how my customers are doing, I shouldn't have to wait. And so that's how we identified the market and the problem. And then we build a solution that is designed for that non-technical user with a very design thinking UX first approach to make it super easy for anyone to ask that question. So that was the Genesis of the company. >> You know, I just love the thinking because you're solving a problem with a clean sheet piece of paper, you're looking at what can be done. And it's just, you can bring up Google because you know, you think about Google's motto was find what you're looking for. And they had a little gimmicky buttons, like I'm feeling lucky, which just took you to a random webpage at that time while everyone else was tryna build these walled gardens and this structural apparatus, Google wanted you in and out with your results fast. And that mindset just never came over to the enterprise and with all that legacy structure and all the baggage associated with it. So I totally loved the vision, but I got to ask you, how did you get to beachhead? How did you get that first success milestone? When did you see results in your thinking? >> Yeah, so I mean, I believe that once you've identified a big market and a big problem, it comes down to the people. So I sort of went on a recruit recruiting mission and I recruited perhaps the best technology and business team that you can find in any enterprise segment, not only just analytics, some of the early engineers, my co-founder, he was at Google before that, Amit Prakash, before that he was at Microsoft working on Bing. So it took a lot of very deliberate effort to find the right kind of people who have a builder's mentality and are also deep experts in areas like search large-scale distributed systems. Very passionate about user experience. And then you start building the product, you know, it took us almost, I would say one and a half three years to get the initial working version of the product. And we were lucky enough to engage with some of the largest companies in the world, such as Walmart who are very interested in our solution because they were facing these kinds of problems. And we almost co-developed this technology with our early customers, focusing on ease of use, scale, security, governance, all of that, because it's one thing to have a concept where you want to make access to data as easy as Google, you have a certain interface people can type and get an answer. But when you are talking about enterprise data and enterprise needs, they are nowhere similar to what you have in consumer space. Consumer space is free for all, all the information is there you can crawl it and then you can access it. In enterprise, for you to take this idea of search, but make it production grid, make it real and not just a concept card. You need to invest a lot in building deep technology and then enabling security and scalability and all of that. So it took us almost , I would say a two and a half to three years to get to the initial version of the product and the problem we are solving and the area of technology search that we are working on. We brought it to the market. It's almost an infinite game. You know, you can keep making things easier and easier. And we've seen how Google has continued to evolve their search over time And it is still evolving. We just feel so lucky to be in this market, taking the direction that we have taken. >> Yeah. It's easy to talk a big game in this area because like you said, it's a hard technical problem because it'll structural data, whether it's schema databases or whatever, legacy baggage, but to make it easy, hard. And I like what you guys go with this, find the right information and put it in the right place, the right time. It's a really hard problem. And the beautiful thing is you guys are building a category while there's spend in the market that needs the problem today. So category creation with an existing market that needs it. So I got to ask you, if you could do me a favor and define for the audience, what is search-driven analytics? What does that mean from your standpoint? >> Yeah, what it means is for the end user, it looks like search but under the hood is driving large scale analytics. I like to say that our product looks like a search engine on the surface, but under the hood, it's a massive number crunching machine. So Search and AI driven analytics. There's two goals there. One, if the user has, any user and we're talking about non-technical users here, we're not talking about necessarily data experts, but if a user has a question, they should be able to get an answer instantly. They shouldn't have to wait. That is what we achieve with Search and with Spot IQ, our AI engine, we help surface insights where people may not even know that those are the questions they should be asking because data has become so complex. People often don't even know what question they should be asking. And we give them a pool that's very easy to use, but it helps surface insights to them. So there is both a pool model that we enabled through Search and a push model that we enable through Spot IQ. >> So I have to ask you that you guys are pioneering this segment you're in first. And sometimes when you're first, you have arrows in your back as you know, it's not all the beginners survive, they get competition copies, but you guys have had a lead. You had success. What's different today as you have competition coming in trying to say, "Oh, we got Search too." So what's different today with ThoughtSpot? How are you guys differentiated? >> Yeah. I mean, that's always a sign of success. If what you are trying to do, if others are saying we have it too, you have done something that is valuable. And that happens in all industry. I think the best example is Tesla. They were the first to look at this very well-known problem. I mean, we haven't had a very sort of unique take on the existence of the problem itself. Everybody knows that there is a problem with access to data, but the technology that we have built is so deep that it's very, very hard to really copy it and make it work in real world with Tesla in automotive industry in cars, there is obviously so many other companies that have launched battery powered cars, electric cars, but there is Tesla and there is all the other electric cars which are a bit of an afterthought, because if you want to build an analytics product, where Search is at the core, Search cannot be added on the top, Search has to be the core, and then you build around it. And that requires you to build a fundamental architecture from the ground up. And you can't take an existing BI product that is built for dash boarding and add a search bar. I have always said that adding a search bar in a UI is perhaps, you know, 10 to 20 lines of JavaScript code. Anyone can add it and there is so much open source stuff out there that you can just take it and plug it. And many people have tried to do that, but taking off the shelf, Search technology that is built for unstructured data and sticking it on to a product that is required to do analytics on enterprise data, that doesn't work. We built a search technology that understands enterprise data at a very deep level, so that when our customers take our product and bring it into their environment, they don't have to fundamentally change how they manage their data. Our goal is to add value to their existing enterprise data Cloud Data Warehouses and deliver this amazing Search experience where our Search engine is enable to understand what's in their data Lake, what's in their Cloud Data Warehouse. What are the schema, the tables, the joints, the cardinality, the data archive, the security requirements, all of things have to be understood by the technology for you to deliver the experience. So now that said, we pride ourselves in not resting on our laurels. You know, we have this sort of motto in the company. We say we are only 2% done. So we are on our own sort of a continuous journey of innovation. And we have been working on taking our Search technology to the next level. And that is something really powerful that we are going to unveil at our upcoming conference, Beyond, in December. And that is one to create even more distance between us and the competition. And it's all driven by what we have seen with our customers, how they're using our product or learnings what they like, what they don't like, where we see gaps and where we see opportunity to make it even easier to deliver value to our customers and our users. >> I think that's a really profound insight you just shared, because if you look at what you just said around thinking about Search as an embedded architectural foundational, you know, embedded in the architecture, that's different than bolting on a feature where you said Java code or some open source library. You know, we see in the security market, people bolted on security had huge problems. Now, all you hear is, "Oh, you got a big security in from the beginning." You actually have baked Search into everything from the beginning. And it's not just a utility, it's a mindset. And it's also a technology metadata data about data software, and all kinds of tech is involved. Am I getting that right? I mean, cause I think this is what I heard you say. It's like, you got to have the data. >> This is totally right. I mean, if I can use an analogy, there is Google search and obviously Yahoo also tried to bring their own search Yahoo search Yahoo actually, Yahoo versus Google is a perfect example or a perfect analogy to compare with ThoughtSpot versus other BI product Yahoo was built for predefined content consumption. You know, you had a homepage, somebody defined it. You could make some customizations. And there is predefined content you can consume it. Now, they also did add search, but that didn't really go so far. While Google said, we will vary from scratch ability to crawl all the data, ability to index all the data and then build a serving infrastructure that deliver this amazing performance and interactivity and relevance for the user. Relevance is where Google already shined. And you can't do those things until you think about the architecture from the ground up. >> Ajeet I'm looking forward to having more deep dive conversations on that one topic. But for the folks who might not be old enough, like me to remember Google back at that time, Yahoo was the best search engine and it was directory basically with a keyword search. It was trivial, technically speaking, but they got big. And then the portal wars came out, we got to have a portal. Google was very much not looked down as an innovator, but they had great technical chops and they just stayed the course. They had a mission to provide the best search engine to help users find what they're looking for. And they never wavered. And it was not fashionable about that time to your point. And then Yahoo was number one, then Google just became Google and the rest is history. So I really think that's super notable because companies face the same problem. What looks like fashionable tech today might not be the right one. I think that's... >> Yeah, and I totally agree. And I think a lot of times in our space, there's a lot of sort of hype around AI and machine learning. We as a company have tried to stay close to our customers and users and build things that will work for them. And a lot of stuff that we are doing, it has never been done before. So it's not to say that along the way, we don't have our own failures. We do have failures and we learn from them. >> Yeah. Yeah. Just don't make the same mistake twice. >> Yeah, I think if you have a process of learning quickly, improving quickly, those are the companies that will have a competitive advantage. In today's world, nobody gets it right the first time. If you're trying to do something fundamentally different, if you're copying somebody else, then you're too late already. >> I totally agree. >> If you do something new, it's about how fast you penetrate And that's... >> That's a great mindset. That's a great mindset. And I think that's worth capturing calling out, but I got to ask you because what's first of all, distinguished history and I love your mindset and just solving problems, big problems. All great. I want to ask you something about the industry and where you guys were in 2012 alright when you started the company, you were literally in what I call the before Cloud phase. Cause it was before Cloud companies and then during Cloud companies and then after Cloud, you know, Amazon clearly took advantage of that for a lot of startups. So right around 2012 through 2016, I'd call that the Amazon is growing up years. How did the Cloud impact your thinking around the product and how you guys were executing because you were right on that wave. You were probably in the sweet spot of your development. >> Yeah. >> Pre business planning. You were in the pre-business planning mode, incomes, Amazon. I'm sure you're probably using Amazon cause your starters and all start up sort of use Amazon at first, but I just think about, do we all have found premise with a data center? How did that impact you guys? And how does that change today? >> Certainly. Yeah it's been fascinating to see how the world is evolving how enterprises have also really evolved in depth, thinking on how they leverage the cloud infrastructure now. In the Cloud, there is the compute and storage infrastructure. And then you have a Cloud Data Warehouse, the analytics stack in the Cloud. That's becoming more popular now with a company like Google, having BigQuery and then Snowflake really amazing concepts and things like that. So when we started, we looked at where our customers are , where is their data. And what kind of infrastructure is available to us at the time there wasn't enough compute to drive the search engine that we wanted to build. There were also not any significant Cloud Data Warehousing at the time, but our engineering team our co-founders, they came from companies like Google, where building a Cloud based architecture and elastic architecture, service oriented architecture is in their DNA. So we architected the product to run on infrastructure that is very elastic that can be run practically anywhere. But our initial customers and applies the Global 2000. They had their data on-prem. So we had started more with on-prem as a go-to-market strategy. and then about four and a half years ago, once cloud infrastructure I'm talking about the compute infrastructure started to become more mature, we certified our software, to run on all three clouds So today we have more than 75 to 80% of our customers already running our software in the Cloud. And as now, because we connect to our primary data sources, our Cloud Data Warehouses, Cloud Data Lakes. Now with Snowflake and BigQuery and Synapse and Redshift, we have enough of our customers who have deployed Cloud Data Warehouses. So we are also able to directly integrate with them. And that's why we launched our own hosted SaaS Offering about a month ago. So I would say our journey in this area has been sort of similar to companies like Splunk or Elastic, which started with a software model initially deployed more on-prem, but then evolved with the customers to the Cloud. So we have a lot of focus and momentum and lot of our customers, as they're moving their data to the Cloud, they're asking us as well to be in the Cloud and provide a hosted offering. And that is what we have built for the last one year. And we launched it a month ago. >> It's nice to be on the right side of history. I got to say, when you're on the way to be there. And that also makes integrations easy too. I love the Cloud play. Let's get to the final segment here. I want to get your thoughts on your customers, your advice. There's a huge untapped opportunity for companies when it comes to data, a lot of them are realizing that the pandemic is highlighting a lot of areas where they have to go faster and then to go to Cloud, they're going to build modern apps more data's coming in than ever before. Where are these untapped opportunities for customers to take advantage of the data? And what's your opinion on where they should look and what they should do? >> Yeah, I really think that the pandemics has shown for the first, the value of data to society at large, there is probably more than a billion people in the world that have seen a chart for the first time in their life. Everybody is being... and COVID has done some magic. But everybody was looking at charts of infection and so on and so forth. So there is a lot more broad awareness of what data can do in improving our society at large for the businesses of course, in the last six, seven months, you heard it enough from lot of leaders that digital transformation is accelerating. Everybody is realizing that the way to interact in the world is becoming more and more digital expecting your customers to come to your branch to do banking is not really an option. And people are also seeing how all the SaaS companies and SaaS businesses, digital businesses, they have really taken off. So if a company like Zoom can suddenly have a a hundred, $150 billion valuation, because you are able to do everything remote, all the enterprises are looking to really touch their customers and partners in a lot more digital way than they could do before. And definitely COVID has also really created this almost, you know, pool buckets of organization. There is lot of companies that have tremendously benefited from it. And there a lot of companies that have been poorly affected, really in a difficult place. And I think both of them for the first category, they are looking at how do I maintain this revenue even after COVID, because one of this thing, you know, hopefully early next year we have a vaccine and things can start to look better again sometime next year. But we have learned so much. We have attracted so many new customers, how do we retain and grow them further? And that means I need to invest more and more in my technology. Now, companies that are not doing well, they really want to figure out how to become more operationally efficient. And they are really under pressure to get more value from there and both categories, improving your revenue, retaining customers. You need to understand the customer behavior. You need to understand which products they are buying at a fine grain level, not with the law of averages, not by looking at a dashboard and saying our average customer likes this kind of product. That one doesn't really work. You have to offer people personalized services and that personalization is just not possible at scale, without really using data on the front lines. You can't have just manager sitting in their office, looking at dashboards and charts and saying these are the kinds of campaigns I need to run because my average customer seems to like these kinds of offers. I need to really empower my sales people, my individual frontline workers, who are interfacing with the customer to be able to make customized offers of services and products to them. And that is possible on the data. So we see a really, a lot more focus in getting value from data, delivering value quickly and digital transformation broadly but definitely leveraging data in businesses. There is tremendous acceleration that is happening and, you know, next five years, it's all going to be about being able to monetize data on the front lines when you are interfacing with your customers and partners >> Ajeet, that's great insight. And I really appreciate what you're saying. And you know, I wrote a blog post in 2007. I said, data will be the new development kit. Back then we used to call development kits, software user development. >> John, you are the real visionary. It took me until 2012 to be able to do this. >> Well, it wasn't clear, but you saw other data was going to have to be programmed be part of the programming. And I think, what you're getting at here is so profound because we're living 2020 people can see the value of data at the right time. It changes the conversations, it changes what's going on in the real time communications of our world with real-time access to information, whether that's machine to machine or machine to human, having data in the right place, changes the context. >> Yap. >> And that is a true, not a tech thing, that's just life, right? I think this year, I think we're going to look back and say, this was the year that everyone realized that real time communications, real-time society needs real time data. And I think it's going to be more important than ever. So it's a really big problem and important one. And thank you for sharing that. >> Yeah. And actually you bring up a very good point programming, developing big data. Data as a development kit. We are also going to announce a new product at Beyond, which will be about bringing ThoughtSpot everywhere, where a lot of business users are in their business applications. And by using ThoughtSpot product, using our full experience, they can obviously do enterprise wide analytics and look at all the data. But if they're looking for insights and nuggets, and they want to ask questions in their business workflows. We are also launching a product capability that will allow software developers to inject data in their business applications and enable and empower their own business users to be able to ask any questions that they might have without having to go to yet another BI product. >> It's data as code. I mean, you almost think about like software metaphors, where's the compiler? Where's the source code? Where's the data code? You start to get into this new mindset of thinking about data as code, because you got to have data about the data. Is it clean data, dirty data? Is it real time? Is it useful? There's a lot of intelligence needed to manage this. This is like a pretty big deal. And it's fairly new in the sense in the science side. Yeah, machine learning has been around for a while and you know, there's tracks for that. But thinking of this way as an operating system mindset, it's not just being a data geek. You know what I'm saying? So I think you're on the right track Ajeet. I really appreciate your thoughts here. Thank you. >> Thank you John. >> Okay. This is a cube conversation. Unpacking the data. The data is the future. We're living in a real-time world and in real-time data can change the outcomes of all kinds of contexts. And with truth, you need data and Ajeet Singh co-founder executive chairman of ThoughtSpot shares his thoughts here in theCUBE. I'm John furrier. Thanks for watching. (soft upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> As you may recall, coming into the second part of 2019 we reported, based on ETR Survey data, that there was a narrowing of spending on emerging tech and an unplugging of a lot of legacy systems. This was really because people were going from experimentation into operationalizing their digital initiatives. When COVID hit, conventional wisdom suggested that there would be a flight to safety. Now, interestingly, we reported with Eric Bradley, based on one of the Venns, that a lot of CIOs were still experimenting with emerging vendors. But this was very anecdotal. Today, we have more data, fresh data, from the ETR Emerging Technology Study on private companies, which really does suggest that there's a notable decline in experimentation, and that's affecting emerging technology vendors. Hi, everybody, this is Dave Vellante, and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights, powered by ETR. Once again, Sagar Kadakia is joining us. Sagar is the Director of Research at ETR. Sagar, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Good to see you again. Thanks for having me, Dave. >> So, it's really important to point out, this Emerging Tech Study that you guys do, it's different from your quarterly Technology Spending Intention Survey. Take us through the methodology. Guys, maybe you could bring up the first chart. And, Sagar, walk us through how you guys approach this. >> No problem. So, a lot of the viewers are used to seeing a lot of the results from the Technology Spending Intention Survey, or the TSIS, as we call it. That study, as the title says, it really tracks spending intentions on more pervasive vendors, right, Microsoft, AWS, as an example. What we're going to look at today is our Emerging Technology Study, which we conduct biannually, in May and November. This study is a little bit different. We ask CIOs around evaluations, awareness, planned evaluations, so think of this as pre-spend, right. So that's a major differentiator from the TSIS. That, and this study, really focuses on private emerging providers. We're really only focused on those really emerging private companies, say, like your Series B to Series G or H, whatever it may be, so, two big differences within those studies. And then today what we're really going to look at is the results from the Emerging Technology Study. Just a couple of quick things here. We had 811 CIOs participate, which represents about 380 billion in annual IT spend, so the results from this study matter. We had almost 75 Fortune 100s take it. So, again, we're really measuring how private emerging providers are doing in the largest organizations. And so today we're going to be reviewing notable sectors, but largely this survey tracks roughly 356 private technologies and frameworks. >> All right, guys, bring up the pie chart, the next slide. Now, Sagar, this is sort of a snapshot here, and it basically says that 44% of CIOs agree that COVID has decreased the organization's evaluation and utilization of emerging tech, despite what I mentioned, Eric Bradley's Venn, which suggested one CIO in particular said, "Hey, I always pick somebody in the lower left "of the magic quadrant." But, again, this is a static view. I know we have some other data, but take us through this, and how this compares to other surveys that you've done. >> No problem. So let's start with the high level takeaways. And I'll actually kind of get into to the point that Eric was debating, 'cause that point is true. It's just really how you kind of slice and dice the data to get to that. So, what you're looking at here, and what the overall takeaway from the Emerging Technology Study was, is, you know, you are going to see notable declines in POCs, of proof-of-concepts, any valuations because of COVID-19. Even though we had been communicating for quite some time, you know, the last few months, that there's increasing pressure for companies to further digitize with COVID-19, there are IT budget constraints. There is a huge pivot in IT resources towards supporting remote employees, a decrease in risk tolerance, and so that's why what you're seeing here is a rather notable number of CIOs, 44%, that said that they are decreasing their organization's evaluation and utilization of private emerging providers. So that is notable. >> Now, as you pointed out, you guys run this survey a couple of times a year. So now let's look at the time series. Guys, if you bring up the next chart. We can see how the sentiment has changed since last year. And, of course, we're isolating here on some of larger companies. So, take us through what this data means. >> No problem. So, how do we quantify what we just saw in the prior slide? We saw 44% of CIOs indicating that they are going to be decreasing their evaluations. But what exactly does that mean? We can pretty much determine that by looking at a lot of the data that we captured through our Emerging Technology Study. There's a lot going on in this slide, but I'll walk you through it. What you're looking at here is Fortune 1000 organizations, so we've really isolated the data to those organizations that matter. So, let's start with the teal, kind of green line first, because I think it's a little bit easier to understand. What you're looking at, Fortune 1000 evaluations, both planned and current, okay? And you're looking at a time series, one year ago and six months ago. So, two of the answer options that we provide CIOs in this survey, right, think about the survey as a grid, where you have seven answer options going horizontally, and then 300-plus vendors and technologies going vertically. For any given vendor, they can essentially indicate one of these options, two of them being on currently evaluating them or I plan to evaluate them in six months. So what you're looking at here is effectively the aggregate number, or the average number of Fortune 1000 evaluations. So if you look into May 2019, all the way on the left of that chart, that 24% roughly means that a quarter of selections made by Fortune 1000 of the survey, they selected plan to evaluate or currently evaluating. If you fast-forward six months, to the middle of the chart, November '19, it's roughly the same, one in four technologies that are Fortune 1000 selected, they indicated that I plan or am currently evaluating them. But now look at that big drop off going into May 2020, the 17%, right? So now one out of every six technologies, or one out of every selections that they made was an evaluation. So a very notable drop. And then if you look at the blue line, this is another answer option that we provided CIOs: I'm aware of the technology but I have no plans to evaluate. So this answer option essentially tracks awareness levels. If you look at the last six months, look at that big uptick from 44% to over 50%, right? So now, essentially one out of every two technologies, or private technologies that a CIO is aware of, they have no plans to evaluate. So this is going to have an impact on the general landscape, when we think about those private emerging providers. But there is one caveat, and, Dave, this is what you mentioned earlier, this is what Eric was talking about. The providers that are doing well are the ones that are work-from-home aligned. And so, just like a few years ago, we were really analyzing results based on are you cloud-native or are you Cloud-aligned, because those technologies are going to do the best, what we're seeing in the emerging space is now the same thing. Those emerging providers that enable organizations to maintain productivity for their employees, essentially allowing their employees to work remotely, those emerging providers are still doing well. And that is probably the second biggest takeaway from this study. >> So now what we're seeing here is this flight to perceive safety, which, to your point, Sagar, doesn't necessarily mean good news for all enterprise tech vendors, but certainly for those that are positioned for the work-from-home pivot. So now let's take a look at a couple of sectors. We'll start with information security. We've reported for years about how the perimeter's been broken down, and that more spend was going to shift from inside the moat to a distributed network, and that's clearly what's happened as a result of COVID. Guys, if you bring up the next chart. Sagar, you take us through this. >> No problem. And as you imagine, I think that the big theme here is zero trust. So, a couple of things here. And let me just explain this chart a little bit, because we're going to be going through a couple of these. What you're seeing on the X-axis here, is this is effectively what we're classifying as near term growth opportunity from all customers. The way we measure that effectively is we look at all the evaluations, current evaluations, planned evaluations, we look at people who are evaluated and plan to utilize these vendors. The more indications you get on that the more to the top right you're going to be. The more indications you get around I'm aware of but I don't plan to evaluate, or I'm replacing this early-stage vendor, the further down and on the left you're going to be. So, on the X-axis you have near term growth opportunity from all customers, and on the Y-axis you have near term growth opportunity from, really, the biggest shops in the world, your Global 2000, your Forbes Private 225, like Cargill, as an example, and then, of course, your federal agencies. So you really want to be positioned up and to the right here. So, the big takeaway here is zero trust. So, just a couple of things on this slide when we think about zero trust. As organizations accelerate their Cloud and Saas spend because of COVID-19, and, you know, what we were talking about earlier, Dave, remote work becomes the new normal, that perimeter security approach is losing appeal, because the perimeter's less defined, right? Apps and data are increasingly being stored in the Cloud. That, and employees are working remotely from everywhere, and they're accessing all of these items. And so what we're seeing now is a big move into zero trust. So, if we look at that chart again, what you're going to see in that upper right quadrant are a lot of identity and access management players. And look at the bifurcation in general. This is what we were talking about earlier in terms of the landscape not doing well. Most security vendors are in that red area, you know, in the middle to the bottom. But if you look at the top right, what are you seeing here? Unify ID, Auth0, WSO2, right, all identity and access management players. These are critical in your zero trust approach, and this is one of the few area where we are seeing upticks. You also see here BitSight, Lucideus. So that's going to be security assessment. You're seeing VECTRA and Netskope and Darktrace, and a few others here. And Cloud Security and IDPS, Intrusion Detection and Prevention System. So, very few sectors are seeing an uptick, very few security sectors actually look pretty good, based on opportunities that are coming. But, essentially, all of them are in that work-from-home aligned security stack, so to speak. >> Right, and of course, as we know, as we've been reporting, buyers have options, from both established companies and these emerging companies that are public, Okta, CrowdStrike, Zscaler. We've seen the work-from-home pivot benefit those guys, but even Palo Alto Networks, even CISCO, I asked (other speaker drowns out speech) last week, I said, "Hey, what about this pivot to work from home? "What about this zero trust?" And he said, "Look, the reality is, yes, "a big part of our portfolio is exposed "to that traditional infrastructure, "but we have options for zero trust as well." So, from a buyer's standpoint, that perceived flight to safety, you have a lot of established vendors, and that clearly is showing up in your data. Now, the other sector that we want to talk about is database. We've been reporting a lot on database, data warehouse. So, why don't you take us through the next graphic here, if you would. >> Sagar: No problem. So, our theme here is that Snowflake is really separating itself from the pack, and, again, you can see that here. Private database and data warehousing vendors really continue to impact a lot of their public peers, and Snowflake is leading the way. We expect Snowflake to gain momentum in the next few years. And, look, there's some rumors that IPOing soon. And so when we think about that set-up, we like it, because as organizations transition away from hybrid Cloud architectures to 100% or near-100% public Cloud, Snowflake is really going to benefit. So they look good, their data stacks look pretty good, right, that's resiliency, redundancy across data centers. So we kind of like them as well. Redis Labs bring a DB and they look pretty good here on the opportunity side, but we are seeing a little bit of churn, so I think probably Snowflake and DataStax are probably our two favorites here. And again, when you think about Snowflake, we continue to think more pervasive vendors, like Paradata and Cloudera, and some of the other larger database firms, they're going to continue seeing wallet and market share losses due to some of these emerging providers. >> Yeah. If you could just keep that slide up for a second, I would point out, in many ways Snowflake is kind of a safer bet, you know, we talk about flight to safety, because they're well-funded, they're established. You can go from zero to Snowflake very quickly, that's sort of their mantra, if you will. But I want to point out and recognize that it is somewhat oranges and tangerines here, Snowflake being an analytical database. You take MariaDB, for instance, I look at that, anyway, as relational and operational. And then you mentioned DataStax. I would say Couchbase, Redis Labs, Aerospike. Cockroach is really a... EValue Store. You've got some non-relational databases in there. But we're looking at the entire sector of databases, which has become a really interesting market. But again, some of those established players are going to do very well, and I would put Snowflake on that cusp. As you pointed out, Bloomberg broke the story, I think last week, that they were contemplating an IPO, which we've known for a while. >> Yeah. And just one last thing on that. We do like some of the more pervasive players, right. Obviously, AWS, all their products, Redshift and DynamoDB. Microsoft looks really good. It's just really some of the other legacy ones, like the Teradatas, the Oracles, the Hadoops, right, that we are going to be impacted. And so the claw providers look really good. >> So, the last decade has really brought forth this whole notion of DevOps, infrastructure as code, the whole API economy. And that's the piece we want to jump into now. And there are some real stand-outs here, you know, despite the early data that we showed you, where CIOs are less prone to look at emerging vendors. There are some, for instance, if you bring up the next chart, guys, like Hashi, that really are standing out, aren't they? >> That's right, Dave. So, again, what you're seeing here is you're seeing that bifurcation that we were talking about earlier. There are a lot of infrastructure software vendors that are not positioned well, but if you look at the ones at the top right that are positioned well... We have two kind of things on here, starting with infrastructure automation. We think a winner here is emerging with Terraform. Look all the way up to the right, how well-positioned they are, how many opportunities they're getting. And for the second straight survey now, Terraform is leading along their peers, Chef, Puppet, SaltStack. And they're leading their peers in so many different categories, notably on allocating more spend, which is obviously very important. For Chef, Puppet and SaltStack, which you can see a little bit below, probably a little bit higher than the middle, we are seeing some elevator churn levels. And so, really, Terraform looks like they're kind of separating themselves. And we've got this great quote from the CIO just a few months ago, on why Terraform is likely pulling away, and I'll read it out here quickly. "The Terraform tool creates "an entire infrastructure in a box. "Unlike vendors that use procedural languages, "like Ants, Bull and Chef, "it will show you the infrastructure "in the way you want it to be. "You don't have to worry about "the things that happen underneath." I know some companies where you can put your entire Amazon infrastructure through Terraform. If Amazon disappears, if your availability drops, load balancers, RDS, everything, you just run Terraform and everything will be created in 10 to 15 minutes. So that shows you the power of Terraform and why we think it's ranked better than some of the other vendors. >> Yeah, I think that really does sum it up. And, actually, guys, if you don't mind bringing that chart back up again. So, a point out, so, Mitchell Hashimoto, Hashi, really, I believe I'm correct, talking to Stu about this a little bit, he sort of led the Terraform project, which is an Open Source project, and, to your point, very easy to deploy. Chef, Puppet, Salt, they were largely disrupted by Cloud, because they're designed to automate deployment largely on-prem and DevOps, and now Terraform sort of packages everything up into a platform. So, Hashi actually makes money, and you'll see it on this slide, and things, Vault, which is kind of their security play. You see GitLab on here. That's really application tooling to deploy code. You see Docker containers, you know, Docker, really all about open source, and they've had great adoption, Docker's challenge has always been monetization. You see Turbonomic on here, which is application resource management. You can't go too deep on these things, but it's pretty deep within this sector. But we are comparing different types of companies, but just to give you a sense as to where the momentum is. All right, let's wrap here. So maybe some final thoughts, Sagar, on the Emerging Technology Study, and then what we can expect in the coming month here, on the update in the Technology Spending Intention Study, please. >> Yeah, no problem. One last thing on the zero trust side that has been a big issue that we didn't get to cover, is VPN spend. Our data is pointing that, yes, even though VPN spend did increase the last few months because of remote work, we actually think that people are going to move away from that as they move onto zero trust. So just one last point on that, just in terms of overall thoughts, you know, again, as we cover it, you can see how bifurcated all these spaces are. Really, if we were to go sector by sector by sector, right, storage and block chain and MLAI and all that stuff, you would see there's a few or maybe one or two vendors doing well, and the majority of vendors are not seeing as many opportunities. And so, again, are you work-from-home aligned? Are you the best vendor of all the other emerging providers? And if you fit those two criteria then you will continue seeing POCs and evaluations. And if you don't fit that criteria, unfortunately, you're going to see less opportunities. So think that's really the big takeaway on that. And then, just in terms of next steps, we're already transitioning now to our next Technology Spending Intention Survey. That launched last week. And so, again, we're going to start getting a feel for how CIOs are spending in 2H-20, right, so, for the back half of the year. And our question changes a little bit. We ask them, "How do you plan on spending in the back half year "versus how you actually spent "in the first half of the year, or 1H-20?" So, we're kind of, tighten the screw, so to speak, and really getting an idea of what's spend going to look like in the back half, and we're also going to get some updates as it relates to budget impacts from COVID-19, as well as how vendor-relationships have changed, as well as business impacts, like layoffs and furloughs, and all that stuff. So we have a tremendous amount of data that's going to be coming in the next few weeks, and it should really prepare us for what to see over the summer and into the fall. >> Yeah, very excited, Sagar, to see that. I just wanted to double down on what you said about changes in networking. We've reported with you guys on NPLS networks, shifting to SD-WAN. But even VPN and SD-WAN are being called into question as the internet becomes the new private network. And so lots of changes there. And again, very excited to see updated data, return of post-COVID, as we exit this isolation economy. Really want to point out to folks that this is not a snapshot survey, right? This is an ongoing exercise that ETR runs, and grateful for our partnership with you guys. Check out ETR.plus, that's the ETR website. I publish weekly on Wikibon.com and SiliconANGLE.com. Sagar, thanks so much for coming on. Once again, great to have you. >> Thank you so much, for having me, Dave. I really appreciate it, as always. >> And thank you for watching this episode of theCube Insights, powered by ETR. This Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (gentle music)

>> Commentator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience, brought to you by HPE. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover Virtual Experience. Rather than all getting together in one place like Las Vegas, we're getting to talk to people around the globe where they are, digging into some of the partner discussions here. Happy to welcome to the program Riccardo De Blasio. He is the Chief Revenue Officer from Commvault. Riccardo, thanks so much for joining us, great to see you. >> Hello Stu, great to be here. >> Excellent. So, you know, obviously HPE Discover, Commvault, and HPE, why don't you give us the latest on, on the partner up? >> Absolutely. Well, first of all, I would like to thank you, HPE, the whole team, not only for this invitation, but for the great partnership that we have, since actually many, many years. Well, things are going really, really well with HPE. We're very happy, we're very proud. I mean, I'm a chief revenue officer, so my title says it all. And if I look at the performances of our alliances in the last, 18 months. It's been a double digit grow and in some quarter, even a triple digit grow. Our relationship and engagement into the field are growing on a weekly basis and the amount of opportunity that we have in focusing in our pipeline with HPE are growing more and more and more. I believe we found, Steve, a good ying and yang, between the two companies, us being the leader of data protection in the market, and in conjunction with one of the largest server infrastructure service provider like HPE, you know, think about it one of the highest success that we are experience right now is Commvault through GreenLake as a backup, as a service, right? So many angles, our partnership, it's working and we just feel we are scratching really the tip of the iceberg. And the best is yet to come. So super excited to be here. Super excited for what's ahead of us. >> All right, Riccardo, well, last year, and we've had theCUBE at Commvault GO for a couple of years, a lot of discussion about the various consumption models, especially how cloud is fitting into things, whether it be a public cloud and backing up data, or SaaS models. Obviously Metallic was the, you know, star of the show at Commvault GO last year, You mentioned, the GreenLake offerings that you're doing with HPE to give back up as a service. So, bring us inside what you're hearing from your customers, how they are managing these various cloud offerings. >> Totally Stu. The adoption into cloud native apps, or moving workloads into cloud models, it is something that has been around for the last 10 years. Obviously, what the current situation is producing is a triggering event to really move in to a light speed transformation and adoption of any type of cloud models. And we believe as a backup and data protection provider, we are in the middle of it, experiencing a lot of benefits. I mean, at the end of the day, if you look at our Metallic offering a one of our blockbuster is backing up office 365, which is a cloud native app. After that, we got Salesforce, or we got ServiceNow, and so on, right? Before we move into more traditional endpoint data management like laptop, or MDM like mobile phone, but even if I look, you know, from an angle of our partnership with HPE, what I see most of the grow and opportunity has been on the GreenLakes platform. A lot of the opportunities that we have in our pipe that have been built in the last six months, where I see a lot of potential to do business together, 80% of them is with GreenLakes, there's always GreenLakes in the middle. >> Excellent. What are you hearing so much from customers? You know, you're the chief revenue officer, so is it the move from CapEx to OpEx? You know, bring us inside a little bit, the finance side and what you're hearing from customers as to how ready. Obviously, with the global pandemic, even puts more of a highlight on those cloud models. If I've done things right I should be able to either, scale up, if needed, or if I need to dial things down for a little while, hopefully I haven't locked myself into some environment. So I would love to hear a little bit more color from you on that piece of it. >> Absolutely, I believe you nailed it, Stu. There's definitely an operational driver behind, which is I can I scale up or down my data center without having the possibility to have people on the ground. And so how can I move into a virtual data center where I have computing, storage, networking, that can follow my peak of IO, according to my business need. And there's the other angle in the current crisis. Company often are not run, but CFO becomes more important, and there's a huge attention to cost, and everything that can be moved from perpetual into a ratable cost. And therefore, cloud has a better fit for that. And, and then last but not least, is also, you know, the better integration that a lot of cloud models provide you with the cloud native apps, right? I mean, can you run Salesforce on-prem? Not really, right. So how can you have a dashboard of different business application and operational application that are better integrated with the cloud native apps. So the more you can offer your client, I.e. GreenLakes, or Metallic, or Commvault, are cloud native services that is naturally integrated with the current cloud native apps, the more you're going to make their life easier. >> One of the big items when you talk about cloud are, you know, compliance and security. Bring us inside what that means when you're dealing with HPE and Commvault together? Sure, I mean, our two organization are traditionally extremely well positioned in the enterprise markets. And when I say enterprise market, I'm talking also about the public sector, vertical, so often or financial service, often vertical industry which are heavily regulated, I think, this is one of the better benefits our joint solution offer to our clients. We know how to deal with this type of environment since the last three decades. And very often we've been at the center of that complexity. So we got the playbook that has been written a number of years ago and re-polished every year. So we feel very strong that every time we win together, one of the competitive advantage we have against our competition is precisely that ability to navigate through a heavily regulated, heavily compliance, enterprise environment that often some of our competitor, they don't have the structure, the culture, the skill set and the tools in order to make our customers life easier on that perspective. >> Excellent. Riccardo, Commvault works with many partners, what makes the HPE partnership special? >> So I think you know what I said earlier, definitely, I would say the first thing is a market segmentation over enterprise. We are experiencing a lot of success with our enterprise client. I look at the joint pipeline that we built together, I would say 90% of the clients are Global 2000 customers. And so that is definitely one number. Number two is, you know how much work we did collectively in integrating our product line and platform together. So if you look, you know, the Commvault Complete solution, and very soon also Metallic, but even Advik, that has been done a lot of effort on that side, there are natively integrated with open API so that our client really will not feel the difference of having two different silos solution. And and then last but not least, the same strategic goal and view of pushing cloud based model, a ratable model, GreenLake for HPE, and Metallic and Advik for Commvault. >> Excellent. You mentioned some of the shifting models to some of the newer solutions. Integration partnership take a little bit of time, but, what should we be expecting from, Commvault in the partnership with HPE for the rest of 2020? >> Absolutely, Steve. Definitely an acceleration. We took the decision at Commvault to focus on fewer partners but very relevant to us. We're very happy to say that HPE is one of them. And we want to do more from a product integration perspective. So the next one in line would be Metallic, and how the Metallic play and integration will play into GreenLakes and into a lot of HPE products. But also we want to do more with our field engagement. So now we have weekly or monthly, quarterly, weekly engagement with our, with our two fields organization just in order to better serve our clients and often do business with the same channel partners that we have in our ecosystem. >> Excellent. Riccardo, thank you so much for joining us. We're really pleasured to talk. >> Thank you, thank you Stu, And thank you HPE for the great partnership and opportunity. >> All right, lots more coverage from theCUBE HPE Discover Virtual Experience. I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE (upbeat mellow music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage, CUBE Virtual's coverage, CUBE digital coverage, of AWS Summit, virtual online, Amazon Summit's normally in face-to-face all around the world, it's happening now online, follow the sun. Of course, we want to bring theCUBE coverage like we do at the events digitally, and we've got a great guest that usually comes on face-to-face, he's coming on virtual, Sanjay Poonen, the chief operating officer of VMware. Sanjay great to see you, thanks for coming in virtually, you look great. >> Hey, John thank you very much. Always a pleasure to talk to you. This is the new reality. We both happen to live very close to each other, me in Los Altos, you in Palo Alto, but here we are in this new mode of communication. But the good news is I think you guys at theCUBE were pioneering a lot of digital innovation, the AI platform, so hopefully it's not much of an adjustment for you guys to move digital. >> It's not really a pivot, just move the boat, put the sails up and sail into the next generation, which brings up really the conversation that we're seeing, which is this digital challenge, the virtual world, it's virtualization, Sanjay, it sounds like VMware. Virtualization spawned so much opportunity, it created Amazon, some say, I'd say. Virtualizing our world, life is now integrated, we're immersed into each other, physical and digital, you got edge computing, you got cloud native, this is now a clear path to customers that recognize with the pandemic challenges of at-scale, that they have to operate their business, reset, reinvent, and grow coming out of this pandemic. This has been a big story that we've been talking about and a lot of smart managers looking at projects saying, I'm doubling down on that, and I'm going to move the resources from this, the people and budget, to this new reality. This is a tailwind for the folks who were prepared, the ones that have the experience, the ones that did the work. theCUBE, thanks for the props, but VMware as well. Your thoughts and reaction to this new reality, because it has to be cloud native, otherwise it doesn't work, your thoughts. >> Yeah, I think, John, you're right on. We were very fortunate as a company to invent the term virtualization for an x86 architecture and the category 20 years ago when Diane founded this great company. And I would say you're right, the public cloud is the instantiation of virtualization at its sort of scale format and we're excited about this Amazon partnership, we'll talk more about that. This new world of doing everything virtual has taken the same concepts to whole new levels. We are partnering very closely with companies like Zoom, because a good part of this is being able to deliver video experiences in there, we'll talk about that if needed. Cloud native security, we announced an acquisition today in container security that's very important because we're making big moves in security, security's become very important. I would just say, John, the first thing that was very important to us as we began to shelter in place was the health of our employees. Ironically, if I go back to, in January I was in Davos, in fact some of your other folks who were on the show earlier, Matt Garman, Andy, we were all there in January. The crisis already started in China, but it wasn't on the world scene as much of a topic of discussion. Little did we know, three, four weeks later, fast forward to February things were moving so quickly. I remember a Friday late in February where we were just about to go the next week to Las Vegas for our in-person sales kickoffs. Thousands of people, we were going to do, I think, five or 6,000 people in Las Vegas and then another 3,000 in Barcelona, and then finally in Singapore. And it had not yet been categorized a pandemic. It was still under this early form of some worriable virus. We decided for the health and safety of our employees to turn the entire event that was going to happen on Monday to something virtual, and I was so proud of the VMware team to just basically pivot just over the weekend. To change our entire event, we'd been thinking about video snippets. We have to become in this sort of virtual, digital age a little bit like TV producers like yourself, turn something that's going to be one day sitting in front of an audience to something that's a lot shorter, quicker snippets, so we began that, and the next thing we began doing over the next several weeks while the shelter in place order started, was systematically, first off, tell our employees, listen, focus on your health, but if you're healthy, turn your attention to serving your customers. And we began to see, which we'll talk about hopefully in the context of the discussion, parts of our portfolio experience a tremendous amount of interest for a COVID-centered world. Our digital workplace solutions, endpoint security, SD-WAN, and that trifecta began to be something that we began to see story after story of customers, hospitals, schools, governments, retailers, pharmacies telling us, thank you, VMware, for helping us when we needed those solutions to better enable our people on the front lines. And all VMware's role, John, was to be a digital first responder to the first responder, and that gave tremendous amount of motivation to all of our employees into it. >> Yeah, and I think that's a great point. One of the things we've been talking about, and you guys have been aligned with this, you mentioned some of those points, is that as we work at home, it points out that digital and technology is now part of lifestyle. So we used to talk about consumerization of IT, or immersion with augmented reality and virtual reality, and then talk about the edge of the network as an endpoint, we are at the edge of the network, we're at home, so this highlights some of the things that are in demand, workspaces, VPN provisioning, these new tools, that some cases we've been hearing people that no one ever thought of having a forecast of 100% VPN penetration. Okay, you did the AirWatch deal way back when you first started, these are now fruits of those labors. So I got to ask you, as managers of your customer base are out there thinking, okay, I got to double down on the right growth strategy for this post-pandemic world, the smart managers are going to look at the technologies enabled for business outcome, so I have to ask you, innovation strategies are one thing, saying it, putting it place, but now more than ever, putting them in action is the mandate that we're hearing from customers. Okay I need an innovation strategy, and I got to put it into action fast. What do you say to those customers? What is VMware doing with AWS, with cloud, to make those innovation strategies not only plausible but actionable? >> That's a great question, John. We focused our energy, before even COVID started, as we prepared for this year, going into sales kickoffs and our fiscal year, around five priorities. Number one was enabling the world to be multicloud, private cloud and public cloud, and clearly our partnership here with Amazon is the best example of that and they are our preferred cloud partner. Secondly, building modern apps with microservices and cloud native, what we call app modernization. Thirdly, which is a key part to the multicloud, is building out the entire network stack, data center networking, the firewalls, the load bouncing in SD-WAN, so I'd call that cloud network. Number four, the modernization of workplace with an additional workspace solution, Workspace ONE. And five, intrinsic security from all aspects of security, network, endpoint, and cloud. So those five priorities were what we began to think through, organize our portfolio, we call them solution pillars, and for any of your viewers who're interested, there's a five-minute version of the VMware story around those five pillars that you can watch on YouTube that I did, you just search for Sanjay Poonen and five-minute story. But then COVID hit us, and we said, okay we got to take these strategies now and make them more actionable. Exactly your question, right? So a subset of that portfolio of five began to become more actionable, because it's pointless going and talking about stuff and it's like, hey, listen, guys, I'm a house on fire, I don't care about the curtains and all the wonderful art. You got to help me through this crisis. So a subset of that portfolio became kind of what was those, think about now your laptop at home, or your endpoint at home. People wanted, on top of their Zoom call, or surrounding their Zoom call, a virtual desktop managed easily, so we began to see Workspace ONE getting a lot of interest from our customers, especially the VDI part of that portfolio. Secondly, that laptop at home needed to be secured. Traditional, old, legacy AV solutions that've worked, enter Carbon Black, so Workspace ONE plus Carbon Black, one and two. Third, that laptop at home needs network acceleration, because we're dialoguing and, John, we don't want any latency. Enter SD-WAN. So the trifecta of Workspace ONE, Carbon Black and VeloCloud, that began to see even more interest and we began to hone in our portfolio around those three. So that's an example of where you have a general strategy, but then you apply it to take action in the midst of a crisis, and then I say, listen, that trifecta, let's just go and present what we can do, we call that the business continuity or business resilience part of our portfolio. We began to start talking to customers, and saying, here's our business continuity solution, here's what we could do to help you, and we targeted hospitals, schools, governments, pharmacies, retailers, the ones who're on the front line of this and said again, that line I said earlier, we want to be a digital first responder to you, you are the real first responder. Right before this call I got off a CIO call with the CIO of a major hospital in the northeast area. What gives me great joy, John, is the fact that we are serving them. Their beds are busting at the seam, in serving patients-- >> And ransomware's a huge problem you guys-- >> We're serving them. >> And great stuff there, Sanjay, I was just on a call this morning with a bunch of folks in the security industry, thought leaders, was in DC, some generals were there, some real thought leaders, trying to figure out security policy around biosecurity, COVID-19, and this invisible disruption, and they were equating it to like the World Wars. Big inflection point, and one of the generals said, in those times of crisis you need alliances. So I got to ask you, COVID-19 is impactful, it's going to have serious impact on the critical nature of it, like you said, the house is on fire, don't worry about the curtains. Alliances matter more than ever when you need to come together. You guys have an ecosystem, Amazon's got an ecosystem, this is going to be a really important test to the alliances out there. How do you view that as you look forward? You need the alliances to be successful, to compete and win in the new world as this invisible enemy, if you will, or disruptor happens, what's your thoughts? >> Yeah, I'll answer in a second, just for your viewers, I sneezed, okay? I've been on your show dozens of time, John, but in your live show, if I sneezed, you'd hear the loud noise. The good news in digital is I can mute myself when a sneeze is about to happen, and we're able to continue the conversation, so these are some side benefits of the digital part of it. But coming to your question on alliance, super important. Ecosystems are how the world run around, united we stand, divided we fall. We have made ecosystems, I've always used this phrase internally at VMware, sort of like Isaac Newton, we see clearly because we stand on the shoulders of giants. So VMware is always able to be bigger of a company if we stand on the shoulders of bigger giants. Who were those companies 20 years ago when Diane started the company? It was the hardware economy of Intel and then HP and Dell, at the time IBM, now Lenovo, Cisco, NetApp, DMC. Today, the new hardware companies Amazon, Azure, Google, whoever have you, we were very, I think, prescient, if you would, to think about that and build a strategic partnership with Amazon three or four years ago. I've mentioned on your show before, Andy's a close friend, he was a classmate over at Harvard Business School, Pat, myself, Ragoo, really got close to Andy and Matt Garman and Mike Clayville and several members of their teams, Teresa Carlson, and began to build a partnership that I think is one of the most incredible success stories of a partnership. And Dell's kind of been a really strong partner with us on private cloud, having now Amazon with public cloud has been seminal, we do regular meetings and build deep integration of, VMware Cloud and AWS is not some announcement two or three years ago. It's deep engineering between, Bask's now in a different role, but in his previous role, that and people like Mark Lohmeyer in our team. And that deep engineering allows us to know and tell customers this simple statement, which both VMware and Amazon reps tell their customers today, if you have a workload running on vSphere, and you want to move that to Amazon, the best place, the preferred place for that is VMware Cloud and Amazon. If you try to refactor that onto a native VC 2, it's a waste of time and money. So to have the entire army of VMware and Amazon telling customers that statement is a huge step, because it tells customers, we have 70 million virtual machines running on-prem. If customers are looking to move those workloads to Amazon, the best place for that VMware Cloud and AWS, and we have some credible customer case studies. Freddie Mac was at VMworld last year. IHS Markit was at VMworld last year talking about it. Those are two examples and many more started it, so we would like to have every VMware and Amazon customer that's thinking about VMware to look at this partnership as one of the best in the industry and say very similar to what Andy I think said on stage at the time of this announcement, it doesn't have to be now a trade-off between public and private cloud, you can get the best of both worlds. That's what we're trying to do here-- >> That's a great point, I want to get your thoughts on leadership, as you look at COVID-19, one of our tracks we're going to be promoting heavily on theCUBE.net and our sites, around how to manage through this crisis. Andy Jassy was quoted on the fireside chat, which is coming up here in North America, but I saw it yesterday in New Zealand time as I time shifted over there, it's a two-sided door versus a one-sided door. That was kind of his theme is you got to be able to go both ways. And I want to get your thoughts, because you might know what you're doing in certain contexts, but if you don't know where you're going, you got to adjust your tactics and strategies to match that, and there's and old expression, if you don't know where you're going, every road will take you there, okay? And so a lot of enterprise CXOs or CEOs have to start thinking about where they want to go with their business, this is the growth strategy. Then you got to understand which roads to take. Your thoughts on this? Obviously we've been thinking it's cloud native, but if I'm a decision maker, I want to make sure I have an architecture that's going to carry me forward to the future. I need to make sure that I know where I'm going, so I know what road I'm on. Versus not knowing where I'm going, and every road looks good. So your thoughts on leadership and what people should be thinking around knowing what their destination is, and then the roads to take? >> John, I think it's the most important question in this time. Great leaders are born through crisis, whether it's Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Roosevelt, any of the leaders since then, in any country, Mahatma Gandhi in India, the country I grew up, Nelson Mandela, MLK, all of these folks were born through crisis, sometimes severe crisis, they had to go to jail, they were born through wars. I would say, listen, similar to the people you talked about, yeah, there's elements of this crisis that similar to a World War, I was talking to my 80 year old father, he's doing well. I asked him, "When was the world like this?" He said, "Second World War." I don't think this crisis is going to last six years. It might be six or 12 months, but I really don't think it'll be six years. Even the health care professionals aren't. So what do we learn through this crisis? It's a test of our leadership, and leaders are made or broken during this time. I would just give a few guides to leaders, this is something tha, Andy's a great leader, Pat, myself, we all are thinking through ways by which we can exercise this. Think of Sully Sullenberger who landed that plane on the Hudson. Did he know when he flew that airbus, US Airways airbus, that few flock of birds were going to get in his engine, and that he was going to have to land this plane in the Hudson? No, but he was making decisions quickly, and what did he exude to his co-pilot and to the rest of staff, calmness and confidence and appropriate communication. And I think it's really important as leaders, first off, that we communicate, communicate, communicate, communicate to our employees. First, our obligation is first to our employees, our family first, and then of course to our company employees, all 30,000 at VMware, and I'm sure similarly Andy does it to his, whatever, 60, 70,000 at AWS. And then you want to be able to communicate to them authentically and with clarity. People are going to be reading between the lines of everything you say, so one of the things I've sought to do with my team, all the front office functions report to me, is do half an hour Zoom video conferences, in the time zone that's convenient to them, so Japan, China, India, Europe, in their time zone, so it's 10 o'clock my time because it's convenient to Japan, and it's just 10 minutes of me speaking of what I'm seeing in the world, empathizing with them but listening to them for 20 minutes. That is communication. Authentically and with clarity, and then turn your attention to your employees, because we're going stir crazy sitting at home, I get it. And we've got to abide by the ordinances with whatever country we're in, turn your attention to your customers. I've gotten to be actually more productive during this time in having more customer conference calls, video conference calls on Zoom or whatever platform with them, and I'm looking at this now as an opportunity to engage in a new way. I have to be better prepared, like I said, these are shorter conversations, they're not as long. Good news I don't have to all over the place, that's better for my family, better for the carbon emission of the world, and also probably for my life long term. And then the third thing I would say is pick one area that you can learn and improve. For me, the last few years, two, three years, it's been security. I wanted to get the company into security, as you saw today we've announced mobile, so I helped architect the acquisition of Carbon Black, very similar to kind of the moves I've made six years ago around AirWatch, very key part to all of our focus to getting more into security, and I made it a personal goal that this year, at the start of the year, before COVID, I was going to meet 1,000 CISOs, in the Fortune 1000 Global 2000. Okay, guess what, COVID happens, and quite frankly that goal's gotten a little easier, because it's much easier for me to meet a lot more people on Zoom video conferences. I could probably do five, 10 per day, and if there's 200 working days in a day, I can easily get there, if I average about five per day, and sometimes I'm meeting them in groups of 10, 20. >> So maybe we can get you on theCUBE more often too, 'cause you have access to a video camera. >> That is my growth mindset for this year. So pick a growth mindset area. Satya Nadella puts this pretty well, "Move from being a know-it-all to a learn-it-all." And that's the mindset, great company. Andy has that same philosophy for Amazon, I think the great leaders right now who are running these cloud companies have that growth mindset. Pick an area that you can grow in this time, and you will find ways to do it. You'll be able to learn online and then be able to teach in some fashion. So I think communicate effectively, authentically, turn your attention to serving your customers, and then pick some growth area that you can learn yourself, and then we will come out of this crisis collectively, individuals and as partners, like VMware and Amazon, and then collectively as a society, I believe we'll come out stronger. >> Awesome great stuff, great insight there, Sanjay. Really appreciate you sharing that leadership. Back to the more of technical questions around leadership is cloud native. It's clear that there's going to be a line in the sand, if you will, there's going to be a right side of history, people are going to have to be on the right side of history, and I believe it's cloud native. You're starting to see this emersion. You guys have some news, you just announced today, you acquired a Kubernetes security startup, around Kubernetes, obviously Kubernetes needs security, it's one of those key new enablers, disruptive enablers out there. Cloud native is a path that is a destination opportunity for people to think about, why that acquisition? Why that company? Why is VMware making this move? >> Yeah, we felt as we talked about our plans in security, backing up to things I talked about in my last few appearances on your show at VMworld, when we announced Carbon Black, was we felt the security industry was broken because there was too many point benders, and we figured there'd be three to five control points, network, endpoint, cloud, where we could play a much more pronounced role at moving a lot of these point benders, I describe this as not having to force our customers to go to a doctor and say I've got to eat 5,000 tablets to get healthy, you make it part of your diet, you make it part of the infrastructure. So how do we do that? With network security, we're off to the races, we're doing a lot more data center networking, firewall, load bouncing, SD-WAN. Really, reality is we can eat into a lot of the point benders there that I've just been, and quite frankly what's happened to us very gratifying in the network security area, you've seen the last few months, some firewall vendors are buying SD-WAN players, kind of following our strategy. That's a tremendous validation of the fact that the network security space is being disrupted. Okay, move to endpoint security, part of the reason we acquired Carbon Black was to unify the client side, Workspace ONE and Carbon Black should come together, and we're well under way in doing that, make Carbon Black agentless on the server side with vSphere, we're well on the way to that, you'll see that very soon. By the way both those things are something that the traditional endpoint players can't do. And then bring out new forms of workload. Servers that are virtualized by VMware is just one form of work. What are other workloads? AWS, the public clouds, and containers. Container's just another workload. And we've been looking at container security for a long time. What we didn't want to do was buy another static analysis player, another platform and replatform it. We felt that we could get great technology, we have incredible grandeur on container cell. It's sort of Red Hat and us, they're the only two companies who are doing Kubernetes scales. It's not any of these endpoint players who understand containers. So Kubernetes, VMware's got an incredible brand and relevance and knowledge there. The networking part of it, service mesh, which is kind of a key component also to this. We've been working with Google and others like Istio in service mesh, we got a lot of IP there that the traditional endpoint players, Symantec, McAfee, Trend, CrowdStrike, don't know either Kubernetes or service mesh well. We add now container security into this, we really distinguish ourselves further from the traditional endpoint players with bringing together, not just the endpoint platform that can do containers, but also Kubernetes service mesh. So why is that important? As people think about their future in containers, they'll want to do this at the runtime level, not at the static level. They'll want to do it at build time And they'll want to have it integrated with some of their networking capabilities like service mesh. Who better to think about that IP and that evolution than VMware, and now we bring, I think it's 12 to 14 people we're bringing in from this acquisition. Several of them in Israel, some of them here in Palo Alto, and they will build that platform into the tech that VMware has onto the Carbon Black cloud and we will deliver that this year. It's not going to be years from now. >> Did you guys talk about the-- >> Our capability, and then we can bring the best of Carbon Black, with Tanzu, service mesh, and even future innovation, like, for example, there's a big movement going around, this thing call open policy agent OPA, which is an open source effort around policy management. You should expect us to embrace that, there could be aspects of OPA that also play into the future of this container security movement, so I think this is a really great move for Patrick and his team, I'm very excited. Patrick is the CEO of Carbon Black and the leader of that security business unit, and he came to me and said, "Listen, one of the areas "we need to move in is container security "because it's the number one request I'm hearing "from our CESOs and customers." I said, "Go ahead Patrick. "Find out who are the best player you could acquire, "but you have to triangulate that strategy "with the Tanzu team and the NSX team, "and when you have a unified strategy what we should go, "we'll go an make the right acquisition." And I'm proud of what he was able to announce today. >> And I noticed you guys on the release didn't talk about the acquisition amount. Was it not material, was it a small amount? >> No, we don't disclose small, it's a tuck-in acquisition. You should think of this as really bringing us some tech and some talent, and being able to build that into the core of the platform of Carbon Black. Carbon Black was the real big move we made. Usually what we do, you saw this with AirWatch, right, anchor on a fairly big move. We paid I think 2.1 billion for Carbon Black, and then build and build and build on top of that, partner very heavily, we didn't talk about that. If there's time we could talk about it. We announced today a security alliance with top SIEM players, in what's called a sock alliance. Who's announced in there? Splunk, IBM QRadar, Google Chronicle, Sumo Logic, and Exabeam, five of the biggest SIEM players are embracing VMware in endpoint security, saying, Carbon Black is who we want to work with. Nobody else has that type of partnership, so build, partner, and then buy. But buy is always very carefully thought through, we're not one of these companies like CA of the past that just bought every company and then it becomes a graveyard of dead acquisition. Our view is we're very disciplined about how we think about acquisition. Acquisitions for us are often the last resort, because we'd prefer to build and partner. But sometimes for time-to-market reasons, we acquire, and when we acquire, it's thoughtful, it's well-organized within VMware, and we take care of our people, 'cause we want, I mean listen, why do acquisitions fail? Because the good people leave. So we're excited about this team, the team in Israel, and the team in Palo Alto, they come from Octarine. We're going to integrate them rapidly into the platform, and this is a good evidence of VMware investing more in security, and our Q3 earnings pulled, John, I said, sorry, we said that the security business was a billion dollar business at VMware already, primarily from network, but some from endpoint. This is evidence of us putting more fuel behind that fire. It's only been six, seven months and Patrick's made his first acquisition inside Carbon Black, so you're going to see us investing more in security, it's an important priority for the company, and I expect us to be a very prominent player in these three pillars, network security, endpoint security, endpoint is both client and the workload, and cloud. Network, endpoint, cloud, they are the three areas where we think there's lots of room for innovation in security. >> Well, we'll be watching, we'll be reporting and analyzing the moves. Great playbook, by the way. Love that organic partnering and then key acquisitions which you build around, it's a great playbook, I think it's very relevant for this time. The most important question I have to ask you, Sanjay, and this is a personal question, because you're the leader of VMware, I noticed that, we all know you're into music, you've been putting music online, kind of a virtual band. You've also hired a CUBE alumni, Victoria Verango from McAfee who also puts up music, you've got some musicians, but you kind of know how to do the digital moves there, so the question is, will the music at VMworld this year be virtual? >> Oh, man. Victoria is actually an even better musician than me. I'm excited about his marketing gifts, but I'm also excited to watch him. But yeah, you've heard him sing, he's got a voice that's somewhat similar to Sting, so we, just for fun, in our Diwali, which is an Indian celebration last year, Tom Corn, myself, and a wonderful lady named Divya, who's got a beautiful voice, had sung a song, which was off the soundtrack of the Bollywood movie, "Secret Superstar," and we just for fun decided to record that in our three separate homes, and put that out on YouTube. You can listen, it's just a two or three-minute run, and it kind of went a little bit viral. And I was thinking to myself, hey, if this is one way by which we can let the VMware community know that, hey, you know what, art conquers COVID-19, you can do music even socially distant, and bring out the spirit of VMware, which is community. So we might build on that idea, Victoria and I were talking about that last night and saying, hey, maybe we do a virtual music kind of concert of maybe 10 or 15 or 20 voices in the various different countries. Record piece of a song and music and put it out there. I think these are just ways by which we're having fun in a virtual setting where people get to see a different side of VMware where, and the intent here, we're all amateurs, John, we're not like great. There are going to be mistakes in this music. If you listen to that audio, it sounds a little tinny, 'cause we're recording it off our iPhone and our iPad microphone. But we'll do the best we can, the point is just to show the human spirit and to show that we care, and at the end of the day, see, the COVID-19 virus has no prejudice on color of skin, or nationality, or ethnicity. It's affecting the whole world. We all went into the tunnel at different times, we will come out of this tunnel together and we will be a stronger human fabric when we're done with this, We shall absolutely overcome. >> Sanjay, give us a quick update to end the segment on your thoughts around VMworld. It's one of the biggest events, we look forward to it. It's the only even left standing that theCUBE's been to every year of theCUBE's existence, we're looking forward to being part of theCUBE virtual. It's been announced it's virtual. What are some of the thinking going on at the highest levels within the VMware community around how you're going to handle VMworld this year? >> Listen, when we began to think about it, we had to obviously give our customers and folks enough notice, so we didn't want to just spring that sometime this summer. So we decided to think through it carefully. I asked Robin, our CMO, to talk to many of the other CMOs in the industry. Good news is all of these are friends of ours, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, Adobe, and even some smaller companies, IBM did theirs. And if they were in the first half of the year, they had to go virtual 'cause we're sheltered in place, and IBM did theirs, Okta did theirs, and we began to watch how they were doing this. We're kind of in the second half, because we were August, September, and we just sensed a lot of hesitancy from our customers that wanted to get on a plane to come here, and even if we got just 500, 1,000, a few thousand, it wasn't going to be the same and there would always be that sort of, even if we were getting back to that, some worry, so we figured we'd do something that might be semi-digital, and we may have some people that roam, but the bulk of it is going to be digital, and we changed the dates to be a little later. I think it's September 20th to 29th. Right now it's all public now, we announced that, and we're going to make it a great program. In some senses like we're becoming TV producer. I told our team we got to be like Disney or ESPN or whoever your favorite show is, YouTube, and produce a really good several-hour program that has got a different way in which digital content is provided, smaller snippets, very interesting speakers, great brand names, make the content clear, crisp and compelling. And if we do that, this will be, I don't know, maybe it's the new norm for some period of time, or it might be forever, I don't know. >> John: We're all learning. >> In the past we had huge conferences that were busting 50, 70, 100,000 and then after the dot-com era, those all shrunk, they're like smaller conferences, and now with advent of companies like Amazon and Salesforce, we have huge events that, like VMworld, are big events. We may move to a environment that's a lot more digital, I don't know what the future of in-presence physical conferences are, but we, like others, we're working with AWS in terms of their future with Reinvent, what Microsoft's doing with Ignite, what Google's doing with Next, what Salesforce's going to do with Dreamforce, all those four companies are good partners of ours. We'll study theirs, we'll work together as a community, the CMOs of all those companies, and we'll come together with something that's a very good digital experience for our customers, that's really what counts. Today I did a webinar with a partner. Typically when we did a briefing in our briefing center, 20 people came. There're 100 people attending this, I got a lot more participation in this QBR that I did with this SI partner, one of the top SIs in the world, in an online session with them, than would I have gotten if they'd all come to Palo Alto. That's goodness. Should we take the best of that world and some physical presence? Maybe in the future, we'll see how it goes. >> Content quality. You know, you know content. Content quality drives everything online, good engagement creates community, that's a nice flywheel. I think you guys will figure it out, you've got a lot of great minds there, and of course, theCUBE virtual will be helping out as we can, and we're rethinking things too-- >> We count on that, John-- >> We're going to be open minded to new ideas, and, hey, whatever's the best content we can deliver, whether it's CUBE, or with you guys, or whoever, we're looking forward to it. Sanjay, thanks for spending the time on this CUBE Keynote coverage of AWS Summit. Since it's digital we can do longer programs, we can do more diverse content. We got great customer practitioners coming up, talking about their journey, their innovation strategies. Sanjay Poonen, COO of VMware, thank you for taking your precious time out of your day today. >> Thank you, John, always a pleasure. >> Thank you. Okay, more CUBE, virtual CUBE digital coverage of AWS Summit 2020, theCUBE.net is we're streaming, and of course, tons of videos on innovation, DevOps, and more, scaling cloud, scaling on-premise hybrid cloud, and more. We got great interviews coming up, stay with us our all-day coverage. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From the Silicon Angle Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's The Cube. Now, here's your host Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody. Welcome to this Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis we're going to look at recent spending data from the ETR Spending Intentions Survey. We believe tech spending is slowing down. Now, it's not falling off a cliff but it is reverting to pre-2018 spending levels. There's some concern in the bellwethers of specifically financial services and insurance accounts and large telcos. We're also seeing less redundancy. What we mean by that is in 2017 and 2018 you had a lot of experimentation going on. You had a lot of digital initiatives that were going into, not really production, but sort of proof of concept. And as a result you were seeing spending on both legacy infrastructure and emerging technologies. What we're seeing now is more replacements. In other words people saying, "Okay, we're now going into production. We've tried that. We're not going to go with A, we're going to double down on B." And we're seeing less experimentation with the emerging technology. So in other words people are pulling out, actually some of the legacy technologies. And they're not just spraying and praying across the entire emerging technology sector. So, as a result, spending is more focused. As they say, it's not a disaster, but it's definitely some cause for concern. So, what I'd like to do, Alex if you bring up the first slide. I want to give you some takeaways from the ETR, the Enterprise Technology Research Q4 Pulse Check Survey. ETR has a data platform of 4,500 practitioners that it surveys regularly. And the most recent spending intention survey will actually be made public on October 16th at the ETR Webcast. ETR is in its quiet period right now, but they've given me a little glimpse and allowed me to share with you, our Cube audience, some of the findings. So as I say, you know, overall tech spending is clearly slowing, but it's still healthy. There's a uniform slowdown, really, across the board. In virtually all sectors with very few exceptions, and I'll highlight some of the companies that are actually quite strong. Telco, large financial services, insurance. That's rippling through to AMIA, which is, as I've said, is over-weighted in banking. The Global 2000 is looking softer. And also the global public and private companies. GPP is what ETR calls it. They say this is one of the best indicators of spending intentions and is a harbinger for future growth or deceleration. So it's the largest public companies and the largest private companies. Think Mars, Deloitte, Cargo, Coke Industries. Big giant, private companies. We're also seeing a number of changes in responses from we're going to increase to more flat-ish. So, again, it's not a disaster. It's not falling off the cliff. And there are some clear winners and losers. So adoptions are really reverting back to 2018 levels. As I said, replacements are arising. You know, digital transformation is moving from test everything to okay, let's go, let's focus now and double-down on those technologies that we really think are winners. So this is hitting both legacy companies and the disrupters. One of the other key takeaways out of the ETR Survey is that Microsoft is getting very, very aggressive. It's extending and expanding its TAM further into cloud, into collaboration, into application performance management, into security. We saw the Surface announcement this past week. Microsoft is embracing Android. Windows is not the future of Microsoft. It's all these other markets that they're going after. They're essentially building out an API platform and focusing in on the user experience. And that's paying off because CIOs are clearly more comfortable with Microsoft. Okay, so now I'm going to take you through some themes. I'm going to make some specific vendor comments, particularly in Cloud, software, and infrastructure. And then we'll wrap. So here's some major themes that really we see going on. Investors still want growth. They're punishing misses on earnings and they're rewarding growth companies. And so you can see on this slide that it's really about growth metrics. What you're seeing is companies are focused on total revenue, total revenue growth, annual recurring revenue growth, billings growth. Companies that maybe aren't growing so fast, like Dell, are focused on share gains. Lately we've seen pullbacks in the software companies and their stock prices really due to higher valuations. So, there's some caution there. There's actually a somewhat surprising focus given the caution and all the discussion about, you know, slowing economy. There's some surprising lack of focus on key performance indicators like cash flow. A few years ago, Splunk actually stopped giving, for example, cash flow targets. You don't see as much focus on market capitalization or shareholders returns. You do see that from Oracle. You see that last week from the Dell Financial Analyst Meeting. I talked about that. But it's selective. You know these are the type of metrics that Oracle, Dell, VMware, IBM, HPE, you know generally HP Inc. as well will focus on. Another thing we see is the Global M&A across all industries is back to 2016 levels. It basically was down 16% in Q3. However, well and that's by the way due to trade wars and other uncertainties and other economic slowdowns and Brexit. But tech M&A has actually been pretty robust this year. I mean, you know take a look at some examples. I'll just name a few. Google with Looker, big acquisitions. Sales Force, huge acquisition. A $15 billion acquisition of Tableau. It also spent over a billion dollars on Click software. Facebook with CTRL-labs. NVIDIA, $7 billion acquisition of Mellanox. VMware just plunked down billion dollars for Carbon Black and its own, you know, sort of pivotal within the family. Splunk with a billion dollar plus acquisition of SignalFx. HP over a billion dollars with Cray. Amazon's been active. Uber's been active. Even nontraditional enterprise tech companies like McDonald's trying to automate some of the drive-through technology. Mastercard with Nets. And of course the stalwart M&A companies Apple, Intel, Microsoft have been pretty active as well as many others. You know but generally I think what's happening is valuations are high and companies are looking for exits. They've got some cool tech so they're putting it out there. That you know, hey now's the time to buy. They want to get out. That maybe IPO is not the best option. Maybe they don't feel like they've got, you know, a long-term, you know, plan that is going to really maximize shareholder value so they're, you know, putting forth themselves for M&A today. And so that's been pretty robust. And I would expect that's going to continue for a little bit here as there are, again, some good technology companies out there. Okay, now let's get into, Alex if you pull up the next slide of the Company Outlook. I want to start with Cloud. Cloud, as they say here, continues it's steady march. I'm going to focus on the Big 3. Microsoft, AWS, and Google. In the ETR Spending Surveys they're all very clearly strong. Microsoft is very strong. As I said it's expanding it's total available market. It's into collaboration now so it's going after Slack, Box, Dropbox, Atlassian. It's announced application performance management capabilities, so it's kind of going after new relic there. New SIM and security products. So IBM, Splunk, Elastic are some targets there. Microsoft is one of the companies that's gaining share overall. Let me talk about AWS. Microsoft is growing faster in Cloud than AWS, but AWS is much, much larger. And AWS's growth continues. So it's not as strong as 2018 but it's stronger, in fact, much stronger than its peers overall in the marketplace. AWS appears to be very well positioned according to the ETR Surveys in database and AI it continues to gain momentum there. The only sort of weak spot is the ECS, the container orchestration area. And that looks a little soft likely due to Kubernetes. Drop down to Google. Now Google, you know, there's some strength in Google's business but it's way behind in terms of market share, as you all know, Microsoft and AWS. You know, its AI and machine learning gains have stalled relative to Microsoft and AWS which continue to grow. Google's strength and strong suit has always been analytics. The ETR data shows that its holdings serve there. But there's deceleration in data warehousing, and even surprisingly in containers given, you know, its strength in contributing to the Kubernetes project. But the ETR 3 Year Outlook, when they do longer term outlook surveys, shows GCP, Google's Cloud platform, gaining. But there's really not a lot of evidence in the existing data, in the near-term data to show that. But the big three, you know, Cloud players, you know, continue to solidify their position. Particularly AWS and Microsoft. Now let's turn our attention to enterprise software. Just going to name a few. ETR will have an extensive at their webcast. We'll have an extensive review of these vendors, and I'll pick up on that. But I just want to pick out a few here. Some of the enterprise software winners. Workday continues to be very, very strong. Especially in healthcare and pharmaceutical. Salesforce, we're seeing a slight deceleration but it's pretty steady. Very strong in Fortune 100. And Einstein, its AI offering appears to be gaining as well. Some of the acquisitions Mulesoft and Tableu are also quite strong. Demandware is another acquisition that's also strong. The other one that's not so strong, ExactTarget is somewhat weakening. So Salesforce is a little bit mixed, but, you know, continues to be pretty steady. Splunk looks strong. Despite some anecdotal comments that point to pricing issues, and I know Splunk's been working on, you know, tweaking its pricing model. And maybe even some competition. There's no indication in the ETR data yet that Splunk's, you know, momentum is attenuating. Security as category generally is very, very strong. And it's lifting all ships. Splunk's analytics business is showing strength is particularly in healthcare and pharmaceuticals, as well as financial services. I like the healthcare and pharmaceuticals exposure because, you know, in a recession healthcare will, you know, continue to do pretty well. Financial services in general is down, so there's maybe some exposure there. UiPath, I did a segment on RPA a couple weeks ago. UiPath continues its rapid share expansion. The latest ETR Survey data shows that that momentum is continuing. And UiPath is distancing itself in the spending surveys from its broader competition as well. Another company we've been following and I did a segment on the analytics and enterprise data warehousing sector a couple weeks ago is Snowflake. Snowflake continues to expand its share. Its slightly slower than its previous highs, which were off the chart. We shared with you its Net Score. Snowflake and UiPath have some of the highest Net Scores in the ETR Survey data of 80+%. Net Score remembers. You take the we're adding the platform, we're spending more and you subtract we're leaving the platform or spending less and that gives you the Net Score. Snowflake and UiPath are two of the highest. So slightly slower than previous ties, but still very very strong. Especially in larger companies. So that's just some highlights in the software sector. The last sector I want to focus on is enterprise infrastructure. So Alex if you'd bring that up. I did a segment at the end of Q2, post Q2 looking at earning statements and also some ETR data on the storage spending segment. So I'll start with Pure Storage. They continue to have elevative spending intentions. Especially in that giant public and private, that leading indicator. There are some storage market headwinds. The storage market generally is still absorbing that all flash injection. I've talked about this before. There's still some competition from Cloud. When Pure came out with its earnings last quarter, the stock dropped. But then when everybody else announced, you know, negative growth or, in Dell's case, Dell's the leader, they were flat. Pure Storage bounced back because on a relative basis they're doing very well. The other indication is Pure storage is very strong in net app accounts. Net apps mix, they don't call them out here but we'll do some further analysis down the road of net apps. So I would expect Pure to continue to gain share and relative to the others in that space. But there are some headwinds overall in the market. VMware, let's talk about VMware. VMware's spending profile, according to ETR, looks like 2018. It's still very strong in Fortune 1000, or 100 rather, but weaker in Fortune 500 and the GPP, the global public and private companies. That's a bit of a concern because GPP is one of the leading indicators. VMware on Cloud on AWS looks very strong, so that continues. That's a strategic area for them. Pivotal looks weak. Carbon Black is not pacing with CrowdStrike. So clearly VMware has some work to do with some of its recent acquisitions. It hasn't completed them yet. But just like the AirWatch acquisition, where AirWatch wasn't the leader in that space, really Citrix was the leader. VMware brought that in, cleaned it up, really got focused. So that's what they're going to have to do with Carbon Black and Security, which is going to be a tougher road to hoe I would say than end user computing and Pivotal. So we'll see how that goes. Let's talk about Dell, Dell EMC, Dell Technologies. The client side of the business is holding strong. As I've said many times server and storage are decelerating. We're seeing market headwinds. People are spending less on server and storage relative to some of the overall initiatives. And so, that's got to bounce back at some point. People are going to still need compute, they're still going to need storage, as I say. Both are suffering from, you know, the Cloud overhang. As well, storage there was such a huge injection of flash it gave so much headroom in the marketplace that it somewhat tempered storage demand overall. Customers said, "Hey, I'm good for a while. Cause now I have performance headroom." Whereas before people would buy spinning discs, they buy the overprovision just to get more capacity. So, you know, that was kind of a funky value proposition. The other thing is VxRail is not as robust as previous years and that's something that Dell EMC talks about as, you know, one of the market share leaders. But it's showing a little bit of softness. So we'll keep an eye on that. Let's talk about Cisco. Networking spend is below a year ago. The overall networking market has been, you know, somewhat decelerating. Security is a bright spot for Cisco. Their security business has grown in double digits for the last couple of quarters. They've got work to do in multi-Cloud. Some bright spots Meraki and Duo are both showing strength. HP, talk about HPE it's mixed. Server and storage markets are soft, as I've said. But HPE remains strong in Fortune 500 and that critical GPP leading indicator. You know Nimble is growing, but maybe not as fast as it used to be and Simplivity is really not as strong as last year. So we'd like to see a little bit of an improvement there. On the bright side, Aruba is showing momentum. Particularly in Fortune 500. I'll make some comments about IBM, even though it's really, you know, this IBM enterprise infrastructure. It's really services, software, and yes some infrastructure. The Red Hat acquisition puts it firmly in infrastructure. But IBM is also mixed. It's bouncing back. IBM Classic, the core IBM is bouncing back in Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 and in that critical GPP indicator. It's showing strength, IBM, in Cloud and it's also showing strength in services. Which is over half of its business. So that's real positive. Its analytics and EDW software business are a little bit soft right now. So that's a bit of a concern that we're watching. The other concern we have is Red Hat has been significantly since the announcement of the merger and acquisition. Now what we don't know, is IBM able to inject Red Hat into its large service and outsourcing business? That might be hidden in some of the spending intention surveys. So we're going to have to look at income statement. And the public statements post earnings season to really dig into that. But we'll keep an eye on that. The last comment is Cloudera. Cloudera once was the high-flying darling. They are hitting all-time lows. They made the acquisition of Hortonworks, which created some consolidation. Our hope was that would allow them to focus and pick up. CEO left. Cloudera, again, hitting all-time lows. In particular, AWS and Snowflake are hurting Cloudera's business. They're particularly strong in Cloudera's shops. Okay, so let me wrap. Let's give some final thoughts. So buyers are planning for a slowdown in tech spending. That is clear, but the sky is not falling. Look we're in the tenth year of a major tech investment cycle, so slowdown, in my opinion, is healthy. Digital initiatives are really moving into higher gear. And that's causing some replacement on legacy technologies and some focus on bets. So we're not just going to bet on every new, emerging technology, were going to focus on those that we believe are going to drive business value. So we're moving from a try-everything mode to a more focused management style. At least for a period of time. We're going to absorb the spend, in my view, of the last two years and then double-down on the winners. So not withstanding the external factors, the trade wars, Brexit, other geopolitical concerns, I would expect that we're going to have a period of absorption. Obviously it's October, so the Stock Market is always nervous in October. You know, we'll see if we get Santa Claus rally going into the end of the year. But we'll keep an eye on that. This is Dave Vellante for Cube Insights powered by ETR. Thank you for watching this breaking analysis. We'll see you next time. (upbeat tech music)

>> from atop the Salesforce Tower in downtown San Francisco. It's the Q covering Accenture Innovation Date brought to you by ex center >> Hey, welcome back Your body jefe Rick here from the Cube were high atop San Francisco in the essential innovation hub. It's in the middle of the Salesforce Tower. It's a beautiful facility. They think you had it. The grand opening about six months ago. We're here for the grand opening. Very cool space. I got maker studios. They've got all kinds of crazy stuff going on. But we're here today to talk about Cloud in this continuing evolution about cloud in the enterprise and hybrid cloud and multi cloud in Public Cloud and Private Cloud. And we're really excited to have a couple of guys who really helping customers make this journey, cause it's really tough to do by yourself. CEOs are super busy. They worry about security and all kinds of other things. So centers, often a trusted partner. We got two of the leaders from center joining us today's Prasad Sankaran. He's the senior managing director of Intelligent Cloud infrastructure for Center Welcome and Larry Soccer, the global managing director. Intelligent cloud infrastructure offering from central gentlemen. Welcome. I love it. It intelligent cloud. What is an intelligent cloud all about? Got it in your title. It must mean something pretty significant. >> Yeah, I think First of all, thank you for having us, but you're absolutely Everything's around becoming more intelligent around using more automation. And the work that, you know we delivered to our clients and cloud, as you know, is the platform to which all of our clients are moving. So it's all about bringing the intelligence not only into infrastructure, but also into cloud generally. And it's all driven by software, >> right? It's just funny to think where we are in this journey. We talked a little bit before we turn the cameras on and there you made an interesting comment when I said, You know, when did this cloud for the Enterprise start? And you took it back to sass based applications, which, >> you know, you were sitting in the sales force builder. >> That's true. It isn't just the tallest building in here, and everyone all right, everyone's >> had a lot of focus on AWS is rise, etcetera. But the real start was really getting into sass. I mean, I remember We used to do a lot of Siebel deployments for CR M, and we started to pivot to sales, for some were moving from remedy into service. Now I mean, we went through on premise collaboration, email todo 360 5 So So we've actually been at it for quite a while in the particularly the SAS world. And it's only more recently that we started to see that kind of push to the, you know, the public pass, and it's starting to cloud native development. But But this journey started, you know, it was that 78 years ago that we really start to see some scale around it >> and tell me if you agree. I think really, what? The sales forces of the world and the service now is of the world off. 3 65 kind of broke down some of those initial barriers which were all really about security and security. Security secure. It's always too here where now security is actually probably an attribute >> and loud can brink Absolutely. In fact, I'm in those barriers took years to bring down. I still saw clients where they were forcing salesforce tor service. Now to put you know instances on Prime, and I think I think they finally woke up toe. You know, these guys invested ton in their security organizations. You know, there's a little of that needle in the haystack. You know, if you breach a data set, you know what you're getting after. But when you happen to sail sports, it's a lot harder. And so you know. So I think that security problems, I've certainly got away. We still have some compliance, regulatory things, data sovereignty. But I think security and not not that it's all by any means that you know, it's always giving an ongoing problem. But I think they're getting more comfortable with their data being up in the public domain, right? Not public. >> I think it also help them with their progress towards getting cloud native. So, you know, you pick certain applications which were obviously hosted by sales force and other companies, and you did some level of custom development around it. And now I think that's paved the way for more complex applications and different workloads now going into, you know, the public cloud and the private cloud. But that's the next part of the journey, >> right? So Let's back up 1/2 a step cause then, as you said, a bunch of stuff then went into Public Cloud, right? Everyone's putting in AWS and Google. Um, IBM has got a public how there was a lot more. They're not quite so many as there used to be. Um, but then we ran into a whole new home, Those of issues, right, Which is kind of opened up this hybrid cloud. This multi cloud world, which is you just can't put everything into a public clouds there certain attributes that you need to think about and yet from the application point of view, before you decide where you deploy that. So I'm just curious. If you can share now, would you guys do with clients? How should they think about applications? How, after they think about what to deploy where I >> think I'll start in the, You know, Larry has a lot of expertise in this area. I think you know, we have to obviously start from an application centric perspectives. You got to take a look at you know where your applications have to live water. What are some of the data implications on the applications or do you have by way of regulatory and compliance issues? Or do you have to do as faras performance because certain applications have to be in a high performance environment? Certain other applications don't think a lot of these factors will then drive where these applications need to recite. And then what we're seeing in today's world is really accomplish. Complex, um, situation where you have a lot of legacy, but you also have private as well as public cloud. So you approach it from an application perspective. >> Yeah. I mean, if you really take a look at Army, you look at it centers clients, and we were totally focused on up into the market Global 2000 savory. You know, clients typically have application portfolios ranging from 520,000 applications. And really, I mean, if you think about the purpose of cloud or even infrastructure for that, they're there to serve the applications. No one cares if your cloud infrastructure is not performing the absolute. So we start off with an application monetization approach and ultimately looking, you know, you know, with our tech advisory guys coming in, there are intelligent engineering service is to do the cloud native and at mod work our platforms. Guys, who do you know everything from sales forward through ASAP. They should drive a strategy on how those applications going to evolve with its 520,000 and determined hey, and usually using some like the six orders methodology. And I'm I am I going to retire this Am I going to retain it? And I'm gonna replace it with sass. Am I gonna re factor in format? And it's ultimately that strategy that's really gonna dictate a multi in and, you know, hybrid cloud story. So it's based on the applications data, gravity issues where they gonna reside on their requirements around regulatory, the requirements for performance, et cetera. That will then dictate the cloud strategies. I'm you know, not a big fan of going in there and just doing a multi hybrid cloud strategy without a really good up front application portfolio approach, right? How we're gonna modernize that >> it hadn't had a you segment. That's a lot of applications. And you know, how do you know the old thing? How do you know that one by that time, how do you help them pray or size? Where they should be focusing on. Yes, >> it. Typically, what we do is work with our clients to do a full application portfolio analysis, and then we're able to then segment the applications based on, you know, important to the business and some of the factors that both of us mentioned. And once we have that, then we come up with an approach where certain sets of applications have moved to sass certain other applications you moved past. So you know, you're basically doing the re factoring and the modernization, and then certain others, you know, you can just, you know, lift and shift. So it's really a combination off both modernization as well as migration. It's a combination off that, but to do that, you have initially look at the entire set of applications and come up with that approach. >> I'm just curious where within that application assessment, where is cost savings? Where is, uh, this is just old and where is opportunities to innovate faster? Because we know a lot of lot of talk really. Days has cost savings, but what the real advantages is execution speed if you can get it. >> If >> you could go back three or four years and we had there was a lot of CEO discussions around cost savings. I'm not really have seen our clients shift. It costs never goes away, obviously right. But there's a lot greater emphasis now on business agility. You know, howto innovate faster, get, get new capabilities, market faster to change my customer experience. So it's really I t is really trying to step up and, you know, enabled the business toe to compete in the marketplace. So we're seeing a huge shift in emphasis or focus at least starting with, you know, how do I get better business agility outta leverage to cloud and cloud native development to get there upper service levels? Actually, we started seeing increase on Hey, you know, these applications need to work. It's actress, So obviously cost still remains a factor, but we seem much more, you know, much more emphasis on agility, you know, enabling the business on giving the right service levels of right experience to the user. Little customers. Big pivot there, >> Okay. And let's get the definitions out because you know a lot of lot of conversation about public clouds. Easy private clouds, easy but hybrid cloud and multi cloud and confusion about what those are. How do you guys define them? How do you help your customers think about the definition? Yes, >> I think it's a really good point. So what we're starting to see is there were a lot of different definitions out there. But I think as I talk to my clients and our partners, I think we're all starting to come toe. You know, the same kind of definition on multi cloud. It's really about using more than one cloud. But hybrid, I think, is a very important concept because hybrid is really all about the placement off the workload or where your application is going to run on. And then again, it goes to all of these points that we talked about data, gravity and performance and other things. Other factors. But it's really all about where do you place the specific workload >> if you look at that, so if you think about public, I mean obviously gives us the innovation of the public providers. You look at how fast Amazon comes out with new versions of Lambda etcetera, so that's the innovations. There obviously agility. You could spend up environments very quickly which is, you know, one of the big benefits of it. The consumption economic models. So that is the number of drivers that are pushing in the direction of public. You know, on the private side, they're still it's quite a few benefits that don't get talked about as much. Um, so you know, if you look at it performance, you know, if you think the public world, you know, although they're scaling up larger T shirts, et cetera, they're still trying to do that for a large array of applications on the private side, you can really Taylor somethingto very high performance characteristics. Whether it's you know, 30 to 64 terabyte Hana, you can get a much more focused precision environment for business critical workloads like that article, article rack. You know, the Duke clusters everything about fraud analysis. So that's a big part of it. Related to that is the data gravity that Prasad just mentioned. You know, if I've got a 64 terrified Hana database, you know, sitting in my private cloud, it may not be that convenient to go and put get that data shared up in red shift or in Google's tensorflow. So So there's some data gravity out. Networks just aren't there. The Laden sea of moving that stuff around is a big issue. And then a lot of people of investments in their data centers. I mean, the other piece, that's interesting. His legacy, you know, You know, as we start to look at the world a lot, there's a ton of Could still living in, You know, whether it's you, Nick system, that IBM mainframes. There's a lot of business value there, and sometimes the business cases aren't aren't necessarily there toe to replace them. Right. And in world of digital, the decoupling where I can start to use micro service is we're seeing a lot of trends. We worked with one hotel to take the reservation system. You know, Rapid and Micro Service is, um, we then didn't you know, open shift couch base, front end. And now when you go against, you know, when you go and browsing properties, you're looking at rates you actually going into distributed database cash on, you know, in using the latest cloud native technologies that could be dropped every two weeks or every three or four days for my mobile application and It's only when it goes, you know, when the transaction goes back, to reserve the room that it goes back there. So we're seeing a lot of power with digital decoupling, but we still need to take advantage of, you know, we've got these legacy applications. So So the data centers air really were trying to evolve them. And really, just, you know, how do we learn everything from the world of public and struck to bring those saints similar type efficiencies to the to the world of private? And really, what we're saying is this emerging approach where I can start to take advantage of the innovation cycles that land is that you know, the red shifts the azure functions of the public world. But then maybe keep some of my more business critical regulated workloads. You know, that's the other side of the private side, right? I've got G X p compliance. If I've got hip data that I need to worry about GDP are you know, the whole set of regular two requirements Over time, we do anticipate the public guys will get much better and more compliant. In fact, they made great headway already, but they're Still not a number of clients are still, you know, not 100% comfortable from rail client's perspective. >> Gotta meet Teresa Carlson. She'll change him. Who runs that AWS Public Sector is doing amazing things, obviously with big government contracts. But but you raise real inching point later. You almost described what I would say is really a hybrid application in this thing. This hotel example that you use because it's is, you know, kind of break in the application and leveraging micro service is to do things around the core that allowed to take advantage of some this agility and hyper fast development, yet still maintain that core stuff that either doesn't need to move Works fine. Be too expensive. Drea Factor. It's a real different weight. Even think about workloads and applications into breaking those things into bits. >> And we see that pattern all over the place. I'm gonna give you the hotel Example Where but finance, you know, look at financial service. Is retail banking so open banking a lot. All those rito applications are on the mainframe. I'm insurance claims and and you look at it, the business value, replicating a lot of like the regulatory stuff, the locality stuff. It doesn't make sense to write it. There's no rule inherent business values of I can wrap it, expose it and you know the micro service's architecture now. D'oh cloud native front end. That's gonna give me a 360 view a customer, Change the customer experience. You know, I've got a much you know, I can still get that agility. The the innovation cycles by public. Bye bye. Wrapping my legacy environment >> in person, you rated jump in and I'll give you something to react to, Which is which is the single glass right now? How do I How did I manage all this stuff now? Not only do I have distributed infrastructure now, I've got distributed applications and the thing that you just described and everyone wants to be that single pane of glass Everybody wants to be the app that's upon everybody. Screen. How are you seeing people deal with the management complexity of these kind of distributed infrastructures? If you will Yeah, >> I think that that's that's an area that's, ah, actually very topical these days because, you know, you're starting to see more and more workers. Goto private cloud and so you've got a hybrid infrastructure you're starting to see move movement from just using the EMS to, you know, the cantinas and Cuban Edie's. And, you know, we talked about Serval s and so on. So all of our clients are looking for a way, and you have different types of users as well. Yeah, developers. You have data scientists. You have, you know, operators and so on. So they're all looking for that control plane that allows them access and a view toe everything that is out there that is being used in the enterprise. And that's where I think you know, a company like Accenture were able to use the best of breed toe provide that visibility to our clients. >> Yeah. I mean, you hit the nail on the head. It's becoming, you know, with all the promise of cloud and all the power. And these new architectures is becoming much more dynamic, ephemeral, with containers and kubernetes with service computing that that one application for the hotel, they're actually started, and they've got some actually, now running a native us of their containers and looking at serverless. So you gonna even a single application can span that and one of things we've seen is is first. You know, a lot of our clients used to look at, you know, application management, you know, different from their their infrastructure. And the lines are now getting very blurry. You need to have very tight alignment. You take that single application. You know, if any my public side goes down or my mid tier with my you know, you know, open shipped on VM where it goes down on my back and mainframe goes down. Or the networks that connected to go down the devices that talked it. It's a very well, despite the power, very complex environment. So what we've been doing is first we've been looking at, you know, how do we get better synergy across what we you know, application service is teams that do the application manager an optimization cloud infrastructure, you know, how do we get better alignment that are embedded security, You know, how do you know what are managed to Security Service's and bringing those together? And then what we did was we looked at, you know, we got very aggressive of cloud for a strategy and, you know, how do we manage the world of public. But when looking at the public providers of hyper scale er's and how they hit incredible degrees of automation, we really looked at, said and said, Hey, look, you gotta operate differently in this new world. What can we learn from how the public guys they're doing that? We came up with this concept We call it running different. You know, how do you operate differently in this new multi speed? You know, you know, hot, very hybrid world across public, private demon, legacy environment and started looking say OK, what is it that they do? You know, first they standardize, and that's one of the big challenges you know, going to almost all of our clients in this a sprawl. And you know, whether it's application sprawl, its infrastructure, sprawl and >> my business is so unique. The Larry no business out there has the same process that we have. So we started make you know how to be >> standardized like center hybrid cloud solution apart with HP. Envy em where we, you know, how do we that was an example. So we can get thio because you can't automate unless you standardise. So that was the first thing you know, standardizing service catalog. Standardizing that, um, you know, the next thing is the operating model. They obviously operate differently. So we've been putting a lot of time and energy and what I call a cloud and agile operating model. And also a big part of that is truly you hear a lot about Dev ops right now, but truly putting the security and and operations into Deb set cops of bringing, you know, the development in the operations much tied together. So spending a lot of time looking at that and transforming operations re skilling the people you know, the operators of the future aren't eyes on glass there. Developers, they're writing the data ingestion, the analytic algorithms, you know, to do predictive operations. They're writing the automation script to take work, you know, test work out. Right. And over time, they'll be tuned in the air. Aye, aye. Engines to really optimize the environment and then finally has presided. Looted thio. Is that the platforms that control planes? That doing that? So, you know, we What we've been doing is we've had a significant investments in the eccentric cloud platform, our infrastructure automation platforms and then the application teams with it with our my wizard framework, and we've been starting to bring that together. You know, it's an integrated control plane that can plug into our clients environments to really manage seamlessly, you know, and provide, you know, automation Analytics. Aye, aye. Across APS, cloud infrastructure and even security. Right. And that, you know, that really is a iob is right. I mean, that's delivering on, you know, as the industry starts toe define and really coalesce around, eh? I ops, that's what we use. >> So just so I'm clear that so it's really your layer your software layer kind of management layer that that integrates all these different systems and provides kind of a unified view. Control, I reporting et cetera. Right >> Exactly. Then can plug in and integrate, you know, third party tools. I had to do some strategic function. >> I'm just I'm just >> curious is one of the themes that we here out in the press right now is this is this kind of pull back of public cloud app. Some of them are coming back. Or maybe it was, you know, kind of a rush. Maybe a little bit too aggressively. What are some of the reasons why people are pulling stuff back out of public clouds, that just with the wrong it was just the wrong application? The costs were not what we anticipated to be. We find it, you know, what are some of the reasons that you see after coming back in house? Yeah, >> I think it's >> a variety of factors. I mean, it's certainly cost, I think is one. So as there are multiple private options and you know, we don't talk about this, but the hyper skills themselves are coming out with their own different private options, like Aunt Ours and out pulls and other stack and on. And Ali Baba has obsessed I and so on. So you see a proliferation of that and you see many more options around private cloud. So I think the cost is certainly a factor. The second is I think data gravity is, I think, a very important point because as you're starting to see how different applications have to work together, then that becomes a very important point. The third is just about compliance, and, you know, the regulatory environment. As we look across the globe, you know, even outside the U. S. We look at Europe and other parts of Asia as clients and moving more to the cloud. You know, that becomes an important factor. So as you start to balance these things, I think you have to take a very application centric view. You see some of those some some maps moving back, and and I think that's the part of the hybrid world is that you know, you can have a nap running on the private cloud and then tomorrow you can move this. Since it's been containerized to run on public and it's, you know, it's all managed that look >> e. I mean, cost is a big factor if you actually look at it. Most of our clients, you know, they typically you were big cap ex businesses, and all of a sudden they're using this consumption consumption model. And they weren't really They didn't have a function to go and look at the thousands or millions of lines of it, right? You know, as your statement, exactly think they misjudged, you know, some of the scale on B e e. I mean, that's one of the reasons we started. It's got to be an application lead modernization that really that will dictate that. And I think in many cases, people didn't may not have thought through which application. What data? There The data, gravity data. Gravity's a conversation I'm having just by with every client right now. You know, I've got a 64 terabyte hana, and that's the core. My crown jewels. That data, you know, how do I get that to tensorflow? How'd I get that >> right? But if Andy was >> here, though, Andy would say, we'll send down the snow. The snow came from which virgin snow plows Snowball snowball. Well, they're snowballs. But we've seen the >> hold of a truck killer >> that comes out and he'd say, Take that and stick it in the cloud. Because if you've got that data in a single source right now, you can apply multitude of applications across that thing. So they you know they're pushing. Get that date end in this single source course than to move it, change it, you know you run it. All these micro lines of billing statement take >> the hotel. I mean, their data stolen the mainframe. So if they may want need to expose it? Yeah, they have a database cash, and they move it out. You know, the particulars of data sets get larger, it becomes, you know, the data. Gravity becomes a big issue. Because no matter how much you know, while Moore's law might be might have elongated from 18 to 24 months, the network will always be the bottle, Mac. So ultimately, we're seeing, you know, a CZ. We proliferate more and more data, all data sets get bigger and better than network becomes more of a bottleneck. Conned. That's a lot of times you gotta look at your applications. They have. I've got some legacy database I need to get. Thio. I need this to be approximately somewhere where I don't have, you know, high bandwith o r. Right Or, you know, highlight and see type or so egress costs a pretty big deals. My date is up in the cloud, and I'm gonna get charged for pulling it off. You know that That's been a big issue. >> You know, it's funny, I think, and I think a lot of the issue, obviously complexity building. It's a totally different building model, but I think to a lot of people will put stuff in a public cloud and then operated as if they bought it. And they're running in the data center in this kind of this. Turn it on, turn it off when you need it. Everyone turns. Everyone loves to talk about the example turning it on when you need it. But nobody ever talks about turning it off when you don't. But but the kind of clothes on our conversation I won't talk about a I and applied a I. CoSine is a lot of talk in the market place, but a time machine learning. But as you guys know pride better than anybody, it's the application of a I and specific applications, which really on unlocks the value. And as we're sitting here talking about this complexity, I can't help but think that, you know, applied a I in a management layer like your run differently, set up to actually know when to turn things on, when to turn things off when you moved in but not moved, it's gonna have to be machines running that right cause the data sets and the complexity of these systems is going to be just overwhelming. Yeah, yeah, >> absolutely completely agree with you in fact. Ah, essential. We actually referred to the Seoul area as Applied intelligence. Ah, and that's our guy, right? And, uh, it is absolutely to add more and more automation Move everything Maur toe where it's being run by the machine rather than, you know, having people really working on these things >> yet, e I mean, if you think you hit the nail on the head, we're gonna a eyes e. I mean, given how things getting complex, more ephemeral, you think about kubernetes et cetera. We're gonna have to leverage a humans or not to be able to get, you know, manage this. The environment is important, right? What's interesting way we've used quite effectively for quite some time. But it's good at some stuff, not good at others. So we find it's very good at, like, ticket triage, like ticket triage, chicken routing, et cetera. You know, any time we take over account, we tune our AI ai engines. We have ticket advisers, etcetera. That's what probably got the most, you know, most bang for the buck. We tried in the network space. Less success to start even with, you know, commercial products that were out there. I think where a I ultimately bails us out of this is if you look at the problem. You know, a lot of times we talked about optimizing around cost, but then performance. I mean, and it's they they're somewhat, you know, you gotta weigh him off each other. So you've got a very multi dimensional problem on howto I optimize my workloads, particularly. I gotta kubernetes cluster and something on Amazon, you know, sums running on my private cloud, etcetera. So we're gonna get some very complex environment. And the only way you're gonna be ableto optimize across multi dimensions that cost performance service levels, you know, and then multiple options don't do it public private, You know, what's my network costs etcetera. Isn't a I engine tuning that ai ai engines? So ultimately, I mean, you heard me earlier on the operators. I think you know, they write the analytic albums, they do the automation scripts, but they're the ultimate ones who then tune the aye aye engines that will manage our environment, right. And I think it kubernetes will be interesting because it becomes a link to the control plane optimize workload placement between >> when the best thing to you. Then you have dynamic optimization can. You might be up to my tanks at us right now, but you might be optimizing for output the next day. So exists really a you know, kind of Ah, never ending >> when you got you got to see them >> together with it. And multi dimension optimization is very difficult. So I mean, you know, humans can't get their head around. Machines can, but they need to be trained. >> Well, Prasad, Larry, Lots of great opportunities for for centuries bring that expertise to the table. So thanks for taking a few minutes to walk through some of these things. Our pleasure. Thank you. Raise Prasad is Larry. I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube. We are high above San Francisco in the Salesforce Tower. Theis Center. Innovation have in San Francisco. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time

>> Hey, welcome back. Your body, Jefe Rick here from the Cube were high atop San Francisco in the century innovation hub. It's in the middle of the Salesforce Tower. It's a beautiful facility. They think you had it. The grand opening about six months ago. We're here for the grand opening. Very cool space. I got maker studios. They've got all kinds of crazy stuff going on. But we're here today to talk about Cloud in this continuing evolution about cloud in the enterprise and hybrid cloud and multi cloud in Public Cloud and Private Cloud. And we're really excited to have a couple of guys who really helping customers make this journey, cause it's really tough to do by yourself. CEOs are super busy. There were about security and all kinds of other things, so centers, often a trusted partner. We got two of the leaders from center joining us today's Prasad Sankaran. He's the senior managing director of Intelligent Cloud infrastructure for Center Welcome and Larry Soccer, the global managing director. Intelligent cloud infrastructure offering from central gentlemen. Welcome. I love it. It intelligent cloud. What is an intelligent cloud all about? Got it in your title. It must mean something pretty significant. >> Yeah, I think First of all, thank you for having us, but yeah, absolutely. Everything's around becoming more intelligent around using more automation. And the work that, you know we delivered to our clients and cloud, as you know, is the platform to reach. All of our clients are moving. So it's all about bringing the intelligence not only into infrastructure, but also into cloud generally. And it's all driven by software, >> right? It's just funny to think where we are in this journey. We talked a little bit before we turn the cameras on and there you made an interesting comment when I said, You know, when did this cloud for the Enterprise start? And you took it back to sass based applications, which, >> you know you were sitting in the sales force builder. >> That's true. It isn't just the tallest building in >> everyone's, you know, everyone's got a lot of focus on AWS is rise, etcetera. But the real start was really getting into sass. I mean, I remember we used to do a lot of Siebel deployments for CR M, and we started to pivot to sales, for some were moving from remedy into service now. I mean, we've went through on premise collaboration, email thio 3 65 So So we've actually been at it for quite a while in the particularly the SAS world. And it's only more recently that we started to see that kind of push to the, you know, the public pass, and it's starting to cloud native development. But But this journey started, you know, it was that 78 years ago that we really started. See some scale around it. >> And I think and tell me if you agree, I think really, what? The sales forces of the world and and the service now is of the world office 3 65 kind of broke down some of those initial beers, which are all really about security and security, security, security, Always to hear where now security is actually probably an attributes and loud can brink. >> Absolutely. In fact, I mean, those barriers took years to bring down. I still saw clients where they were forcing salesforce tor service Now to put, you know, instances on prime and I think I think they finally woke up toe. You know, these guys invested ton in their security organizations. You know there's a little of that needle in the haystack. You know, if you breach a data set, you know what you're getting after. But when Europe into sales force, it's a lot harder. And so you know. So I think that security problems have certainly gone away. We still have some compliance, regulatory things, data sovereignty. But I think security and not not that it sold by any means that you know, it's always giving an ongoing problem. But I think they're getting more comfortable with their data being up in the in the public domain, right? Not public. >> And I think it also helped them with their progress towards getting cloud native. So, you know, you pick certain applications which were obviously hosted by sales force and other companies, and you did some level of custom development around it. And now I think that's paved the way for more complex applications and different workloads now going into, you know, the public cloud and the private cloud. But that's the next part of the journey, >> right? So let's back up 1/2 a step, because then, as you said, a bunch of stuff then went into public cloud, right? Everyone's putting in AWS and Google. Um, IBM has got a public how there was a lot more. They're not quite so many as there used to be, Um, but then we ran into a whole new host of issues, right, which is kind of opened up this hybrid cloud. This multi cloud world, which is you just can't put everything into a public clouds. There's certain attributes is that you need to think about and yet from the application point of view before you decide where you deploy that. So I'm just curious. If you can share now, would you guys do with clients? How should they think about applications? How should they think about what to deploy where I think >> I'll start in? The military has a lot of expertise in this area. I think you know, we have to obviously start from an application centric perspective. You go to take a look at you know where your applications have to live water. What are some of the data implications on the applications, or do you have by way of regulatory and compliance issues, or do you have to do as faras performance because certain applications have to be in a high performance environment. Certain other applications don't think a lot of these factors will. Then Dr where these applications need to recite and then what we think in today's world is really accomplish. Complex, um, situation where you have a lot of legacy. But you also have private as well as public cloud. So you approach it from an application perspective. >> Yeah. I mean, if you really take a look at Army, you look at it centers clients, and we were totally focused on up into the market Global 2000 savory. You know how clients typically have application portfolios ranging from 520,000 applications? And really, I mean, if you think about the purpose of cloud or even infrastructure for that, they're there to serve the applications. No one cares if your cloud infrastructure is not performing the absolute. So we start off with an application monetization approach and ultimately looking, you know, you know, with our tech advisory guys coming in, there are intelligent engineering service is to do the cloud native and at mod work our platforms, guys, who do you know everything from sales forward through ASAP. They should drive a strategy on how those applications gonna evolve with its 520,000 and determined hey, and usually using some, like the six orders methodology. And I'm I am I going to retire this Am I going to retain it? And, you know, I'm gonna replace it with sass. Am I gonna re factor in format? And it's ultimately that strategy that's really gonna dictate a multi and, you know, every cloud story. So it's based on the applications data, gravity issues where they gonna reside on their requirements around regulatory, the requirements for performance, etcetera. That will then dictate the cloud strategies. I'm you know, not a big fan of going in there and just doing a multi hybrid cloud strategy without a really good up front application portfolio approach, right? How we gonna modernize that >> it had. And how do you segment? That's a lot of applications. And you know, how do you know the old thing? How do you know that one by that time, how do you help them pray or size where they should be focusing on us? >> So typically what we do is work with our clients to do a full application portfolio analysis, and then we're able to then segment the applications based on, you know, important to the business and some of the factors that both of us mentioned. And once we have that, then we come up with an approach where certain sets of applications he moved to sass certain other applications you move to pass. So you know, you're basically doing the re factoring and the modernization and then certain others you know, you can just, you know, lift and shift. So it's really a combination off both modernization as well as migration. It's a combination off that, but to do that, you have to initially look at the entire set of applications and come up with that approach. >> I'm just curious where within that application assessment, um, where is cost savings? Where is, uh, this is just old. And where is opportunities to innovate faster? Because we know a lot of lot of talk really. Days has cost savings, but what the real advantages is execution speed if you can get it. If >> you could go back through four years and we had there was a lot of CEO discussions around cost savings, I'm not really have seen our clients shift. It costs never goes away, obviously right. But there's a lot greater emphasis now on business agility. You know, howto innovate faster, get getting your capabilities to market faster, to change my customer experience. So So it's really I t is really trying to step up and, you know, enabled the business toe to compete in the marketplace. We're seeing a huge shift in emphasis or focus at least starting with, you know, how'd I get better business agility outta leverage to cloud and cloud native development to get their upper service levels? Actually, we started seeing increase on Hey, you know, these applications need to work. It's actress. So So Obviously, cost still remains a factor, but we seem much more for, you know, much more emphasis on agility, you know, enabling the business on, given the right service levels of right experience to the user, little customers. Big pivot there, >> Okay. And let's get the definitions out because you know a lot of lot of conversation about public clouds, easy private clouds, easy but hybrid cloud and multi cloud and confusion about what those are. How do you guys define him? How do you help your customers think about the definition? Yes, >> I think it's a really good point. So what we're starting to see is there were a lot of different definitions out there. But I think as I talked more clients and our partners, I think we're all starting to, you know, come to ah, you know, the same kind of definition on multi cloud. It's really about using more than one cloud. But hybrid, I think, is a very important concept because hybrid is really all about the placement off the workload or where your application is going to run on. And then again, it goes to all of these points that we talked about data, gravity and performance and other things. Other factors. But it's really all about where do you place the specific look >> if you look at that, so if you think about public, I mean obviously gives us the innovation of the public providers. You look at how fast Amazon comes out with new versions of Lambda etcetera. So that's the innovations there obviously agility. You could spend up environments very quickly, which is, you know, one of the big benefits of it. The consumption, economic models. So that is the number of drivers that are pushing in the direction of public. You know, on the private side, they're still it's quite a few benefits that don't get talked about as much. Um, so you know, if you look at it, um, performance if you think the public world, you know, Although they're scaling up larger T shirts, et cetera, they're still trying to do that for a large array of applications on the private side, you can really Taylor somethingto very high performance characteristics. Whether it's you know, 30 to 64 terabyte Hana, you can get a much more focused precision environment for business. Critical workloads like that article, article rack, the Duke clusters, everything about fraud analysis. So that's a big part of it. Related to that is the data gravity that Prasad just mentioned. You know, if I've got a 64 terabyte Hana database you know, sitting in my private cloud, it may not be that convenient to go and put get that data shared up in red shift or in Google's tensorflow. So So there's some data gravity out. Networks just aren't there. The laden sea of moving that stuff around is a big issue. And then a lot of people of investments in their data centers. I mean, the other piece, that's interesting. His legacy, you know, you know, as we start to look at the world a lot, there's a ton of code still living in, You know, whether it's you, nick system, just IBM mainframes. There's a lot of business value there, and sometimes the business cases aren't aren't necessarily there toe to replace them. Right? And in world of digital, the decoupling where I can start to use micro service is we're seeing a lot of trends. We worked with one hotel to take their reservation system. You know, Rapid and Micro Service is, um, we then didn't you know, open shift couch base, front end. And now, when you go against, you know, when you go and browsing properties, you're looking at rates you actually going into distributed database cash on, you know, in using the latest cloud native technologies that could be dropped every two weeks or everything three or four days for my mobile application. And it's only when it goes, you know, when the transaction goes back, to reserve the room that it goes back there. So we're seeing a lot of power with digital decoupling, But we still need to take advantage of, you know, we've got these legacy applications. So So the data centers air really were trying to evolve them. And really, just, you know, how do we learn everything from the world of public and struck to bring those saints similar type efficiencies to the to the world of private? And really, what we're seeing is this emerging approach where I can start to take advantage of the innovation cycles. The land is that, you know, the red shifts the functions of the public world, but then maybe keep some of my more business critical regulated workloads. You know, that's the other side of the private side, right? I've got G X p compliance. If I've got hip, a data that I need to worry about GDP are there, you know, the whole set of regular two requirements. Now, over time, we do anticipate the public guys will get much better and more compliant. In fact, they made great headway already, but they're still not a number of clients are still, you know, not 100% comfortable from my client's perspective. >> Gotta meet Teresa Carlson. She'll change him, runs that AWS public sector is doing amazing things, obviously with big government contracts. But but you raise real inching point later. You almost described what I would say is really a hybrid application in this in this hotel example that you use because it's is, you know, kind of breaking the application and leveraging micro service is to do things around the core that allowed to take advantage of some this agility and hyper fast development, yet still maintain that core stuff that either doesn't need to move. Works fine, be too expensive. Drea Factor. It's a real different weight. Even think about workloads and applications into breaking those things into bits. >> And we see that pattern all over the place. I'm gonna give you the hotel Example Where? But finance, you know, look at financial service. Is retail banking so open banking a lot. All those rito applications are on the mainframe. I'm insurance claims and and you look at it the business value of replicating a lot of like the regulatory stuff, the locality stuff. It doesn't make sense to write it. There's no rule inherent business values of I can wrap it, expose it and in a micro service's architecture now D'oh cloud native front end. That's gonna give me a 360 view a customer, Change the customer experience. You know, I've got a much you know, I can still get that agility. The innovation cycles by public. Bye bye. Wrapping my legacy environment >> and percent you raided, jump in and I'll give you something to react to, Which is which is the single planet glass right now? How do I How did I manage all this stuff now? Not only do I have distributed infrastructure now, I've got distributed applications in the and the thing that you just described and everyone wants to be that single pane of glass. Everybody wants to be the app that's upon everybody. Screen. How are you seeing people deal with the management complexity of these kind of distributed infrastructures? If you will Yeah, >> I think that that's that's an area that's, ah, actually very topical these days because, you know, you're starting to see more and more workers go to private cloud. And so you've got a hybrid infrastructure you're starting to see move movement from just using the EMS to, you know, cantinas and Cuba needs. And, you know, we talked about Serval s and so on. So all of our clients are looking for a way, and you have different types of users as well. Yeah, developers. You have data scientists. You have, you know, operators and so on. So they're all looking for that control plane that allows them access and a view toe everything that is out there that is being used in the enterprise. And that's where I think you know, a company like Accenture were able to use the best of breed toe provide that visibility to our clients, >> right? Yeah. I mean, you hit the nail on the head. It's becoming, you know, with all the promises, cloud and all the power. And these new architectures is becoming much more dynamic, ephemeral, with containers and kubernetes with service computing that that that one application for the hotel, they're actually started in. They've got some, actually, now running a native us of their containers and looking at surveillance. So you're gonna even a single application can span that. And one of things we've seen is is first, you know, a lot of our clients used to look at, you know, application management, you know, different from their their infrastructure. And the lines are now getting very blurry. You need to have very tight alignment. You take that single application, if any my public side goes down or my mid tier with my you know, you know, open shipped on VM, where it goes down on my back and mainframe goes down. Or the networks that connected to go down the devices that talk to it. It's a very well. Despite the power, it's a very complex environment. So what we've been doing is first we've been looking at, you know, how do we get better synergy across what we you know, Application Service's teams that do that Application manager, an optimization cloud infrastructure. How do we get better alignment that are embedded security, You know, how do you know what are managed to security service is bringing those together. And then what we did was we looked at, you know, we got very aggressive with cloud for a strategy and, you know, how do we manage the world of public? But when looking at the public providers of hyper scale, er's and how they hit Incredible degrees of automation. We really looked at, said and said, Hey, look, you gotta operate differently in this new world. What can we learn from how the public guys we're doing that We came up with this concept. We call it running different. You know, how do you operate differently in this new multi speed? You know, you know, hot, very hybrid world across public, private demon, legacy, environment, and start a look and say, OK, what is it that they do? You know, first they standardize, and that's one of the big challenges you know, going to almost all of our clients in this a sprawl. And you know, whether it's application sprawl, its infrastructure, sprawl >> and my business is so unique. The Larry no business out there has the same process that way. So >> we started make you know how to be standardized like center hybrid cloud solution important with hp envy And where we how do we that was an example of so we can get to you because you can't automate unless you standardise. So that was the first thing you know, standardizing our service catalog. Standardizing that, um you know, the next thing is the operating model. They obviously operate differently. So we've been putting a lot of time and energy and what I call a cloud and agile operating model. And also a big part of that is truly you hear a lot about Dev ops right now. But truly putting the security and and operations into Deb said cops are bringing, you know, the development in the operations much tied together. So spending a lot of time looking at that and transforming operations re Skilling the people you know, the operators of the future aren't eyes on glass there. Developers, they're writing the data ingestion, the analytic algorithms, you know, to do predictive operations. They're riding the automation script to take work, you know, test work out right. And over time they'll be tuning the aye aye engines to really optimize environment. And then finally, has Prasad alluded to Is that the platforms that control planes? That doing that? So, you know what we've been doing is we've had a significant investments in the eccentric cloud platform, our infrastructure automation platforms, and then the application teams with it with my wizard framework, and we started to bring that together you know, it's an integrated control plane that can plug into our clients environments to really manage seamlessly, you know, and provide. You know, it's automation. Analytics. Aye, aye. Across APS, cloud infrastructure and even security. Right. And that, you know, that really is a I ops, right? I mean, that's delivering on, you know, as the industry starts toe define and really coalesce around, eh? I ops. That's what we you A ups. >> So just so I'm clear that so it's really your layer your software layer kind of management layer that that integrates all these different systems and provides kind of a unified view. Control? Aye, aye. Reporting et cetera. Right? >> Exactly. Then can plug in and integrate, you know, third party tools to do straight functions. >> I'm just I'm just curious is one of the themes that we here out in the press right now is this is this kind of pull back of public cloud app, something we're coming back. Or maybe it was, you know, kind of a rush. Maybe a little bit too aggressively. What are some of the reasons why people are pulling stuff back out of public clouds that just with the wrong. It was just the wrong application. The costs were not what we anticipated to be. We find it, you know, what are some of the reasons that you see after coming back in house? Yeah, I think it's >> a variety of factors. I mean, it's certainly cost, I think is one. So as there are multiple private options and you know, we don't talk about this, but the hyper skills themselves are coming out with their own different private options like an tars and out pulls an actor stack and on. And Ali Baba has obsessed I and so on. So you see a proliferation of that, then you see many more options around around private cloud. So I think the cost is certainly a factor. The second is I think data gravity is, I think, a very important point because as you're starting to see how different applications have to work together, then that becomes a very important point. The third is just about compliance, and, you know, the regulatory environment. As we look across the globe, even outside the U. S. We look at Europe and other parts of Asia as clients and moving more to the cloud. You know that becomes an important factor. So as you start to balance these things, I think you have to take a very application centric view. You see some of those some some maps moving back, and and I think that's the part of the hybrid world is that you know, you can have a nap running on the private cloud and then tomorrow you can move this. Since it's been containerized to run on public and it's, you know, it's all managed. That left >> E. I mean, cost is a big factor if you actually look at it. Most of our clients, you know, they typically you were a big cap ex businesses, and all of a sudden they're using this consumption, you know, consumption model. And they went, really, they didn't have a function to go and look at be thousands or millions of lines of it, right? You know, as your statement Exactly. I think they misjudged, you know, some of the scale on Do you know e? I mean, that's one of the reasons we started. It's got to be an application led, you know, modernization, that really that will dictate that. And I think In many cases, people didn't. May not have thought Through which application. What data? There The data, gravity data. Gravity's a conversation I'm having just by with every client right now. And if I've got a 64 terabyte Hana and that's the core, my crown jewels that data, you know, how do I get that to tensorflow? How'd I get that? >> Right? But if Andy was here, though, and he would say we'll send down the stove, the snow came from which virgin snow plows? Snowball Snowball. Well, they're snowballs. But I have seen the whole truck killer that comes out and he'd say, Take that and stick it in the cloud. Because if you've got that data in a single source right now, you can apply multitude of applications across that thing. So they, you know, they're pushing. Get that date end in this single source. Of course. Then to move it, change it. You know, you run into all these micro lines of billing statement, take >> the hotel. I mean, their data stolen the mainframe, so if they anyone need to expose it, Yeah, they have a database cash, and they move it out, You know, particulars of data sets get larger, it becomes, you know, the data. Gravity becomes a big issue because no matter how much you know, while Moore's Law might be might have elongated from 18 to 24 months, the network will always be the bottle Mac. So ultimately, we're seeing, you know, a CZ. We proliferate more and more data, all data sets get bigger and better. The network becomes more of a bottleneck. And that's a It's a lot of times you gotta look at your applications. They have. I've got some legacy database I need to get Thio. I need this to be approximately somewhere where I don't have, you know, high bandwith. Oh, all right. Or, you know, highlight and see type. Also, egress costs a pretty big deals. My date is up in the cloud, and I'm gonna get charged for pulling it off. You know, that's being a big issue, >> you know, it's funny, I think, and I think a lot of the the issue, obviously complexity building. It's a totally from building model, but I think to a lot of people will put stuff in a public cloud and then operated as if they bought it and they're running in the data center in this kind of this. Turn it on, Turn it off when you need it. Everyone turns. Everyone loves to talk about the example turning it on when you need it. But nobody ever talks about turning it off when you don't. But it kind of close on our conversation. I won't talk about a I and applied a Iot because he has a lot of talk in the market place. But, hey, I'm machine learning. But as you guys know pride better than anybody, it's the application of a I and specific applications, which really on unlocks the value. And as we're sitting here talking about this complexity, I can't help but think that, you know, applied a I in a management layer like your run differently, set up to actually know when to turn things on, when to turn things off when you moved in but not moved, it's gonna have to be machines running that right cause the data sets and the complexity of these systems is going to be just overwhelming. Yeah, yeah, >> absolutely. Completely agree with you. In fact, attack sensual. We actually refer to this whole area as applied intelligence on That's our guy, right? And it is absolutely to add more and more automation move everything Maur toe where it's being run by the machine rather than you know, having people really working on these things >> yet, e I mean, if you think you hit the nail on the head, we're gonna a eyes e. I mean, given how things getting complex, more ephemeral, you think about kubernetes et cetera. We're gonna have to leverage a humans or not to be able to get, you know, manage this. The environments comported right. What's interesting way we've used quite effectively for quite some time. But it's good at some stuff, not good at others. So we find it's very good at, like, ticket triage, like ticket triage, chicken rounding et cetera. You know, any time we take over account, we tune our AI ai engines. We have ticket advisers, etcetera. That's what probably got the most, you know, most bang for the buck. We tried in the network space, less success to start even with, you know, commercial products that were out there. I think where a I ultimately bails us out of this is if you look at the problem. You know, a lot of times we talked about optimizing around cost, but then performance. I mean, and it's they they're somewhat, you know, you gotta weigh him off each other. So you've got a very multi dimensional problem on howto I optimize my workloads, particularly. I gotta kubernetes cluster and something on Amazon, you know, sums running on my private cloud, etcetera. So we're gonna get some very complex environment. And the only way you're gonna be ableto optimize across multi dimensions that cost performance service levels, you know, And then multiple options don't do it public private, You know, what's my network costs etcetera. Isn't a I engine tuning that ai ai engines? So ultimately, I mean, you heard me earlier on the operators. I think you know, they write the analytic albums, they do the automation scripts, but they're the ultimate one too. Then tune the aye aye engines that will manage our environment. And I think it kubernetes will be interesting because it becomes a link to the control plane optimize workload placement. You know, between >> when the best thing to you, then you have dynamic optimization. Could you might be optimizing eggs at us right now. But you might be optimizing for output the next day. So exists really a you know, kind of Ah, never ending when you got me. They got to see them >> together with you and multi dimension. Optimization is very difficult. So I mean, you know, humans can't get their head around. Machines can, but they need to be trained. >> Well, Prasad, Larry, Lots of great opportunities for for centuries bring that expertise to the tables. So thanks for taking a few minutes to walk through some of these things. Our pleasure. Thank you, Grace. Besides Larry, I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube. We are high above San Francisco in the Salesforce Tower, Theis Center, Innovation hub in San Francisco. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>> From the SiliconANGLE media office, in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to a Cube Conversation here in our new Boston area studio, happy to welcome back to the program a VIP from our community, Patrick Osborne, who's the Vice President and General Manager for big data and secondary storage at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Patrick, great to talk to you. >> Great to be back, thanks, Stu. >> All right, we're talking about the big thing, hundredth year of the NFL kicking off here. Maybe we're talking a little bit about the changing role of infrastructure and, we've been talking about it at the Wikibon team for a number of years, data is at the center of the universe today, when we talk about IT and businesses and what they're thinking about, and in some ways everything's changed, and in other ways it feels like I go to some of these shows and the people that have even more experience than me are like "Oh, geez, we've recreated the mainframe." So, we're fresh off of VMworld, you skipped the show this year, but I know HPE had a large presence at the show, and let me start there, I guess, we look at data centers and cloud, and the mission VMware has is how do they maintain relevant as customers are changing their applications? They just made billions of dollars of acquisitions to be more in the cloud native environment, so when you look at, HPE's very well known in the infrastructure space, had some changes as to what pieces are in the company versus partnered with the company, so when you talk to your customers and they're changing what I call the long pole in the tent of modernization, it's the applications. Where are they today, where are some of the areas that they're doing well, and where are the areas that it's challenging and struggling? >> Yeah, so I'd say from an HPE perspective, we've made a number of investments as well, over the last couple years, both inorganic and organic investments in the space, and I think that even though we've historically been known as an infrastructure company, we're very quickly pivoting towards being known as an enterprise workload company, and so for my perspective, the things that we're trying to do, especially in our division around AI and ML and analytics is being able to provide a platform for customers, especially application developers. I think when we talk about how the world is changing, the buyer personas people were selling to now have completely drastically changed, right? There's no more dedicated backup teams, there's rarely now dedicated storage teams, maybe only in very large organizations, and so now you're catering to a different set of folks, and for instance, over the last two or three years, we've seen the advent of folks like a chief data officer, the CDO, data scientists, data engineers, and so for us, we have a whole new buyer persona and user persona that we not only have to cater to in our UX design, but also present the value, which is a much different conversation than we've had in the past. >> Yeah, you know I actually had a number of conversations with customers at the VMworld show, and they talked about, organizationally they often still have hardware-defined roles, yet they live in a software-defined world. So, even groups that are like "I still have some storage headcount and some "networking headcount," but virtualization and cloud are slowly eating over pieces it, but there's still some turf battles, which I was sad to hear because, I've worked for the last couple of decades to try to eliminate silos and get people working together, so we know those organizational changes often take even longer than the long cycles of technology that we're trying to roll out here. You mentioned some of the big data pieces, and yeah, HPE's made a number of acquisitions. Most recently MapR. Wonder if you could help us connect the dots. When we covered heavily, the big data wave, and Dave Vellante would say, "Look, the people that "deploy these technologies, the end users will create "way more value than the distributions of Hadoop will." When we did our forecast, they were there, but the promise of big data was, data was going to go from that burden, how do I keep it, how do I maintain it, how do I back it up, to new value for the company, new revenue that we could have along that where, and whether or not that happened often mattered on deployment, but when you go into the AI space, like what you're doing with BlueData, is that a continuation of what we were seeing with the big data space, is there some new waves that are drastically changing the outcomes in what we're seeing, how does that all fit together? >> Yeah, so I mean I think it's definitely an extension of all these things are creative and incremental at the end of the day. I think some of the things around how people are operationalizing AI and ML are pretty unique, and so from our perspective, we made some investments around BlueData, and we've had some recent product announcements in that area around helping folks operationalize machine learning, which is, at this point it's becoming very real and people are putting it into a number of different use cases, and then to come along with that, the need to store data, right, so we talk about this often, which nobody talks about storage anymore, everyone talks about data, right? The need to store all this data that's coming in in a persistent data layer is super important, more important than it ever was, and it comes in multiple different forms and multiple different factors, and also protocols. So, to have a data platform that is very scalable, has enterprise resiliency to it, the ability to take data and manifest it in different ways, right, is important for that entire ecosystem, we felt that MapR was a great platform, they have a great data platform, that started with Hadoop, moved into supporting things like streams, Kafka and Spark, and then certainly now have been shifted into a Kubernetes and container deployment, and then mapping their file system and their database and streams to servicing AI and ML workloads, so it's kind of along the same vein and being able to live in that world that you're still separating compute and storage, and being able to scale those independently, but work together from a security perspective, I think it's really important. >> One of the boundaries that I've always been fascinated with is, some of the underlying components that we're changing, so when we rolled out virtualization, the whole storage and networking industry had to work to kind of put the pieces back together as we took advantage of that. You mentioned Kubernetes, at the KubeCon show, there's lots of that same plumbing things that need to be understand and work. But on the other hand, we've seen a massive transformation in the database market. 10 years ago, everybody had one database to rule them all, and now most companies we talk to, it's like "Oh, well I've got lots of little databases "and now pulling them together differently." But that boundary between what's happening at the infrastructure layer and what's happening at the application layer. On the one hand, they seem to be pulling apart, you know, I should just be able to use cloud or serverless and makes it easy, but on the same hot time, you're talking everybody's like "I've got the best infrastructure for your AI deployment," so can you talk a little bit about some of the hard challenges that HPE's looking at solving, what do you look to actually create, whether that be a box or a service or some offering, cause I know HPE has lots of different areas that you look at those solutions. >> Yeah, we're trying to, when we go and have a successful deployment at our customers, and we have deployments in most verticals, right, in the Fortune 500 Global 2000, whether it's financial services, automotive, manufacturing, you can name healthcare, right? I think what we've seen is that the successful deployments are the ones that bring together the application owner's line of business, even the data scientist engineers, along with the infrastructure folks, right? Think, sometimes they're at odds. And so when you can bring together a platform that at the end of the day is going to provide something, right, as a service, it's either an analytic sandbox, big data and analytics as a service, AI as a service, right, there is a set of folks that are trying to service a number of application developers and data scientists internally, that's a platform that can have a uniform data structure, where you can grab all this data and have access to it securely, and be able to deploy your workflow on top of that, in a virtualized, multitenant way, deployed in containers with the toolsets and the applications that they want to have access to, but not have to deal with the infrastructure, right? And then that can be the providence of the CIO and the data center team and the infrastructure folks working with those teams, and that's where we've seen the magic happen for successful deployments, and those are the ones that, they end up growing and scaling very quickly, and they can be deployed on-prem, they can be deployed, we have some of our pilots and POCs that start completely in the cloud and then come back on prem for different reasons, security, data locality, governance, what have you, but it provides the flexibility, but I think what we found is that, taking an outcome and a services-based approach that bring everyone to the table, that's where we see the projects really get a big business benefit for our customers. >> You know, I was having a conversation earlier today, and when we watch the adoption of virtualization, it's been almost 20 years now, since most people are doing it. When we'd reached about 10 years in, we felt that most people were doing it and were on their journey, but things like converged and hyperconverged infrastructure really helped accelerate us past that kind of early majority into the late majority because it was the simplicity of that offering. We wonder, are we reaching some of that same point when we look at cloud, and when I say cloud, not just public cloud, but what we're doing in private, where the hybrid, multicloud mixup that we have, because while cloud is definitely real and here to stay, I don't think anybody would really say that cloud, circa 2019, is easy. So, how does HPE and its partners, how do we make it even easier so that customers can move down that journey to modernize themselves even more, and get out of what we call that undifferentiated heavy lifting? >> Yeah, so definitely want to avoid the undifferentiated heavy lifting, because that's certainly a weight on many organizations, and so what we are trying to provide is a platform that increases customers' time to value, and by providing, by abstracting a lot of difficult things. I mean there's a lot of data gravity in this space, right, you're talking about, we have projects right now for autonomous cars where they ingest two, five, 10 petabytes a day, for example, and it's not, it's very difficult to migrate and move that data, right, so you want to be able to bring that data in, tap into it securely, there's a lot of networking that goes on that's very difficult from a security perspective as well as multitenancy and making sure that that model is set up correctly. So for us, it's all about providing a platform that can service multiple tenants and multiple organizations that are all using similar toolsets at the end of the day, but you can have your specific data scientists and data engineers operating on a platform that they don't have to worry about infrastructure. Right, cause at the end of the day, when we go visit those folks who own those applications, oftentimes they don't want to deal with, "I need to go request in a VM, "I need to go request a block of IP addresses, "I need some LUNs for my storage, "I need a server deployment to run bare metal," you know, some bare metal tooling. They really want to establish a service, just like we saw with virtualization, and so right now it's sort of the fight for, how can I make my infrastructure as invisible as possible and fight for the eyeballs of the developers? >> Great. Want to just give you the final word, Patrick, what's exciting you, kind of second half of the year, things you're looking forward to? >> Yeah, so the things that excite me is certainly customer acquisition, right, we've been marching along that very quickly with some of these new acquisitions and some of the net new development we've done within HPE, I think that the, we've got a lot of stuff cooking with Kubernetes in that area, and so we'll make some big announcements at KubeCon, and that's always very exciting to talk in these new ecosystems, and speaking of ecosystems, we're establishing, I think there's new ecosystems that are forming in the market, especially around AI and ML, it's still a very nascent market, and so we're bringing on new partners every week from an application development perspective, and so for me it's really exciting to talk with all these new apps, these new tool chains, new toolsets, libraries, algorithms, and I think it's really exciting to kind of move up stack and be in this very cool world of application development. >> I know when I see the market landscape of some of the AI space, you need to have a big monitor or be able to zoom in, cause there's a lot of players, there's a lot of pieces, we always worry about things like API sprawls and the like, but absolutely super exciting space, Patrick Osborne, thanks so much for giving us an update on what's happening, especially how AI is driving a lot of new innovation in the area. >> Yeah, very exciting, thanks for having me. >> All right, Patrick Osborne with HPE, and I'm Stu Miniman, thanks as always for joining theCUBE.

(upbeat instrumental music) >> Narrator: Live from San Francisco, Celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2019. (upbeat instrumental music) Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Hello and welcome back everyone. theCUBE's Live coverage here in San Francisco, California. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, VMworld 2019 coverage. Dave, 10 years of Cube coverage, Yip! we started out 10 years ago. VMworld is the last show standing. Our next guest is Todd Forsythe, CMO of Veritas. Great to see you, first time on theCUBE. Thanks Todd. It is inaugural. (John laughs) Aafter 25 years in the industry, it's crazy. With your talent, I think we're going to have a good segment here. I'm sure we will. Very entertaining. No, seriously we've known each other, we were on an advisory board together. You're a prolific marketer, you do a lot of great things. You're progressive, you try new things with startups, but also you got to run a big operation. >> Todd: That's right. MarTech stacks, you like to look at platforms. This is a re-platforming of the internet we're seeing with Cloud 2.0, and I want to get your thoughts on this, because you got a unique perspective at Veritas, you know, an older brand modernized in real time. That's right. New products refresh in a massively changing growth, still growth market. It's a data business. Absolutely. That's right, a 100%. So what's your take on this? As you look at the landscape, you've got the modern brand, you got to take it out there, new products. You know it's interesting, I had a really fascinating conversation yesterday with a customer, and the customer said, "You know, I was walking through the expo hall, "and I saw Amazon, I saw Microsoft, "I saw IBM, I saw Dell Technologies, "I saw Kubernetes, I saw Pure, I saw Nutanix, "I thought I was in my own data center." And it's interesting, I think about our business, and in our business, data doesn't care. Like you know data doesn't care if you're running a modern architecture. Data doesn't care if you're running Legacy. So what we're really focused on is helping companies manage data in highly complex, and extremely demanding environments regardless of their infrastructure. And Cloud 2.0 speaks to the complexity of that, because you know, these, and we were talking earlier with VMware about these categories that used to exist, these Gartner Magic Quadrants. You know, you can't put something that's not a silo in a silo, you're horizontally disrupting. And data does that, data has to move around and it's got to move everywhere. So there's no more silo boxes of categories. A 100% agree, you know it's interesting, we launched Enterprise Data Services earlier this year, and that was the precise reason why, because we've relooked at what data protection is. Data protection is no longer backing up your data from a cloud to a cloud from your on Prime, it's a much broader category. It covers how your data becomes available, how resilient you are, understanding where your data is, how it's categorized so you can respond to ransomware attacks, manage regulations around the world. So our view of data protection is a platform that is horizontal and cuts across. Well you guys, I mean the heritage of Veritas is the original data management company, right? Yeah. With no hardware agenda, and so my question for you, Todd, is what attracted you to Veritas? Softball question, so the most amazing customers any company could possibly imagine, Global 2000, the top telecommunications companies, the top banks, top stock exchanges. Secondly a product strategy that's really zoned in, back to your point about this, a platform that cuts across all of these diverse technologies and solves problems for customers that abstracts them from the complex environments that they're in so they could focus on outcomes, and Greg has done an amazing job recruiting a top notch leadership team. So it was really great product, good leaders. Okay now, follow up is you guys, you know, number one, top anyway, right and with Gartner Magic Quadrant, everybody wants a piece of your hide, (chuckles) the whole industry is coming at you. So, what's the sort of messaging strategy to keep top spot from both outward facing and also product development? Sure, sure. So we look at two types of competitors. Competitors that are offering point solutions, predominately playing in the mid-market, and when you're a large financial institution, and you have a highly complex environment, you're in a multi-cloud world, and you can't afford to have a siloed backup data. So you need to understand how your data is classified, where it's stored. So if you're responding to ransomware, and that ransomware attack is targeted to a specific server, you need to know if you have PII there, or if you have cat pictures there. If you have cat pictures there, then, (chuckles). >> John: Let 'em have it. Let 'em have it, exactly. (John laughs) So our platform cuts across protection, availability, and insights, which categorizes your data. So the data gets categorized in NetBackup, extends to the analytics platform, so you know where your data is, and you could take action on your data. The hard question of the day, instead of a softball I'll give you a hard one, you got to refresh the brand of Veritas has got a lot of pros and cons. The pros are, you know, well-known, a lot of customers, I got a customer question later, but the brand is important, because you have the new modern platform products, platform and products. Yeah, yeah. You got to get the name, Veritas has old meaning. You have a lot of older customers, you have legacy customers. How are you going to go out there and refresh? Is there any new plans there? We have a ton of plans. You know, we have the product, we have the customers. The product, the platform product is amazing. We are a quiet company, so we need to be noisier in the marketplace, and we need to insert ourselves into relevant conversations that are top of mind with CEOs and CIOs, whether it's ransomware. If you look at all of the ransomware attacks, It's a huge opportunity I read like two weeks ago in the State of Texas there were 10, 15 municipalities that were attacked. At the same time. At the same time! and we have a solution that can help customers recover from ransomware, so we have to insert ourselves in those dialogues because we have a very, very specific point of view that can help customers. Well but to John's point, right? Everybody that you compete with will say, we have a solution that, you know, helps solve ransomware. So, how do you separate from the pack? Like I said, everybody's trying to take pick you off. You know, we want a piece of that install base, right? 'Cause you got to keep the install base, and you got to keep growing, right? I'll lay down the gauntlet. I would love any competitor to showcase how they can support 500 workloads, a 150 storage targets, 60 cloud providers, at enterprise scale with a high degree of reliability. Our differentiator is we can cut across these very complex, very demanding IT environments, at scale. I want to get your thoughts on the customer journey question, because I think, you know, you mentioned the customer base, we've been following what you guys do. I mean I ran, I was in Bahrain for a regional Amazon event I was covering in the Middle East, and in the exhibit was this Veritas, and they recognized, hey, there's theCUBE guy. I was like, hey, thanks for watching. But seriously, you guys are everywhere. You got huge customers, but you probably have a lot of customers that are trying to go from here to there, VMware was talking almost specifically around, you know, you got the enterprise scale world, and they want that cloud Nirvana, and then there's that missing middle in between. So, you probably have a lot of transformational stories. What is the patterns of customer profile that you see? Some of them making the journey? Some of them are having a hard time? What's the state of the mind of the customer that you guys have? Well, we are definitely seeing a hybrid, multi-cloud world as you've heard here this week. 52% Of our customers are running in a hybrid cloud environment, and we have a core relationship with their legacy infrastructure, and our customers are asking our help to extend their data protection, and their NetBackup environment into the cloud, to backup the cloud, and across new modern workloads. So our customers are pulling us into their environments to do more. And that's cloud and hybrid basically. Cloud and hybrid. Public cloud and on premises. And our customers are also realizing that they're responsible for backing up their own data in the cloud. There's this misperception in the industry that if I move to a cloud provider, the cloud provider will manage my data, when in actuality you are still responsible for your data. You know, Amazon with security has a shared responsibility model. They say, okay, we protect the EC2, the infrastructure for S3, et cetera. You're responsible for pretty much everything else. And I think that you could draft off that message. Yeah, yeah! You guys too, a couple of years ago, had a great event call Veritas Vision where everybody came in, and then you changed that. Now you sort of go to where the customers are, and I'm wondering, how's that working out? It predated you. Yeah! Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah! So I won't ask you why that decision was made, but you know, how's it working out? I mean, a company like yours, there was like four, 5,000 people there, it was a really good event. So, a great question, and a highly relevant question, because we're just about to launch our series. So, you know, having run large, large, large user conferences, and you look at distribution of your customers and, you know, you typically find that 80% of your customers are coming from the US. You look at our customer base, global international customers. We have a high percentage of customers that are outside of the U.S. So, our strategy is let's take our user conference, let's take our message, let's take our value proposition to the customer. So, we are kicking off next month an entire series around the world, Germany, Paris, Rome, Seoul, Bali, Singapore, Melbourne, our vision series, where it's our anti-user conference. We're taking content directly to our customers. Is this regional or are those cities based? How is that segment? City based. So it's like an Amazon Summit kind of thing you go to? Yeah, yep. Okay so as a follow-up. So, as a seasoned pro in this space, why either, or, why not do both? I mean there's a budget obviously is one thing, it's expensive to run these events, I get it, but. I would prefer to put more money to where the customer is at. The field, kind of. Yeah, into the fields, you know, one of the life lessons of being a marketer is go to where the customer is. Don't try to get the customer to come to you. Well, your head of sales will love that message, you're going well. (Todd laughs) So our strategy is to go where the customer is. Yeah, and that does help sales actually. So, while you're on that point, you're a very progressive marketer, for the folks that don't know you, I'll share with them that, you know, you like to try things, and you love start-ups, and you love to promote new things. The marketing stack, I've said on theCUBE, and we'd love to have you challenge us if you want, love to debate it, I said, the MarTech Stack just didn't pan out. I mean, it worked? No, no, it didn't, no! Did it work? Is it evolving? Is it siloed? Is the cloud changing the MarTech Stack? So again, pretty aggressive statement, but my point is, email marketing was great for that generation, still is. There's new organic flows, maybe I'm biased, but I'd love to get your thoughts. How is the marketing tech world evolving with cloud computing? So, I'm going to say something provocative. >> John: Okay, all right, here we go. I think the CRM industry has gotten B2B marketing wrong. What I mean by that is you look at most CRM capabilities in B2B and they're focused on an individual. They're focused on a lead, they're focused on nurturing an individual, but if you look at our customers and enterprise, individuals don't buy, buying groups, committees, and accounts buy. So where we're focused is looking at accounts, and understanding account company based behavior that shows buying intent and triggers, which then initiate our marketing. So it's not built around a lead, it's built around-- >> John: So account based marketing? Account based marketing, but account based insight and intelligence around, is there a project or buying opportunity? And you know our good friends at Manigo, that's what they do, which is AI driven, trigger-based marketing. And that's where I think the industry is going. And what's your thoughts on organic marketing, because one of the things that's hot, is we live this world with theCUBE, and we've been kind of pioneering this model where co-creating content together and pushing it out into these digital streams is an organic process. It's technically earned media and PR parlance, but we're seeing the evolution of the CMO-like action around storytelling, right? And so, like community based storytelling, it's an organic function, it's hard to control. You can't just buy it, it's got to be kind of nurtured or enabled. That's right. What's your view on that? Because this is an emerging trend we're seeing, VM were just reorganizing a whole storytelling integrated group of PR pros, that are acting like the marketing, in their marketing. Well you know, one of the most active, customer segments we have is our VOX Community, and if you think to your point about co-creation of content in collaboration, our VOX Community collaborates on solving problems that customers have, they call that-- >> John: Can you take a minute to explain, what is VOX Community to us? VOX is a community of our technical users, where they help each other share best practices and solve problems. >> Dave: A lot of how-to? A lot of how-to-- Not Vox Media. Not Vox Media, correct. Just need to make sure to get that out there. Forums, there's videos. Is this your community, or is it third-party? Veritas. Okay, Veritas. It's a Veritas community, yeah. And then to your other point, John, the marketing world has changed. We've quickly moved into a world where we now have an anonymous relationship with our customer, with email, with direct mail. Yeah, we're always driving to registration to capture a name, that world is long gone. A Facebook show that's been weaponized, so you know. Yeah, that's right. It's the data business, at the end of the day. The user experience is horrible, right? Everybody hates that, and so yeah, there are other ways now you can use data, you can infer. Yeah, that's right, exactly. You can read the tea leaves, and probably make a pretty high prediction, or highly accurate prediction. What is the most under reported trend that you think marketers should look at in terms of capabilities that are working out in the field for you? I would say the ability to leverage predicative analytics, call it AI or machine learning, understand what's happening at an account, and whether there's a buying trigger. I think accessing that information, learning from that information in terms of how should you initiate a selling motion, and then enabling the sales force with that intelligence, I think is a wide open territory. All right, we got a-- So a couple of other things. If I can? Yeah! Just to get it in. So you guys made a big platform enhancements a couple of years ago, and then a big eight dot, whatever it was, eight dot something, two, three, five. I think it was 8.2. Customer momentum, can you update us on that? Maybe even customer examples, and then I've got a partner question for you. Yeah, so I talked about the value of the platform, and we'll take Renault as an example. So Renault, a NetBackup customer, Renault wanted to make their virtualized SAP environment highly available, and they looked at a variety of different solutions, and they looked at some solutions that were homegrown and others, and they realized just extending the Veritas platform was faster time to market, 60% cost savings. So, there's a perfect example of a customer leveraging our platform play. And a couple partner questions. So, you know, we're here at VMworld, so your VMware partnership obviously pretty important, and then we're at Pure Accelerate next month, you guys are there, you got a big presence there, I know you got a tight partnership with them. That's right. Give us the partner update. Partner update, so we have very solid relationships with Amazon, Microsoft, VMware, Google, Nutanix, Pure, and that's where we're really doubling down in terms of technology integration, joint go-to-market. >> Dave: Great. And the community site is vox.veritas.com, I just was checking it out. Thank you for the plug. There's a church one, there's a religious one, not to be confused with Vox Media, so just want to make sure everyone got that URL. We think community is super important. Thanks for coming on theCUBE Excellent! and sharing your insights. Thank you gentlemen. Thank you. Todd Forsythe, CMO of Veritas. More live coverage of VMworld after this short break. (upbeat dance music)

>> Hey, welcome back. Your body, Jefe Rick here from the Cube were high atop San Francisco in the century innovation hub. It's in the middle of the Salesforce Tower. It's a beautiful facility. They think you had it. The grand opening about six months ago. We're here for the grand opening. Very cool space. I got maker studios. They've got all kinds of crazy stuff going on. But we're here today to talk about Cloud in this continuing evolution about cloud in the enterprise and hybrid cloud and multi cloud in Public Cloud and Private Cloud. And we're really excited to have a couple of guys who really helping customers make this journey, cause it's really tough to do by yourself. CEOs are super busy. There were about security and all kinds of other things, so centers, often a trusted partner. We got two of the leaders from center joining us today's Prasad Sankaran. He's the senior managing director of Intelligent Cloud infrastructure for Center Welcome and Larry Soccer, the global managing director. Intelligent cloud infrastructure offering from central gentlemen. Welcome. I love it. It intelligent cloud. What is an intelligent cloud all about? Got it in your title. It must mean something pretty significant. >> Yeah, I think First of all, thank you for having us, but yeah, absolutely. Everything's around becoming more intelligent around using more automation. And the work that, you know we delivered to our clients and cloud, as you know, is the platform to reach. All of our clients are moving. So it's all about bringing the intelligence not only into infrastructure, but also into cloud generally. And it's all driven by software, >> right? It's just funny to think where we are in this journey. We talked a little bit before we turn the cameras on and there you made an interesting comment when I said, You know, when did this cloud for the Enterprise start? And you took it back to sass based applications, which, >> you know you were sitting in the sales force builder. >> That's true. It isn't just the tallest building in >> everyone's, you know, everyone's got a lot of focus on AWS is rise, etcetera. But the real start was really getting into sass. I mean, I remember we used to do a lot of Siebel deployments for CR M, and we started to pivot to sales, for some were moving from remedy into service now. I mean, we've went through on premise collaboration, email thio 3 65 So So we've actually been at it for quite a while in the particularly the SAS world. And it's only more recently that we started to see that kind of push to the, you know, the public pass, and it's starting to cloud native development. But But this journey started, you know, it was that 78 years ago that we really started. See some scale around it. >> And I think and tell me if you agree, I think really, what? The sales forces of the world and and the service now is of the world office 3 65 kind of broke down some of those initial beers, which are all really about security and security, security, security, Always to hear where now security is actually probably an attributes and loud can brink. >> Absolutely. In fact, I mean, those barriers took years to bring down. I still saw clients where they were forcing salesforce tor service Now to put, you know, instances on prime and I think I think they finally woke up toe. You know, these guys invested ton in their security organizations. You know there's a little of that needle in the haystack. You know, if you breach a data set, you know what you're getting after. But when Europe into sales force, it's a lot harder. And so you know. So I think that security problems have certainly gone away. We still have some compliance, regulatory things, data sovereignty. But I think security and not not that it sold by any means that you know, it's always giving an ongoing problem. But I think they're getting more comfortable with their data being up in the in the public domain, right? Not public. >> And I think it also helped them with their progress towards getting cloud native. So, you know, you pick certain applications which were obviously hosted by sales force and other companies, and you did some level of custom development around it. And now I think that's paved the way for more complex applications and different workloads now going into, you know, the public cloud and the private cloud. But that's the next part of the journey, >> right? So let's back up 1/2 a step, because then, as you said, a bunch of stuff then went into public cloud, right? Everyone's putting in AWS and Google. Um, IBM has got a public how there was a lot more. They're not quite so many as there used to be, Um, but then we ran into a whole new host of issues, right, which is kind of opened up this hybrid cloud. This multi cloud world, which is you just can't put everything into a public clouds. There's certain attributes is that you need to think about and yet from the application point of view before you decide where you deploy that. So I'm just curious. If you can share now, would you guys do with clients? How should they think about applications? How should they think about what to deploy where I >> think I'll start in? The military has a lot of expertise in this area. I think you know, we have to obviously start from an application centric perspective. You go to take a look at you know where your applications have to live water. What are some of the data implications on the applications, or do you have by way of regulatory and compliance issues, or do you have to do as faras performance because certain applications have to be in a high performance environment. Certain other applications don't think a lot of these factors will. Then Dr where these applications need to recite and then what we think in today's world is really accomplish. Complex, um, situation where you have a lot of legacy. But you also have private as well as public cloud. So you approach it from an application perspective. >> Yeah. I mean, if you really take a look at Army, you look at it centers clients, and we were totally focused on up into the market Global 2000 savory. You know how clients typically have application portfolios ranging from 520,000 applications? And really, I mean, if you think about the purpose of cloud or even infrastructure for that, they're there to serve the applications. No one cares if your cloud infrastructure is not performing the absolute. So we start off with an application monetization approach and ultimately looking, you know, you know, with our tech advisory guys coming in, there are intelligent engineering service is to do the cloud native and at mod work our platforms, guys, who do you know everything from sales forward through ASAP. They should drive a strategy on how those applications gonna evolve with its 520,000 and determined hey, and usually using some, like the six orders methodology. And I'm I am I going to retire this Am I going to retain it? And, you know, I'm gonna replace it with sass. Am I gonna re factor in format? And it's ultimately that strategy that's really gonna dictate a multi and, you know, every cloud story. So it's based on the applications data, gravity issues where they gonna reside on their requirements around regulatory, the requirements for performance, etcetera. That will then dictate the cloud strategies. I'm you know, not a big fan of going in there and just doing a multi hybrid cloud strategy without a really good up front application portfolio approach, right? How we gonna modernize that >> it had. And how do you segment? That's a lot of applications. And you know, how do you know the old thing? How do you know that one by that time, how do you help them pray or size where they should be focusing on us? >> So typically what we do is work with our clients to do a full application portfolio analysis, and then we're able to then segment the applications based on, you know, important to the business and some of the factors that both of us mentioned. And once we have that, then we come up with an approach where certain sets of applications he moved to sass certain other applications you move to pass. So you know, you're basically doing the re factoring and the modernization and then certain others you know, you can just, you know, lift and shift. So it's really a combination off both modernization as well as migration. It's a combination off that, but to do that, you have to initially look at the entire set of applications and come up with that approach. >> I'm just curious where within that application assessment, um, where is cost savings? Where is, uh, this is just old. And where is opportunities to innovate faster? Because we know a lot of lot of talk really. Days has cost savings, but what the real advantages is execution speed if you can get it. If >> you could go back through four years and we had there was a lot of CEO discussions around cost savings, I'm not really have seen our clients shift. It costs never goes away, obviously right. But there's a lot greater emphasis now on business agility. You know, howto innovate faster, get getting your capabilities to market faster, to change my customer experience. So So it's really I t is really trying to step up and, you know, enabled the business toe to compete in the marketplace. We're seeing a huge shift in emphasis or focus at least starting with, you know, how'd I get better business agility outta leverage to cloud and cloud native development to get their upper service levels? Actually, we started seeing increase on Hey, you know, these applications need to work. It's actress. So So Obviously, cost still remains a factor, but we seem much more for, you know, much more emphasis on agility, you know, enabling the business on, given the right service levels of right experience to the user, little customers. Big pivot there, >> Okay. And let's get the definitions out because you know a lot of lot of conversation about public clouds, easy private clouds, easy but hybrid cloud and multi cloud and confusion about what those are. How do you guys define him? How do you help your customers think about the definition? Yes, >> I think it's a really good point. So what we're starting to see is there were a lot of different definitions out there. But I think as I talked more clients and our partners, I think we're all starting to, you know, come to ah, you know, the same kind of definition on multi cloud. It's really about using more than one cloud. But hybrid, I think, is a very important concept because hybrid is really all about the placement off the workload or where your application is going to run on. And then again, it goes to all of these points that we talked about data, gravity and performance and other things. Other factors. But it's really all about where do you place the specific look >> if you look at that, so if you think about public, I mean obviously gives us the innovation of the public providers. You look at how fast Amazon comes out with new versions of Lambda etcetera. So that's the innovations there obviously agility. You could spend up environments very quickly, which is, you know, one of the big benefits of it. The consumption, economic models. So that is the number of drivers that are pushing in the direction of public. You know, on the private side, they're still it's quite a few benefits that don't get talked about as much. Um, so you know, if you look at it, um, performance if you think the public world, you know, Although they're scaling up larger T shirts, et cetera, they're still trying to do that for a large array of applications on the private side, you can really Taylor somethingto very high performance characteristics. Whether it's you know, 30 to 64 terabyte Hana, you can get a much more focused precision environment for business. Critical workloads like that article, article rack, the Duke clusters, everything about fraud analysis. So that's a big part of it. Related to that is the data gravity that Prasad just mentioned. You know, if I've got a 64 terabyte Hana database you know, sitting in my private cloud, it may not be that convenient to go and put get that data shared up in red shift or in Google's tensorflow. So So there's some data gravity out. Networks just aren't there. The laden sea of moving that stuff around is a big issue. And then a lot of people of investments in their data centers. I mean, the other piece, that's interesting. His legacy, you know, you know, as we start to look at the world a lot, there's a ton of code still living in, You know, whether it's you, nick system, just IBM mainframes. There's a lot of business value there, and sometimes the business cases aren't aren't necessarily there toe to replace them. Right? And in world of digital, the decoupling where I can start to use micro service is we're seeing a lot of trends. We worked with one hotel to take their reservation system. You know, Rapid and Micro Service is, um, we then didn't you know, open shift couch base, front end. And now, when you go against, you know, when you go and browsing properties, you're looking at rates you actually going into distributed database cash on, you know, in using the latest cloud native technologies that could be dropped every two weeks or everything three or four days for my mobile application. And it's only when it goes, you know, when the transaction goes back, to reserve the room that it goes back there. So we're seeing a lot of power with digital decoupling, But we still need to take advantage of, you know, we've got these legacy applications. So So the data centers air really were trying to evolve them. And really, just, you know, how do we learn everything from the world of public and struck to bring those saints similar type efficiencies to the to the world of private? And really, what we're seeing is this emerging approach where I can start to take advantage of the innovation cycles. The land is that, you know, the red shifts the functions of the public world, but then maybe keep some of my more business critical regulated workloads. You know, that's the other side of the private side, right? I've got G X p compliance. If I've got hip, a data that I need to worry about GDP are there, you know, the whole set of regular two requirements. Now, over time, we do anticipate the public guys will get much better and more compliant. In fact, they made great headway already, but they're still not a number of clients are still, you know, not 100% comfortable from my client's perspective. >> Gotta meet Teresa Carlson. She'll change him, runs that AWS public sector is doing amazing things, obviously with big government contracts. But but you raise real inching point later. You almost described what I would say is really a hybrid application in this in this hotel example that you use because it's is, you know, kind of breaking the application and leveraging micro service is to do things around the core that allowed to take advantage of some this agility and hyper fast development, yet still maintain that core stuff that either doesn't need to move. Works fine, be too expensive. Drea Factor. It's a real different weight. Even think about workloads and applications into breaking those things into bits. >> And we see that pattern all over the place. I'm gonna give you the hotel Example Where? But finance, you know, look at financial service. Is retail banking so open banking a lot. All those rito applications are on the mainframe. I'm insurance claims and and you look at it the business value of replicating a lot of like the regulatory stuff, the locality stuff. It doesn't make sense to write it. There's no rule inherent business values of I can wrap it, expose it and in a micro service's architecture now D'oh cloud native front end. That's gonna give me a 360 view a customer, Change the customer experience. You know, I've got a much you know, I can still get that agility. The innovation cycles by public. Bye bye. Wrapping my legacy environment >> and percent you raided, jump in and I'll give you something to react to, Which is which is the single planet glass right now? How do I How did I manage all this stuff now? Not only do I have distributed infrastructure now, I've got distributed applications in the and the thing that you just described and everyone wants to be that single pane of glass. Everybody wants to be the app that's upon everybody. Screen. How are you seeing people deal with the management complexity of these kind of distributed infrastructures? If you >> will Yeah, I think that that's that's an area that's, ah, actually very topical these days because, you know, you're starting to see more and more workers go to private cloud. And so you've got a hybrid infrastructure you're starting to see move movement from just using the EMS to, you know, cantinas and Cuba needs. And, you know, we talked about Serval s and so on. So all of our clients are looking for a way, and you have different types of users as well. Yeah, developers. You have data scientists. You have, you know, operators and so on. So they're all looking for that control plane that allows them access and a view toe everything that is out there that is being used in the enterprise. And that's where I think you know, a company like Accenture were able to use the best of breed toe provide that visibility to our clients, >> right? Yeah. I mean, you hit the nail on the head. It's becoming, you know, with all the promises, cloud and all the power. And these new architectures is becoming much more dynamic, ephemeral, with containers and kubernetes with service computing that that that one application for the hotel, they're actually started in. They've got some, actually, now running a native us of their containers and looking at surveillance. So you're gonna even a single application can span that. And one of things we've seen is is first, you know, a lot of our clients used to look at, you know, application management, you know, different from their their infrastructure. And the lines are now getting very blurry. You need to have very tight alignment. You take that single application, if any my public side goes down or my mid tier with my you know, you know, open shipped on VM, where it goes down on my back and mainframe goes down. Or the networks that connected to go down the devices that talk to it. It's a very well. Despite the power, it's a very complex environment. So what we've been doing is first we've been looking at, you know, how do we get better synergy across what we you know, Application Service's teams that do that Application manager, an optimization cloud infrastructure. How do we get better alignment that are embedded security, You know, how do you know what are managed to security service is bringing those together. And then what we did was we looked at, you know, we got very aggressive with cloud for a strategy and, you know, how do we manage the world of public? But when looking at the public providers of hyper scale, er's and how they hit Incredible degrees of automation. We really looked at, said and said, Hey, look, you gotta operate differently in this new world. What can we learn from how the public guys we're doing that We came up with this concept. We call it running different. You know, how do you operate differently in this new multi speed? You know, you know, hot, very hybrid world across public, private demon, legacy, environment, and start a look and say, OK, what is it that they do? You know, first they standardize, and that's one of the big challenges you know, going to almost all of our clients in this a sprawl. And you know, whether it's application sprawl, its infrastructure, sprawl >> and my business is so unique. The Larry no business out there has the same process that way. So >> we started make you know how to be standardized like center hybrid cloud solution important with hp envy And where we how do we that was an example of so we can get to you because you can't automate unless you standardise. So that was the first thing you know, standardizing our service catalog. Standardizing that, um you know, the next thing is the operating model. They obviously operate differently. So we've been putting a lot of time and energy and what I call a cloud and agile operating model. And also a big part of that is truly you hear a lot about Dev ops right now. But truly putting the security and and operations into Deb said cops are bringing, you know, the development in the operations much tied together. So spending a lot of time looking at that and transforming operations re Skilling the people you know, the operators of the future aren't eyes on glass there. Developers, they're writing the data ingestion, the analytic algorithms, you know, to do predictive operations. They're riding the automation script to take work, you know, test work out right. And over time they'll be tuning the aye aye engines to really optimize environment. And then finally, has Prasad alluded to Is that the platforms that control planes? That doing that? So, you know what we've been doing is we've had a significant investments in the eccentric cloud platform, our infrastructure automation platforms, and then the application teams with it with my wizard framework, and we started to bring that together you know, it's an integrated control plane that can plug into our clients environments to really manage seamlessly, you know, and provide. You know, it's automation. Analytics. Aye, aye. Across APS, cloud infrastructure and even security. Right. And that, you know, that really is a I ops, right? I mean, that's delivering on, you know, as the industry starts toe define and really coalesce around, eh? I ops. That's what we you A ups. >> So just so I'm clear that so it's really your layer your software layer kind of management layer that that integrates all these different systems and provides kind of a unified view. Control? Aye, aye. Reporting et cetera. Right? >> Exactly. Then can plug in and integrate, you know, third party tools to do straight functions. >> I'm just I'm just curious is one of the themes that we here out in the press right now is this is this kind of pull back of public cloud app, something we're coming back. Or maybe it was, you know, kind of a rush. Maybe a little bit too aggressively. What are some of the reasons why people are pulling stuff back out of public clouds that just with the wrong. It was just the wrong application. The costs were not what we anticipated to be. We find it, you know, what are some of the reasons that you see after coming back in house? Yeah, I think it's >> a variety of factors. I mean, it's certainly cost, I think is one. So as there are multiple private options and you know, we don't talk about this, but the hyper skills themselves are coming out with their own different private options like an tars and out pulls an actor stack and on. And Ali Baba has obsessed I and so on. So you see a proliferation of that, then you see many more options around around private cloud. So I think the cost is certainly a factor. The second is I think data gravity is, I think, a very important point because as you're starting to see how different applications have to work together, then that becomes a very important point. The third is just about compliance, and, you know, the regulatory environment. As we look across the globe, even outside the U. S. We look at Europe and other parts of Asia as clients and moving more to the cloud. You know that becomes an important factor. So as you start to balance these things, I think you have to take a very application centric view. You see some of those some some maps moving back, and and I think that's the part of the hybrid world is that you know, you can have a nap running on the private cloud and then tomorrow you can move this. Since it's been containerized to run on public and it's, you know, it's all managed. That >> left E. I mean, cost is a big factor if you actually look at it. Most of our clients, you know, they typically you were a big cap ex businesses, and all of a sudden they're using this consumption, you know, consumption model. And they went, really, they didn't have a function to go and look at be thousands or millions of lines of it, right? You know, as your statement Exactly. I think they misjudged, you know, some of the scale on Do you know e? I mean, that's one of the reasons we started. It's got to be an application led, you know, modernization, that really that will dictate that. And I think In many cases, people didn't. May not have thought Through which application. What data? There The data, gravity data. Gravity's a conversation I'm having just by with every client right now. And if I've got a 64 terabyte Hana and that's the core, my crown jewels that data, you know, how do I get that to tensorflow? How'd I get that? >> Right? But if Andy was here, though, and he would say we'll send down the stove, the snow came from which virgin snow plows? Snowball Snowball. Well, they're snowballs. But I have seen the whole truck killer that comes out and he'd say, Take that and stick it in the cloud. Because if you've got that data in a single source right now, you can apply multitude of applications across that thing. So they, you know, they're pushing. Get that date end in this single source. Of course. Then to move it, change it. You know, you run into all these micro lines of billing statement, take >> the hotel. I mean, their data stolen the mainframe, so if they anyone need to expose it, Yeah, they have a database cash, and they move it out, You know, particulars of data sets get larger, it becomes, you know, the data. Gravity becomes a big issue because no matter how much you know, while Moore's Law might be might have elongated from 18 to 24 months, the network will always be the bottle Mac. So ultimately, we're seeing, you know, a CZ. We proliferate more and more data, all data sets get bigger and better. The network becomes more of a bottleneck. And that's a It's a lot of times you gotta look at your applications. They have. I've got some legacy database I need to get Thio. I need this to be approximately somewhere where I don't have, you know, high bandwith. Oh, all right. Or, you know, highlight and see type. Also, egress costs a pretty big deals. My date is up in the cloud, and I'm gonna get charged for pulling it off. You know, that's being a big issue, >> you know, it's funny, I think, and I think a lot of the the issue, obviously complexity building. It's a totally from building model, but I think to a lot of people will put stuff in a public cloud and then operated as if they bought it and they're running in the data center in this kind of this. Turn it on, Turn it off when you need it. Everyone turns. Everyone loves to talk about the example turning it on when you need it. But nobody ever talks about turning it off when you don't. But it kind of close on our conversation. I won't talk about a I and applied a Iot because he has a lot of talk in the market place. But, hey, I'm machine learning. But as you guys know pride better than anybody, it's the application of a I and specific applications, which really on unlocks the value. And as we're sitting here talking about this complexity, I can't help but think that, you know, applied a I in a management layer like your run differently, set up to actually know when to turn things on, when to turn things off when you moved in but not moved, it's gonna have to be machines running that right cause the data sets and the complexity of these systems is going to be just overwhelming. >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Completely agree with you. In fact, attack sensual. We actually refer to this whole area as applied intelligence on That's our guy, right? And it is absolutely to add more and more automation move everything Maur toe where it's being run by the machine rather than you know, having people really working on these things >> yet, e I mean, if you think you hit the nail on the head, we're gonna a eyes e. I mean, given how things getting complex, more ephemeral, you think about kubernetes et cetera. We're gonna have to leverage a humans or not to be able to get, you know, manage this. The environments comported right. What's interesting way we've used quite effectively for quite some time. But it's good at some stuff, not good at others. So we find it's very good at, like, ticket triage, like ticket triage, chicken rounding et cetera. You know, any time we take over account, we tune our AI ai engines. We have ticket advisers, etcetera. That's what probably got the most, you know, most bang for the buck. We tried in the network space, less success to start even with, you know, commercial products that were out there. I think where a I ultimately bails us out of this is if you look at the problem. You know, a lot of times we talked about optimizing around cost, but then performance. I mean, and it's they they're somewhat, you know, you gotta weigh him off each other. So you've got a very multi dimensional problem on howto I optimize my workloads, particularly. I gotta kubernetes cluster and something on Amazon, you know, sums running on my private cloud, etcetera. So we're gonna get some very complex environment. And the only way you're gonna be ableto optimize across multi dimensions that cost performance service levels, you know, And then multiple options don't do it public private, You know, what's my network costs etcetera. Isn't a I engine tuning that ai ai engines? So ultimately, I mean, you heard me earlier on the operators. I think you know, they write the analytic albums, they do the automation scripts, but they're the ultimate one too. Then tune the aye aye engines that will manage our environment. And I think it kubernetes will be interesting because it becomes a link to the control plane optimize workload placement. You know, between >> when the best thing to you, then you have dynamic optimization. Could you might be optimizing eggs at us right now. But you might be optimizing for output the next day. So exists really a you know, kind of Ah, never ending when you got me. They got to see them >> together with you and multi dimension. Optimization is very difficult. So I mean, you know, humans can't get their head around. Machines can, but they need to be trained. >> Well, Prasad, Larry, Lots of great opportunities for for centuries bring that expertise to the tables. So thanks for taking a few minutes to walk through some of these things. Our pleasure. Thank you, Grace. Besides Larry, I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube. We are high above San Francisco in the Salesforce Tower, Theis Center, Innovation hub in San Francisco. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.