>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusets, it's the Cube! Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> We're back with Rob Emsley, who's the Director of Product Marketing for Dell EMC Data Protection Division. Rob, good to see you. >> Oh, good to be back, Dave. >> Yeah, so we heard from Beth about some of the momentum, the pivot-to-cloud. What's fueling this from you standpoint. >> I think one of the things that most people know, is that if you're a C-I-O today, is that you have to be looking at how you're going to make use of the cloud. And data protection is one of the easiest ways of getting into, kind of your cloud journey Whether it be using the cloud as a backup target, or a backup to the cloud. Using cloud for longterm retention. And we're moving away from on premises or off premises, backup storage using the cloud for that. Using cloud for disaster recovery, standing up copies of your production environment when you need to in the case of a disaster in the cloud. Or if you've deployed applications in the cloud, backing up in the cloud. So protecting the data that that's in the cloud applications. >> That's a good point. it's actually a pretty low risk choice to use the cloud for a data product. There was an article in the wall street journal the other day and they had these experts talking about how should you protect data? And a lot of them were saying, "Well, I might protect it two, three, four times." Is that kind of what they're doing in the cloud? I mean, I can say it's a safe bet, right? >> Yeah, it is. I think the idea of using the cloud for longterm retention, I mean, so many customers, they use their backups as an archive of the history of their production systems. And one of the things though is that architecture in that situation does actually matter. So one of the things that we've been able to do is we've been able to take our on premise appliance technology that we've had in the market for many years with date domain. And our power protect DD. I've been able to take that technology, put it into a software defined architecture and deploy it in AWS, Azure, GCP. So that really allows us to bring the duplication into cloud economics. So people always say, "Oh, cloud is cheap." But you still get a bill every month. So if we can reduce the size of that bill, customers say, "Oh, that's an actually good architecture to use." So that's a big benefit. >> Yeah. And they can put that money elsewhere. So is that really how customers are enabling all these various use cases that you're talking about? >> Certainly from a longterm retention to the cloud perspective, the ability to tear to the cloud from on premises appliances, whether it be a target appliances with power protect DD or integrated appliances, letting the integrate data protection appliance or the power protect X 400. So a very easy use of the cloud as a target. So after 14 days of on premise retention, you move that data off into the public cloud. >> So let's talk about purpose-built backup appliances that was a booming market. Data domain kind of took off, got the lead. EMC obviously acquired them. Now it's Dell EMC and it's a critical part of your portfolio. Can you give us the update on what's happening in that space? >> Yeah, so still it's a big market. I think in 2019 it probably was a $3 billion market. Rough and tough. We're still very fortunate that the customers still vote with their hardened budgets to choose Dell EMC purpose-built backup appliances to put into their on premise locations to store their backups. Certainly the market is divided between two types. One is target appliances and the other is integrated on the target appliance side. We've been lucky enough to, with the acquisition of data domain and now with the new Power protect DD appliances, we already maintain a really significant market share position with those The target clients is very useful, they can be used with our software, they can be used with third party software. It's kind of a, we need a default solution for target based appliances comes from Dell EMC. But what's changed is integrated appliances have become sort of much more interesting to customers as they start thinking about what they do next with their backup software. The form factor that they like to use is an integrated appliance, >> But you still got two integrated appliances. How should customers think about those in terms of strategic fit? >> Yeah, so we introduced our first integrated appliance by combining our data in the main technology with our backup software. And we introduced the integrated data protection appliance into the market in 2017. So think of that as our scale up architecture, bringing our backup software together with our D duplication storage highly integrated with the client, the cloud's hearing, cloud AR. and that's been a very fast growing part of our portfolio. In fact, through the first three quarters of last year as trapped by IDC, we actually grew that business by over 157%. So in a very, very good way of consuming backup software and appliances. But as you mentioned, last year was a big year for us because we introduced our first scale out appliance with the power protect X 400. So not only was it our first scale out, we offered it in both a hybrid form factor, but also an all flash form factor. So that was something that really, really leans into sort of our next generation of appliances. We started using something called multidimensional appliance portfolio scale up, scale out, hybrid or flash, integrated or target. So it's really the focus of giving customers a choice of how they actually consume data protection for us. >> we've talked in the cube a lot about these data protection market, how it's evolving, extending into data management. We talked today about cloud. I want to ask you as somebody who's been in the industry, you've seen a lot of different approaches. I was commenting recently on the amazing transformation of Dell, Dell technologies, from largely a PC company with an enterprise business that was, you know, okay. But not nearly as what it is today, what amazing transformation, 90 plus billion dollar company. You left when it was EMC and now you've come back in Dell technologies, there's been a really a much greater emphasis on speed agility of the AC cloud. How do you see the culture generally and in specifically within the data protection division? >> Yeah, good question. I think that one of the biggest changes for me is the increase in time to market being so important the ability to rapidly evolve your solutions to meet market requirements. One of the things that the data protection division has done is they've truly embraced agile at scale product development. So if you think about our power protect portfolio, specifically the X 400 appliance and the power protect data manager software that powers it is that's on a three month release cadence. So that gives us the ability to rapidly provide net new functionality to our customers. That in the days of our older products is that even though those have also evolved to a more regular release cadence, that used to be the time between releases was often measured in a year to 18 months. And that's completely different now since I've come back. So that really gives a marketeer the ability to really lean into communicate into the market on a much more regular basis. Having a more of a continuous theme to deliver. So if you think about our theme for this year, cloud data protection is really the focus of what we're talking to the market about and VM-ware and cyber recovery is on how those relate to our client deck protection theme is really what we'll be using to communicate and then be supported by these regular releases into the market. >> Well, the focus on acceleration, cultural agility it's key. You guys are a leader. Everybody wants a piece of you, you're hired, you're not just going to let them take it. So you need that type of discipline to really continue to drive innovation in the marketplace. Rob, thanks so much for coming on The cube was great to have you. >> Thanks Dave. >> You're welcome. And thank you for watching everybody. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusets, it's theCUBE. Now here's your host Stu Miniman. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to a CUBE Conversation, here in our Boston area studio. Happy to welcome back to the program, William Toll who is the head of product marketing, at Acronis. Fresh of the Acronis Global Cyber Summit, down in Miami. Thanks so much for joining us William. >> Great. Thanks Stu, thanks for having me. >> All right, so you had your customers, your partners, you had the speakers. Miami Beach, (mumbles) lovely view down there. It's a little chillier up here in the Boston area. Why don't you bring us some of the energy and announcements that you had at the show for those who might not have caught it. >> Sure, I have to say it was and amazing event. The feedback that we've gotten from our partners, from our customers, from everyone that attended was fantastic. For a company like Acronis, we've been in business for 17 years. Providing data protection, cyber protection solutions. We really hit the ball out of the park, for our first customer event, the eco-system really came together and it was a couple days of learning and understanding the future of cyber protection. >> So William, while the term Cyber is on everyone's lip these days. You can't turn on the news without hearing about the latest security threat. Everyone's concerned about this. Maybe just give us Acronis's definition of what cyber protection is. >> Sure, cyber protection is the combination of data protection and cyber security. We believe that the world is becoming more digital, and data's becoming more valuable. It is essential that cyber protections solutions protect that data, protect it from being lost. Protect that data from being stolen. And protect that data from being manipulated. When you look at traditional data protection solutions that really don't incorporate any kind of security solutions, you're really putting that data at risk and the future is cyber protection. >> Okay so when I talk to data protection companies, all of them were talking about ransomware as one of the pieces. Ransomware, everyone has a solution, that helps that piece of it. Maybe help understand where Acronis fits. Cyber security is a broad piece. There's no silver bullet to solve security we know, it is more of a practice and everyone needs to be involved with it. What announcements were made at the show? Help us understand where Acronis fits in the overall security landscape. >> Sure, so the biggest announcement at the show was the fact that our Acronis Cyber Cloud Solution has been expanded to include Acronis Cyber Protect. And this is a suite of cyber security solutions that essentially democratizes enterprise grade security, for the SNB and beyond. If we think about vulnerability assessments and patch management and other solutions that really are inaccessible to the SNB. Our manned service provider partners and resellers are now able to take what was once isolated point solutions, and bring that together and protect that data, where the data lives. >> That's great. My background is more in the enterprise, and we've talked about things that the enterprise can do now that before you needed to be a nation state. But when you talk about bringing these solutions down to the SNB, is this the enabler of cloud, help us understand a bit more why it's so critically important for us. >> It's a very different world right? Acronis was the first data protection solution to integrate ransomware protection. Acronis was also the first solution provider that brought block chain based security solutions that authenticates files. So our customers are able to demonstrate that that file is authentic and has not been manipulated. That's not something that is front and center with the Acronis solutions, but it demonstrates our desire to really protect that data from loss, theft and manipulation. >> Okay. You were talking earlier about data, we know data is one of the most important resources for companies today. And security now is a board level discussion, so Acronis is not new to the industry. Tell us why kind of now is so important in the Acronis's history? >> Sure, just last year for example, we blocked over 400,000 ransomware attempts across the millions and millions of devices that we're protecting. When you think about data, data lives in multiple occasions now. It's getting harder and harder for organizations to protect that data. Acronis specializes in protecting data at the edge. So this is outside of the corporate data center, where it's more and more important that that data is protected, and has the same policies and requirements met for protecting that data as the systems inside the corporate data center. >> All right, William we had a bunch of big announcements at the show. Give our audience a bit of a look forward. What should we be expecting to see from Acronis and your partners as we head towards 2020. >> Sure, so another one of the big announcements we made was Acronis cyber platform. And that's the opening of our API's and our SDK's. So now Acronis is opening the possibility for developers and ISV's and our service provider partners, to integrate additional solutions, to have data protection, cyber protection. So and example would be, any of the SaaS applications or ISV's that want to imbed native cyber protection, right into their solution. Another example would be a service provider that want's to automate more and more of their cyber protections operation solutions. Now developers can come and visit developer.acronis.com. They can register on the Acronis developer network and then they can get busy with integrating additional data sources for cyber protection and even add new data destinations for that storage, data destinations for the storage of cyber protection. >> Yes, so important. I'm just off of one of the large public cloud conferences there, and in the security space that was one of the discussions, how do I API's how do I share as the different ISV's data between them so that security will be more than just a bunch of point pieces that don't work together but have the industry as a whole are trying to protect companies and their data. >> It needs to be integrated and it needs to be native. And that's what were enabling at the Acronis cyber platform. >> Right William, give you the final word for Acronis and how people should be thinking about-- >> Sure, cyber protection is the future. A recent report by one of the big industry analysts firms demonstrated the power of bringing the back up team with the cyber security team, traditionally silo's, together. Because at the end of the day, everyone's doing the same thing, and that's protecting the data. >> All right. Well William Toll, thank you so much. We know how critically important data is and everything around protecting that cyber security of course. Helping to pull everything together. As always I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE.

>> From Cambridge Massachusetts, it's The Cube covering MIT Chief Data Officer, and Information Quality Symposium 2019. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. (electronic music) >> Welcome back to MIT in Cambridge, Massachusets everybody. You're watching The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante I'm here with Paul Gillin. Day two of the of the MIT Chief Data Officer Information Quality Conference. One of the things we like to do, at these shows, we love to profile Boston area start-ups that are focused on data, and in particular we love to focus on start-ups that are founded by women. Julie Johnson is here, She's the Co-founder and CEO of Armored Things. Julie, great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> Great to see you. >> So why did you start Armored Things? >> You know, Armored Things was created around a mission to keep people safe. Early in the time where were looking at starting this company, incidents like Las Vegas happened, Parkland happened, and we realized that the world of security and operations was really stuck in the past right? It's a manual solutions generally driven by a human instinct, anecdotal evidence, and tools like Walkie-Talkies and video cameras. We knew there had to be a better way right? In the world of Data that we live in today, I would ask if either of you got in your car this morning without turning on Google Maps to see where you were going, and the best route with traffic. We want to help universities, ball parks, corporate campuses do that for people. How do we keep our people safe? By understanding how they live. >> Yeah, and stay away from Lambert Street in Cambridge by the way. >> (laughing) >> Okay so, you know in people, when they think about security they think about cyber, they think about virtual security, et cetera et cetera, but there's also the physical security aspect. Can you talk about the balance of those two? >> Yeah, and I think both are very important. We actually tend to mimic some of the revolutions that have happened on the cyber security side over the last 10 years with what we're trying to do in the world of physical security. So, folks watching this who are familiar with cyber security might understand concepts like anomaly detection, SIEM and SOAR for orchestrated response. We very much believe that similar concepts can be applied to the physical world, but the unique thing about the physical world, is that it has defined boundaries, right? People behave in accordance with their environment. So, how do we take the lessons learned in cyber security over 10 to 15 years, and apply them to that physical world? I also believe that physical and cyber security are converging. So, are there things that we know in the physical world because of how we approach the problem? That can be a leading indicator of a threat in either the physical world or the digital world. What many people don't understand is that for some of these cyber security hacks, the first weak link is physical access to your network, to your data, to your systems. How do we actually help you get an eye on that, so you already have some context when you notice it in the digital realm. >> So, go back to the two examples you sited earlier, the two shooting examples. Could those have been prevented or mitigated in some way using the type of technology you're building? >> Yeah, I hate to say that you could ever prevent an incident like that. Everyone wants us to do better. Our goal is to get a better sense predicatively of the leading indicators that tell you you have a problem. So, because we're fundamentally looking at patterns of people and flow, I want to know when a normal random environment starts to disperse in a certain way, or if I have a bottle neck in my environment. Because if then I have that type of incident occur, I already know where my hotspots are, where my pockets of risk are. So, I can address it that much more efficiently from a response perspective. >> So if people are moving quickly away from a venue, it might be and indication that there's something wrong- >> It could be, Yeah. That demands attention. >> Yeah, when you go to a baseball game, or when you go to work I would imagine that you generally have a certain pattern of behavior. People know conceptually what those patterns are. But, we're the first effort to bring them data to prove what those patterns are so that they can actually use that data to consistently re-examine their operations, re-examine their security from a staffing perspective, from a management perspective, to make sure that they're using all the data that's at their disposal. >> Seems like there would be many other applications beyond security of this type of analysis. Are you committed to the security space, or do you have broader ambitions? >> Are we committed to the security space is a hundred percent. I would say the number one reason why people join our team, and the number one reason why people call us to be customers is for security. There's a better way to do things. We fundamentally believe that every ball park, every university, every corporate campus, needs a better way. I think what we've seen though is exactly what you're saying. As we built our software, for security in these venues, and started with an understanding of people and flow, there's a lot that falls out of that right? How do I open gates that are more effective based on patterns of entry and exit. How do I make sure that my staffing's appropriate for the number of people I have in my environment. There's lots of other contextual information that can ultimately drive a bottom line or top line revenue. So, you take a pro sports venue for example. If we know that on a 10 degree colder day people tend to eagres more early in the game, how do we adjust our food and beverage strategy to save money on hourly workers, so that we're not over staffing in a period of time that doesn't need those resources. >> She's talking about the physical and the logical security worlds coming together, and security of course has always been about data, but 10 years ago it was staring at logs increasing the machines are helping us do that, and software is helping us do that. So can you add some color to at least the trends in the market generally, and then maybe specifically what you're doing bringing machine intelligence to the data to make us more secure. >> Sure, and I hate to break it to you, but logs are still a pretty big part of what people are watching on a daily basis, as are video cameras. We've seen a lot of great technology evolve in the video management system realm. Very advanced technology great at object recognition and detecting certain behaviors with a video only solution, right? How do we help pinpoint certain behaviors on a specific frame or specific camera. The only problem with that is, if you have people watching those cameras, you're still relying on humans in the loop to catch a malicious behavior, to respond in the event that they're notified about something unusual. That still becomes a manual process. What we do, is we use data to watch not only cameras, but we are watching your cameras, your Wi-Fi, access control. Contextual data from public transit, or weather. How do we get this greater understanding of your environment that helps us watch everything so that we can surface the things that you want the humans in the loop to pay attention to, right? So, we're not trying to remove the human, we're trying to help them focus their time and make decisions that are backed by data in the most efficient way possible. >> How about the concerns about The Surveillance Society? In some countries, it's just taken for granted now that you're on camera all the time. In the US that's a little bit more controversial. Is what your doing, do you have to be sensitive to that in designing the tools you're building? >> Yeah, and I think to Dave's question, there are solutions like facial recognition which are very much working on identifying the individual. We have a philosophy as a company, that security doesn't necessarily start with the individual, it starts with the aggregate. How do we understand at an aggregate macro level, the patterns in an environment. Which means I don't have to identify Paul, or I don't have to identify Dave. I want to look for what's usual and unusual, and use that as the basis of my response. There's certain instances where you want to know who people are. Do I want to know who my security personnel are so I can dispatch them more efficiently? Absolutely. Let's opt those people in and allow them to share the information they need to share to be better resources for our environment. But, that's the exception not the norm. If we make the norm privacy first, I think we'll be really successful in this emerging GDPR data centric world. >> But I could see somebody down the road saying hey can you help us find this bad guy? And my kids at camp this week, This is his 7th year of camp, and this year was the first year my wife, she was able to sign up for a facial recognition thing. So, we used to have to scroll through hundreds and hundreds of pictures to see oh, there he is! And so Deb signs up for this thing, and then it pings you when your son has a picture taken. >> Yeah. And I was like, That's awesome. Oh. (laughing) >> That's great until you think about it. >> But there aren't really any clear privacy laws today. And so you guys are saying, look it, we're looking at the big picture. >> That's right. >> But that day is coming isn't it? >> There's certain environments that care more than others. If you think about universities, which is where we first started building our technology, they cared greatly about the privacy of their students. Health care is a great example. We want to make sure that we're protecting peoples personal data at a different level. Not only because that's the right thing to do, but also from a regulatory perspective. So, how do we give them the same security without compromising the privacy. >> Talk about Bottom line. You mentioned to us earlier that you just signed a contract with a sports franchise, you're actually going to help them, help save them money by deploying their resources more efficiently. How does your technology help the bottom line? >> Sure, you're average sporting venue, is getting great information at the point a ticket is scanned or a ticket is purchased, they have very little visibility beyond that into the customer journey during an event at their venue. So, if you think about again, patterns of people and flow from a security perspective, at our core we're helping them staff the right gates, or figure out where people need to be based on hot spots in their environment. But, what that also results in is an ability to drive other operational benefits. Do we have a zone that's very low utilization that we could use as maybe even a benefit to our avid fans. Send them to that area, get traffic in that area, and now give them a better concession experience because of it, right? Where they're going to end up spending more money because they're not waiting in line in the different zone. So, how do we give them a dashboard in real time, but also alerts or reports that they can use on an ongoing basis to change their decision making going forward. >> So, give us the company overview. Where are you guys at with funding, head count, all that good stuff. >> So, we raised a seed round with some great Boston and Silicon Valley investors a year ago. So, that was Glasswing is a Boston AI focused fund, has been a great partner for us, and Inovia which is Canada's largest VC fund recently opened a Silicon Valley office. We just started raising a series A about a week ago. I'm excited to say those conversation have been going really well so far. We have some potential strategic partners who we're excited about who know data better then anyone else that we think would help us accelerate our business. We also have a few folks who are very familiar with the large venue space. You know, the distributed campuses, the sporting and entertainment venues. So, we're out looking for the right partner to lead our series A round, and take our business to the next level, but where we are today with five really great branded customers, I think we'll have 20 by the end of next year, and we won't stop fighting 'till we're at every ball park, every football stadium, every convention center, school. >> The big question, at some point will you be able to eliminate security lines? (laughing) >> I don't think that's my core mission. (laughing) But, optimistically I'd love to help you. Right, I think there's some very talented people working on that challenge, so I'll defer that one to them. >> And rough head count today? >> We have 23 people. >> You're 23 people so- >> Yeah, I headquartered in Boston Post Office Square. >> Awesome, great location. So, and you say you've got five customers, so you're generating revenue? >> Yes >> Okay, good. Well, thank you for coming in The Cube >> Yeah, thank you. >> And best of luck with the series A- >> I appreciate it and going forward >> Yeah, great. >> All right, and thank you for watching. Paul Gillin and I will be back right after this short break. This is The Cube from MIT Chief Data Officer Information Quality Conference in Cambridge. We'll be right back. (electronic music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusets, it's theCUBE! (techno music) Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. >> Hi. I'm Stu Miniman and this is a Cube Conversation from our Boston area studio. Welcome back to the program. Bobby Patrick, who is the Chief Marketing Officer of UiPath. Bobby, good to see you. >> Great to be here Stu. >> Alright. Bobby, we're going to tackle head-on an interesting discussion that's been going on in the industry. Of course, Artificial Intelligence is this wave that is impacting a lot when you look at earnings reports, everyone's talking about it. Most companies are understanding how they're doing it. It is not a new term. I go back reading my history of technology, Ada Lovelace, 150 years ago when she was helping to define what a computer was. She made the Lovelace objective, I believe they said - >> Right. >> Which was later quoted by Turing and the like is that if we can describe it in code, it's probably not Artificial Intelligence cause their not building new things - >> Right. >> And being able to change on there, so there's hype around AI itself, but UiPath is one of the leaders in Robotic Process Automation and how that fits in with AI and Machine Learning, all of these other terms it can get a bit of an acronym soup and we all can't agree on what the terms are. So, let's start with some of the basics Bobby. Please give us RPA and AI and we'll get into it from there. >> Well, Robotic Process Automation, according to the analysts, like Forester are part of the overall AI broader kind of massive, massive market. AI itself has many different, different, routes. Deep learning right, and machine learning, natural language processing, right and so on. I think AI is a term that covers many different grounds. And RPA, AI applies two ways. It applies within RPA and that we have a technology called Computer Vision. It's how a robot looks at a screen like how a human does, which is very, very difficult actually. You look at a citrix terminal session, or a VDI session, different than an Excel sheet, different than as SASAB, and most processes across all of those, so a robot has to be able to look at all of, all of those screen elements, and understand them right. AI within Computer Vision around understanding documents, looking at unstructured data, looking at handwriting. Conversational understanding. Looking at text in an email determining context, helping with chatbots. But a number of those components, doesn't mean we have to build that all ourselves. What RPA does is we bring it all together. We make it easy to automate and build and create the data flow of a process. Then you can apply AI to that, right. So, I think, two years ago when I first joined UiPath, putting RPA and AI in the same sentence people laughed. Year ago we said, ya know what, RPA is really the path to AI in business operations. Now, ya know we say that we're the most highly valued AI company in the world and no one has ever disagreed. >> Yeah, so it's good to lay out some of the adopting cause one of the things to look at and say if I looked at this product two or three years ago, it's not the product that it is today. We know how fast software - >> Right. Is making changes along the line. Second thing, automation itself is something we've been talking about my entire career. >> Right. When I look at things we were doing 5, 10, 15 years ago, and calling automation, we kind of laugh at it. Because today, automation absolutely is making a lot of changes. RPA is taking that automation in a very strategic direction for many companies there. It's the conversation we had last year at your conference was, RPA is the gateway drug if you will. >> Right. >> Of that environment because automation has scared a lot of people. Am I just doing scripts, what do I control, what do I set? Maybe just give us that first grounding of where that automation path is, has come and is going. >> So, there's different kinds of automation right as you said. We've had automation for decades, primarily in IT. Automation was primarily around API to API integration. And that's really hard, right. It requires developers, engineers, it requires them to keep it current. It's expensive and takes a longer time. Along comes the technology, RPA and UiPath, right were you can automate fairly quickly. There's built in recorders and you can do it with a drag and drop, like a flow chart. You can automate a process, and that, that automation is immediately beneficial. Meaning that outcome, is immediate. And, the cost to doing that is small in comparison. And I think, maybe it's the longtail of automation in some ways. It's all of these things that we do around a SAP process. The reality is if you have SAP, or you have Oracle, or you have Workday, the human processes around that involve still a Spreadsheet. It involves PDF documents. A great, one of my favorite examples right now on YouTube with Microsoft is Chevron. Chevron has hundreds of thousands of PDF's that is generated from every oil rig every day. It has all kinds of data in different formats. Tables, different structured and semi-structured data. They would actually extract that data, manually. To be able to process that and analyze that, right. Working with Microsoft AI and UiPath RPA they're able to automate that entire massive process. And now they're on stage talking about it, Microsoft and UiPath events right. And, they call that AI. That's applying AI to a massive problem for them. They need the robot to be completely accurate though. You don't to worry that the data that is being extracted from the PDF's is inaccurate, right. So, Machine Learning goes into that. There's exception management that's a part of that process as well. They call it AI. >> Yeah, some of this is just, people in the industry, the industry watchers is, we get very particular on different terminology. Let's not conflate Artificial Intelligence, or Augmented Intelligence with Machine Learning, because their different environments. I've heard Forester talk about, right, it's a spectrum though, there's an umbrella for some of these. So, we like to get not too pedantic on individual terms itself. >> Right. >> Um - >> Let me give you more examples. I think the term robotic and RPA, yes, it's true that the vast majority of the last couple of years with RPA have been very rules based, right. Because most processes today like in a call center, there's a rule. Do this and this, then this and this. And so, you're automating that same rules based structure. But once that data's flowing through, you can actually then look at the history of that data and then turn a rules based automation into an experience based automation. And how do you do that? You apply Machine Learning algorithms. You apply Data Robot, LMAI, IBM Watson to it, right. But, it's still the RPA platform that is driving that automation, it's just no longer rules based it's experience based. A great example at UiPath Together Dubai recently, was Dubai customs. They had a process where when you declared something, let's say you box of chocolate, they had to open up a binder and find a classification code for that box of chocolate. Well, they use our RPA product and they make a call out to IBM Watson as a part of the automation, and they just write in, pink box of candy filled chocolate. And it takes its Deep Learning, it comes back with a classification code, all part of an automated process. What happens? Dubai customs lines go from being a two hours to a few minutes, right. It's a combination of our RPA capability and our automation board capability and the ability to bring in IBM Watson. Dubai customs says they applied AI now and solved a big problem. >> One of the things I was reading through the recent Gartner Magic Quadrant on RPA, and they had two classifications. One was, kind of the automation does it all, and the other was the people and machines. Things like chatbox, some of the examples you've been giving there seem to be that combination. Where do those two fit together or are those distinctions that you make? >> Yeah, I mean Gartner's interesting. Gartner's a very IT-centric analyst firm, right and IT often in my view are often very conventional thinkers and not the fastest to adopt breakthrough technologies. They weren't the fastest to adopt Cloud, they weren't the fastest to adopt on-demand CRM, and they weren't the fastest to jump onto RPA because they believe, why can't we use API for everything. And the Gartner analysts is kind of, in the beginning of the process of the Magic Quadrant, they spent a lot of time with us and they were trying hard to say that was, you should solve everything with an API. That's just not reality, right? It's not feasible, and it's not affordable, right? But, RPA is just not the automation of a task or process, it's then applying a whole other set of other technologies. We have 700 partners today in our ecosystem. Natural Language processing partners, right. Machine learning partners. Chatbox partners, you mentioned. So we want to be, we want to make it very easy. In a drag and drop way. To be able to apply these great technologies to an automation to solve some big problem. What's fun to me right now is there's a lot of great startups. They come out of say insurance, or they come out of financial services and they've got a great algorithm and they know the business really well. And they probably have one or two amazing customers, and they're stuck. We, for them, this came from a partner of ours, you're becoming, you UiPath, you're becoming our best route to market because you have the data. You have the work flow. Our job I think in some ways, is to make it easy to bring these technologies together to apply them to an automation to make that through a democratized way where a non-engineer can do this, and I think that's what's happening. >> Yeah, those integrations between environments can be very powerful something we see. Every shop has lots of applications, has lots of technical data and they're not just sweeping the floor of everything they have. What are some of the limits of AI and RPA today, what do you see things going? >> I think, Deep Learning we see very little of that. It's probably applied to some kind of science project and things within companies. I think for the vast majority of our customers, they use machine learning within RPA for Computer Vision by default. But, ya know they're still not really at a stage of mass adoption of what algorithms do I want to apply to a process. I think we're trying to make it easier for you to be able to drag and drop AI we call it, to make it easier to apply. But, I think we're in very early days. And as you mentioned, there's market confusion on it. I know one thing from our 90 plus customers that are in our advisory boards. I know from them they say their companies struggles with finding an ROI in AI, and, you know, I think we're helping there cause we're applying to real operations. They say the same thing about Blockchain. I don't know Stu. Do you know of a single example of a Blockchain ROI, great example? >> Yeah, it reminds me, Big Data was one of those, over half of the people failed to get the ROI they want. It's one of those promises of certain technology - >> Right. >> That high-level, you know let's poo-poo Bobby things that actually have tangible results - >> Yeah. >> And get things done. But you weren't following the strict guidelines of the API economy. >> Right, well true, exactly right. What I find amazing is, I mentioned in another one of our talks conversations that 23,000 have come to UiPath events this year. To our own events, not trade events and other shows, that's different. They want to get on stage and talk. They're delighted about this. And their talking about, generally speaking, RPA's helping them go digital. But they're all saying their ambition is to apply AI to make those processes smarter. To learn from - to go from rules based to experience based. I think what's beautiful about UiPath, is that we're a platform that you can get there overtime. You can apply - you can predict perhaps the algorithm 's you're going to want to use in two or three years. We're not going to force you, you can apply any algorithm you want to an automation work going through. I think that flexibility is actually for customers, they find it very comforting. >> It's one of those things I say, most companies have a cloud strategy. That needs to be written in, not etched in stone. You need to revisit it every quarter. Same thing with what happening AI and in your space things are changing so fast and they need to be agile. >> That's right. >> They need to be able to make changes. In October, you're going to have a lot of those customers up on stage talking. Where will this AI discussion fit into UiPath forward in Las Vegas. We talk a lot about our AI fabric, framework it's around document understanding, getting heavy robots getting smarter and smarter, what they see on the screen, what they see on a document, what they see with handwriting, and improving the accuracy of visual understanding. Looking at the, face recognition and other types of images and being able to understand the images. Conversational understanding. The tone of an email. Is this person really upset? How upset? Or, a conversational chatbot. Really evolving from mimicking humans with RPA to augmenting humans and I think that story, both in the innovations, the customer examples on stage, I think you're going to see the sophistication of automation's that are being used through UiPath grow exponentially. >> Okay, so I want to give you the final word on this. And I don't want to talk to the people that might poo-poo or argue RPA and AI and ML and all these things. Bring us inside your customers. What...where, how does that conversation start? Are they coming it from AI, ML, RPA or is there, ya know a business discussion that usually catalyzes this engagement? >> Our customer's are starting with digital. They're trying to go digital. They know they need digital transformation, it's been very, very hard. There's a real outcome that comes quickly from taking a mundane task that is expensive, and automating that. The outcomes are quick, often projects that involve our partners like Accenture and others. The payback period on the entire project with RPA can be 6 months, it's self-funding. What other technologies doing B2B is self-funding in one year? That's part of the incredible adoption birth. But, every single customer doesn't stop there. They say okay, I also want to know that this automation is, I want to know that I can go apply AI to this. It's in every conversation. So there's two big booms with UiPath and our RPA. The first is when you go digital, there's some great outcome. There's productivity gain, it's immediate, right. I guess I said the payback period is quick. The second big one is when you go and turn it from a rules based to an experience based process, or you apply AI to it, there's another set of business benefits down the road. As more algorithms come out and things, you keep applying to it. This is sort of the gift that keeps on giving. I think if we didn't have that connection to Machine Learning or AI, I think the enthusiasm level of the majority of our customers would not be anywhere near what it is today. >> Alright, well Bobby really appreciate digging into the customerality, RPA, AI all the acronym soup that was going on and we look forward to UiPath Forward at the Bellagio in Las Vegas this October. >> It'll be fun. Alright, I'm Stu Miniman, as always thank you so much for watching theCube.

>> From Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE. Covering WTG Transform 2019 brought to you by Winslow Technology Group. >> Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman, and we're at WTG Transform 2019 here in Boston, Massachusets. Happen to welcome back to the program the CTO of Winslow Technology Group. Rick Gouin spoke to the customers this morning, threw in a bunch of data points, got us all thinking about where we are today and where we're going tomorrow in the cloud. Rick, thanks so much for joining us >> Hey, thanks for having me. >> All right, so rick, you and I, we've known each other for a few years now, we have these great debates as to kind of where we are and where we're going. I attended a Nutanix event a couple years ago, and Nassim Taleb, who is the author of a number of books including Black Swan and Antifragile, he worked on Wall Street and he said look, we all try to make these predictions, but we think it's going to be a line, or maybe they'll be slow adoption, but the black swan that he said is something, just the quick thing is you've never seen a black swan, you'd think that all swans are white, and once you've seen a black swan, you're like, oh my god, everything that I thought I knew I have to think any questions. Predicting the future, especially in a never changing world where we don't have all the facts and when we can't predict, is really challenging. So understanding whether cloud will take 80% of the market or 30% in the next five years is a little bit of a complex thing. It's like trying to predict the weather here in New England where we're watching the clouds and the rain roll in and roll out. Start with us as to Winslow Technology, your customers, where they are with cloud, and how that conversation goes with them today. >> Yeah, so I think you make a great point about these statistics, these assertions, these predictions. We're getting bombarded with them without context, and I think that it leaves a lot of our customers feeling like they're behind the curve a little bit because have bandy about the, you'll hear 80% of cloud, of companies have a cloud strategy, and there's never the follow up to see did it change two weeks later, was it actually implemented. And so, I think what we can all agree on is that one, all of these technologies are going to continue to grow. Their adoption is going to continue to grow. We're going to continue to figure out different ways to extract value from those services, but the other part of this, and I think it's really where Winslow fits in, is that we want to help our customers position themselves to take advantage of that. So I want to help our customers transform what they're doing today. If we look out at that three, at that five year mark, we know that we're going to have a lot of workloads out there. I don't know what the percentage is going to be, I'm not going to throw a fake number out there, but we know that it's going to be bigger than the one today. And we also, I would assert, that there are things we can help you do in your on-prem environment today that will help you make you better prepared for that transition and allow you to attack that, hopefully, in a more strategic and well considered way. >> Yeah, absolutely. Well rick, I am very sure 87% of all statistics lie, and beyond that, I would poke and prod at any numbers that I see there because look, numbers are numbers, and as you said, things do change all the time. >> Context. >> When I look at some of the tailwinds that have been driving your business the last few years, hyper convergent infrastructure, some of the services wrapping around, help customers with their security journey, with their cloud journey. You've got a number of partners that are there. The bombardment that your customers get, it doesn't stop. If they open up, they open up the news today, it's like oh, AWS just unleased their latest on outpost, and VMware is partnering with all the clouds, and therefore you better be ready for it. The thing I'll poke a little bit at, I don't mind that customers think they're a little bit far behind because what they need to be doing is being that change mindset because the worse thing they can do is just say, well, I've got it the way I want it and I'm not going to change. And I think that that's something you would agree with and that Winslow's helping them to try to keep up because nobody can keep up by themselves, so they've got to be able to turn to partners like yourself to keep up. >> Yeah. I think one of the think one of the things that was telling that I touched on earlier today a little bit was the number three reason that we heard from our customers for why they weren't leveraging the public cloud was because they didn't know how. And I think that that's telling, I think that sort of response to the whole notion that they're feeling behind the curve, but I also feel like you mentioned hyper converged, you mentioned some of these other partners we work with. These guys all have some great stories that will allow our customers to take a first step. What we're not talking about is saying hey, customers, you've got to re-platform everything. You've got to re-write everything to leverage all these different cloud services and cloud platform. That's a big lift for a lot of our customers, but what might not be such a huge lift is leveraging some of those cloud services, cloud connectivity capabilities that are built into those platforms from those partners like Nutanix, like VMware, like Dell EMC. >> So rick, I really liked your line that most customers, many customers end up hybrid by accident. And unfortunately, I think that's where we are when you go talk to them, they might not understand hybrid cloud, multi cloud, they're just like oh, that's vendor terminology, but do you have SAS? Oh, absolutely, they've all got O365 and Salesforce, and a whole host of other ones. Three which probably IPO today. And are they using a public cloud? They definitely are. Most of them at least understand they're using it as opposed to five years ago it was like oh, wait, we actually checked all the IPs and we had three groups that we didn't realize that were doing the old stealth IT. So what is the advice, how do we make sure we get everybody talking in, what are some steps to move forward on that strategy to actually have a coherent cloud offering, not just the pieces that I put together because that's what different groups did. >> Sure, yeah. I think the hybrid by accident scenario is one that we're seeing more and more often from our customers and also just from other folks in the industry. And I guess just to kind of expand on that a little bit, what we're talking about there is when somebody that we're working with perhaps goes into a project, goes into a cycle with the notion that they're going to be all of one or all of the other. I'm going to put everything in the cloud or I'm going to put nothing in the cloud. And what happens is you find a workload that doesn't fit where your whatever your direction is. And so all of a sudden, if you're one of those people who say oh the cloud is just somebody else's computer. Next thing you know, you're on O365, next thing you know you're consuming Dropbox or who knows what. You've got all of these different public services and you have no integration between your on-prem environment and all these public services you're leveraging. And so, you find yourself in a scenario where you're in a hybrid by accident, and which means that you didn't build in the sort of management that would be able to consider these different silos of information. And so, what we kind of advocate is that when you're approaching these strategic decisions, recognize upfront that you may very well end up in hybrid scenario, at least in the next few years this is probably what it's going to look like, at least that's what I think. Recognize that upfront and build that into your plan. If you plan to end up in a hybrid end state, you're whole environment is going to be such much more cohesive, you're going to have that app mobility, you're going to have so much more flexibility than if you end up there by accident by moving half your workloads out, lift and shifting some things over here, some stuff gets left behind, different groups are managing different things 'cause they're different skillsets. If you plan to be in that state at the end, you're going to be in much better shape, but you're also going to be well positioned to continue to move things out as those services become more robust and as you can extract more value from those for your business. >> I think if you've looked at the history of IT, it's very rare that we get one thing to rule them all. >> Right. >> And it's like, well, Ethernet's done a good job at networking, and the mainframe had it's time there, but at the end of the day, five years from now, it might just be all my solutions are cloud, but it's just, as you said, that location matters a little bit less because by the way, it's not just public and private, that edge computing thing is a huge draw that most companies I talk to have some kind of IOT and censure strategy that they're picking out. How can users be data driven to get to the right things in the right place and really make smart decisions? >> Yeah. So I think that there's two facets here to being able to make data driven decisions. The first is that you have to collect the data. We have to put in the diligence, so certainly, that's one of the places that we're able to help our customers in collecting and in quantifying it, attaching dollars and cents. Here's what the services will cost, here's what the professional services, the re-platforming will cost. Let's wrap some numbers around this. If you're trying to make those decisions, if you're creating a strategy, and you haven't taken a look at what your costs are going to be, what your level of effort is going to be, that's a super incomplete strategy, and it's one of the frustrating things for me as a customer facing resource to walk into one of those situations where a customer is dead set on their strategy, but really doesn't understand it themselves. We really welcome the opportunity to help those kind of do their diligence to be able to create more informed and data drive strategies. Leveraging information from their own environments. >> All right. Rick, last thing is we know things are changing all the time. What's the last thing you want people to know about Winslow Technology 2019 that they might not have understood if they looked at the company a year or three years ago? >> Yeah, so I think that some of the big changes that have really come to us in the last couple years is we're adding technical firepower at alarming rate. Our growth is really focused on the services delivery, and the engineering talent we've brought in high end security resources, high end VMware resources. We're able to deliver those cloud connectivity capabilities from all those different products that you mentioned. We're able to deliver a fairly robust security portfolio today, not to mention, the highest level of VMware expertise that there is out there. So we put a lot of focus into the services, into professional services, into helping our customers sort of understand and make that journey, straddle that public, private, hybrid, multi sort of thing. And we think that services is going to drive a lot of this for us going forward. And so our capabilities are growing leaps and bounds, year over year in the services and engineering talent perspective. >> All right, well, Rick Gouin, CTO of Winslow Technology. Always a pleasure to catch up. My prediction, next year I think we'll be another five to 10% in our agreement as to what the future looks like. >> I like it. >> Just because it will be today as opposed to tomorrow >> Yes. >> in the viewpoint. Be back with much more here from WTG 2019. I'm Stu Miniman. And thanks for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

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

>> From Boston, Massachusets, it's The Cube. Covering Actifio 2019: Data Driven, Brought to you by Actifio. >> Welcome back to Boston, everybody. We're here at the Intercontinental Hotel at Actifio's Data Driven conference, day one. You're watching The Cube. The leader in on-the-ground tech coverage. My name is is Dave Valante, Stu Minamin is here, so is John Ferrer, my friend Frank Gens is here, he's the Senior Vice President and Chief Analyst at IDC and Head Dot Connector. Frank, welcome to The Cube. >> Well thank you Dave. >> First time. >> First time. >> Newbie. >> Yep. >> You're going to crush it, I know. >> Be gentle. >> You know, you're awesome, I've watched you over the many years, of course, you know, you seem to get competitive, and it's like who gets the best rating? Frank always had the best ratings at the Directions conference. He's blushing but I could- >> I don't know if that's true but I'll accept it. >> I could never beat him, no matter how hard I tried. But you are a phenomenal speaker, you gave a great conversation this morning. I'm sure you drew a lot from your Directions talk, but every year you lay down this, you know, sort of, mini manifesto. You describe it as, you connect the dots, IDC, thousands of analysts. And it's your job to say okay, what does this all mean? Not in the micro, let's up-level a little bit. So, what's happening? You talked today, You know you gave your version of the wave slides. So, where are we in the waves? We are exiting the experimentation phase, and coming in to a new phase that multiplied innovation. I saw AI on there, block-chain, some other technologies. Where are we today? >> Yeah, well I think having mental models of the6 industry or any complex system is pretty important. I mean I've made a career dumbing-down a complex industry into something simple enough that I can understand, so we've done it again now with what we call the third platform. So, ten years ago seeing the whole raft of new technologies at the time were coming in that would become the foundation for the next thirty years of tech, so, that's an old story now. Cloud, mobile, social, big data, obviously IOT technologies coming in, block-chain, and so forth. So we call this general era the third platform, but we noticed a few years ago, well, we're at the threshold of kind of a major scale-up of innovation in this third platform that's very different from the last ten or twelve years, which we called the experimentation stage. Where people were using this stuff, using the cloud, using mobile, big data, to create cool things, but they were doing it in kind of a isolated way. Kind of the traditional, well I'm going to invent something and I may have a few friends help me, whereas, the promise of the cloud has been , well, if you have a lot of developers out on the cloud, that form a community, an ecosystem, think of GitHub, you know, any of the big code repositories, or the ability to have shared service as often Amazon, Cloud, or IBM, or Google, or Microsoft, the promise is there to actually bring to life what Bill Joy said, you know, in the nineties. Which was no matter how smart you are, most of the smart people in the world work for someone else. So the questions always been, well, how do I tap into all those other smart people who don't work for me? So we can feel that where we are in the industry right now is the business model of multiplied innovation or if you prefer, a network of collaborative innovation, being able to build something interesting quickly, using a lot of innovation from other people, and then adding your special sauce. But that's going to take the scale of innovation just up a couple of orders of magnitude. And the pace, of course, that goes with that, is people are innovating much more rapid clip now. So really, the full promise of a cloud-native innovation model, so we kind of feel like we're right here, which means there's lots of big changes around the technologies, around kind of the world of developers and apps, AI is changing, and of course, the industry structure itself. You know the power positions, you know, a lot of vendors have spent a lot of energy trying to protect the power positions of the last thirty years. >> Yeah so we're getting into some of that. So, but you know, everybody talks about digital transformation, and they kind of roll their eyes, like it's a big buzzword, but it's real. It's dataware at a data-driven conference. And data, you know, being at the heart of businesses means that you're seeing businesses transition industries, or traverse industries, you know, Amazon getting into groceries, Apple getting into content, Amazon as well, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, so, my question is, what's a tech company? I mean, you know, Bennyhoff says that, you know, every company's a sass company, and you're certainly seeing that, and it's got to be great for your business. >> Yeah, yeah absolutely >> Quantifying all those markets, but I mean, the market that you quantify is just it's every company now. Banks, insurance companies, grocers, you know? Everybody is a tech company. >> I think, yeah, that's a hundred percent right. It is that this is the biggest revolution in the economy, you know, for many many decades. Or you might say centuries even. Is yeah, whoever put it, was it Mark Andreson or whoever used to talk about software leading the world, we're in the middle of that. Only, software now is being delivered in the form of digital or cloud services so, you know, every company is a tech company. And of course it really raises the question, well what are tech companies? You know, they need to kind of think back about where does our value add? But it is great. It's when we look at the world of clouds, one of the first things we observed in 2007, 2008 was, well, clouds wasn't just about S3 storage clouds, or salesforce.com's softwares and service. It's a model that can be applied to any industry, any company, any offering. And of course we've seen all these startups whether it's Uber or Netflix or whoever it is, basically digital innovation in every single industry, transforming that industry. So, to me that's the exciting part is if that model of transforming industries through the use of software, through digital technology. In that kind of experimentation stage it was mainly a startup story. All those unicorns. To me the multiplied innovation chapter, it's about- (audio cuts out) finally, you know, the cities, the Procter & Gambles, the Walmarts, the John Deere's, they're finally saying hey, this cloud platform and digital innovation, if we can do that in our industry. >> Yeah, so intrapreneurship is actually, you know, starting to- >> Yeah. >> So you and I have seen a lot of psychos, we watched the you know, the mainframe wave get crushed by the micro-processor based revolution, IDC at the time spent a lot of time looking at that. >> Vacuum tubes. >> Water coolant is back. So but the industry has marched to the cadence of Moore's Law forever. Even Thomas Friedman when he talks about, you know, his stuff and he throws in Moore's Law. But no longer Moore's Law the sort of engine of innovation. There's other factors. So what's the innovation cocktail looking forward over the next ten years? You've talked about cloud, you know, we've talked about AI, what's that, you know, sandwich, the innovation sandwich look like? >> Yeah so to me I think it is the harnessing of all this flood of technologies, again, that are mainly coming off the cloud, and that parade is not stopping. Quantum, you know, lots of other technologies are coming down the pipe. But to me, you know, it is the mixture of number one the cloud, public cloud stacks being able to travel anywhere in the world. So take the cloud on the road. So it's even, I would say, not even just scale, I think of, that's almost like a mount of compute power. Which could happen inside multiple hyperscale data centers. I'm also thinking about scale in terms of the horizontal. >> Bringing that model anywhere. >> Take me out to the edge. >> Wherever your data lives. >> Take me to a Carnival cruise ship, you know, take me to, you know, an apple-powered autonomous car, or take me to a hospital or a retail store. So the public cloud stacks where all the innovation is basically happening in the industry. Jail-breaking that out so it can come, you know it's through Amazon, AWS Outpost, or Ajerstack, or Google Anthos, this movement of the cloud guys, to say we'll take public cloud innovation wherever you need it. That to me is a big part of the cocktail because that's you know, basically the public clouds have been the epicenter of most tech innovation the last three or four years, so, that's very important. I think, you know just quickly, the other piece of the puzzle is the revolution that's happening in the modularity of apps. So the micro services revolution. So, the building of new apps and the refactoring of old apps using containers, using servos technologies, you know, API lifecycle management technologies, and of course, agile development methods. Kind of getting to this kind of iterative sped up deployment model, where people might've deployed new code four times a year, they're now deploying it four times a minute. >> Yeah right. >> So to me that's- and kind of aligned with that is what I was mentioning before, that if you can apply that, kind of, rapid scale, massive volume innovation model and bring others into the party, so now you're part of a cloud-connected community of innovators. And again, that could be around a Github, or could be around a Google or Amazon, or it could be around, you know, Walmart. In a retail world. Or an Amazon in retail. Or it could be around a Proctor & Gamble, or around a Disney, digital entertainment, you know, where they're creating ecosystems of innovators, and so to me, bringing people, you know, so it's not just these technologies that enable rapid, high-volume modular innovation, but it's saying okay now plugging lots of people's brains together is just going to, I think that, here's the- >> And all the data that throws off obviously. >> Throws a ton of data, but, to me the number we use it kind of is the punchline for, well where does multiplied innovation lead? A distributed cloud, this revolution in distributing modular massive scale development, that we think the next five years, we'll see as many new apps developed and deploye6d as we saw developed and deployed in the last forty years. So five years, the next five years, versus the last forty years, and so to me that's, that is the revolution. Because, you know, when that happens that means we're going to start seeing that long tail of used cases that people could never get to, you know, all the highly verticalized used cases are going to be filled, you know we're going to finally a lot of white space has been white for decades, is going to start getting a lot of cool colors and a lot of solutions delivered to them. >> Let's talk about some of the macro stuff, I don't know the exact numbers, but it's probably three trillion, maybe it's four trillion now, big market. You talked today about the market's going two x GDP. >> Yeah. >> For the tech market, that is. Why is it that the tech market is able to grow at a rate faster than GDP? And is there a relationship between GDP and tech growth? >> Yeah, well, I think, we are still, while, you know, we've been in tech, talk about those apps developed the last forty years, we've both been there, so- >> And that includes the iPhone apps, too, so that's actually a pretty impressive number when you think about the last ten years being included in that number. >> Absolutely, but if you think about it, we are still kind of teenagers when you think about that Andreson idea of software eating the world. You know, we're just kind of on the early appetizer, you know, the sorbet is coming to clear our palates before we go to the next course. But we're not even close to the main course. And so I think when you look at the kind of, the percentage of companies and industry process that is digital, that has been highly digitized. We're still early days, so to me, I think that's why. That the kind of the steady state of how much of an industry is kind of process and data flow is based on software. I'll just make up a number, you know, we may be a third of the way to whatever the steady state is. We've got two-thirds of the way to go. So to me, that supports growth of IT investment rising at double the rate of overall. Because it's sucking in and absorbing and transforming big pieces of the existing economy, >> So given the size of the market, given that all companies are tech companies. What are your thoughts on the narrative right now? You're hearing a lot of pressure from, you know, public policy to break up big tech. And we saw, you know you and I were there when Microsoft, and I would argue, they were, you know, breaking the law. Okay, the Department of Justice did the right thing, and they put handcuffs on them. >> Yeah. >> But they never really, you know, went after the whole breakup scenario, and you hear a lot of that, a lot of the vitriol. Do you think that makes sense? To break up big tech and what would the result be? >> You don't think I'm going to step on those land mines, do you? >> Okay well I've got an opinion. >> Alright I'll give you mine then. Alright, since- >> I mean, I'll lay it out there, I just think if you break up big tech the little techs are going to get bigger. It's going to be like AT&T all over again. The other thing I would add is if you want to go after China for, you know, IP theft, okay fine, but why would you attack the AI leaders? Now, if they're breaking the law, that should not be allowed. I'm not for you know, monopolistic, you know, illegal behavior. What are your thoughts? >> Alright, you've convinced me to answer this question. >> We're having a conversation- >> Nothing like a little competitive juice going. You're totally wrong. >> Lay it out for me. >> No, I think, but this has been a recurring pattern, as you were saying, it even goes back further to you know, AT&T and people wanting to connect other people to the chiraphone, and it goes IBM mainframes, opening up to peripherals. Right, it goes back to it. Exactly. It goes back to the wheel. But it's yeah, to me it's a valid question to ask. And I think, you know, part of the story I was telling, that multiplied innovation story, and Bill Joy, Joy's Law is really about platform. Right? And so when you get aggregated portfolio of technical capabilities that allow innovation to happen. Right, so the great thing is, you know, you typically see concentration, consolidation around those platforms. But of course they give life to a lot of competition and growth on top of them. So that to me is the, that's the conundrum, because if you attack the platform, you may send us back into this kind of disaggregated, less creative- so that's the art, is to take the scalpel and figure out well, where are the appropriate boundaries for, you know, putting those walls, where if you're in this part of the industry, you can't be in this. So, to me I think one, at least reasonable way to think about it is, so for example, if you are a major cloud platform player, right, you're providing all of the AI services, the cloud services, the compute services, the block-chain services, that a lot of the sass world is using. That, somebody could argue, well, if you get too strong in the sass world, you then could be in a position to give yourself favorable position from the platform. Because everyone in the sass world is depending on the platform. So somebody might say you can't be in. You know, if you're in the sass position you'll have to separate that from the platform business. But I think to me, so that's a logical way to do it, but I think you also have to ask, well, are people actually abusing? Right, so I- >> I think it's a really good question. >> I don't think it's fair to just say well, theoretically it could be abused. If the abuse is not happening, I don't think you, it's appropriate to prophylactically, it's like go after a crime before it's committed. So I think, the other thing that is happening is, often these monopolies or power positions have been about economic power, pricing power, I think there's another dynamic happening because consumer date, people's data, the Facebook phenomenon, the Twitter and the rest, there's a lot of stuff that's not necessarily about pricing, but that's about kind of social norms and privacy that I think are at work and that we haven't really seen as big a factor, I mean obviously we've had privacy regulation is Europe with GDPR and the rest, obviously in check, but part of that's because of the social platforms, so that's another vector that is coming in. >> Well, you would like to see the government actually say okay, this is the framework, or this is what we think the law should be. I mean, part of it is okay, Facebook they have incentive to appropriate our data and they get, okay, and maybe they're not taking enough responsibility for. But I to date have not seen the evidence as we did with, you know, Microsoft wiping out, you know, Lotus, and Novel, and Word Perfect through bundling and what it did to Netscape with bundling the browser and the price practices that- I don't see that, today, maybe I'm just missing it, but- >> Yeah I think that's going to be all around, you know, online advertising, and all that, to me that's kind of the market- >> Yeah, so Google, some of the Google stuff, that's probably legit, and that's fine, they should stop that. >> But to me the bigger issue is more around privacy.6 You know, it's a social norm, it's societal, it's not an economic factor I think around Facebook and the social platforms, and I think, I don't know what the right answer is, but I think certainly government it's legitimate for those questions to be asked. >> Well maybe GDPR becomes that framework, so, they're trying to give us the hook but, I'm having too much fun. So we're going to- I don't know how closely you follow Facebook, I mean they're obviously big tech, so Facebook has this whole crypto-play, seems like they're using it for driving an ecosystem and making money. As opposed to dealing with the privacy issue. I'd like to see more on the latter than the former, perhaps, but, any thoughts on Facebook and what's going on there with their crypto-play? >> Yeah I don't study them all that much so, I am fascinated when Mark Zuckerberg was saying well now our key business now is about privacy, which I find interesting. It doesn't feel that way necessarily, as a consumer and an observer, but- >> Well you're on Facebook, I'm on Facebook, >> Yeah yeah. >> Okay so how about big IPOs, we're in the tenth year now of this huge, you know, tail-wind for tech. Obviously you have guys like Uber, Lyft going IPO,6 losing tons of money. Stocks actually haven't done that well which is kind of interesting. You saw Zoom, you know, go public, doing very well. Slack is about to go public. So there's really a rush to IPO. Your thoughts on that? Is this sustainable? Or are we kind of coming to the end here? >> Yeah so, I think in part, you know, predicting the stock market waves is a very tough thing to do, but I think one kind of secular trend is going to be relevant for these tech IPOs is what I was mentioning earlier, is that we've now had a ten, twelve year run of basically startups coming in and reinventing industries while the incumbents in the industries are basically sitting on their hands, or sleeping. So to me the next ten years, those startups are going to, not that, I mean we've seen that large companies waking up doesn't necessarily always lead to success but it feels to me like it's going to be a more competitive environment for all those startups Because the incumbents, not all of them, and maybe not even most of them, but some decent portion of them are going to wind up becoming digital giants in their own industry. So to me I think that's a different world the next ten years than the last ten. I do think one important thing, and I think around acquisitions MNA, and we saw it just the last few weeks with Google Looker and we saw Tab Low with Salesforce, is if that, the mega-cloud world of Microsoft, Ajer, and Amazon, Google. That world is clearly consolidating. There's room for three or four global players and that game is almost over. But there's another power position on top of that, which is around where did all the app, business app guys, all the suite guys, SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, Adobe, Microsoft, you name it. Where did they go? And so we see, we think- >> Service Now, now kind of getting big. >> Absolutely, so we're entering a intensive period, and I think again, the Tab Low and Looker is just an example where those companies are all stepping on the gas to become better platforms. So apps as platforms, or app portfolio as platforms, so, much more of a data play, analytics play, buying other pieces of the app portfolio, that they may not have. And basically scaling up to become the business process platforms and ecosystems there. So I think we are just at the beginning of that, so look for a lot of sass companies. >> And I wonder if Amazon could become a platform for developers to actually disrupt those traditional sass guys. It's not obvious to me how those guys get disrupted, and I'm thinking, everybody says oh is Amazon going to get into the app space? Maybe some day if they happen to do a cam expans6ion, But it seems to me that they become a platform fo6r new apps you know, your apps explosion.6 At the edge, obviously, you know, local. >> Well there's no question. I think those appcentric apps is what I'd call that competition up there and versus kind of a mega cloud. There's no question the mega cloud guys. They've already started launching like call center, contact center software, they're creeping up into that world of business apps so I don't think they're going to stop and so I think that that is a reasonable place to look is will they just start trying to create and effect suites and platforms around sass of their own. >> Startups, ecosystems like you were saying. Alright, I got to give you some rapid fire questions here, so, when do you think, or do you think, no, I'm going to say when you think, that owning and driving your own car will become the exception, rather than the norm? Buy into the autonomous vehicles hype? Or- >> I think, to me, that's a ten-year type of horizon. >> Okay, ten plus, alright. When will machines be able to make better diagnosis than than doctors? >> Well, you could argue that in some fields we're almost there, or we're there. So it's all about the scope of issue, right? So if it's reading a radiology, you know, film or image, to look for something right there, we're almost there. But for complex cancers or whatever that's going to take- >> One more dot connecting question. >> Yeah yeah. >> So do you think large retail stores will essentially disappear? >> Oh boy that's a- they certainly won't disappear, but I think they can so witness Apple and Amazon even trying to come in, so it feels that the mix is certainly shifting, right? So it feels to me that the model of retail presence, I think that will still be important. Touch, feel, look, socialize. But it feels like the days of, you know, ten thousand or five thousand store chains, it feels like that's declining in a big way. >> How about big banks? You think they'll lose control of the payment systems? >> I think they're already starting to, yeah, so, I would say that is, and they're trying to get in to compete, so I think that is on its way, no question. I think that horse is out of the barn. >> So cloud, AI, new apps, new innovation cocktails, software eating the world, everybody is a tech company. Frank Gens, great to have you. >> Dave, always great to see you. >> Alright, keep it right there buddy. You're watching The Cube, from Actifio: Data Driven nineteen. We'll be right back right after this short break. (bouncy electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Boston, Massachusets, it's theCUBE covering Red Hat Summit, 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Well, welcome back here in Boston. We're at the BCEC as we are starting to wrap up our coverage here of day two of the Red Hat Summit, 2019. Along with Stu Miniman, I'm John Walls, and we're now joined by Ashesh Badani, who is the senior vice president of Cloud Platforms at Red Hat. Been a big day for you, hasn't it Mr. Badani? >> It sure has, thanks for having me back on! >> You bet! All right, so OpenShift 4, we saw the unveiling, your baby gets introduced to the world. What's the reaction been between this morning and this afternoon in terms of people, what they're asking you about, what they're most curious about, and maybe what their best reaction is. >> Yeah, so it's not necessarily a surprise for the folks who have been following OpenShift closely, we put the beta out for a little while, so that's the good news, but let me roll back just a little. >> John: Sure >> I think another part of the news that was really important for us is our announcement of a milestone that we crossed, which is a thousand customers, right? And it was at this very summit and theCUBE definitely knows this well, right, because they've been talking for a while. At this very Summit in 2015, four years ago, that we launched OpenShift Version 3. Right and so, you know you fast forward four years, right, and now the diversity of cases that we see, you know, spanning, established apps, cloud native apps, we heard Exxon talking about AIML data signs that they're putting on the platform, in a variety of different industries, is amazing. And I think the way OpenShift 4 has come along for us, is us having the opportunity to learn what have all these customers been doing well, and what else do we need to do on the platform to make that experience a better one. How do we reimagine enterprise kubernetes, to take it to the next level. And I think that's what we're introducing to the industry. >> Ashesh I think back four years ago, kubernetes was not something that was on the tip of the tongues of most people here. Congratulations on 1,000. >> Thank you. >> I hear what, 100, 150, new customers every quarter is the current rate there, but what I've really enjoyed, talked to a CIO and they're like okay, we're talking about digital transformation, we're talking about how we're modernizing all of our environments, and OpenShift is the platform that we do it. So, talk a little bit, from a customer's standpoint, the speeds, the feeds, the technical pieces, but that outcome, what is it an enabler of for your customers? >> Yeah, so excellent points Stu, we've seen whole sale complete digital transformations underway with our customers. So whether it's Deutsche Bank, who came and talked about running thousands of containers now, moving a whole bunch of workload onto the platform, which is incredible to see. Whether it's a customer like Volkswagen, who talking yesterday, if you caught that, about building an autonomous, self-driving, sets of technologies on the platform. What we're seeing is not just what we thought we would only see in the beginning which is one built, cloud native apps, and digital apps, and so on. Or, more nice existing apps, and bring them on the platform. But also, technologies that are making a fundamental difference, and I'll call one out. So I'm a judge for The Innovation Awards, we do this every year, I have been for many years, I love it, it's one of my favorite parts of the show. This year, we had one entry, which is one of the winners, which is HCA, which is a healthcare provider, talking about how they've been using the OpenShift platform as a means to make a fundamental difference in patients' lives. And when I say fundamental difference, actually saving lives. And you'll hear more about their story, but what they've done, is be able to say, look how can we detect early warning signals, faster than we have been, take some AI technology, and correlate against that, and see how we can reduce sepsis within patients. It's a very personal story for me, my mother died of sepsis. And the fact that they've been able to do this, and I think they're reporting they've already saved dozens of lives based on this. That's when you know, the things that you're doing are making a real difference, making a real transformation, not just in an actual customers' lives, but in users and people around the world. >> You were saying earlier too, Ashesh, about looking at what customers are doing and then trying to improve upon that experience, and give them a more effective experience, whatever the right adjective might be, in terms of what you're doing with 4. If you had to look at it, and say okay, these are the two or three pillars of this where I think we've made the biggest improvement or the biggest change, what would those be? >> Yes, so, one is to look at the world as it is in some sense, which is what a customer's doing. Customers weren't deployed to hybrid cloud, right? They want choice, they want independence with regard to which environments are rented on, whether it's physical, virtual, private, or any public cloud. Customers want one platform, to say I want to run these next generation, cloud native, market service based applications, along with my established stateful applications. Customers want a platform for innovation, right? So for example, we have customers that say, look, I really need a modern platform because I want to recruit the next generation of developers from colleges, if I don't give them the ability to play with Go, or Python, or new databases, they're gonna go to some Silicon Valley company, and I'm going to deplete my pool of talent that I need to compete, right? 'Cause digital transformation is about taking existing companies, and making them digitally enabled. Going forward, what we're also seeing is the ability for us to say well maybe the experience we've given existing customers can be improved. How do we for example, give them a platform, that's more autonomous in nature, more self-driving in nature, that can heal itself, based on for example, there's a critical update that's required that we can send over the air to them. How can we bring greater automation into the platform? It's all of those ideas that we've got based on how customers are using it today, is what we're bringing to bear, going forward. >> Ashesh, one of the errors we have trying to help customers parse through the language is, everybody's talking about platforms, if you look at the public clouds, everybody's all in on kubernetes, a few weeks ago, we were at the Google Cloud event, talked to Red Hat there, there's Anthos, there's OpenShift, look at Azure, we Satya Nadella up on stage, and you're like, okay they've got their own kubernetes platform, but I've got OpenShift fully integrated there. >> Ashesh: Yeah. >> Can you help is kinda understand how those fit together because it's an interesting and changing dynamic. >> Well it's a very Silicon Valley buzzword, right? Everyone wants a platform, everyone wants to build a platform, Facebook's a platform, Uber's a platform, Airbnb is, everything's seeming a platform, right? What I really want to focus on more is in regard to, we want to be able to give folks literally an abstraction level, an ability for companies to say I want to embrace digital transformation. Before we get there, someone's like what's digital transformation, I don't even understand what that means anymore. My simple definition is basically flipping the table. Typically companies spend 80% on maintenance, 20% innovation, how do we flip that? So they're spending 80% innovation, 20% maintenance. So if we're still thinking in those terms, let me give you a way to develop those applications, spend more time and energy on innovation, and then allow for you to take advantage of what I'll call a pool of resources. Compute, network, and storage. Across the environment that you have in place. Some of which you might own, some of which some third parties might provide for you, and some of which you get from public cloud. And take advantage of innovation that's being done outside. Innovative services that come from either public cloud providers, or ISPs, or separate providers, and then be able to do that innovated rapid fashion, you know, develop, deploy, iterate quickly. So to me that is really fundamentally what we're trying to provide customers, and it takes different forms, internal packaging. >> Maybe you can explain to me, the Azure OpenStack seems different than some of the other partnerships. Two years ago, when we were sitting in this building, we talked to you about AWS with OpenShift in that partnership, so what's differentiated and special about the Azure OpenStack integration. >> Yeah, so the Azure partnership, it's a good question because we've now taken our partnering with the public cloud providers to the next level, if you will. With Azure there's a few things in play, first it's a jointly offered managed service from Red Hat and Microsoft, where we're both supporting it together. So in the case of OpenShift and AWS, that's you know OpenShift directly to the ring of service, in this case, it's right out of Microsoft, working close together to make that happen. It's a native service to Azure, so if you saw in the keynote, you could use a command line to call OpenShift directly integrate into the Azure command line. It's available within the interface of Microsoft-Azure. So it feels like a native service, you can take advantages of other Azure services, and bring those to bear, so obviously increases developer experience from that perspective. We also inherit all the compliances, certifications, that Microsoft-Azure has, as well, for that service, as well as all the availability requirements that they put out there, so it's much more closely integrated together, much better developer experience, native to Azure, and then the ability for the Microsoft sales team to go out and sell it to their customers in conjunction. >> You talk a lot about different partnerships, and bringing this collaborative, open-mindset to each and every relationship, how hard is that to do? Because you have your of way of doing things and it's worked very well, and yet, you go out and you have these new partnerships or extensions of partnerships, and not everybody with whom you work does things the same way, and so, everybody's gotta be malleable to a certain extent, but just in terms of being that flexible all the time, what does that do for you? >> So, we take that for granted sometimes, the way we work. And I don't mean to say that to be boastful, or arrogant, in any fashion. I had an interview earlier today, and the reporter said why don't you put on your page, that you're 100% open source? And I said we never put that on our page because that's just how we work, we assume that, we assume everyone knows that about us, and we're going forward. And he says, well, I don't know, perhaps there's others that don't know. And he's right. The world's changing, we're expanding our opportunities in front of folks. In the same way we've only and always known, we used to collaborate with others in the community, before we fully embraced OpenStack, there were certain projects that Red Hat was investing in that were Red Hat driven, and we say maybe there wasn't as much community around it, we're gonna go down and embrace and fully parse an OpenStack community. Same's the case, for example, in kubernetes too. It's not necessarily a project that we created on our own, in conjunction with Google, and many others in the community. And so that's something that's part of our DNA, I'm not sure we're doing anything different, in engaging with communities, just how we work. >> So, Ashesh, I know your team's busy doing a lot of things. We've been hearing about what sessions are overflowing, down in the expo floor, so why don't you give us some visibility. But there was one specific one I wondered if you could start with. >> Ashesh: Sure. >> So down on the expo floor, it's a containerized environment and it has something to do with puppies, and therefor how does that connect with OpenShift 4 if we can start there. >> That's a tough one, you're gonna have to go and ask the puppies how to make a difference in the world. (laughing) >> John: So we go from kubernetes to canines, (laughing) that's what we're doing here. >> I do believe they're comfort dogs, but there was coding and some of the other stuff, so give us a little bit of the walk around, the expo flow, the breakouts and the like, in some of the hot areas, that your team's working on. >> Fair enough, fair enough. Maybe not puppies, but maybe we're trying to herd cats, close enough, right? >> John: Safer terrain. >> The amount of interest, the number of sessions, with OpenShift, or container based technologies, cloud based technologies, it's tremendous to see that. So regardless if whether you see the breakouts that are in place, the customer sessions, I think we've got over 100 customers, I think. Who are presenting on all aspects of their journey. So to me, that's remarkable. Lots of interest in our road map going forward, which is great to see, standing room only for OpenShift 4 and where we're taking that. Other technology that's interesting, the work, for example, we're doing in serverless. We announced an OpenSource collaboration with Mircrosoft, something called KEDA, the Kubernetes eventually. Our scaling project, so interesting how customers can kind of engage around that as well. And then the partner ecosystem, you can walk around and see just a plethora of ISVs, we're all looking to build operators, or have operators and are certifying operators within our ecosystem. And then it's ways for us to expose that to our joint customers. >> We're gonna cut you loose, and let you go, the floor's gonna be open for a few minutes, those puppies are just down behind Stu, we'll let you go check that out. >> Alright, thanks, I hear you can adopt them if you want to, as well. >> Before we let you go see the comfort dogs, 1,000 customers, where do you see, when we come back a year from now, where you are, where you wanna see it go, show us a little bit looking forward. >> So there's been some news around Red Hat that has probably happened over the last few months, the people are hearing this, I look at that as a great opportunity for us to expand our reach into markets, both in terms of industries perhaps we haven't necessarily gone into, that other companies have been. Perhaps we say it's manufacturing, perhaps this is the opportunity for us to cross the chasm, have a lot more trained consultants who can help get more customers on the journey, so I fully expect our reach increasing over a period time. And then you'll see, if you will, iterations of OpenShift 4 and the progress we've made against that, and hopefully many more success stories on the stage. >> Alright, looking forward to catching up next year, if not sooner. >> Ashesh: Okay, excellent. >> John: And congratulations on today, and best of luck down the road. >> Thanks again for having me. >> And good to see you! >> Ashesh: Yeah, likewise! >> Back with more on theCube, you are watching our coverage live, here from Red Hat Summit, 2019, in Boston, Massachusetts. (upbeat techno music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusets, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, welcome to this preview of HPE's, Discover Madrid storage news. We're gonna unpack that. My name is Dave Vellante and Hewlett Packard Enterprise has a six-month cadence of shows. They have one in the June timeframe in Las Vegas, and then one in Europe. This year, again, it's in Madrid and you always see them announce products and innovations coinciding with those big user shows. With me here is Patrick Osborne who's the Vice President and General Manager of Big Data and Secondary Storage at HPE. Patrick, great to see you again. >> Great to be here, love theCUBE, thanks for having us. >> Oh, you're very welcome. So let's, let's unpack some of these announcements. You guys, as I said, you're on this six-month cadence. You've got sort of three big themes that you're vectoring into, maybe you could start there. >> Yeah, so within HP Storage and Big Data where, you know, where our point of view is around intelligent storage and intelligent data management and underneath that we've kind of vectored in on three pillars that you talked about. AI driven, so essentially bringing the intelligence, self-managing, self-healing, to all of our storage platforms, and big-data platforms, built for the Cloud, right? We've got a lot of use cases, and user stories, and you've seen from an HPE perspective, Hybrid Cloud, you know, is a big investment we're making in addition to the edge. And the last is delivering all of our capabilities, from product perspective, solutions and services as a service, right? So GreenLake is something that we started a few years ago and being able to provide that type of elastic, you know, purchasing experience for our customers is gonna weave itself in further products and solutions that we announce. >> So I like your strategy around AI. AI of course gets a lot of buzz these days. You guy are taking a practical approach. The Nimble acquisition gave you some capabilities there in predictive maintenance. You've pushed it into your automation capabilities. So let's talk about the hard news specifically around InfoSight. >> Yeah, so InfoSight is an incredible platform and what you see is that we've been not only giving customers richer experiences on top of InfoSight that go further up into the stack so we're providing recommendation engines so we've got this whole concept of Cross-stack Analytics that go from, you know, your app and your virtualization layer through the physical infrastructure. So we've had a number of pieces of that, that we're announcing to give very rich, AI-driven guidance, to customers, you know, to fix specific problems. We're also extending it to more platforms. Right, we just announced last week the ability to run InfoSight on our server platforms, right? So we're starting off on a journey of providing that which we're doing at the storage and networking layer weaving in our server platform. So essentially platforms like ProLiant, Synergy, Apollo, all of our value compute platforms. So we are, we're doing some really cool stuff not only providing the experience on new platforms, but richer experiences certainly around performance bottlenecks on 3PAR so we're getting deeper AI-driven recommendation engines as well as what we call an AI-driven resource planner for Nimble. So if you take a look at it from a tops-down view this isn't AI marketing. We're actually applying these techniques and machine learning within our install base in our fleet which is growing larger as we extend support from our platforms that actually make people's lives easier from a storage administration perspective. >> And that was a big part of the acquisition that IP, that machine intelligence IP. Obviously you had to evaluate that and the complexity of bringing it across the portfolio. You know we live in this API-driven world, Nimble was a very modern platform so that facilitated that injection of that intelligence across the platform and that's what we're seeing now isn't it. >> Yeah, absolutely. You go from essentially tooling up these platforms for this very rich telemetry really delivering a differentiated support experience that takes a lot of the manual interactions and interventions from a human perspective out of it and now we're moving in with these three announcements that we've made into things that are doing predictive analytics, recommendations and automation at the end of the day. So we're really making, trying to make people's lives easier from an admin perspective and giving them time back to work on higher value activities. >> Well let's talk about Cloud. HP doesn't have a public Cloud like an Amazon or an Azure, you partner with those guys, but you have Cloud Volumes, which is Cloud-like, it's actually Cloud from a business model perspective. Explain what Cloud Volumes is and what's the news here? >> Yeah, so, we've got a great service, it's called HPE Cloud Volumes and you'll see throughout the year us extending more user stories and experiences for Hybrid Cloud, right. So we have CloudBank, which focuses on secondary storage, Cloud Volumes is for primary storage users, so it is a Cloud, public Cloud adjacent storage as a service and it allows you to go into the portal, into your credentials. You can enter in your credit card number and essentially get storage as a service as an adjacent, or replacement data service for, for example, EBS from Amazon. So you're able to stand up storage as a service within a co-location facility that we manage and it's completely delivered as a service and then our announcement for that is that, so what we've done in the Americas is you can essentially apply compute instances from the public Cloud to that storage, so it's in a co-location facility it's very close from a latency standpoint to the public Cloud. Now we're gonna be extending that service into Europe, so UK, Ireland, and for the EMEA users as well as now we can also support persistent storage work loads for Docker and Kubernetes and this is a big win for a lot of customers that wanna do continuous improvement, continuous development, and use those containerized frameworks and then you can essentially, you know, integrate with your on-prem storage to your off-prem and then pull in the compute from the Cloud. >> Okay so you got that, write once, run anywhere sort of model. I was gonna ask you well why would I do this instead of EBS, I think you just answered that question. It's because you now can do that anywhere, hybrid is a key theme here, right? >> Yeah, also too from a resiliency perspective, performance, and durability perspective, the service that we provide is, you know, certainly six-nines, very high performant, from a latency perspective. We've been in the enterprise-storage game for quite some time so we feel we've got a really good service just from the technology perspective as well. >> And the European piece, I presume a lot of that is, well of course, GDPR, the fines went into effect in May of 2018. There's a lot of discussion about okay, data can't leave a particular locality, it's especially onerous in Europe, but probably other places as well. So there's a, there's a data locality governance compliance angle here too, is there not? >> Yeah, absolutely, and for us if you take a specific industry like healthcare, you know, for example, so you have to have pretty clear line of sight for your data provenance so it allows us to provide the service in these locations for a healthcare customer, or a healthcare ISV, you know, SAS provider to be able to essentially point to where that data is, you know, and so for us it's gonna be an entrance into that vertical for hybrid Cloud use cases. >> Alright so, so again, we've got the AI-driven piece, the Cloud piece, I see as a service, which is the third piece, I see Cloud as one, and as a service is one-A, it's almost like a feature of Cloud. So let's unpack that a little bit. What are you announcing in as a service and what's your position there? >> Yeah, so our vision is to be able to provide, and as a service experience, for almost everything we have that we provide our customers. Whether it's an individual product, whether it's a solution, or actually like a segment, right? So in the space that I work in, in Big Data and secondary service, secondary storage, backup is a service, for example, right, it's something that customers want, right? They don't want to be able to manage that on their own by piece parts, architect the whole thing, so what we're able to do is provide your primary storage, your secondary storage, your backup ISV, so in this case we're gonna be providing backup as a service through GreenLake with Vim. And then we even can bring in your Cloud capacity, so for example, Azure Blob Storage which will be your tertiary storage, you know, from an archive perspective. So for us it really allows us to provide customers an experience that, you know, is more of an, it's an experienced, Cloud is a destination, we're providing a multi-Cloud, a Hybrid-Cloud experience not only from a technology perspective, but also from a purchasing flex up, flex down, flex out experience and we're gonna keep on doing that over and over for the next, you know, foreseeable future. >> So you've been doing GreenLake for awhile here-- >> Yeah, absolutely. >> So how's that going and what's new here? >> Yeah, so that's been going great. We have well over, I think at this point, 500 petabytes on our management under GreenLake and so the service is, it's interesting when you think about it, when we were designing this we thought, just like the public Cloud, the compute as a service would take off, but from our perspective I think one of the biggest pain points for customers is managing data, you know, storage and Big Data, so storage as a service has grown very rapidly. So these services are very popular and we'll keep on iterating on them to create maximum velocity. One of the other things that's interesting about some of these accounting rules that have taken place, is that customers seed to us the, the ability to do architecture, right, so we're essentially creating no Snowflakes for our customers and they get better outcomes from a business perspective so we help them with the architecture, we help them with planning an architecture of the actual equipment and then they get a very defined business outcome in SLA that they pay for as a service, right? So it's a win-win across the board, is really good. >> Okay, so no Snowflakes as in, not everything's custom-- >> Absolutely. >> And then that, so that lowers not only your cost, it lowers the customer's cost. So let's take an example like that, let's take backup as a service which is part of GreenLake. How does that work if I wanna engage with you on backup as a service? >> Yeah, so we have a team of folks in Pointnext that can engage like very far up in the front end, right, so they say, hey, listen, I know that I need to do a major re-architecture for my secondary storage, HPE, can you help me out? So we provide advisory services, we have well-known architectures that fit a set of well-known mission critical, business critical applications at a typical customer site so we can drive that all the way from the inception of that project to implementation. We can take more customized view, or a road-mapped approach to customers where they want to bite off a little bit at a time and use things like Flex Capacity, and then weave in a full GreenLake implementation so it's very flexible in terms of the way we can implement it. So we can go soup to nuts, or we can get down to a very small granular pieces of infrastructure. >> Just sticking on data protection for a second, I saw a stat the other day, it's a fairly well, you know, popular, often quoted stat, it was Gartner I think, is 50% of customers are gonna change their backup platform by like 2023 or something. And you think about, and by the way, I think that's a legitimate stat and when you talk to customers about why, well things are changing, the Cloud, Multicloud, things like GDPR, Ransomware, digital transformation, I wanna get more out of my data then just insurance, my backup then just insurance, I wanna do analytics. So there's all these other sort of evolving things. I presume your backup as a service is evolving with that? >> Absolutely. >> What are you seeing there? >> Yeah, we're definitely seeing that the secondary storage market is very dynamic in terms of the expectations from customers, are, you know, they're changing, and changing very rapidly. And so not only are providing things like GreenLake and backup as a service we're also seeking new partners in this space so one of the big announcements that we'll make at Discover is we are doing a pretty big amplification of our partnership in an OEM relationship with Cohesity, right, so a lot of customers are looking for a secondary platform from a consolidation standpoint, so being able to run a number of very different disparate workloads from a secondary storage perspective and make them, you know, work. So it's a great platform scale-out. It's gonna run on a number of our HPE platforms, right, so we're gonna be able to provide customers that whole solution from HPE partnering with Cohesity. So, you know, in general this secondary storage market's hot and we're making some bets in our ecosystem right now. >> You also have Big Data in your title so you're responsible for that portfolio. I know Apollo in the HPC world has been at a foothold there. There's a lot of synergies between high-performance computing and Big Data-- >> Absolutely. >> What's going on in the Big Data world? >> Yeah, so Big Data is one of our fastest growing segments within HPE. I'd say Big Data and Analytics and some of the things that are going on with AI, and commercial high-performance applications. So for us we're, we have a new platform that we're announcing, our Gen10 version of Apollo 4200, it's definitely the workhorse of our Apollo server line for applications like, Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapR, we see Apache Spark, Kafka, a number of these as well as some of these newer workloads around HPC, so TensorFlow, Caffe, H2O, and so that platform allows us with a really good compute memory and storage mix, from a footprint perspective, and it certainly scales into rack-level infrastructure. That part of the business for us is growing very quickly. I think a lot of customers are using these Big Data Analytics techniques to transform their business and, you know, as we go along and help them it certainly, it's been a really cool ride to see all this implemented at customer sites. >> You know with all this talk about sort of Big Data and Analytics, and Cloud, and AI, you sort of, you know, get lost, the infrastructure kinda gets lost, but you know, the plumbing still matters, right, and so underneath this. So we saw the flash trend, and that really had a major impact on certainly the storage business specifically, but generally, the overall marketplace, I mean, you really, it'd be hard to support a lot of these emerging workloads without flash and that stack continues to evolve, the pyramid if you will. So you've got flash memory now replacing much of the spinning disk space, you've got DRAM which obviously is the most expensive, highest performance, and there seems to be this layer emerging in the middle, this storage-class memory layer. What are you guys doing there? Is there anything new there? >> Yeah, so we've got a couple things cooking in that space. In general, like when you talk about the infrastructure it is important, right, and we're trying to help customers not only by providing really good product in scalable infrastructure, things like Apollo, you know our system's Nimble 3PAR. We're also trying to provide experience around that too. So, you know, combining things like InfoSight, InfoSight on storage, InfoSight on servers and Apollo for Big Data workloads is something that we're gonna be delivering in the future. The platforms really matter. So we're gonna be introducing NVME and storage class memory into our, what we feel is the industry-leading portfolio for our, for flash storage. So between Nimble and 3PAR we'll have, those platforms will be, and they're NVME ready and we'll be making some product announcements on the availability of that type of medium. So if you think about using it in a platform like 3PAR, right, industry leading from a performance perspective allows to get sub 200 millisecond performance for very mission-critical latency intolerant applications and it's a great architecture. It scales in parallel, active, active, active, right, so you can get quite a bit of performance from a very, a large 3PAR system and we're gonna be introducing NVME into that equation as a part of this announcement. >> So, we see this as critical, for years, in the storage business, you talk about how storage is growing, storage is growing, storage is growing, and we'd show the charts upper to the right, and, but it always like yeah, and somehow you gotta store it, you gotta manage it, you might have to move it, it's a real pain. The whole equation is changing now because of things like flash, things like GPU, storage class memory, NVME, now you're seeing, and of course all this ML and deep learning tech, and now you're seeing things that you're able to do with the data that you've never been able to do before-- >> Absolutely. >> And emerging use cases and so it's not just lots of data, it's completely new use cases and it's driving new demands for infrastructure isn't it? >> Absolutely, I mean, there's some macro economic tailwinds that we had this year, but HP had a phenomenal year this year and we're looking at some pretty good outlooks into next year as well. So, yeah, from our perspective the requirement for customers, for latency improvements, bandwidth improvements, and total addressable capacity improvements is, never stops, right? So it's always going on and it's the data pipeline is getting longer. The amount of services and experiences that you're tying on to, existing applications, keeps on augmenting, right? So for us there's always new capabilities, always new ways that we can improve our products. We use for things like InfoSight, and a lot of the predictive Analytics, we're using those techniques for ourselves to improve our customers experience with our products. So it's been, it's a very, you know, virtual cycle in the industry right now. >> Well Patrick, thanks for coming in to theCube and unpacking these announcements at Discover Madrid. You're doing a great job sort of executing on the storage plan. Every time I see you there's new announcements, new innovations, you guys are hittin' all your marks, so congratulations on that. >> HPE, intelligent storage, intelligent data management, so if you guys have data needs you know where to come to. >> Alright, thanks again Patrick. >> Great, thank you so much. >> Talk to you soon. Alright, thanks for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante from theCUBE. We'll see ya next time. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Boston, it's theCUBE covering IBM Chief Data Officer Summit. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back, everyone. We are wrapping up a day of coverage, live coverage from theCUBE at the IBM CDO Summit on a very blustery cold day here in Boston, Massachusets. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. I've been all day with Paul Gillan, my co-host. It's been a lot of fun co-hosting with you. >> It's been a pleasure. It's been a great day. >> Yeah. >> Great guests all day. >> Absolutely, high quality. This is not your father's IBM, not your mother's IBM, this is a very different company from when you started covering IBM way back when and to-- >> 1982. >> 82, so talk about a little bit about the changes. You grew up in an IBM town. >> I grew up in an IBM town. I grew up in an IBM world where everyone dressed the same, everyone had a set of talking points, it was a very closed, dark organization, dense organization, very little information got out. Of course the company at that time was operating under a consent to prove the justice department. Been attempting to be broken up. So they were understandably nervous. We began to see that change after IBM's crisis in the late 80s and began to open up the, began to celebrate individuals where previously individualism had been discouraged at IBM. And what you see at this conference here, I don't know, I'm always amazed when I go to IBM conferences at the differences I see between the people I meet at the conferences and sort of the corporate image that is represented which is of a company that is struggling to make some transitions. I see just lots of vibrant, intelligent, enthusiastic, forward-looking people. Very, very smart people at these conferences. I don't think that gets out enough to the IBM watchers out there. >> I would agree and what we're hearing too, about from the employees themselves talking about the soft skills that are needed to succeed here at IBM but also in all sorts of industries. I mean, our first guest, Inderpal was talking about, you asked him, "What do you need to succeed as a CDO?" Well, what are sort of the traits and ability-- >> He didn't talk about technology. >> And so it wasn't really on his list. >> He didn't talk about numbers or technology at all. He talked about managing relationships, about motivating organizations-- >> Inspiring people exactly. Exactly, so having those kinds of soft skills so necessary for success in the data world but also here at IBM. And then we've also had a lot of other people on talking about IBM as this very inclusive place where you bring your authentic self to work. I write for Harvard business reviews so these are really buzzy words right now. But really, so I don't know if a lot of employees would say that about their employer. >> And when you talk to IBMers, you hear very enthusiastic people, people who love the company, who love working here. With all the diversity, the way the company's been out front in promoting minorities, in promoting women, in all kinds of ways that it really was ahead of the game in the way he treated his workforce. You know, looking at the content of the conference, a couple things really stood out for me. I've been following this area for about five years now working at the MIT CDO event, on theCUBE for a number of years and really five years ago the CDO concept, we were asking questions like, does this job have a future, what does this job look like, what are the skills that are needed, where does it fit in the organization, is this a replacement for the CIO and conflict with the CIO, what's the responsibility, what is the job, we were asking. Really three or four years ago not hearing any of that anymore. There is a lot of unanimity of opinion. This position is important, it's critical. 90 percent of large organizations will have a CDO within the next couple of years, and the role appears to be well defined and is becoming more strategic and the issues of conflict with the CIO are largely being resolved. This is a main stream corporate C level position now, and it's amazing how quickly that's happened. Really over the last four years. >> Well and Andrew Paul said when he first started out, he was a CDO in 2006. He said, when I started out data was considered exhaust, so pollution and now we really know that it is a valuable asset. >> Now it's oil. >> Exactly, now it's gold and oil, and all the other. Yeah, no what about sort of this evolution from big data, big data was the buzz word a few years ago, now it's really all about AI. >> It is, and I've been an AI skeptic for a long time just because I've heard the term AI used for many years and when we didn't have it, when it didn't exist, I am now a believer. I believe that these systems that are being built are really exhibit signs of intelligence and we are going to much quicker in the future as Cloud comes into play, as software becomes more of an assembly process. We just had the discussion of the IBM risk analysis, supply chain risk analysis application. That was essentially assembled. It wasn't really written, it was assembled from components and it's a fantastic idea. We are going to see more of these powerful applications coming about and being built by people who are not extremely technical. So I think, I was amazed to see how the evolution of this program has gone from big data to AI. Today was all about AI and they're not talkin' trash anymore this stuff is really going to work. >> Are we cautious enough, would you think, as I mean, when you're thinking about all the industries here who are now playing in AI, sometimes scampering up the AI ladder a little too quickly because they want the shiny toys, when they really need to actually dig in deep with their data. But do you, as an analyst, where do you put-- >> Well, are we ever cautious enough with new technology? I mean look what Facebook is going through right now. We always go overboard and then we have to pull back and gaze at our navel and figure out, you know, how do we do this right. I'm sure there are a lot of mistakes being made with AI right now. Fortunately, I don't think the mistakes are being made in areas where it's going to meaningfully impact people's quality of life. It's not going to, we're not going to have medical, we had some people from the healthcare field on today. It was very clear that they take AI seriously, the role of AI seriously. I think we'll see a lot of stupid applications of AI, but that's always the way new technology is, right? So you have to experiment, you have to make some mistakes before you figure out what really works and I think we're just going through a natural cycle here. What's exciting is that these applications are the most transformational I've ever seen. >> Wow, and this is from someone who's been covering this industry for many decades. >> It's hard to maintain that wild-eyed enthusiasm after all these years, but it really is, boy, I wish I was 20 years younger, because this is going to be fun to stick around and watch how this develops. How about you? >> We got to raise our kids to grow up and be data scientists. >> I have every intention of doing that. (laughing) How about you? You were more focused on the workforce and the people side of the equation. We heard a lot about that today. >> Exactly, I mean, because frankly, what is all of this stuff doing, but making our work lives more easier, more satisfying, more interesting, less tedious, less boring, less onerous. So I think, frankly, when you put it all in terms of that is our goal is to help people do their jobs better and sometimes people's jobs are saving lives, sometimes people's jobs are, you know, helping people win at Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes. But that's what it really comes down to, so if it really is helping people do these things, I mean, it is as you said, very exciting. It's an exciting time to be looking at all of this stuff. >> And a time when I think people like you and me will increasingly be able to build these kinds of applications, because the tools are getting that easy to use. >> I hope so. I'm not that good. >> Well, maybe not you. (laughing) >> You can. My kids, definitely. Well, Paul it's been a real pleasure hosting, co-hosting this show with you. >> You too, it's been great. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Paul Gillan. This has been theCUBE's live coverage of IBM CDO Summit, we will see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> From Boston Massachusets, it's the Cube, covering LiveWorx 18, brought to you by PTC. >> Welcome back to the seaport in Boston everybody, you're watching the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage and my name is Dave Vellante. We're here, this is day one of the PTC LiveWorx show, the confluence of internet of things, Edge Computing, AI, Block chains, security, a lot of innovation going on here in this new industry that's being formed out of a lot of older and existing incumbent industries. Lieutenant Bruce Litchfield is here, he's the VP of sustainment operations at Lockheed Martin. Bruce, thanks so much for coming on the Cube, appreciate you coming on. >> Thanks David, how are you today? >> I'm doing great thanks, it's a good show here, a lot of excitement, a lot of really interesting demos, we see you lot of movement here but I wonder if can talk about your military experience and how it relates to your current role at Lockheed Martin? >> Sure, so I spent 30 plus years in the military, and I retired as a lieutenant general so. >> Well, thank you for your service really. >> You know, it's an honor to serve and time when by fast and really got to work with some great people. And when you have that in your blood, it's hard to walk away and not continue service. I got a chance to work with Lockheed Martin who delivers the products and builds the products that I grew up with in the air force. Most of my career was in the sustainment and keeping them flying kind of aspect of the air force so now I get to work on them from a corporate perspective and continued to deliver products and capabilities and upgrade them so that tomorrow can be better than today. And that folks out in the field make sure that when the systems are needed and they have to use them, they're ready, capable, and, to go to, do whatever it is. >> Okay, sustainment is in your title and that's your current role, so by sustainment you mean, it works, when you need it to work, is that, describe that a little bit? That's right so, I use the simple term, keep them flying. And when you think about that, all over the world, 365 days a year, 27-7, you never know when a mission needs to take off or a soldier, sailor, eminent marine might need a capability to save a life, change the course of a battle, or otherwise make a difference. If a Lockheed Martin system's involved, I want to make sure it's there and ready to go and they don't have to worry about whether it's going to be able to succeed in the mission. >> So what's the role of technology in keeping systems up? I know in the IT world, it used to be just get two of everything, or three of everything, or four of everything, and just make things redundant. That kind of thinking's obviously evolved but what tech is Lockheed Martin bringing to this problem? >> If you look over the systems, and I'll just take, I came from the air force, and so the air force is flying weapon systems that are 50 plus years old along with we are delivering now the F35, which is the absolute latest in technology and capability. And so when I look at the evolution of technology over the time, it really is very impressive. I really do term sustainment as a systems engineering problem, it's making sure the part is there, it's making sure the system's reliable, it's making sure the tech data, it's making sure the support equipment. Anything that the maintenance person may need to get that jet airborne. Got to make sure it's there at the right time at the right place. And so if you look at the technology of how it's evolved over the year, it's much the same as our capability to go to war is, from what I would consider the command and control of World War Two or you just launched a jet. In fact we talked about it today. For one raid in World War Two, it took almost 200 bombers to hit one target, dropping over, almost a half a million tons of munitions, to today one aircraft can hit multiple targets with precision accuracy and keeping our air men safe, so the technology's evolved, along with how we sustain aircraft, which has really evolved over that time. >> So much more software obviously involved in aircraft today, how has the industry dealt with the increase in complexity as a result of things like software and code, but at the same time, it's clearly delivering more reliable systems and more efficient systems as you described? >> That's right, so think about in this way. Underpinning an inherent capability, such as the F35, is a reliability of this system. So if just take that one weapon system. So we have, right now, delivered over 300 aircraft and they're bedded down at over 14 locations, around the world. 74% of the items in that aircraft have never failed, over the time that they been out there, including over, about a hundred thousand hours worth of flight hours. Then when you start looking at that, almost 94% of them meet or exceed their liability requirements. So now we're just down to a few parts that we've got to make sure that we improve through regular upgrades that you would do under normal conditions to make the most reliable system. Then on top of that, you put the software embedded in the aircraft, it helps the folks on the flight line know what's failed, where it's failed and then know how to troubleshoot and so you've brought technology to a point of what I would call human interaction on the flight line. >> You talk a lot about predictive maintenance and anticipating failures. Presumably that is part of this capability, is that, I mean, how real is that? Is it in action today? Is it sort of a future thing or can you talk about that? >> So, it's very much in action today and we have a predictive health and what we're really trying to drive to is a condition based maintenance airplane. In other words, if you think about going to a commercial airline, you don't want it to fly to fail, you want to make sure that when ever you show up that it's ready, you board it and you take off. Well, we're evolving the technology that involves us to go to a condition based maintenance so we can do maintenance on the off time and when the aircraft not needed or what I would call a scheduled kind of time frame and that helps ensure that we don't just, it's mission ready whenever the pilots need it or when ever the sorty requirements call for it. >> Okay, so, let's talk about some of the challenges that you guys face in terms of bringing technology and sustaining this technology into whatever generation of aircraft? I think we're in fifth generation today? First of all what's fifth generation what are some of the challenges that you face? >> So let's start with fifth gen, so from an operational perspective, when someone says fifth gen technology, it's really taken into account what I would consider low visibility or in other words, making the aircraft hard to detect. It's putting avionic sensors on there so that the pilot knows what's going on around them and is able to fuse that information, to to give them very explicit information of what's happening on the battlefield and then be able to keep those that are supporting him informed of what's happening. It's a high maneuverability of the weapon system as well as speed that it goes. So there's the technology aspects of fifth gen and then what I like to refer to is fifth gen sustainment and that's really what we're doing at Lockheed Martin. What we want to be able to do is bring fifth gen sustainment capability to the field and drive the cost down so it's at a fourth gen or below the price of what current systems are. So get new technology, modern technology, sustain it at a very high readiness rate at a cost lower than what they currently see today. So fifth for fourth is one of the mantra's that we're trying to deliver, or at least drive the cost down, as low as possible. And one of the challenges that I would say is that balance between how do you have that capability and then keep the cost down? So you have to do things differently. You have to evolve to a new way of looking, so we talked about, a condition based maintenance or evolving to it and a capability where you don't fly to fail. You do it when the system's down when you do it on a scheduled basis to do that. At the same time you have to integrate all the capabilities together for software, to bring in analytics to the capabilities that you have and prognostics kind of maintenance to the field. And so it's a systems engineering, a complex instrument system's engineering problem so really that's what makes, kind of, I would call the strength of Lockheed Martin, which prides itself on being a technology company, making tomorrow better than today. >> Yeah, and a system's thinker. >> And a system's thinker. >> When you talk about these capabilities, observability, avionics capabilities, maneuverability, increased speeds, I just, it just jumps in my head, data. Let's talk about the role of data in analytics, I mean, the data explosion here, how are you dealing with all of that data? >> So we get close to a terabyte worth of information a day, and then how you exploit that really goes across the entirety of what I would call the sustainment ecosystem. And if you look at it, sustainment probably, we can break it down into about 11 different areas, whether it's supply chain, whether it's managing the inventory that we have within supply chain, whether it's in reliability, prognostics. Whether it's in the maintenance repair and overhaul capability. So we're bringing analytics across the entire spectrum of that and what we're out doing right now, is getting best of breed capabilities so that we can piece together a holistic picture to better sustain this weapon system, so data is the key to doing that. At the end of the day it's how do you bring that data and then bring it to what I would call the analog piece or the human being at the flight line that still has to maintain the parts. But we want to make sure the right parts at the right place at the right time. >> So the human is still the last mile. That terabyte a day, is the majority of that stored, it is persisted or is there a lot of it that's kind of throw away data? Can you? >> No, I mean, the great news id we capture that data and so we have a chance to go utilize it to improve not only what tomorrow is but if I look at analytics for sustainment piece, I look at it in three pieces. One is a dashboard, alright where are you? What's the status? Okay that's good, that's your speedometer. Then it is how do you do decision aids and tools, which means how do you make better decisions to affect maybe tomorrow's operation? Then there's a third part about it which is predictive analytics, how do I make decisions today that affect me three to five years apart and that I can make a decision today and have confidence that down the road that's absolutely going to be the right decision? >> And I mean, the first two, the status and the decision aids, those are real time or near real time. >> Very much so. >> Pretty much instantaneous types of things, that's a challenge obviously to deal with that. >> It is and then we are dealing with a defense. You got to be always cognizant of security, cyber security, and making sure that what you do keeps that data safe and make sure that no one be able to tamper with it so that your making real time decisions based on the known capabilities of the data and where it comes from. >> Well Bruce thank you very much for coming on the Cube. I hope you're enjoying the LiveWorx show. It was really a pleasure having you. >> David thank you, it's a great show and it's great to be here. >> Our pleasure. >> Okay, keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest. You're watching the Cube live, from LiveWorx in Boston. We'll be right back.

>> From Boston, Massachusets it's theCube. Covering LiveWorx 18. Brought to you by PTC. >> Welcome back to bean town, everybody. This is theCube, the leader in live tech coverage, and we're covering LiveWorx, the three day conference hosted by PTC. We're at the BCEC, which is kind of the Starship Enterprise. I'm Dave Vellante, with my co-host Stu Miniman. As I say, Cube one day coverage of this three day conference. Maciek Kranz is here. He's the Vice President of Strategic Innovations at Cisco. Maciek, thanks for coming on theCube. >> Thank you so much for having me. It really looks like a cube. >> Usually we're out in the open, but they've put us here in a cube, which is great. Of course we were at Cisco Live last week. You were there, it was an awesome show. 27, 28 thousand people. A lot of the innovations that we're talking about here, you guys, you know, at Cisco, are obviously touching upon. Whether it was blockchain or the edge. May I ask you, innovation's in your title. What are you doing here at this conference? >> Basically we're on the mission to make sure that every company, large and small, whatever the industry you're in, gets started on the IOT journey. All of us here, we were talking about it last week at Cisco Live, we are sort of on the mission to make sure that everybody knows how to do it, how to get started, how to go through the journey. So I'm here to promote the cause. >> You had posted a blog a little bit ago on LinkedIn. Check it out, if you go to Maciek's LinkedIn profile you'll see it. Five myths around IOT, and I thought it was quite instructive. I'm going to start with the middle of it, which is IOT is this one big market, and we've been talking about how it's a trillion dollar market. It's almost impossible to size. It's so fragmented, and bringing together the operations technology and information technology world, and there's the edge, there's the core, there's hardware, there's software, there's services. How should we think about the IOT, obviously not as one big market as you pointed out in your blog. >> Right, and you actually nailed it. When you think about sort of a traditional way that technology companies think about the market, it was sort of model of just get a billion people to get on your platform and the good things will happen. Well in the IOT space, as you pointed out, it's a very fragmented market. So you basically need to have two strategies. You either become a horizontal specialist and then you integrate with a vertical specialist to develop a joint solution, or you focus on use case and you focus on one market, and you go deep and focus with customers. So from that perspective the approach is different, but in a nutshell to be successful in this space, it's not only about technology, it's about ecosystem. It's about building the coaliltion of the willing, because at the end of the day, the customers want solutions to their problems. And they don't want to just buy your technology, they want to work with you on developing solutions that drive business outcomes. >> Maciek, one of the things that's been interesting to watch is that people want to try, and they want to try faster. One of the big benefits of public cloud was that I have this sandbox that I could throw some people at, have a little bit of money, and try things and fail and try again. One of the concerns I have when I hear things like PTC and Microsoft get up on stage and say, "It's going to take 20 to 25 partners to put this together." When I hear that it's fragmented, it's going to take time, it's going to take money, help us. Are there are ways I can start playing with things to understand what will and what won't work for my environment, or is this something that I have to throw a million dollars and group of people for a year and a half on? >> It's actually a great point, and it's another, I would say, misconception, which is I need to go deep, have a sort of a big strategy. One of the things that I talk about with the customers is, yes, dream big but start small. So yes, have a sort of a big vision, big architecture, but then focus on a first project, because it's a multi-year, multi-phased journey. So from that perspective, you know, at Cisco we have roughly 14,000 customers that already got started on this IOT journey, and the use cases that we've seen sort of are in four different categories. First one is connect things, so connecting your operations, the second one is remote operations, the third one is predictive analytics, the fourth one is preventive maintenance. So don't be a hero, pick one of these four use cases, try it out, then do a ROI on this, and if your ROI is positive then do a next, maybe more sophisticated, more adventurous kind of a project down the road. So pace yourself. >> This is our 9th year doing theCube, and the one thing we've learned about information technology, operations technology, is it all comes back to data. And you pointed out again, you pointed it out in your piece, it's not just about connecting, it's about the data. So let's talk about the data, the data model. You've got edge, you've got core. You've got this really increasingly complex and elongating data pipeline. You've got physics, you've got latency. So what's your perspective on the data, how that's evolving, and how organizations need to take advantage of the data? >> Dave, I think you nailed it. It may come across funny because I work for Cisco and we connect things, but if you think about the first wave of internet, the main purpose of the devices and the way we were connecting them, was basically for you and I to get access to each other, to get access to the online data, to the online processes. The main purpose we connecting IOT devices, so that they can generate the data, and then we can analyze that data, turn these systems into solutions to drive business outcomes. So from that perspective we're actually seeing a big shift in the sort of data model, and it requires flexibility. Traditionally, we talked about cloud, right? In a cloud we usually see the use cases that require a processing of a lot of data, sort of in the batch possessing mode, or for example if you want to connect a bunch of vending machines, you can connect them directly to the cloud, because these machines actually send only very few packets and they send them very infrequently. Basically saying, "Hey, come on over "and replenish a bunch of supplies." But if you look at connected vehicle, if you look at an oil rig, in the case of oil rig, there's let's say a large one that has 100,000 sensors. These sensors generate a couple terabytes of data per day. You can't just send this data directly to the cloud through the satellite connection, right? You have to process the data on the oil rig based on the policy coming from the cloud. So from that perspective we've seen that there's a need for a more flexible architecture. We call it Fog Computing, which basically allows you to have flexibility of extending the cloud to the edge so you can process the data at the edge. You can execute on the AI functions at the edge as well. So that's one of the big architectural shifts that we've seen with IOT as well. >> Maciek, one of the opportunities of new architectures has been to do a redo for security. When it comes to IOT, though, there's a lot of concern around that, because just the surface area that we're going to have, the devices. Talk to us about how security fits into IOT. >> Yeah, it's hard to talk about IOT without mentioning security, right? And we obviously seen over the last two years a lot of press around IOT denial of service attacks and so forth, and for me I think the silver lining out of all of this news is that, first of all, that we have seen the vendor community finally taking IOT security seriously. So all the security vendors are actually investing in IOT security now appropriately. We now working together as an industry on standards, on interoperability, on sort of come on architectures, even with the device vendors who traditionally didn't pay much attention to security as well. Sort of like what we did with wifi, you remember, about 15 years ago but at a much greater scale. So the vendor community's focusing on it, but more importantly also the businesses are moving from what I would consider sort of a... I would say that kind of a denial. Hoping that their plant is not connected to the outside world and that it's secure. Moving down now to the much more modern model, which is basically a comprehensive architecture working with are-see-sos, across the enterprise, focusing on before, during, and after. So IOT now is being integrated into a broader security architecture, and IT and OT are working together. So yes, there is a concern, yes. There are a lot of events hitting the news, but I also think as an industry we're making progress. >> Just to follow up on that, Cisco obviously has an advantage in security, because you go end-to-end, you guys make everything, and you can do deep-packet inspection, and that seems to be a real advantage here. But then there's this thing called blockchain, and everybody talks about how blockchain can be applied. Where do you see blockchain fitting into the security equation? >> Yeah, I think that's a good question. Maybe a bit more broader story, I actually believe there's four legs to this digital transformations tool. There's IOT generating the data and acting on the decisions, there's AI, there is the fog computing we talked about, and the fourth tool is blockchain, which basically allows us to make sure that the data we're using we can actually trust. At the high level blockchain, people often confuse blockchain and Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, but blockchain is an underlying technology behind sort of the crypto, that allows basically multiple parties to write their transactions in a fast and permanent way. But in the enterprise context, in IOT context, blockchain allows us to actually come up with very new use cases by looking at the provenance, and looking at the data across multiple parties. The data we can trust. For example, the use cases such as counterfeiting, there are use cases like food safety. Like patient records. Like provenance of materials. So now we can enable these use cases, because we have a single source of truth. >> I want to ask you about disruption. I like the mental model and picture that you created before of a horizontal technologies, and you kind of get vertical industries, and it seems like, again I'm bringing it back to data. We heard Super Mario at the host of the conference say this was the largest digital transformation conference. Which we laughed, like every conference is a digital transformation conference. But to us, digital transformation, digital means data. And that picture you drew of horizontal technology and vertical industries, it's all data, and data enables disruption. It used to be a vertical stack of talent and manufacturing and supply chain within an industry, and now data seems to be blowing that to pieces in digital. You see Amazon getting into, you know, buying Whole Foods in grocery. You see Apple in financial services. Others, Silicon Valley type companies, disrupting healthcare, which we all know needs disruption. What do you make of disruption? It seems like no industry is safe. It seems like Silicon Valley has this dual disruption agenda. Horizontal technology and then partnering within industries, and everything is getting turned up on its side. What do you make of it all? >> Dave, I think you nailed it. It is about and verus or, right? When you think about companies, you mentioned Microsoft, Cisco, Amazon, verus PTC or Rockwell, or Emerson and others. 10 years ago we sort of lived on a different planet, right, and rarely these companies even talked to each other. And now, even at this show, these companies are actually showing joint solutions. So that's precisely, I think, what we've seen, which is technology competence coming from the Valley and from traditional technology industry, and then the vertical and market expertise coming from these more traditional vendors. At the end of the day, it is about technology, but it is also about talent. It is about skillsets. It's about all of us pulling our resources together to develop solutions to drive business outcomes. So cloud, obviously, was a very disruptive force in our industry. But when you think about IOT, just based on what you just said, it seems to me given the assets, the resources, the people, the plants, the equipment, it seems like IOT is maybe somewhat evolutionary. Not a completely... It's a disruptive force in that's new and that it's different, but it seems like the incumbents, I mean look at PTC, their resurgence. It seems like the incumbents have an advantage here. What are your thoughts? >> I think that if they play it right they absolutely do. But it requires also a shift in mindset, and I think we seeing it already, which is moving from a vertical, one company does it all kind of mentality, into the lets build an ecosystem based on open systems, open standards, interoperability. And that's sort of a shift I think we are seeing. So for me, I think that the incumbents, if they embrace this kind of a model, they absolutely have a critical role to play. On the flip side, the technology companies realizing that they need to, it's not only about technology, but it's also about partnering. It's about integrating within legacy ecosystems and the legacy infrastructure. So each of the sides of the coin need to learn new tricks. >> Okay, last question, is your initial thoughts, anyway, on this event, some initial take aways. I know it's early, day one, but you've been here. You've heard the keynotes. Final thoughts? >> I think so far it's actually a great start to the event. I have to say, what we've talked about already, my biggest take away is to see, and actually joy, is to see companies from different walks of life working together. You have robotics companies, you have AI companies, you have industrial companies. All of them are coming up with solutions together, and that's basically what we want to see. Is breaking the barriers and multiple companies working together to move the industry forward. >> And you're also seeing the big SIs are here. I can see Accenture, I can see Deloid. I know InfoSys is here, et cetera, et cetera. So if they're here, you know there's a lot of money to be made. So Maciek, thanks very much. It's really a pleasure having you. Alright, keep it right there, everybody. This is theCube, from LiveWorx in Boston. We'll be right back after this short break.

(inspirational music) - So GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation was passed by the EU in 2016, in May of 2016. It is, as Ronald was saying it's four base things. The right to privacy, the right to be forgotten, privacy built into systems by default, and the right to data transfer. - [Panelist] Takes effect next year. - It is already in effect. GDPR took effect in May of 2016. The enforcement penalties take place the 25th of May 2018. Now here's where there's two things on the penalty side that are important for everyone to know. Number one. GDPR is extra territorial. Which means that any EU citizen anywhere on the planet has GDPR goes with them. So say you are a pizza shop in Nebraska. An EU citizen walks in, orders a pizza, gives the credit card, stuff like that. If you for some reason destroy that data, GDPR now applies to you Mr. Pizza Shop, whether or not you do business in the EU, because an EU citizens data is with you. It's true, the penalties are much different than they ever have been. In the old days companies could simply write off penalties as saying that's cost of doing business. With GDPR the penalties are up to 4% of your annual revenue or 20 million euros, which ever is greater, and there may be criminal sanctions against, charges against key company executives. So there's a lot of questions about how this is going to be implemented. But one of the first impacts you will see from a marketing perspective is, all the advertising we do, targeting people by their age, by their personal identifiable information, by their demographics, between now and May 25th 2018 a good chunk of that may have to go away because we may not, there's no way for you to say well this person's an EU citizen this person's not. People give false information all the time online. So how do you differentiate every company regardless whether they are in the EU or not will have to adapt to it. Or deal with the penalties. - When you think about the principles that GDPR gives you, I look at that and think that's just, to me that's just good data management practices and principles. It happens to be around personal data for GDPR right now, but those principles are just valley for probably kind of any kind of data. So if you're on the digital transformation journey, with all the change and all the opportunity that brings, these practices and principles for GDPR, they should be helping drive things like your digital transformation. For a lot of our customers, change is the only constant they've got, especially managing all this whilst everything is changing around you. It's tough for a lot of them. - How are people thinking about the data layer, where it lives, on prem, in the cloud, think about GDPR compliance, you know all that sort of good stuff. How are you and Red Hat, how are you asking people to think about that? - So, you know, data management is a big question. We build storage tooling. We understand how to put the bytes on disk, and persist and maintain the storage. It's a different question what are the data services and what is the data governance or policy around placement. And, I think it's a really interesting part of the ecosystem today. We've been working with some research partners in the Massachusets open cloud at Boston University on a project called Cloud Dataverse. And it has a whole policy question around data. It's there, scientists want to share data sets, to control and understand who you're sharing your data sets with. So its definitely a space that we are interested in. Understand that there's a lot of work to be done there, and GDPR just kind of shines the light right on it. Says, policy and governance around where data is placed is actually fundamental and important. And I think it's an important part because you have seen some of the data issues recently in the news. And, we got to get a handle on where data goes, and ultimately I'd love to see a place where I'm in control of how my data is shared with the rest of the world. - GDPR provides for two types of things that a business must do. It must provide insight into the data that it's captured, about business or an individual, legal entity. And it must also then provide the processes for mediating or taking action against that data according to whatever the customers virtues are. Tell us a little bit about that. - So these are two important features because of GDPR. First thing GDPR has 99 articles and 173 articles and 99 like term technological ways. There are other ways, legal ways to do it, but technologically what they want. Like if Peter decides, that I need to know from this bank or from this social media company how much information you have about me, and what are you doing with it. They have to provide that information in 30 days. That is called right to access. And the second thing is you can come and say, well I'm not using these five things which you sold me earlier I don't want you to use that information, or even have information on that for me or my son or my kid. So you can tell them delete that information or mask that. - And that's call the right to? - Right to erasure, right to remove the data. And these two things are very important. This gives customer, they make customer the king. They make the individual the king. He can say tell me what you have on me, and delete what you have on me. - Now the laws have been in the books in, at least in the EU for GDPR for a while. But the fines start getting leveled in May. - May 5th. - Now we've heard that... - So GDPR is a big thing for us and our customers and prospects as well. So we are actively working on getting GDPR compliant. Today our platform is FIPS compliance, so that's already a big stepping stone to getting there. So we look at GDPR in one of, in two ways again, right? One is the solution that we provide to our customers, the data platform and the data protect as we call it. Being GDPR complaint. Meaning the data that lands on that system. The ability to delete the data, the ability to say who has access to the data, rules based taxes, things like that. The second aspect is, our support and the fact that we have access to a lot of customer information ourselves, right? The fact that we can look at their systems and make sure that, everything we do internally is also GDPR compliant, so that the customers and our support systems and our sales force database is all GDPR as well. So both those elements come into play and we are actively working on all of them. (inspirational music)

>> Announcer: From Gillette Stadium, in Foxborough, Massachusets, it's theCUBE. Covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2018 presented by siliconANGLE. >> I'm Stu Miniman, and this is siliconANGLE Media's production of theCUBE at the VTUG Winter Warmer 2018. It's the 12th year of the event, the fifth year we've actually had theCUBE here. Dave Vellante, my boss, was here the first year. Every other year, I've been kind of manning it solo. Great community here, I talked to a lot of users and really looking at, you know, some of the transitions that are happening in the industry. This event is all about virtualization and Cloud, and to help me put an exclamation point on everything we've been looking at here, and what's happening in the industry, happen to welcome back to the program Rob Strechay who is the SVP of product at Zerto, someone I've known for longer than I even realize, and you know, been on the program many times, But first time since you've been at Zerto. >> Yeah, first time since I was at Hewlett-Packer Enterprise. So, I'm glad to join you guys here, and great event, glad to be able to get down here today. >> You know, Zerto, company we've known for many years. I happen to know one of the earliest investors in the company, and you know, when I look at two of the biggest industry shows, when you talk about Virtualization and Cloud, it's VMworld and it's Amazon's Reinvent show. >> Right. And, I remember like the first or second year we did Amazon Reinvent, the Zerto booth was like right behind us, and so your company that really spans that gammon, helping customers with that, so I want to get your viewpoint, you talked about why people come here, but what are you hearing from the users? What are some of the big challenges they're facing, and how are they looking to manage some of those transitions? >> Yeah, I think it's really critical to have events like this that are, you know, a lot of different vendors that are here because I think when we see a number of companies going out and looking, and I was with a customer down in New York City yesterday, the software for FinTac. And what they were looking at is, how do we leverage multi-cloud? It becomes very important. They're looking at, it's not going to just be Amazon, it's not just going to be Azure, it's not going to be VMC on AWUS, they're looking at how they're going to have a multi-cloud strategy. And I think that when, what we're hearing from customers is there's a lot of confusion in the market, and I think that's why this program and others are really great at cutting through what is real, what's not real, how do you look for the ability to have that data mobility between clouds but with security. Especially today's like Privacy Day, you know, on the 25th, so, you know, you start to look at it and go, hey, security's a big thing, and a big theme from what people were saying here today too. >> Yeah, and one of the user interviews I really loved today talked about one of the biggest challenges he saw, he said, gosh, security, think about the Intel discussion there, what's that going to mean? And he actually said, performance issue actually doesn't fit, isn't a big deal for him from an architectural standpoint. Security? Oh my gosh, he's in healthcare. (laughs) If he's in violation, or if patient information gets out there, you know, this is the kind of things that put companies out of business. >> Absolutely, yeah, and I think that's what we're hearing. I mean, especially yesterday, it was okay, how do you layer encryption on top of your solution? How do you utilize the different types of secure transfers? How do you make sure the data is secure? There's a lot about that resiliency of the data, and making sure you can get it back, and it's immutable for that matter. >> Yeah, one of the things when we talk to customers, it's funny, in the industry we're always arguing as to what's the right terminology? It's like, I still get to have a company that said they had a convergence problem that they were trying to fix, and also it's like, hyper-cloud, multi-cloud, no, they have a Cloud strategy. And yes, they're using sass, yes, they're using public Cloud, and yes, almost everybody's got something in their data center. How do we get our arms around it? How do I have the services that work with me wherever I am, whether that's data protection, security, replications. So where's Zetro fit in that discussion, and how are customers doing at getting their arms around these challenges? >> So I think a lot of when I'm out talking to the CIO's and the VP's of infrastructure and having those conversations, a lot of what we help them understand is here's where you need to go, and here's the choices you need to make. Are you going to use Azure? Do you have an EA with Microsoft? Because you've probably been paying for Azure credits that you're not using, so start there. It's simple, it cost you nothing extra. Get your feet wet, dip your feet in there. We see a lot of customers of ours that use DR's as a service as the first stepping stone to getting into the Cloud. It's a nice, easy way in, they can get their feet wet, they can test out the performance, the security, they can do user acceptance testing without actually having to go there. They can also get a realistic view of the cost. I think that was talked about earlier today too. With some of the Amazon stuff is that really, you have to understand the cost. It's not the same as owning it on Prime. But then again you're not having the on Prime anymore, so if you can get away with that, when we see people taking strategies, a lot of it is data center consolidation, but maybe now I'm down from six data centers to two. And I still need to have that third copy. Where do I put that third copy? Do I put it at another data center? Do I go to a manage service provider, cloud service provider, or do I go to the public cloud? So, what we try to do is offer them a platform, the Zerto platform, that can actually take them to all those different places. We can take them there and bring them back. Yes, people use use for DR, but really that data mobility and the data flexibility really helps them stay away from the vendor lock-in as well. >> What are you hearing from customers when they talk about vendor lock in? There's very few companies out there that do a good job at being, it's like, oh, the VM ware, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, we can actually help you across the board there. >> Rob: Yeah. >> How much is lock-in a concern, and how do you as a software company stay agnostic and still fit into all of those environments? >> Yeah, the staying agnostic is really tough because some people are nicer than others, you know, to work with, and you know you try to not pick your favorites, but a the same time, we let our customers drive us to where they are going. I think that when we started to look at the bigger picture, people start out, you know, Amazon's the 800 pound gorilla in the space, everyone tries Amazon first. Maybe they didn't like or have the experience they thought they would, it was a lot more work than they thought it was going to be, so they start to look at other options. So when we started out, in 2014 we've been shipping our to Amazon, DR to Amazon part of our platform. Now, over the last year, we've added in the go-to and go-back from Azure, and we'll soon release the next iteration of that next month that will take even further among and across those different platforms. And I think to your point, it's a how can we give our customers choice? If you want to use a manage service provider, such as an IBM where they're based on Cloud foundation from VMWare, you can use that. If you want to then go from there to Amazon, our product will actually enable you to do that. And I think that's what we can do is look at our customers, and they've, luckily enough, driven us to this heterogeneous cloud environment. >> I want to get your comment on something. When people talk about compute moving to a more utility model, but it's not the way utility was where if I'm getting energy, as a consumer, from one place or another, I don't care whether it's wind, solar, or coal, nuclear, because I'm just getting it. When I look at Cloud computing, even infrastructure's a service. There's things that need to happen. When I talk to most software companies, it's yes, I'm going to support across the board, but there's special integration. There's things that I can do to make Amazon better, Azure better, Google better, and it's all a little bit different, and even with things like cooper netties, it's not homonogizing IT. The big problem we see out there is IT is a heterogeneous mess. There's never killing anything, it's all add this and add this, and now we've got a bad episode of Hoarders. >> Yes. (laughing) >> Is what we got, so I'm curious from a customer standpoint and from a product standpoint, maybe you know you could talk a little bit about that. >> I think our customers have been very clear to us that's simplicity, and I think that's what you're getting at is that simplicity is job one for us. If we're not being simple about what we do, and we're not really trying to make it all that one platform, we're not doing our job. We're doing a disservice our customers. So our Azure product looks identical to our AWS looks identical to our IBM looks identical to one of my other cloud service provider's products. Looks the same as your on Prime VMWare to VMWare or VMWare to HyperV for that matter. I think that part of it is that we've taken an approach that, exactly that. We got to be heterogeneous, but we've got to make it all look the same and be the same user experience. So, I think what we as an industry can do better is really focusing on user experience and single platform to help across these because like you said, we have a customer, he uses both AWS and Azure. And he was on of our first customers on AWS and one of our first customers using our Azure product. He said that certain Linux systems actually run better on Azure than they did on Amazon, and that surprised him. But he was able to go up and test them out, put them up there, felt them over, and do them in a test bubble, and see how well they ran, and I think to your exact point it's that was a surprise to him, and I think it's that your mileage will vary with the different clouds, and being able to go there and test on them is very important 'cause you're going to find that, like he did, he's a smaller company, it's a refabrics manufacturer, TenCate, they really focused on having that multicloud strategy because for them, they didn't want to have all their eggs in one basket either, but they found that certain applications ran better on Azure, certain ran better on AWS, so they're going to have that multicloud strategy. >> Alright, Rob, help bring us home. What brings Zerto to an event like this, kind of user groups in general, to VTUG specifically? >> Yeah, so the VTUG, we've been a long term supporter of this, I think since pretty much the founding of the founding of the company, so one of the reasons is a lot of out customers come to... So, we want to support them getting more knowledge out there, obviously we get to reach more customers and more potential customers, but at the same time, it's about the community and building that community. We look for more, in fact, we're starting to do even local user groups of our own. We've seen that the user groups have fallen off, and in particular around disaster recovery, in the IT resiliency, there's really no place to go. You had ISACA, you had different organizations for certifications, but really, that community where I can go and understand what are my peers doing, and get that group learning is so important, and that's why we've been a long term supporter of this. >> Alright, well Rob Strechay, really appreciate you helping me wrap up, put an exclamation point on what's going on here at the show as well as in the industry are all the major changes happening, virtualization and Cloud. Make sure to check out TheCUBE.net for all of our coverage. We have a huge line up of 2018 events. Feel free to reach out to the team. As always, I'm really to get on Twitter, I'm just @stu, @-S-T-U, and thank you so much of watching, I'm Stu Miniman, and you've been watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Narrator: From Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusets, it's theCUBE, covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2018. Presented by SiliconANGLE. (upbeat music) >> I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's fifth year at the VTUG Winter Warmer. 2018 is the 12th year of this event, always love when we get to talk to some of the users at the conference which's why I'm really happy to introduce to our audience Sue Morrow, who is a network manager at United Methodist Homes. Thanks for joining me Sue. >> No problem. >> First, tell me a little bit about yourself and what brings you all the way from Upstate New York to come to the VTUG. >> Well, I like to go to conferences whenever I can continue my education in IT. I grew up with computers in my house in the '80s. My dad was a physics teacher and a scientist so we always had a Commodore 64 or an Amiga in our house, growing up, when most people had Atari, we had computers. >> Totally, so Commodore 64, classic. I myself was a Tandy Radioshack, the TRS-80 Model III. So, in a similar era. >> Yep, I actually took a basic coding class on a TRS-80 when I was around 10, I think. Anyway, grew up with computers and somehow stumbled into IT later in life. So, that's why I'm here. >> United Methodist Homes, tell us just a little bit about what the mission of the company is. >> United Methodist Homes is a longterm care corporation. We have four facilities, two in the Binghamton area and two in Northeastern Pennsylvania. We have all levels of care from nursing homes, skilled care, up to independent living, and everything in between. >> Okay, and as network manager, what's under your purview? >> Well, it's kind of a silly title, actually. In longterm care or in healthcare or nonprofits, as we are, you often wear many hats and so that's, sort of, a weird title for me, but I supervise our help desk which we serve centrally from our corporate office. We serve about 600 actual computer users and, all in total, about 1200 employees who interface with the technology, in some way. So, I supervise the help desk, I make sure our network is running well. IT has changed over the years so that we're now providing more of a service and making sure that everything is up and running, network-wise, for everyone instead of keeping our servers running all the time. >> Yeah, reminds me of the old saying, it was like oh, the network is the computer, things like that, so you've got both ends of it. >> Sue: Yes. >> What kind of things are you looking at from a technology standpoint when you come to event like this? Did you catch some of the keynotes this morning, there was a broad spectrum? >> Yes. >> What are the kind of things that you're digging in to and find interesting? >> Yeah, the keynotes are really interesting. I think the first one that I went to with Luigi and Chris was great just to, kind of, expand your thinking about your own career personally, and where you want to go with your life was really interesting. I also watched Randall do his coding which is completely outside of what I do everyday, but was fascinating. And then the last major keynote was fantastic. I think that from my perspective in my company, we're kind of small and we don't do a whole lot of, we don't run apps and things like that, so the things that we have ritualized is mostly storage, so I'm looking at better ways that we can manage our storage and stuff. Most of the applications that we run now are SAS applications hosted by somebody else and their cloud, or a public cloud, or wherever, so I'm not so much looking at the cloud technologies like more businesses are that are providing an application for their company. >> It sounds like cloud and SAS's being a part of the overall strategy, have you been seeing that dynamic change in your company? How does it impact what you're doing or is it just a separate organization. >> It's definitely been a shift in the last few years, we used to run all of our applications in-house. Longterm care has caught up now, with the hospitals, so we have our electronic medical record which is a hosted application, whereas, up until five years ago, that was an on-premises application that we hosted and had to run and maintain, and update and upgrade, and make sure was available. That is definitely been a shift, that everything is now hosted. So we just make sure that our network is up and running and support our users and all of their issues when they break things, flip their screens, drop something, provide hardware for them all that sorts of stuff. >> The constant pace of innovation change. On the news this week they were saying, okay, medical records on your iPhone is up for debate. Does regulation impact your day to day activities and what are some of the challenges in that area? >> Absolutely. One of the other things we have to do is interface with the providers. We have medical providers that come in from the outside and they need to access our EMR also, so we need to provide access for them on, sometimes, whatever device they bring in, which is not always compatible, so we have a whole other set of challenges there. Where we can manage our computers for our employees by pushing out policies and things that are required for the application. When someone comes in from the outside, it isn't, necessarily, setup right, so we have that other set of challenges, and regulation-wise, yes. The government is always pushing out new and updated regulations for healthcare and we have to keep on top of that too. Of course, we have HIPAA concerns and things like that, which is also comes into play when you're talking about cloud host, and any hosted application. We have to be concerned about HIPAA, as well. >> Yeah, wondering when I look at the space that you're in, the ultimate goal is you want the patients, the people at your company, be able to spend more time, help them, not be caught up in the technology of things. Could you, maybe, talk a little bit about that dynamic? >> Yeah, one of the things that I always say is, we need to give our employees the tools that they need to do their job most efficiently. A nurse needs to be ready to go at the beginning of her shift on her laptop, ready to pass meds, and when they can't remember their password or that computer isn't working, my team needs to work as quickly as we can to get them back to work. We serve our users, really. We're not there being all techy. They want us to fix them and get them back to work, and that's what we do. We put tools in their hands, any device that they need to make them more efficient. I try hard to provide a variety of devices, people have different preferences on how they do their work. Some people prefer a laptop, some people prefer to stand at a wall-mounted touchscreen and document, some people want to carry a tablet with them. I try to provide a range of devices so that they can have whatever suits them and makes them most comfortable to get their job done. >> Love that, it's not, necessarily, about the cool or trendier thing, it's about getting business done, helping, and in you're case, enabling your employees to really help the people that are there. Anything you want to highlight as to things you're excited to look at this show, or just technology in general? >> I'm just kind of here for the general nature of it. I enjoy the networking and getting to talk to people, and keeping current in what's happening in the industry and my career, so that's why I come. >> Alright, well Sue Morrow, really appreciate you coming, sharing with our audience. >> Absolutely. >> User groups like this, all about the users. Happy to have lots of them on the program, so big thanks to the VTUG group for bringing us some great guests. We'll be back with more coverage here. I'm Stu Miniman, you're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)