>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with our leaders all around the world. This is theCUBE conversation. >> Welcome to theCUBE and the special IBM Brocade panel. I'm Lisa Martin. And I'm having a great opportunity here to sit down for the next 20 minutes with three gentlemen please welcome Brian Sherman a distinguished engineer from IBM, Brian, great to have you joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> And Matt key here. Flash systems SME from IBM, Matt, happy Friday. >> Happy Friday, Lisa. Thanks for having us. >> Our pleasure. And AIG Customer solution here from Brocade is here. AJ welcome. >> Thanks for having me along. >> AJ we're going to stick with you, IBM and Brocade have had a very long you said about 22 year strategic partnership. There's some new news. And in terms of the evolution of that talk to us about what's going on with with Brocade IBM and what is new in the storage industry? >> Yeah, so the the newest thing for us at the moment is that IBM just in mid-October launched our Gen seven platforms. So this is think about the stresses that are going on in the IT environments. This is our attempt to keep pace with with the performance levels that the IBM teams are now putting into their storage environments the All-Flash Data Centers and the new technologies around non-volatile memory express. So that's really, what's driving this along with the desire to say, "You know what people aren't allowed "to be in the data center." And so if they can't be in the data center then the fabrics actually have to be able to figure out what's going on and basically provide a lot of the automation pieces. So something we're referring to as the autonomous SAM. >> And we're going to dig into NBME of our fabrics in a second but I do want to AJ continue with you in terms of industries, financial services, healthcare airlines there's the biggest users, biggest need. >> Pretty much across the board. So if you look at the global 2000 as an example, something on the order of about 96, 97% of the global 2000 make use of fiber channel environments and in portions of their world generally tends to be a lot of the high end financial guys, a lot of the pharmaceutical guys, the automotive, the telcos, pretty much if the data matters, and it's something that's critical whether we talk about payment card information or healthcare environments, data that absolutely has to be retained, has to get there, has to perform then it's this combination that we're bringing together today around the new storage elements and the functionalities they have there. And then our ability in the fabric. So the concept of a 64 gig environment to help basically not be the bottleneck in the application demands, 'cause one thing I can promise you after 40 years in this industry is the software guys always figure out how to all the performance that the hardware guys put on the shelf, right? Every single time. >> Well there's gauntlet thrown down there. Matt, let's go to you. I want to get IBM's perspective on this. Again, as we said, a 22 year strategic partnership, as we look at things like not being able to get into the data center during these unprecedented times and also the need to be able to remove some of those bottlenecks how does IBM view this? >> Yeah, totally. It's certainly a case of raising the bar, right? So we have to as a vendor continue to evolve in terms of performance, in terms of capacity, cost density, escalating simplicity, because it's not just a case of not be able to touch the rates, but there's fewer people not being able to adjust the rates, right? It's a case where our operational density continues to have to evolve being able to raise the bar on the network and be able to still saturate those line rates and be able to provide that simply a cost efficiency that gets us to a utilization that raises the bar from our per capita ratio from not just talking about 200, 300 terabytes per admin but going beyond the petabyte scale per admin. And we can't do that unless people have access to the data. And we have to provide the resiliency. We have to provide the simplicity of presentation and automation from our side. And then this collaboration that we do with our network brother like Brocade here continued to stay out of the discussion when it comes to talking about networks and who threw the ball next. So we truly appreciate this Gen seven launch that they're doing we're happy to come in and fill that pipe on the flash side for them. >> Excellent and Brian as a distinguished engineer and let me get your perspectives on the evolution of the technology over this 22 year partnership. >> Thanks Lisa. It certainly has been a longstanding, a great relationship, great partnership all the way from inventing joint things, to developing, to testing and deploying to different technologies through the course of time. And it's been one of those that where we are today, like AJ had talked about being able to sustain what the applications require today in this always on time type of environment. And as Matt said, bringing together the density and operational simplicity to make that happen 'cause we have to make it easier from the storage side for operations to be able to manage this volume of data that we have coming out and our due diligence is to be able to serve the data up as fast as we can and as resilient as we can. >> And so sticking with you, Brian that simplicity is key because as we know as we get more and more advances in technology the IT environment is only becoming more complex. So really truly enabling organizations in any industry to simplify is absolute table stakes. >> Yeah, it definitely is. And that's core to what we're focused on and how do we make the storage environment simple. It's been one those through the years and historically, we've had entry-level us and the industry as a whole, is that an entry-level product mid range level products, high-end level products. And earlier this year, we said enough, enough of that it's one product portfolio. So it's the same software stack it's just, okay. Small, medium and large in terms of the appliances that get delivered. Again, building on what Matt said, from a density perspective where we can have a petabyte of uncompressed and data reduced storage in a two Enclosure. So it becomes from a overall administration perspective, again, one software stake, one automation stack, one way to do point in time copies, replication. So in focusing on how to make that as simple for the operations as we possibly can. >> I think we'd all take a little bit of that right now. Matt, let's go to you and then AJ view, let's talk a little bit more, dig into the IBM storage arrays. I mean, we're talking about advances in flash, we're talking about NBME as a forcing function for applications to change and evolve with the storage. Matt, give us your thoughts on that. >> We saw a monumental leap in where we take some simplicity pieces from how we deliver our arrays but also the technology within the arrays. About nine months ago, in February we launched into the latest generation of non technology and with that born the story of simplicity one of the pieces that we've been happily essentially negating of value prop is storage level tiering and be able to say, "Hey, well we still support the idea of going down "to near line SaaS and enterprise disc in different flavors "of solid state whether it's tier one short usage "the tier zero high performance, high usage, "all the way up to storage class memory." While we support those technologies and the automated tiering, this elegance of what we've done as latest generation technology that we launched nine months ago has been able to essentially homogenize the environments to we're able to deliver that petabyte per rack unit ratio that Brian was mentioning be able to deliver over into all tier zero solution that doesn't have to go through woes of software managed data reduction or any kind of software managed hearing just to be always fast, always essentially available from a 100% data availability guaranteed that we offer through a technology called hyper swap, but it's really kind of highlighting what we take in from that simplicity story, by going into that extra mile and meeting the market in technology refresh. I mean, if you say the words IBM over the Thanksgiving table, you're kind of thinking, how big blue, big mainframe, old iron stuff but it's very happy to say over in distributed systems that we are in fact leading this pack by multiple months not just the fact that, "Hey, we announced sooner." But actually coming to delivering on-prem the actual solution itself nine, 10 months prior to anybody else and when that gets us into new density flavors gets us into new efficiency offerings. Not just talk about, "Hey, I can do this petabyte scale "a couple of rack units but with the likes of Brocade." That actually equates to a terabyte per second and a floor tile, what's that do for your analytics story? And the fact that we're now leveraging NBME to undercut the value prop of spinning disc in your HBC analytics environments by five X, that's huge. So now let's take near line SaaS off the table for anything that's actually per data of an angle of value to us. So in simplicity elements, what we're doing now will be able to make our own flash we've been deriving from the tech memory systems acquisition eight years ago and then integrating that into some essentially industry proven software solutions that we do with the bird flies. That appliance form factor has been absolutely monumental for us in the distributed systems. >> And thanks for giving us a topic to discuss at our socially distant Thanksgiving table. We'll talk about IBM. I know now I have great, great conversation. AJ over to you lot of advances here also in such a dynamic times, I want to get Brocade's perspective on how you're taking advantage of these latest technologies with IBM and also from a customer's perspective, what are they feeling and really being able to embrace and utilize that simplicity that Matt talked about. >> So there's a couple of things that fall into that to be honest, one of which is that similar to what you heard Brian described across the IBM portfolio for storage in our SaaS infrastructure. It's a single operating system up and down the line. So from the most entry-level platform we have to the largest platform we have it's a single software up and down. It's a single management environment up and down and it's also intended to be extremely reliable and extremely performance because here's part of the challenge when Matt's talking about multiple petabytes in a two U rack height, but the conversation you want to flip on its head there a little bit is "Okay exactly how many virtual machines "and how many applications are you going to be driving "out of that?" Because it's going to be thousands like between six and 10,000 potentially out of that, right? So imagine then if you have some sort of little hiccup in the connectivity to the data store for 6,000 to 10,000 applications, that's not the kind of thing that people get forgiving about. When we're all home like this. When your healthcare, when your finance, when your entertainment, when everything is coming to you across the network and remotely in this version and it's all application driven, the one thing that you want to make sure of is that network doesn't hiccup because humans have a lot of really good characteristics. Patience would not be one of those. And so you want to make sure that everything is in fact in play and running. And that's as one of the things that we work very hard with our friends at IBM to make sure of is that the kinds of analytics that Matt was just describing are things that you can readily get done. Speed is the new currency of business is a phrase you hear from... A quote you hear from Marc Benioff at Salesforce, right. And he's right if you can get data out of intelligence out of the data you've been collecting, that's really cool. But one of the other sort of flip sides on the people not being able to be in the data center and then to Matt's point, not as many people around either is how are humans fast enough when you look... Honestly when you look at the performance of the platforms, these folks are putting up how is human response time going to be good enough? And we all sort of have this headset of a network operations center where you've got a couple dozen people in a half lit room staring at massive screens on the thing to pop. Okay, if the first time a red light pops the human begins the investigation at what point is that going to be good enough? And so our argument for the autonomy piece of of what we're doing in the fabrics is you can't wait on the humans. You need to augment it. I get that people still want to be in charge and that's good. Humans are still smarter than the Silicon. We're not as repeatable, but we're still so far smarter about it. And so we needed to be able to do that measurement. We need to be able to figure out what normal looks like. We need to be able to highlight to the storage platform and to the application admins, when things go sideways because the demand from the applications isn't going to slow down. The demands from your environment whether you want to think about take the next steps with not just your home entertainment home entertainment systems but learning augmented reality, right. Virtual reality environments for kids, right? How do you make them feel like they're part and parcel of the classroom, for as long as we have to continue living a modified world and perhaps past it, right? If you can take a grade school from your local area and give them a virtual walkthrough of the loop where everybody's got a perfect view and it all looks incredibly real to them those are cool things, right? Those are cool applications, right? If you can figure out a new vaccine faster, right. Not a bad thing, right. If we can model better, not a bad thing. So we need to enable those things we need to not be the bottleneck, which is you get Matt and Brian over an adult beverage at some point and ask them about the cycle time for the Silicon they're playing with. We've never had Moore's law applied to external storage before never in the history of external storage. Has that been true until now. And so their cycle times, Matt, right? >> Yeah you struck a nerve there AJ, cause it's pretty simple for us to follow the linear increase in capacity and computational horsepower, right. We just ride the X86 bandwagon, ride the Silicon bandwagon. But what we have to do in order to maintain But what we have to do in order to maintain the simplicity story is followed more important one is the resiliency factor, right? 'Cause as we increased the capacity as we increased the essentially the amount of data responsible for each admin we have to literally log rhythmically increase the resiliency of these boxes because we're going to talk about petabyte scale systems and hosting them really 10,000 virtual machines in the two U form factor. I need to be able to accommodate that to make sure things don't blip. I need resilient networks, right. Have redundancy and access. I need to have protection schemes at every single layer of the stack. And so we're quite happy to be able to provide that as we leapfrog the industry and go in literally situations that are three times the competitive density that we you see out there and other distributed systems that are still bound by the commercial offerings, then, hey we also have to own that risk from a vendor side we have to make these things is actually rate six protection scheme equivalent from a drive standpoint and act back from controllers everywhere. Be able to supply the performance and consistency of that service throughout even the bad situations. >> And to that point, one of the things that you talked about, that's interesting to me that I'd kind of like you to highlight is your recovery times, because bad things will happen. And so you guys do something very, very different about that. That's critical to a lot of my customers because they know that Murphy will show up one day. So, I mean 'cause it happens, so then what. >> Well, speaking of that, then what Brian I want to go over to you. You mentioned Matt mentioned resiliency. And if we think of the situation that we're in in 2020 many companies are used to DR and BC plans for natural disasters, pandemics. So as we look at the shift and then the the volume of ransomware, that's going up one ransomware attack every 11 seconds this year, right now. How Brian what's that change that businesses need to make from from cyber security to cyber resiliency? >> Yeah, it's a good point in, and I try to hammer that home with our clients that, you're used to having your business continuity disaster recovery this whole cyber resiliency thing is a completely separate practice that we have to set up and think about and go through the same thought process that you did for your DR What are you going to do? What are you going to pretest? How are you going to test it? How are you going to detect whether or not you've got ransomware? So I spent a lot of time with our clients on that theme of you have to think about and build your cyber resiliency plan 'cause it's going to happen. It's not like a DR plan where it's a pure insurance policy and went and like you said, every 11 seconds there's an event that takes place. It's going to be a win not then. Yeah and then we have to work with our customers to put in a place for cyber resiliency and then we spent a lot of discussion on, okay what does that mean for my critical applications, from a restore time of backup and mutability. What do we need for those types of services, right? In terms of quick restore, which are my tier zero applications that I need to get back as fast as possible, what other ones can I they'll stick out on tape or virtual tape in and do things like that. So again, there's a wide range of technology that we have available in the in the portfolio for helping our clients from cyber resiliency. And then we try to distinguish that cyber resiliency versus cyber security. So how do we help to keep every, everybody out from a cybersecurity view? And then what can we do from the cyber resiliency, from a storage perspective to help them once once it gets to us, that's a bad thing. So how can we help? How help our folks recover? Well, and that's the point that you're making Brian is that now it's not a matter of, could this happen to us? It's going to, how much can we tolerate? But ultimately we have to be able to recover. We can't restore that data and one of those things when you talk about ransomware and things, we go to that people as the weakest link insecurity AJ talked about that, there's the people. Yeah there's probably quite a bit of lack of patients going on right now. But as we look as I want to go back over to you to kind of look at, from a data center perspective and these storage solutions, being able to utilize things to help the people, AI and Machine Learning. You talked about AR VR. Talk to me a little bit more about that as you see, say in the next 12 months or so as moving forward, these trends these new solutions that are simplified. >> Yeah, so a couple of things around that one of which is iteration of technology the storage platforms the Silicon they're making use of Matt I think you told me 14 months is the roughly the Silicon cycle that you guys are seeing, right? So performance levels are going to continue to go up the speeds. The speeds are going to continue to go up. The scale is going to is going to continue to shift. And one of the things that does for a lot of the application owners is it lets them think broader. It lets them think bigger. And I wish I could tell you that I knew what the next big application was going to be but then we'd be having a conversation about which Island in the Pacific I was going to be retiring too. But they're going to come and they're going to consume this performance because if you look at the applications that you're dealing with in your everyday life, right. They continue to get broader. The scope of them continues to scale out, right. There's things that we do. I saw I think it was an MIT development recently where they're talking about being able to and they were originally doing it for Alzheimer's and dementia, but they're talking about being able to use the microphones in your smartphone to listen to the way you cough and use that as a predictor for people who have COVID that are not symptomatic yet. So asymptomatic COVID people, right? So when we start talking about where this, where this kind of technology can go and where it can lead us, right. There's sort of this unending possibility for it. But what that on, in part is that the infrastructure has to be extremely sound, right? The foundation has to be there. We have to have the resilience, the reliability and one of the points that Brian was just making is extremely key. We talk about disaster tolerance business continuous, so business continuance is how do you recover? Cyber resilience is the same conversation, right? So you have the protection side of it. Here's my defenses. Now what happens when they actually get in. And let's be honest, right? Humans are frequently that weak link, right. For a variety of behaviors that the humans that humans have. And so when that happens, where's the software in the storage that tells you, "Hey, wait there's an odd traffic behavior here "where data is being copied "at rates and to locations that that are not normal." And so that's part of when we talk about what we're doing in our side of the automation is how do you know what normal looks like? And once you know what normal looks like you can figure out where the outliers are. And that's one of the things that people use a lot for trying to determine whether or not ransomware is going on is, "Hey, this is a traffic pattern, that's new. "This is a traffic pattern. "That's different." Are they doing this because they're copying the dataset from here to here and encrypting it as they go, right? 'Cause that's one of the challenges you got to, you got to watch for. So I think you're going to see a lot of advancement in the application space. And not just the MIT stuff, which is great. The fact that people are actually able to or I may have misspoken, maybe Johns Hopkins. And I apologize to the Johns Hopkins folks that kind of scenario, right. There's no knowing what they can make use of here in terms of the data sets, right. Because we're gathering so much data, the internet of things is an overused phrase but the sheer volume of data that's being generated outside of the data center, but manipulated analyzed and stored internally. 'Cause you got to have it someplace secure. Right and that's one of the things that we look at from our side is we've got to be that as close to unbreakable as we can be. And then when things do break able to figure out exactly what happened as rapidly as possible and then the recovery cycle as well. >> Excellent and I want to finish with you. We just have a few seconds left, but as AJ was talking about this massive evolution and applications, for example when we talk about simplicity and we talk about resiliency and being able to recover when something happens, how did these new technologies that we've been unpacking today? How did these help the admin folks deal with all of the dynamics that are happening today? >> Yeah so I think the biggest the drop, the mic thing we can say right now is that we're delivering 100% tier zero in Vme without data reduction value props on top of it at a cost that undercuts off-prem S3 storage. So if you look at what you can do from an off-prem solution for air gap and from cyber resiliency you can put your data somewhere else. And it's going to take whatever long time to transfer that data back on prem, to read get back to your recover point. But when you work at economics that we're doing right now in the distributed systems, hey, you're DR side, your copies of data do not have to wait for that. Off-prem bandwidth to restore. You can actually literally restore it in place. And you couple that with all of the the technology on the software side that integrates with it I get incremental point in time. Recovery is either it's on the primary side of DRS side, wherever, but the fact that we get to approach this thing from a cost value then by all means I can naturally absorb a lot of the cyber resiliency value in that too. And because it's all getting all the same orchestrated capabilities, regardless of the big, small, medium, all that stuff, it's the same skillsets. And so I don't need to really learn new platforms or new solutions to providing cyber resiliency. It's just part of my day-to-day activity because fundamentally all of us have to wear that cyber resiliency hat. But as, as our job, as a vendor is to make that simple make it cost elegance, and be able to provide a essentially a homogenous solutions overall. So, hey, as your business grows, your risk gets averted on your recovery means also get the thwarted essentially by your incumbent solutions and architecture. So it's pretty cool stuff that we're doing, right. >> It is pretty cool. And I'd say a lot of folks would say, that's the Nirvana but I think the message that the three of you have given in the last 20 minutes or so is that IBM and Brocade together. This is a reality. You guys are a cornucopia of knowledge. Brian, Matt, AJ, thank you so much for joining me on this panel I really enjoyed our conversation. >> Thank you. >> Thank you again Lisa. >> My pleasure. From my guests I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching this IBM Brocade panel on theCUBE.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. Everyone welcome back to the cubes coverage of a Davis reinvent 2020. It's a virtual conference this year. This is the Cube virtual. I'm John for your host. We're not in person this year. We're doing it remote because of the pandemic, but it's gonna be wall to wall coverage for three weeks. We've got you covered. And we got a great interview signature interview here with Two Cube alumni's Matt Garment, vice president of sales and marketing at AWS, formerly head of the C two and, of course, Sanjay Poon in CEO of VM Ware. Both distinguished guests and alumni of the Cube. Good to see you, Sanjay. Matt. Thanks for coming on. Uh, let's just jump into it. How are you guys doing? >>Great. Exciting. Excited for reinvent and, uh, excited for the conversation. So thanks for having us on. >>Yeah, I'm great to be here. We are allowed to be 6 ft away from each other, so I came in, but super excited about the partnership. Matt and I have been friends for several years on. You were so excited about another reinvent, the different circumstances doing all virtual. But it's a fantastic partnership. >>You know, I look forward to reinvent one of my most favorite times of the year, and it's also kind of stressful because it's backs up against Thanksgiving. And but, you know, you get through it, you have your turkey and you do the Friday and you guys probably Kino, perhaps, and all things going on and then you go to Vegas is a few celebration. We're not doing it this year. Three weeks eso There's gonna be a lot of big content in the first week, and we're gonna roll that out. We're gonna cover it, But it's gonna be a different celebrations so mad. I know you're in front center on this, Uh, just real quick. What are what do you expect people to be doing on the system? What's your expectations and how is this all going to play out? >>Yeah, you know, it's gonna be different, but I think we have Justus much exciting news as ever. And, you know, it's gonna be over a three week period. I think it actually gives people an opportunity to Seymour things. I think a lot of times we heard from, uh, from customers before was they love the excitement of being in Vegas, and we're not gonna be able to exactly replicate that, but But we have a lot of exciting things planned, and it'll enables customers to get two more sessions Seymour of the content and really see more of the exciting things that are coming out of AWS. And there's a lot s over the three weeks I encourage folks toe to dive in and really learn things is a This is the opportunity for customers to learn about the cloud and and some really cool things coming out. We're excited. >>Well, congratulations on all the business performs. I know that there's been a tailwind with the pandemic as people wanna go faster and smarter with cloud and on premise and Sanjay, you guys have a great results as well. Before I get into some of my point. Of course, I have a lot of I know we don't a lot of time, but I want to get a nup date on the relationship we covered in three years ago when, uh, Andy Jassy and team came down to San Francisco with Pat Gelsinger, Raghu, Sanjay. All this went down. There were skeptics. Relationship has proven to be quite strong and successful for both parties because you guys take a minute so you will start with you and talk about the relationship update. Where you guys at, What's the status? The relationship people want to know. >>Yeah, I think John, the relationship is going really well. Uh, it's rooted in first off, a clear understanding that there's value for customers. Um, this is the best of the public cloud in the private cloud in a hybrid cloud journey. And then, secondly, a deep engineering effort. This wasn't a Barney announcement. We both decided Matt in his previous role, was running a lot of the engineering efforts. Uh, we were really keen to make this a deep engineering effort, and often when we have our connected Cube ers, we're doing one little later this afternoon. I often can't tell when a Amazon personal speaking when a VM ware person speaking we're so connected both the engineering and then the go to market efforts. And I think after the two or three years that the the solution has had to just state and now we have many, many customers started to get real value. The go to market side of the operations really starting take off. So we're very excited about it. It is the preferred and the best offering. We think in the market, Um, and for Vienna, where customers. We message it as the best place for Vienna workload that's running on V sphere to move into Amazon. >>Matt, what's your take on the relationship update from your >>standpoint, I agree with Sanjay. I think it's been it's been fantastic. I think like you said, some folks were skeptical when we first announced it. But But, you know, we knew that there was something there and I think as we've gotten even deeper into this partnership, Onda figured out how we can continue Thio integrate more deeply both with on Prem and into the cloud. Our customers have really guided us and I think that's that's enabled us to further strengthen that partnership, and customers continue to get more excited when they see how easy it is to move and operate their VM where in their V sphere workloads inside of a W S on how it integrates well with the AWS environment, Um on they can still use all of the same functions and capabilities that they they built their business on the inside of the sphere. We're seeing bigger and bigger customers really just embrace us, and the partnerships only grown stronger. I think you know, Sanjay and I, we do joint sales calls together. I think that the business has really, really grown. It's been it's been a fantastic partnership. >>I was talking about that yesterday with being where in eight of us teams members as well. I want to get your thoughts on this cultural fit. Sanjay mentioned e think the engineering cultures air there. The also the corporate culture, both customer focused. Remember Andy Jassy told me, Hey, we're customer focused like you're making big. You make big, big statements Public Cloud and now he goes toe hybrid. He's very reactive to the customers and this is a cultural thing for me, was an VM where what are the customers saying to you now? What are you working backwards from this year? Because there's a lot to work backwards from. You got the pandemic. You got clear trends around at modernization automation under the covers, if you will. And you got VM Ware successful software running on their cloud on AWS. You got other customers. Matt, what's the big trends right now that are highlighted in your in your world? >>Yeah, it's a good question. And I think you know, it really does highlight the strength of this this hybrid model, I think, you know, pre pandemic. We had huge numbers of customers, obviously kind of looking at the cloud, but some of the largest enterprises in the world, in the more traditional enterprises, they really weren't doing a lot, you know, they were tipping their toes in, and some of the forward leaning enterprises were being really aggressive about getting into the cloud. But, you know, many people were just, you know, kind of hesitant or kind of telling, saying, Yes, we'll go learn about the cloud. I think as soon as the pandemic hit, we're really starting to see some of those more traditional enterprises realize it's a business imperative for them. Toe have ah, big cloud strategy and to move there quickly, and I I think our partnership with VM Ware and the VMC offering really is allowing many of these large enterprises to do that. And we see we see big traditional enterprise is really accelerating that move into the cloud. It gives them the business agility they need that allows them to operate their environment in uncertain world that allows them to operate remotely on DSO. We're seeing all of those trends, and I think I think we're going to continue to see the acceleration of our joint business. >>Sanjay, your thoughts. Virtualization has hit ah, whole nother level. It's not like server virtualization like it's cultural, it's societal. What's your take? >>Yeah, I think you know, virtualization is that fabric that connects the private cloud to the public cloud. It's the basis for a lot of the public cloud infrastructure. So when we listen to customers, I think the first kind of misconception we had to help them with was that it had to be choice between one or the other and being able to take Vienna Cloud, which was basically compute storage networking management and put that into the bare metal capabilities of AWS, an engineer deep into the stack and all the services that Matt and the engineering team were able to provide to us now allows that sort of application that sitting on premise to move like a house on wheels into a W s. And that's a beautiful experience we've even shown in in conferences, like a virtual reality moving of a workload, throwing a workload into a W s and a W s catches it. It's a good metaphor in a good way to think of those things that VM were like like the most playing the customers like like the emotional moves nicely. But then the other a misconception we had thio kind of illustrate to our customers was that you could once you were there, uh, let's take that metaphor. The house and wheels renovate the house with all the I think there's probably $200 services that Amazon AWS has. Um, all of a I data services be I I o t. Whatever. You have all the things that Andy and Matt kind of talk about in any of the reinvents. You get to participate and build on those services so it has. It's not like you take this there, and then it's sort of a dead end. You get to modernize your app after you migrated. So this migrate and modernize motion is something that we really start to reinforce with our customers, and it doesn't matter which one you do. First, you may modernize first and then migrate or migrate first and modernize. And in the modernized parts we've also made some significant investments and containers and Tan Xue. We could talk about that at this time and optimizing that for both the private cloud world and the public cloud world like Amazon. >>You know, Matt, this is something that we're talking about a lot this week. These few weeks with reinvent going on this everything is a service trend has a lot of things under it, like automation. Higher level services. One of the critics would say, Three years ago, when this announcement relationship between VM Ware enables came out was, Oh, Amazon's is going to steal all of their customers and VM we're screwed. Turns out that's not the case. You guys are both winning and rising. Tide floats all boats because VM Ware has an operator kind of market. People are operating their business with VM ware and they're adding higher level services with Cloud native, So it Xan overall win, so that was proven false. So clearly the new trend You guys are gaining a large enterprises that wanna go faster, have that existing operator kind of legacy stuff or pre conditions of the enterprise like VM ware. So how do you guide the technology teams and how do you look at this? Because this is where customers are like saying, Hey, I cannot operate my business house on wheels, modernize it in real time, come out a covert with the growth strategy and go faster your interview on all that. >>So I think you're exactly right. I think we see a lot of customers who see I don't want to necessarily lose what I have. I want to add on top of that, And so whether that's adding machine learning and kind of figuring out how they can take their data from various different data silos and put them into a large data lake and gets the machine learning insights on top of that, whether they want to do analytics, um, whether they want to d i o T. Whether they want to modernize two containers, I think there's there's a whole bunch of ways in which customers are looking at that. But you're absolutely right. It's not a I'm gonna go from a to B. It's I'm gonna take a and add B to it and, um, we see that's that's over and over again. I think what we've seen from customers doing it and, um and they're really taking advantage of that, right? And I think customers see all the announcements that we're making a reinvent over the next three weeks, and they wanna be able to take advantage of those things right? It's it's they want to be able to add that onto their production environment. They want to take a lot of the benefits they've gotten from their VM Ware environment, but also add some of these innovations from AWS. And I think that Z that really is what we focus on is what our engineering teams focus on. You know, we have joint engineering efforts to figure out how we can bridge that gap, right, so that they BMR environments can very easily reach into their A W s environment and take advantage of all the new services and offerings that we have there. So, um, that's that's exactly what our joint teams really pushed together. >>Sanjay, I wanna get your thoughts on this and we talk. Two years ago, we had a conversation with Cuba. I ask you since this is a great move for VM Ware because it simplifies the messaging and clears up the whole cloud strategy. And you had said something that I'm gonna bring this back today. You said it's not just simplifying the messaging to customers about what we're gonna do in the cloud. It's going to simplify their life is gonna make things easier. Have them set up for better bitterness. Goodness down the road. Can you take him in to explain what that what that goodness was? What came out of the simplicity of the messaging, the simplicity of solution? Where are we now? How does that all kind of Italian together? Can you take him in to explain that? >>Yeah, I think when the history books are written, John, um, this partnership will be one of the most seminal partnerships because from VM Ware's perspective, maybe a little from Amazon Let Matt talk about if you feel the same way. This is a headwind turning into a tailwind. I think that's sort of narrative that VM ware in Amazon were competing each others that maybe was the early story. In the early days of A W s Progress and VM, we're trying to build our own public cloud and then divesting that, uh, Mats, a Stanford grad. I'm a Harvard grad. So one day there'll be a case study. I think in both schools about how this partnership we have a strong partnership with deadlines, sometimes joke. That's a little bit of an arranged marriage we don't have. We didn't have much saying that because AMC Bardhyl so that's an important partnership. But this one we have to work hard to create. And I tell our customers, Del on AWS are top partners. And as you think about what we've been able to do here, the simplicity to the customer for you, as you describe this, is being able to really lower cost of ownership in any process, in terms of how they're building and migrating APs to be the best optimization of hardware, software and services. And the more you could make that better, simpler, cheaper through software and through the movement to the cloud. Um, I think customers benefit, and then you know, Of course, the innovation machine of both companies. Uh, Amazon's really building. I mean, every time I go to read and I'm just amazed at the Yeah, I think it's a near 200 services that they're building in all of these rich layers. All of those developers, services and, I don't know, two million customers. The whatever number of people that have it reinvent this year get to participate on top of all the applications and the virtualization infrastructure we built over the 20 years of our history. Uh eh. So I hope, you know, as we continue do this, this is all now, but customers success large and small customers being able to. And I'm very gratified to three years since we announced this that we're getting very good customer traction. And for us, that's gonna be a key focus to the reinvent, uh, presence we >>have at their show. It really just goes to show you when you built, when you invest in relationships up and down the spectrum from engineering Ah, product and executive. It kind of does pay off. Congratulations to you guys on that matter. I want to get your thoughts on where this kind of going because you're talking about the messaging from VM ware in the execution that comes behind it is the best, you know, Private public cloud hybrid cloud success. There's momentum there. What are the customers saying to you when you look at customer proof points? Um, what do you point to? Because you're now in charge of sales and marketing, you have to take now the installed base of Amazon Web services, which is you got the Debs and startups and, you know, cloud scale to large enterprises. Now you got the postcode growth. Go fast, cloud scale. You've got a huge customer base. You've got a target. These guys, you gotta bring this solution. What are they saying about the VM ware AWS success? Can you share some? Some >>days I'd be happy to, I think I mean, look, this this is what gets, uh, us excited. I know Sanjay gets just as excited about this. It's and it's really it's resonating across our customer base. You know, there's folks like S and P Global who's a large enterprise, right? They had, uh, they had a hardware procurement cycle. They were looking at them on front of implementation and they looked at a WSMV I'm wearing. They said, Look, we want to migrate. All of our applications want to migrate. Everything we have into the cloud, I think it was 150 critical financial applications that they seamlessly migrated with zero downtime Now all running on BMC in the cloud. Um, you look at governments, right? We have thing folks like the Scottish government on many government customers. We have folks that are like Penny Mac and regulated industries. Um, that really took critical parts of their application. Andi seamlessly migrated them to to A W S and BMC, and they looked at us. And when we talk to these customers, we really say, like, where is the best place for us to run these v sphere workloads? And, um and the great thing is we have a consistent message. We we know that it's the right that that aws nbn where's the best place to run those VCR workloads in the cloud? And so as we see enterprises as we see regulated industries as we see governments really looking to modernize and take advantage of the cloud, we're seeing them move whole swaths of their applications. And this is not just small parts. These are the critical really mission critical applications that they know that they need to get out flexibility on, and they want to get that agility. And so, um, you know, there's been a broad swath of customers like that that have really moved large large pieces of their application in date of us. So it's been fun to see. >>And John, if I might add to that what we've also sought to do is pick some of those great customers like the ones that Matt talked about and put them on stage. Uh, VM world. In previous, we had Freddie Mac and we had, you know, I h s market and these are good examples in the few that Matt talked about. So I'm super excited. I expect there'll be many more reinvent we did. Some also be in world. So we're getting these big customers to talk about this because then you get the 10 phenomenon. Everyone wants to come to this, tend to be able to participate in that momentum. The other thing I'm super excited about it started off as a US phenomenon. Just the U s customers, but I'm starting to see riel interest from European and a p J customers. Asia Pacific customers in countries Australia, Japan, U. K, France, Germany. So this becomes a global phenomenon where customers understand that this doesn't have to be just the U. S centric customers that are participating. And then that was, for me a very key objective because the early customers always gonna start in the Geo where, um, you know, there's the most resonance with the public cloud. But now we're starting to see this really take off in many parts of the world. >>Yeah, that's a great point at something we can talk about another conversation. Maybe we will bring you guys into some of our live check ins throughout the three weeks we're doing here. Reinvent. But this global regional approach Matt has been hugely successful. Um, we're on Amazon. We have Q breaches because by default, we're on top of Amazon. You're seeing companies build on top of Amazon. Look a snowflake. The largest I po in the history of Wall Street behind VM Ware. They run Amazon, right? And I will probably have other clouds to down the road. But the point is you guys are enabling this. >>Yeah, global. And it's it is one of the things that we hear from customers that they that they love about running in the cloud is that, you know, think about if you had Teoh, you know you mentioned snowflake. Imagine if your snowflake and you have to go build data centers everywhere. If you had to go roll out toe to Europe and then you have to build data centers in Germany and then you have to build data centers and the U. K. And then you had to go build data centers in Australia like that would be an enormous cost and complexity, and they probably wouldn't do it frankly, at their early stage, Um, you know, now they just they spin up another stack and their ableto serve their customers anywhere around the world. And we're seeing that from our VM or customers where, you know, they actually are spinning up brand new vmc clusters, uh, where they weren't able to do it before, where they either had toe operate from a single stack. Um, now they're able to say, you know what? I'd love to have Ah, vm or stack in Australia, and they're able to get that up and running quickly. And so I do think that this is actually enabling new business it z, enabling customers to think about. How do they put their computer environment close to where their end users are or where they need that computer environment to be sometime just close to end users? Sometimes it's for data residency requirements, but it really kind of enables customers to do that. Where think about in a cove in world, if you have to go launch a data center in a new country, you probably just I mean, maybe it wouldn't even be possible to do that way are today. And now it's just FBI calls. So >>I mean, your point about going slows in an option. The imperative we have, you know, even expression here inside silicon and on the Cube team. Is there a problem? Yes. Is it important? Yes. What are the consequences if you don't solve the problem? Can you quantify those consequences? And then you gotta look at solutions and look at the timing. So you got timing. You got cost. You got the consequences of not doing it. And speed all those things. No. No one's gonna roll out of data center in six months if they if they tried so again, Cloud. And I'm trying to come into play here. You gotta operate something. It's a hand in the glove, its's. I'm seeing the cream rise to the top with covert. You're seeing real examples of riel scale riel value problems that you solve that important that have consequences that can be quantified. I mean, it's simple. Is that >>you know, John, I was gonna say, in addition to this via McLeod on aws were also pretty, you know, prominent AWS customer for some of our services. So some of the services that we've seen accelerate through Covic Are these distributed workforce security capabilities? Eso we resume internally, that obviously runs on AWS. But then surrounding that with workspace one and carbon like to secure the laptop that goes home. Those services of us running A W. S two. So this is one of those places where we're grateful that we could run those cloud services because we're also just like Snowflake and Zoom and others. Many of the services that we build that our SAS type services run on Amazon, and that reinforces the partnership for us. Almost like a SAS customer. >>Well, gentlemen, really appreciate your insight. As always, a great conversation. We could go for another hour. You guys with leaders of your organizations, you're at the front lines as managing through the pandemic will have you guys come into our check ins throughout the three weeks now here during reinvent from or commentary. But I'd like to end this segment by sharing. In your opinion, what is the most important thing that the audience should pay attention to this year at Reinvent? I know there's a lot of things going on. It's three weeks, not four days. It's so it's longer, but still there's a lot of announcements, man, on your side vm where you got the moment and you got your announcements. What should customers pay attention to this reinvent Virtual 2020. >>So, do you wanna go first? >>No, man, it's your show. You go first. E >>I would encourage folks toe Really think about and plan the three weeks out. This this is the opportunity to really dive in and learn. Right? Reinvent is as as many of you know, this This is just a different type of conference. It's not American Conference. This is a learning conference, and and even virtually that doesn't change. And so I encourage. Look across the broad swath of things that we're doing. Learn about machine learning and what we're doing in that space. Learn about the new compute capabilities or container capabilities. Learn about you know what, what is most relevant to your business if you're looking about. Hey, I have an on premise data center, and I'm looking about how I extend into the cloud. There's a lot of new capabilities around BMC and AWS that makes sense, but there's also a lot of cool announcements around just other services. Um, that could be interesting. We have a ton of customers. They're giving talks. And learning from other customers is often the best way to really understand how you can get the most value out of the cloud. And so I encourage folks toe really kind of block that time. I think it's easy when your remote to get distracted by, you know, watching Netflix or answering emails or things like that. But this is this is a great opportunity to block that schedule. Find the time that you have to really spend time and dive into the sessions because we have a ton of great content on a lot of really cool launches coming up. >>Yeah, I'm just very quickly. I would like one of things I love about Amazon's culture and were similar. VM Ware is that sort of growth mindset. Learn it all and I'm looking forward myself personally to going to reinvent university. This is three weeks of learning, uh, listening to many of those those things. I learned a ton and I've tried to have my own sort of mindset of have being a learn it all as opposed to know it. Also these air incredible sessions and I would also reinforce what Matt said which is going find pure customers of yours that are in your same vertical. We're seeing enormous success in the key verticals Vienna plays in which itself called financial services public sector healthcare manufacturing, CPG retail. I mean, whatever it is so and many of those customers will be, uh, you know, doing virtual talks or we have case studies of use cases because often these sort of birds of a feather allow you to then plan your migration of modernization journey in a similar >>fashion, Matt Sanjay, always great to get the leaders of the two biggest companies in our world A, W s and VM where to share their perspectives. Uh, this year is gonna be different. I'm looking forward to, you know, really kinda stepping up and leaning into the virtual because, you know, we're gonna do three weeks of cube coverage. We have, like, special coverage days, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday for each of the three weeks that we're in. And we're gonna try to make this fun as possible. Keep everyone engaged on tryto navigate, help people navigate through the virtual world. So looking forward to having you guys back on and and sharing. Thanks for coming. I appreciate it. Thank you very much. Okay, this is the cubes. Virtual coverage of virtual reinvent 2020. I'm John for your host. Stay with us. Silicon angle dot com. The cube will be checking in with our live coverage in and out of the sessions and stay with us for more wall to wall coverage. Thanks for watching. Yeah,

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE! With digital coverage of DevOps Virtual Forum, brought to you by Broadcom. >> Hi, Lisa Martin here covering the Broadcom DevOps Virtual Forum. I'm very pleased to be joined today by a CUBE alumni, Jeffrey Hammond, the Vice President and Principal Analyst serving CIOs at Forrester. Jeffrey, nice to talk with you today. >> Good morning, it's good to be here. >> So, a virtual forum, a great opportunity to engage with our audiences. So much has changed in the last, it's an understatement, right? Or it's an overstated thing, but it's obvious. So much has changed. When we think of DevOps, one of the things that we think of is speed, enabling organizations to be able to better serve customers or adapt to changing markets like we're in now. Speaking of the need to adapt, talk to us about what you're seeing with respect to DevOps and Agile in the age of COVID. What are things looking like? >> Yeah, I think that for most organizations, we're in a period of adjustment. When we initially started, it was essentially a sprint. You run as hard as you can for as fast as you can for as long as you can and you just kind of power through it. And that's actually what the folks at GitHub saw in May, when they run an analysis of how developers commit times and level of work that they were committing and how they were working. In the first couple months of COVID, was progressing, they found that developers, at least in the Pacific Time Zone, were actually increasing their work volume, maybe 'cause they didn't have two hour commutes, or maybe because they work stuck away in their homes, but for whatever reason, they were doing more work. And it's almost like, if you've ever run a marathon, the first mile or two in the marathon, you feel great, you just want to run and you want to power through it, you want to go hard. And if you do that, by the time you get to mile 18 or 19, you're going to be gassed, sucking for wind. And that's I think where we're starting to hit. So as we start to gear our development shops up for the reality that most of us won't be returning into an office until 2021 at the earliest. And many organizations will be fundamentally changing their remote work policies, we have to make sure that the agile processes that we use, and the DevOps processes and tools that we use to support these teams are essentially aligned to help developers run that marathon, instead of just kind of power through. So, let me give you a couple specifics. For many organizations, they have been in an environment where they will tolerate remote work and what I would call remote work around the edges, like developers can be remote, but product managers and essentially scrum masters and all the administrators that are running the SCM repositories and the DevOps pipelines are all in the office. And it's essentially centralized work. That's not where we are anymore. We're moving from remote workers at the edge to remote workers at the center of what we do. And so, one of the implications of that is that we have to think about all the activities that you need to do from a DevOps perspective, or from an agile perspective. They have to be remotable. One of the things I found with some of the organizations I talked to early on was, there were things that administrators had to do that required them to go into the office, to reboot the SCM server as an example, or to make sure that the final approvals for production were made. And so, the code could be moved into the production environment. And so, it actually was a little bit difficult because they had to get specific approval from the HR organizations to actually be allowed to go into the office in some states. And so, one of the the results of that is that, while we've traditionally said tools are important, but they're not as important as culture, as structure, as organization, as process, I think we have to rethink that a little bit. Because to the extent that tools enable us to be more digitally organized and to achieve higher levels of digitization in our processes, and be able to support the idea of remote workers in the center. They're now on an equal footing with so many of the other levers that organizations have at their disposal. I'll give you another example. For years, we've said that the key to success with Agile at the team level is cross functional, co-located teams that are working together. Physically co-located. It's the easiest way to show agile success. We can't do that anymore. We can't be physically located at least for the foreseeable future. So, how do you take the low hanging fruits of an agile transformation and apply it in the time of COVID? Well, I think what you have to do is you have to look at what physical co-location has enabled in the past and understand that it's not so much the fact that we're together looking at each other across the table, it's the fact that we're able to get into a shared mind space. From a measurement perspective, we can have shared purpose, we can engage in high bandwidth communications. It's the spiritual aspect of that physical co-location that is actually important. So, one of the biggest things that organizations need to start to ask themselves is, how do we achieve spiritual co-location with our Agile teams, because we don't have the ease of physical co-location available to us anymore. >> Well, spiritual co-location is such an interesting kind of provocative phrase there, but something that probably was a challenge. Here we are seven, eight months in, for many organizations as you say, going from physical workspaces, co-location, being able to collaborate face to face to a light switch flip overnight, and this undefined indeterminate period of time where all we were living with was uncertainty. How does spiritual... When you talk about spiritual co-location in terms of collaboration and processes and technology. Help us unpack that and how are you seeing organizations adopt it? >> Yeah, it's a great question. And I think it goes to the very root of how organizations are trying to transform themselves to be more agile and to embrace DevOps. If you go all the way back to the original Agile Manifesto. There were four principles that were espoused. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools. That's still important, individuals and interactions are at the core of software development. Processes and tools that support those individuals in those interactions are more important than ever. Working software over comprehensive documentation. Working software is still more important. But when you are trying to onboard employees, and they can't come into the office, and they can't do the two day training session, and kind of understand how things work, and they can't just holler over theCUBE, to ask a question, you may need to invest a little bit more in documentation to help that onboarding process be successful in a remote context. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation. Absolutely still important. But employee collaboration is equally as important if you want to be spiritually co-located and if you want to have a shared purpose. And then, responding to change over following a plan. I think one of the things that's happened in a lot of organizations is we have focused so much of our DevOps effort around velocity. Getting faster, we need to run as fast as we can. Like that sprinter, okay? Trying to just power through it as quickly as possible. But as we shift to the marathon way of thinking, velocity is still important but agility becomes even more important. So when you have to create an application in three weeks to do track and trace for your employees, agility is more important than just flat out velocity. And so, changing some of the ways that we think about DevOps practices is important to make sure that that agility is there. For one thing, you have to defer decisions as far down the chain to the team level as possible. So those teams have to be empowered to make decisions. Because you can't have a program level meeting of six or seven teams in one large hall and say, here's the lay of the land, here's what we're going to do, here are our processes, and here are our guardrails. Those teams have to make decisions much more quickly. The developers are actually developing code in smaller chunks of flow. They have to be able to take two hours here, or 50 minutes there and do something useful. And so, the tools that support us have to become tolerant of the reality of how we're working. So, if they work in a way that it allows the team together to take as much autonomy as they can handle, to allow them to communicate in a way that delivers shared purpose, and allows them to adapt and master new technologies, then they're in the zone, they'll get spiritually connected. I hope that makes sense (chuckles). >> It does, I think we all could use some of that. But you talked about in the beginning and I've talked to numerous companies during the pandemic on theCUBE about the productivity or rather the number of hours worked has gone way up for many roles, and times that they normally at late at night on the weekends. So, but it's a cultural, it's a mind shift. To your point about DevOps focused on velocity, sprint, sprint, sprint, and now we have to. So that cultural shift is not an easy one for developers and even the biz folks to flip so quickly. What have you seen in terms of the velocity at which businesses are able to get more of that balance between the velocity, the sprint and the agility? >> I think at the core, this really comes down to management sensitivity. When everybody was in the office, you could kind of see the mental health of development teams by watching how they work, you can call it management by walking around, right? We can't do that, managers have to be more aware of what their teams are doing, because they're not going to see that developer doing a check in at 9:00 p.m. on a Friday, because that's what they had to do to meet the objectives. And they're going to have to find new ways to measure engagement and also potential burnout. A friend of mine once had a great metric that he called the Parking Lot Metric. It was helpful as the parking lot at nine and helpful was it at five. And that gives you an indication of how engaged your developers are. What's the digital equivalent of the Parking Lot Metric in the time of COVID, it's commit stats, it's commit rates, it's the turn rate that we have in our code. So we have this information, we may not be collecting it, but then the next question becomes how do we use that information? Do we use that information to say, well, this team isn't delivering at the same level of productivity as another team? Do we weaponize that data? Or do we use that data to identify impedances in the process? Why isn't a team working effectively? Is it because they have higher levels of family obligations, and they've got kids that are at home? Is it because they're working with hardware technology, and guess what, it's not easy to get the hardware technology into their home office, because it's in the lab, at the corporate office. Or they're trying to communicate halfway around the world. And they're communicating with an office lab that is also shut down. And the bandwidth just doesn't enable the level of high bandwidth communications. So, from a DevOps perspective, managers have to get much more sensitive to the exhaust that the DevOps tools are throwing off, but also how they're going to use that in a constructive way to prevent burnout. And then they also need to, if they're not already managing, or monitoring or measuring the level of developer engagement they have, they really need to start. Whether that's surveys around developer satisfaction, whether it's more regular social events where developers can kind of just get together and drink a beer and talk about what's going on in the project and monitoring who checks in and who doesn't. They have to work harder, I think than they ever have before. >> Well, and you mentioned burnout. And that's something that I think we've all faced in this time at varying levels, and it changes and it's a real, there's a tension in the air regardless of where you are. There's a challenge, as you mentioned, people having their kids as co-workers and fighting for bandwidth, because everyone is forced in this situation. I'd love to get your perspective on some businesses that have done this, well, this adaptation. What can you share in terms of some real world examples that might inspire the audience? >> Yeah, I'll start with Stack Overflow. They recently published a piece in the Journal of the ACM around some of the things that they had discovered. First of all, just a cultural philosophy. If one person is remote, everybody is remote. And you just think that way from the executive level. Social spaces, one of the things that they talk about doing is leaving the video conference room open at the team level all day long. And the team members will go on mute, so that they don't have to, that they don't necessarily have to be there with somebody else listening to them. But if they have a question, they can just pop off mute really quickly and ask the question and if anybody else knows the answer, it's kind of like being in that virtual pod, if you will. Even here at Forrester, one of the things that we've done is we've invested in social ceremonies. We've actually moved our team meetings on my analyst team from once every two weeks to weekly. And we have built more time in for socialization, just so we can see how we're doing. I think Microsoft has really made some good information available in how they've managed things like the onboarding process. I think Amanda Silver over there mentioned that a couple of weeks ago, a presentation they did that Microsoft's onboarded over 150,000 people since the start of COVID. If you don't have good remote onboarding processes, that's going to be a disaster. Now, they're not all developers, but if you think about it, everything from how you do the interviewing process, to how you get people their badges, to how they get their equipment. Security is another issue that they called out. Typically, IT security, security of developers machines, ends at the corporate desktop. But now since we're increasingly using our own machines, our own hardware, security organization's going to have to extend their security policies to cover employee devices. And that's caused them to scramble a little bit. So, the examples are out there. It's not a lot of like, we have to do everything completely differently. But it's a lot of subtle changes that have to be made. I'll give you another example. One of the things that we are seeing is that more and more organizations to deal with the challenges around agility with respect to delivering software and embracing low code tools. In fact, we see about 50% of firms are using low code tools right now, we predict it's going to be 75% by the end of next year. So, figuring out how your DevOps processes support an organization that might be using Mendix or OutSystems, or the Power Platform, building the front end of an application, like a track and trace application really, really quickly. But then hooking it up to your back end infrastructure. Does that happen completely outside the DevOps investments that you're making? And the agile processes that you're making? Or do you adapt your organization. Are hybrid teams now, teams that not just have professional developers, but also have business users that are doing some development with a low code tool. Those are the kinds of things that we have to be willing to entertain in order to shift the focus a little bit more toward the agility side, I think. >> A lot of obstacles but also a lot of opportunities for businesses to really learn, pay attention here, pivot and grow and hopefully some good opportunities for the developers and the business folks to just get better at what they're doing and learning to embrace spiritual co-location. Jeffrey, thank you so much for joining us on the program today, very insightful conversation. >> It's my pleasure, it's an important thing. Just remember, if you're going to run that marathon, break it into 26, 10 minute runs, take a walk break in between each, and you'll find that you'll get there. >> Digestible components, wise advice. Jeffrey Hammond, thank you so much for joining. For Jeffrey, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching Broadcom's DevOps Virtual Forum. (bright upbeat music)

>>From around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of dev ops virtual forum brought to you by Broadcom. >>Hi, Lisa Martin here covering the Broadcom dev ops virtual forum. I'm very pleased to be joined today by a cube alumni, Jeffrey Hammond, the vice president and principal analyst serving CIO is at Forester. Jeffrey. Nice to talk with you today. >>Good morning. It's good to be here. Yeah. >>So a virtual forum, great opportunity to engage with our audiences so much has changed in the last it's an understatement, right? Or it's an overstated thing, but it's an obvious, so much has changed when we think of dev ops. One of the things that we think of is speed, you know, enabling organizations to be able to better serve customers or adapt to changing markets like we're in now, speaking of the need to adapt, talk to us about what you're seeing with respect to dev ops and agile in the age of COVID, what are things looking like? >>Yeah, I think that, um, for most organizations, we're in a, uh, a period of adjustment, uh, when we initially started, it was essentially a sprint, you know, you run as hard as you can for as fast as you can for as long as you can and you just kind of power through it. And, and that's actually what, um, the folks that get hub saw in may when they ran an analysis of how developers, uh, commit times and a level of work that they were committing and how they were working, uh, in the first couple of months of COVID was, was progressing. They found that developers, at least in the Pacific time zone were actually increasing their work volume, maybe because they didn't have two hour commutes or maybe because they were stuck away in their homes, but for whatever reason, they were doing more work. >>And it's almost like, you know, if you've ever run a marathon the first mile or two in the marathon, you feel great and you just want to run and you want to power through it and you want to go hard. And if you do that by the time you get to mile 18 or 19, you're going to be gassed. It's sucking for wind. Uh, and, and that's, I think where we're starting to hit. So as we start to, um, gear our development chops out for the reality that most of us won't be returning into an office until 2021 at the earliest and many organizations will, will be fundamentally changing, uh, their remote workforce, uh, policies. We have to make sure that the agile processes that we use and the dev ops processes and tools that we use to support these teams are essentially aligned to help developers run that marathon instead of just kind of power through. >>So, um, let me give you a couple of specifics for many organizations, they have been in an environment where they will, um, tolerate Rover remote work and what I would call remote work around the edges like developers can be remote, but product managers and, um, you know, essentially scrum masters and all the administrators that are running the, uh, uh, the SCM repositories and, and the dev ops pipelines are all in the office. And it's essentially centralized work. That's not, we are anymore. We're moving from remote workers at the edge to remote workers at the center of what we do. And so one of the implications of that is that, um, we have to think about all the activities that you need to do from a dev ops perspective or from an agile perspective, they have to be remote people. One of the things I found with some of the organizations I talked to early on was there were things that administrators had to do that required them to go into the office to reboot the SCM server as an example, or to make sure that the final approvals for production, uh, were made. >>And so the code could be moved into the production environment. And so it actually was a little bit difficult because they had to get specific approval from the HR organizations to actually be allowed to go into the office in some States. And so one of the, the results of that is that while we've traditionally said, you know, tools are important, but they're not as important as culture as structure as organization as process. I think we have to rethink that a little bit because to the extent that tools enable us to be more digitally organized and to hiring, you know, achieve higher levels of digitization in our processes and be able to support the idea of remote workers in the center. They're now on an equal footing with so many of the other levers, uh, that, that, um, uh, that organizations have at their disposal. Um, I'll give you another example for years. >>We've said that the key to success with agile at the team level is cross-functional co located teams that are working together physically co located. It's the easiest way to show agile success. We can't do that anymore. We can't be physically located at least for the foreseeable future. So, you know, how do you take the low hanging fruits of an agile transformation and apply it in, in, in, in the time of COVID? Well, I think what you have to do is that you have to look at what physical co-location has enabled in the past and understand that it's not so much the fact that we're together looking at each other across the table. It's the fact that we're able to get into a shared mindspace, uh, from, um, uh, from a measurement perspective, we can have shared purpose. We can engage in high bandwidth communications. It's the spiritual aspect of that physical co-location that is actually important. So one of the biggest things that organizations need to start to ask themselves is how do we achieve spiritual colocation with our agile teams? Because we don't have the, the ease of physical co-location available to us anymore? >>Well, the spiritual co-location is such an interesting kind of provocative phrase there, but something that probably was a challenge here, we are seven, eight months in for many organizations, as you say, going from, you know, physical workspaces, co-location being able to collaborate face to face to a, a light switch flip overnight. And this undefined period of time where all we were living with with was uncertainty, how does spiritual, what do you, when you talk about spiritual co-location in terms of collaboration and processes and technology help us unpack that, and how are you seeing organizations adopted? >>Yeah, it's, it's, um, it's a great question. And, and I think it goes to the very root of how organizations are trying to transform themselves to be more agile and to embrace dev ops. Um, if you go all the way back to the, to the original, uh, agile manifesto, you know, there were four principles that were espoused individuals and interactions over processes and tools. That's still important. Individuals and interactions are at the core of software development, processes and tools that support those individual and interact. Uh, those individuals in those interactions are more important than ever working software over comprehensive documentation. Working software is still more important, but when you are trying to onboard employees and they can't come into the office and they can't do the two day training session and kind of understand how things work and they can't just holler over the cube, uh, to ask a question, you may need to invest a little bit more in documentation to help that onboarding process be successful in a remote context, uh, customer collaboration over contract negotiation. >>Absolutely still important, but employee collaboration is equally as important if you want to be spiritually, spiritually co-located. And if you want to have a shared purpose and then, um, responding to change over following a plan. I think one of the things that's happened in a lot of organizations is we have focused so much of our dev ops effort around velocity getting faster. We need to run as fast as we can like that sprinter. Okay. You know, trying to just power through it as quickly as possible. But as we shift to, to the, to the marathon way of thinking, um, velocity is still important, but agility becomes even more important. So when you have to create an application in three weeks to do track and trace for your employees, agility is more important. Um, and then just flat out velocity. Um, and so changing some of the ways that we think about dev ops practices, um, is, is important to make sure that that agility is there for one thing, you have to defer decisions as far down the chain to the team level as possible. >>So those teams have to be empowered to make decisions because you can't have a program level meeting of six or seven teams and one large hall and say, here's the lay of the land. Here's what we're going to do here are our processes. And here are our guardrails. Those teams have to make decisions much more quickly that developers are actually developing code in smaller chunks of flow. They have to be able to take two hours here or 50 minutes there and do something useful. And so the tools that support us have to become tolerant of the reality of, of, of, of how we're working. So if they work in a way that it allows the team together to take as much autonomy as they can handle, um, to, uh, allow them to communicate in a way that, that, that delivers shared purpose and allows them to adapt and master new technologies, then they're in the zone in their spiritual, they'll get spiritually connected. I hope that makes sense. >>It does. I think we all could use some of that, but, you know, you talked about in the beginning and I've, I've talked to numerous companies during the pandemic on the cube about the productivity, or rather the number of hours of work has gone way up for many roles, you know, and, and, and times that they normally late at night on the weekends. So, but it's a cultural, it's a mind shift to your point about dev ops focused on velocity, sprints, sprints, sprints, and now we have to, so that cultural shift is not an easy one for developers. And even at this folks to flip so quickly, what have you seen in terms of the velocity at which businesses are able to get more of that balance between the velocity, the sprint and the agility? >>I think, I think at the core, this really comes down to management sensitivity. Um, when everybody was in the office, you could kind of see the mental health of development teams by, by watching how they work. You know, you call it management by walking around, right. We can't do that. Managers have to, um, to, to be more aware of what their teams are doing, because they're not going to see that, that developer doing a check-in at 9:00 PM on a Friday, uh, because that's what they had to do, uh, to meet the objectives. And, um, and, and they're going to have to, to, um, to find new ways to measure engagement and also potential burnout. Um, friend of mine once had, uh, had a great metric that he called the parking lot metric. It was helpful as the parking lot at nine. And how full was it at five? >>And that gives you an indication of how engaged your developers are. Um, what's the digital equivalent equivalent to the parking lot metric in the time of COVID it's commit stats, it's commit rates. It's, um, you know, the, uh, the turn rate, uh, that we have in our code. So we have this information, we may not be collecting it, but then the next question becomes, how do we use that information? Do we use that information to say, well, this team isn't delivering as at the same level of productivity as another team, do we weaponize that data or do we use that data to identify impedances in the process? Um, why isn't a team working effectively? Is it because they have higher levels of family obligations and they've got kids that, that are at home? Um, is it because they're working with, um, you know, hardware technology, and guess what, they, it's not easy to get the hardware technology into their home office because it's in the lab at the, uh, at the corporate office, uh, or they're trying to communicate, uh, you know, halfway around the world. >>And, uh, they're communicating with a, with an office lab that is also shut down and, and, and the bandwidth just doesn't enable the, the level of high bandwidth communications. So from a dev ops perspective, managers have to get much more sensitive to the, the exhaust that the dev ops tools are throwing off, but also how they're going to use that in a constructive way to, to prevent burnout. And then they also need to, if they're not already managing or monitoring or measuring the level of developer engagement, they have, they really need to start whether that's surveys around developer satisfaction, um, whether it's, you know, more regular social events, uh, where developers can kind of just get together and drink a beer and talk about what's going on in the project, uh, and monitoring who checks in and who doesn't, uh, they have to, to, um, work harder, I think, than they ever have before. >>Well, and you mentioned burnout, and that's something that I think we've all faced in this time at varying levels and it changes. And it's a real, there's a tension in the air, regardless of where you are. There's a challenge, as you mentioned, people having, you know, coworker, their kids as coworkers and fighting for bandwidth, because everyone is forced in this situation. I'd love to get your perspective on some businesses that are, that have done this well, this adaptation, what can you share in terms of some real-world examples that might inspire the audience? >>Yeah. Uh, I'll start with, uh, stack overflow. Uh, they recently published a piece in the journal of the ACM around some of the things that they had discovered. Um, you know, first of all, just a cultural philosophy. If one person is remote, everybody is remote. And you just think that way from an executive level, um, social spaces. One of the things that they talk about doing is leaving a video conference room open at a team level all day long, and the team members, you know, we'll go on mute, you know, so that they don't have to, that they don't necessarily have to be there with somebody else listening to them. But if they have a question, they can just pop off mute really quickly and ask the question. And if anybody else knows the answer, it's kind of like being in that virtual pod. Uh, if you, uh, if you will, um, even here at Forrester, one of the things that we've done is we've invested in social ceremonies. >>We've actually moved our to our team meetings on, on my analyst team from, from once every two weeks to weekly. And we have built more time in for social Ajay socialization, just so we can see, uh, how, how, how we're doing. Um, I think Microsoft has really made some good, uh, information available in how they've managed things like the onboarding process. I think I'm Amanda silver over there mentioned that a couple of weeks ago when, uh, uh, a presentation they did that, uh, uh, Microsoft onboarded over 150,000 people since the start of COVID, if you don't have good remote onboarding processes, that's going to be a disaster. Now they're not all developers, but if you think about it, um, everything from how you do the interviewing process, uh, to how you get people, their badges, to how they get their equipment. Um, security is a, is another issue that they called out typically, uh, it security, um, the security of, of developers machines ends at, at, at the corporate desktop. >>But, you know, since we're increasingly using our own machines, our own hardware, um, security organizations kind of have to extend their security policies to cover, uh, employee devices, and that's caused them to scramble a little bit. Uh, so, so the examples are out there. It's not a lot of, like, we have to do everything completely differently, but it's a lot of subtle changes that, that have to be made. Um, I'll give you another example. Um, one of the things that, that we are seeing is that, um, more and more organizations to deal with the challenges around agility, with respect to delivering software, embracing low-code tools. In fact, uh, we see about 50% of firms are using low-code tools right now. We predict it's going to be 75% by the end of next year. So figuring out how your dev ops processes support an organization that might be using Mendix or OutSystems, or, you know, the power platform building the front end of an application, like a track and trace application really, really quickly, but then hooking it up to your backend infrastructure. Does that happen completely outside the dev ops investments that you're making and the agile processes that you're making, or do you adapt your organization? Um, our hybrid teams now teams that not just have professional developers, but also have business users that are doing some development with a low-code tool. Those are the kinds of things that we have to be, um, willing to, um, to entertain in order to shift the focus a little bit more toward the agility side, I think >>Lot of obstacles, but also a lot of opportunities for businesses to really learn, pay attention here, pivot and grow, and hopefully some good opportunities for the developers and the business folks to just get better at what they're doing and learning to embrace spiritual co-location Jeffrey, thank you so much for joining us on the program today. Very insightful conversation. >>My pleasure. It's it's, it's an important thing. Just remember if you're going to run that marathon, break it into 26, 10 minute runs, take a walk break in between each and you'll find that you'll get there. >>Digestible components, wise advice. Jeffery Hammond. Thank you so much for joining for Jeffrey I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching Broadcom's dev ops virtual forum >>From around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of dev ops virtual forum brought to you by Broadcom, >>Continuing our conversations here at Broadcom's dev ops virtual forum. Lisa Martin here, please. To welcome back to the program, Serge Lucio, the general manager of the enterprise software division at Broadcom. Hey, Serge. Welcome. Thank you. Good to be here. So I know you were just, uh, participating with the biz ops manifesto that just happened recently. I just had the chance to talk with Jeffrey Hammond and he unlocked this really interesting concept, but I wanted to get your thoughts on spiritual co-location as really a necessity for biz ops to succeed in this unusual time in which we're living. What are your thoughts on spiritual colocation in terms of cultural change versus adoption of technologies? >>Yeah, it's a, it's, it's quite interesting, right? When we, when we think about the major impediments for, uh, for dev ops implementation, it's all about culture, right? And swore over the last 20 years, we've been talking about silos. We'd be talking about the paradox for these teams to when it went to align in many ways, it's not so much about these teams aligning, but about being in the same car in the same books, right? It's really about fusing those teams around kind of the common purpose, a common objective. So to me, the, this, this is really about kind of changing this culture where people start to look at a kind of OKR is instead of the key objective, um, that, that drives the entire team. Now, what it means in practice is really that's, uh, we need to change a lot of behaviors, right? It's not about the Yarki, it's not about roles. It's about, you know, who can do what and when, and, uh, you know, driving a bias towards action. It also means that we need, I mean, especially in this school times, it becomes very difficult, right? To drive kind of a kind of collaboration between these teams. And so I think there there's a significant role that especially tools can play in terms of providing this complex feedback from teams to, uh, to be in that preface spiritual qualification. >>Well, and it talked about culture being, it's something that, you know, we're so used to talking about dev ops with respect to velocity, all about speed here. But of course this time everything changed so quickly, but going from the physical spaces to everybody being remote really does take it. It's very different than you can't replicate it digitally, but there are collaboration tools that can kind of really be essential to help that cultural shift. Right? >>Yeah. So 2020, we, we touch to talk about collaboration in a very mundane way. Like, of course we can use zoom. We can all get into, into the same room. But the point when I think when Jeff says spiritual, co-location, it's really about, we all share the same objective. Do we, do we have a niece who, for instance, our pipeline, right? When you talk about dev ops, probably we all started thinking about this continuous delivery pipeline that basically drives the automation, the orchestration across the team, but just thinking about a pipeline, right, at the end of the day, it's all about what is the meantime to beat back to these teams. If I'm a developer and a commit code, I don't, does it take where, you know, that code to be processed through pipeline pushy? Can I get feedback if I am a finance person who is funding a product or a project, what is my meantime to beat back? >>And so a lot of, kind of a, when we think about the pipeline, I think what's been really inspiring to me in the last year or so is that there is much more of an adoption of the Dora metrics. There is way more of a focus around value stream management. And to me, this is really when we talk about collaboration, it's really a balance. How do you provide the feedback to the different stakeholders across the life cycle in a very timely matter? And that's what we would need to get to in terms of kind of this, this notion of collaboration. It's not so much about people being in the same physical space. It's about, you know, when I checked in code, you know, to do I guess the system to automatically identify what I'm going to break. If I'm about to release some allegation, how can the system help me reduce my change pillar rates? Because it's, it's able to predict that some issue was introduced in the outpatient or work product. Um, so I think there's, there's a great role of technology and AI candidate Lynch to, to actually provide that new level of collaboration. >>So we'll get to AI in a second, but I'm curious, what are some of the, of the metrics you think that really matter right now is organizations are still in some form of transformation to this new almost 100% remote workforce. >>So I'll just say first, I'm not a big fan of metrics. Um, and the reason being that, you know, you can look at a change killer rate, right, or a lead time or cycle time. And those are, those are interesting metrics, right? The trend on metric is absolutely critical, but what's more important is you get to the root cause what is taught to you lean to that metric to degrade or improve or time. And so I'm much more interested and we, you know, fruit for Broadcom. Are we more interested in understanding what are the patterns that contribute to this? So I'll give you a very mundane example. You know, we know that cycle time is heavily influenced by, um, organizational boundaries. So, you know, we talk a lot about silos, but, uh, we we've worked with many of our customers doing value stream mapping. And oftentimes what you see is that really the boundaries of your organization creates a lot of idle time, right? So to me, it's less about the metrics. I think the door metrics are a pretty, you know, valid set metrics, but what's way more important is to understand what are the antiperspirants, what are the things that we can detect through the data that actually are affecting those metrics. And, uh, I mean, over the last 10, 20 years, we've learned a lot about kind of what are, what are the antiperspirants within our large enterprise customers. And there are plenty of them. >>What are some of the things that you're seeing now with respect to patterns that have developed over the last seven to eight months? >>So I think the two areas which clearly are evolving very quickly are on kind of the front end of the life cycle, where DevOps is more and more embracing value stream management value stream mapping. Um, and I think what's interesting is that in many ways the product is becoming the new silo. Uh, the notion of a product is very difficult by itself to actually define people are starting to recognize that a value stream is not its own little kind of Island. That in reality, when I define a product, this product, oftentimes as dependencies on our products and that in fact, you're looking at kind of a network of value streams, if you will. So, so even on that, and there is clearly kind of a new sets, if you will, of anti-patterns where products are being defined as a set of OTRs, they have interdependencies and you have have a new set of silos on the operands, uh, the Abra key movement to Israel and the SRE space where, um, I think there is a cultural clash while the dev ops side is very much embracing this notion of OTRs and value stream mapping and Belgium management. >>On the other end, you have the it operations teams. We still think business services, right? For them, they think about configure items, think about infrastructure. And so, you know, it's not uncommon to see, you know, teams where, you know, the operations team is still thinking about hundreds of thousands, tens of thousands of business services. And so the, the, there is there's this boundary where, um, I think, well, SRE is being put in place. And there's lots of thinking about what kind of metrics can be fined. I think, you know, going back to culture, I think there's a lot of cultural evolution that's still required for true operations team. >>And that's a hard thing. Cultural transformation in any industry pandemic or not is a challenging thing. You talked about, uh, AI and automation of minutes ago. How do you think those technologies can be leveraged by DevOps leaders to influence their successes and their ability to collaborate, maybe see eye to eye with the SRS? >>Yeah. Um, so th you're kind of too. So even for myself, as a leader of a, you know, 1500 people organization, there's a number of things I don't see right. On a daily basis. And, um, I think the, the, the, the technologies that we have at our disposal today from the AI are able to mind a lot of data and expose a lot of, uh, issues that's as leaders we may not be aware of. And some of the, some of these are pretty kind of easy to understand, right? We all think we're agile. And yet when you, when you start to understand, for instance, uh, what is the, what is the working progress right to during the sprint? Um, when you start to analyze the data you can detect, for instance, that maybe the teams are over committed, that there is too much work in progress. >>You can start to identify kind of, interdepencies either from a technology, from a people point of view, which were hidden, uh, you can start to understand maybe the change filler rates he's he is dragging. So I believe that there is a, there's a fundamental role to be played by the tools to, to expose again, these anti parents, to, to make these things visible to the teams, to be able to even compare teams. Right. One of the things that's, that's, uh, that's amazing is now we have access to tons of data, not just from a given customer, but across a large number of customers. And so we start to compare all of these teams kind of operate, and what's working, what's not working >>Thoughts on AI and automation as, as a facilitator of spiritual co-location. >>Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It's um, you know, th there's, uh, the problem we all face is the unknown, right? The, the law city, but volume variety of the data, uh, everyday we don't really necessarily completely appreciate what is the impact of our actions, right? And so, um, AI can really act as a safety net that enables us to, to understand what is the impact of our actions. Um, and so, yeah, in many ways, the ability to be informed in a timely matter to be able to interact with people on the basis of data, um, and collaborate on the data. And the actual matter, I think is, is a, is a very powerful enabler, uh, on, in that respect. I mean, I, I've seen, um, I've seen countless of times that, uh, for instance, at the SRE boundary, um, to basically show that we'll turn the quality attributes, so an incoming release, right. And exposing that to, uh, an operations person and a sorry person, and enabling that collaboration dialogue through data is a very, very powerful tool. >>Do you have any recommendations for how teams can use, you know, the SRE folks, the dev ops says can use AI and automation in the right ways to be successful rather than some ways that aren't going to be nonproductive. >>Yeah. So to me, the th there, there's a part of the question really is when, when we talk about data, there are there different ways you can use data, right? Um, so you can, you can do a lot of an analytics, predictive analytics. So I think there is a, there's a tendency, uh, to look at, let's say a, um, a specific KPI, like a, an availability KPI, or change filler rate, and to basically do a regression analysis and projecting all these things, going to happen in the future. To me, that that's, that's a, that's a bad approach. The reason why I fundamentally think it's a better approach is because we are systems. The way we develop software is, is a, is a non-leader kind of system, right? Software development is not linear nature. And so I think there's a D this is probably the worst approach is to actually focus on metrics on the other end. >>Um, if you, if you start to actually understand at a more granular level, what har, uh, which are the things which are contributing to this, right? So if you start to understand, for instance, that whenever maybe, you know, you affect a specific part of the application that translates into production issues. So we, we have, I've actually, uh, a customer who, uh, identified that, uh, over 50% of their unplanned outages were related to specific components in your architecture. And whenever these components were changed, this resulted in these plant outages. So if you start to be able to basically establish causality, right, cause an effect between kind of data across the last cycle. I think, I think this is the right way to, uh, to, to use AI. And so pharma to be, I think it's way more God could have a classification problem. What are the classes of problems that do exist and affect things as opposed to analytics, predictive, which I don't think is as powerful. >>So I mentioned in the beginning of our conversation, that just came off the biz ops manifesto. You're one of the authors of that. I want to get your thoughts on dev ops and biz ops overlapping, complimenting each other, what, from a, the biz ops perspective, what does it mean to the future of dev ops? >>Yeah, so, so it's interesting, right? If you think about DevOps, um, there's no felony document, right? Can we, we can refer to the Phoenix project. I mean, there are a set of documents which have been written, but in many ways, there's no clear definition of what dev ops is. Uh, if you go to the dev ops Institute today, you'll see that they are specific, um, trainings for instance, on value management on SRE. And so in many ways, the problem we have as an industry is that, um, there are set practices between agile dev ops, SRE Valley should management. I told, right. And we all basically talk about the same things, right. We all talk about essentially, um, accelerating in the meantime fee to feedback, but yet we don't have the common framework to talk about that. The other key thing is that we add to wait, uh, for, uh, for jeans, Jean Kim's Lascaux, um, to, uh, to really start to get into the business aspect, right? >>And for value stream mapping to start to emerge for us to start as an industry, right. It, to start to think about what is our connection with the business aspect, what's our purpose, right? And ultimately it's all about driving these business outcomes. And so to me, these ops is really about kind of, uh, putting a lens on this critical element that it's not business and it, that we in fact need to fuse business 19 that I need needs to transform itself to recognize that it's, it's this value generator, right. It's not a cost center. And so the relationship to me, it's more than BizOps provides kind of this Oliver or kind of framework, if you will. That set the context for what is the reason, uh, for it to exist. What's part of the core values and principles that it needs to embrace to, again, change from a cost center to a value center. And then we need to start to use this as a way to start to unify some of the, again, the core practices, whether it's agile, DevOps value, stream mapping SRE. Um, so, so I think over time, my hope is that we start to optimize a lot of our practices, language, um, and, uh, and cultural elements. >>Last question surgeon, the last few seconds we have here talking about this, the relation between biz ops and dev ops, um, what do you think as DevOps evolves? And as you talked to circle some of your insights, what should our audience keep their eyes on in the next six to 12 months? >>So to me, the key, the key, um, challenge for, for the industry is really around. So we were seeing a very rapid shift towards kind of, uh, product to product, right. Which we don't want to do is to recreate kind of these new silos, these hard silos. Um, so that, that's one of the big changes, uh, that I think we need to be, uh, to be really careful about, um, because it is ultimately, it is about culture. It's not about, uh, it's not about, um, kind of how we segment the work, right. And, uh, any true culture that we can overcome kind of silos. So back to, I guess, with Jeffrey's concept of, um, kind of the spiritual co-location, I think it's, it's really about that too. It's really about kind of, uh, uh, focusing on the business outcomes on kind of aligning on driving engagement across the teams, but, but not for create a, kind of a new set of silos, which instead of being vertical are going to be these horizontal products >>Crazy by surge that looking at culture as kind of a way of really, uh, uh, addressing and helping to, uh, re re reduce, replace challenges. We thank you so much for sharing your insights and your time at today's DevOps virtual forum. >>Thank you. Thanks for your time. >>I'll be right back >>From around the globe it's the cube with digital coverage of devops virtual forum brought to you by Broadcom. >>Welcome to Broadcom's DevOps virtual forum, I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm joined by another Martin, very socially distanced from me all the way coming from Birmingham, England is Glynn Martin, the head of QA transformation at BT. Glynn, it's great to have you on the program. Thank you, Lisa. I'm looking forward to it. As we said before, we went live to Martins for the person one in one segment. So this is going to be an interesting segment guys, what we're going to do is Glynn's going to give us a really kind of deep inside out view of devops from an evolution perspective. So Glynn, let's start. Transformation is at the heart of what you do. It's obviously been a very transformative year. How have the events of this year affected the >> transformation that you are still responsible for driving? Yeah. Thank you, Lisa. I mean, yeah, it has been a difficult year. >>Um, and although working for BT, which is a global telecommunications company, um, I'm relatively resilient, I suppose, as a, an industry, um, through COVID obviously still has been affected and has got its challenges. And if anything, it's actually caused us to accelerate our transformation journey. Um, you know, we had to do some great things during this time around, um, you know, in the UK for our emergency and, um, health workers give them unlimited data and for vulnerable people to support them. And that's spent that we've had to deliver changes quickly. Um, but what we want to be able to do is deliver those kinds of changes quickly, but sustainably for everything that we do, not just because there's an emergency. Um, so we were already on the kind of journey to agile, but ever more important now that we are, we are able to do those, that kind of work, do it more quickly. >>Um, and that it works because the, the implications of it not working is, can be terrible in terms of you know, we've been supporting testing centers,  new hospitals to treat COVID patients. So we need to get it right. And then therefore the coverage of what we do, the quality of what we do and how quickly we do it really has taken on a new scale and what was already a very competitive market within the telco industry within the UK. Um, you know, what I would say is that, you know, we are under pressure to deliver more value, but we have small cost challenges. We have to obviously, um, deal with the fact that, you know, COVID 19 has hit most industries kind of revenues and profits. So we've got this kind of paradox between having less costs, but having to deliver more value quicker and  to higher quality. So yeah, certainly the finances is, um, on our minds and that's why we need flexible models, cost models that allow us to kind of do growth, but we get that growth by showing that we're delivering value. Um, especially in these times when there are financial challenges on companies. So one of the things that I want to ask you about, I'm again, looking at DevOps from the inside >>Out and the evolution that you've seen, you talked about the speed of things really accelerating in this last nine months or so. When we think dev ops, we think speed. But one of the things I'd love to get your perspective on is we've talked about in a number of the segments that we've done for this event is cultural change. What are some of the things that you've seen there as, as needing to get, as you said, get things right, but done so quickly to support essential businesses, essential workers. How have you seen that cultural shift? >>Yeah, I think, you know, before test teams for themselves at this part of the software delivery cycle, um, and actually now really our customers are expecting that quality and to deliver for our customers what they want, quality has to be ingrained throughout the life cycle. Obviously, you know, there's lots of buzzwords like shift left. Um, how do we do shift left testing? Um, but for me, that's really instilling quality and given capabilities shared capabilities throughout the life cycle that drive automation, drive improvements. I always say that, you know, you're only as good as your lowest common denominator. And one thing that we were finding on our dev ops journey was that we  would be trying to do certain things quick, we had automated build, automated tests. But if we were taking a weeks to create test scripts, or we were taking weeks to manually craft data, and even then when we had taken so long to do it, that the coverage was quite poor and that led to lots of defects later on in the life cycle, or even in our production environment, we just couldn't afford to do that. >>And actually, focusing on continuous testing over the last nine to 12 months has really given us the ability to deliver quickly across the whole life cycle. And therefore actually go from doing a kind of semi agile kind of thing, where we did the user stories, we did a few of the kind of agile ceremonies, but we weren't really deploying any quicker into production because our stakeholders were scared that we didn't have the same control that we had when we had more waterfall releases. And, you know, when we didn't think of ourselves. So we've done a lot of work on every aspect, um, especially from a testing point of view, every aspect of every activity, rather than just looking at automated tests, you know, whether it is actually creating the test in the first place, whether it's doing security testing earlier in the lot and performance testing in the life cycle, et cetera. So, yeah,  it's been a real key thing that for CT, for us to drive DevOps, >>Talk to me a little bit about your team. What are some of the shifts in terms of expectations that you're experiencing and how your team interacts with the internal folks from pipeline through life cycle? >>Yeah, we've done a lot of work on this. Um, you know, there's a thing that I think people will probably call it a customer experience gap, and it reminds me of a Gilbert cartoon, where we start with the requirements here and you're almost like a Chinese whisper effects and what we deliver is completely different. So we think the testing team or the delivery teams, um, know in our teeth has done a great job. This is what it said in the acceptance criteria, but then our customers are saying, well, actually that's not working this isn't working and there's this kind of gap. Um, we had a great launch this year of agile requirements, it's one of the Broadcom tools. And that was the first time in, ever since I remember actually working within BT, I had customers saying to me, wow, you know, we want more of this. >>We want more projects to have extra requirements design on it because it allowed us to actually work with the business collaboratively. I mean, we talk about collaboration, but how do we actually, you know, do that and have something that both the business and technical people can understand. And we've actually been working with the business , using agile requirements designer to really look at what the requirements are, tease out requirements we hadn't even thought of and making sure that we've got high levels of test coverage. And what we actually deliver at the end of it, not only have we been able to generate tests more quickly, but we've got much higher test coverage and also can more smartly, using the kind of AI within the tool and then some of the other kinds of pipeline tools, actually deliver to choose the right tasks, and actually doing a risk based testing approach. So that's been a great launch this year, but just the start of many kinds of things that we're doing >>Well, what I hear in that, Glynn is a lot of positives that have come out of a very challenging situation. Talk to me about it. And I liked that perspective. This is a very challenging time for everybody in the world, but it sounds like from a collaboration perspective you're right, we talk about that a lot critical with devops. But those challenges there, you guys were able to overcome those pretty quickly. What other challenges did you face and figure out quickly enough to be able to pivot so fast? >>I mean, you talked about culture. You know, BT is like most companies  So it's very siloed. You know we're still trying to work to become closer as a company. So I think there's a lot of challenges around how would you integrate with other tools? How would you integrate with the various different technologies. And BT, we have 58 different IT stacks. That's not systems, that's stacks, all of those stacks can have hundreds of systems. And we're trying to, we've got a drive at the moment, a simplified program where we're trying to you know, reduce that number to 14 stacks. And even then there'll be complexity behind the scenes that we will be challenged more and more as we go forward. How do we actually highlight that to our users? And as an it organization, how do we make ourselves leaner, so that even when we've still got some of that legacy, and we'll never fully get rid of it and that's the kind of trade off that we have to make, how do we actually deal with that and hide that from our users and drive those programs, so we can, as I say, accelerate change,  reduce that kind of waste and that kind of legacy costs out of our business. You know, the other thing as well, I'm sure telecoms is probably no different to insurance or finance. When you take the number of products that we do, and then you combine them, the permutations are tens and hundreds of thousands of products. So we, as a business are trying to simplify, we are trying to do that in an agile way. >>And haven't tried to do agile in the proper way and really actually work at pace, really deliver value. So I think what we're looking more and more at the moment is actually  more value focused. Before we used to deliver changes sometimes into production. Someone had a great idea, or it was a great idea nine months ago or 12 months ago, but actually then we ended up deploying it and then we'd look at the users, the usage of that product or that application or whatever it is, and it's not being used for six months. So we haven't got, you know, the cost of the last 12 months. We certainly haven't gotten room for that kind of waste and, you know, for not really understanding the value of changes that we are doing. So I think that's the most important thing of the moment, it's really taking that waste out. You know, there's lots of focus on things like flow management, what bits of our process are actually taking too long. And we've started on that journey, but we've got a hell of a long way to go. But that involves looking at every aspect of the software delivery cycle. >> Going from, what 58 IT stacks down to 14 or whatever it's going to be, simplifying sounds magical to everybody. It's a big challenge. What are some of the core technology capabilities that you see really as kind of essential for enabling that with this new way that you're working? >>Yeah. I mean, I think we were started on a continuous testing journey, and I think that's just the start. I mean as I say, looking at every aspect of, you know, from a QA point of view is every aspect of what we do. And it's also looking at, you know, we've started to branch into more like AI, uh, AI ops and, you know, really the full life cycle. Um, and you know, that's just a stepping stone to, you know, I think autonomics is the way forward, right. You know, all of this kind of stuff that happens, um, you know, monitoring, uh, you know, watching the systems what's happening in production, how do we feed that back? How'd you get to a point where actually we think about change and then suddenly it's in production safely, or if it's not going to safety, it's automatically backing out. So, you know, it's a very, very long journey, but if we want to, you know, in a world where the pace is in ever-increasing and the demands for the team, and, you know, with the pressures on, at the moment where we're being asked to do things, uh, you know, more efficiently and as lean as possible, we need to be thinking about every part of the process and how we put the kind of stepping stones in place to lead us to a more automated kind of, um, you know, um, the future. >>Do you feel that that planned outcomes are starting to align with what's delivered, given this massive shift that you're experiencing? >>I think it's starting to, and I think, you know, as I say, as we look at more of a value based approach, um, and, um, you know, as I say, print, this was a kind of flow management. I think that that will become ever, uh, ever more important. So, um, I think it starting to people certainly realize that, you know, teams need to work together, you know, the kind of the cousin between business and it, especially as we go to more kind of SAS based solutions, low code solutions, you know, there's not such a gap anymore, actually, some of our business partners that expense to be much more tech savvy. Um, so I think, you know, this is what we have to kind of appreciate what is its role, how do we give the capabilities, um, become more of a centers of excellence rather than actually doing mounds amounts of work. And for me, and from a testing point of view, you know, mounds and mounds of testing, actually, how do we automate that? How do we actually generate that instead of, um, create it? I think that's the kind of challenge going forward. >>What are some, as we look forward, what are some of the things that you would like to see implemented or deployed in the next, say six to 12 months as we hopefully round a corner with this pandemic? >>Yeah, I think, um, you know, certainly for, for where we are as a company from a QA perspective, we are, um, you let's start in bits that we do well, you know, we've started creating, um, continuous delivery and DevOps pipelines. Um, there's still manual aspects of that. So, you know, certainly for me, I I've challenged my team with saying how do we do an automated journey? So if I put a requirement in JIRA or rally or wherever it is and why then click a button and, you know, with either zero touch for one such, then put that into production and have confidence that, that has been done safely and that it works and what happens if it doesn't work. So, you know, that's, that's the next, um, the next few months, that's what our concentration, um, is, is about. But it's also about decision-making, you know, how do you actually understand those value judgments? >>And I think there's lots of the things dev ops, AI ops, kind of that always ask aspects of business operations. I think it's about having the information in one place to make those kinds of decisions. How does it all try and tie it together? As I say, even still with kind of dev ops, we've still got elements within my company where we've got lots of different organizations doing some, doing similar kinds of things, but they're all kind of working in silos. So I think having AI ops as it comes more and more to the fore as we go to cloud, and that's what we need to, you know, we're still very early on in our cloud journey, you know, so we need to make sure the technologies work with cloud as well as you can have, um, legacy systems, but it's about bringing that all together and having a full, visible pipeline, um, that everybody can see and make decisions. >>You said the word confidence, which jumped out at me right away, because absolutely you've got to have be able to have confidence in what your team is delivering and how it's impacting the business and those customers. Last question then for you is how would you advise your peers in a similar situation to leverage technology automation, for example, dev ops, to be able to gain the confidence that they're making the right decisions for their business? >>I think the, the, the, the, the approach that we've taken actually is not started with technology. Um, we've actually taken a human centered design, uh, as a core principle of what we do, um, within the it part of BT. So by using human centered design, that means we talk to our customers, we understand their pain points, we map out their current processes. Um, and then when we mapped out what this process does, it also understand their aspirations as well, you know? Um, and where do they want to be in six months? You know, do they want it to be, um, more agile and, you know, or do they want to, you know, is, is this a part of their business that they want to do one better? We actually then looked at why that's not running well, and then see what, what solutions are out there. >>We've been lucky that, you know, with our partnership, with Broadcom within the payer line, lots of the tools and the PLA have directly answered some of the business's problems. But I think by having those conversations and actually engaging with the business, um, you know, especially if the business hold the purse strings, which in, in, uh, you know, in some companies include not as they do there is that kind of, you know, almost by understanding their, their pain points and then starting, this is how we can solve your problem. Um, is we've, we've tended to be much more successful than trying to impose something and say, well, here's the technology that they don't quite understand. It doesn't really understand how it kind of resonates with their problems. So I think that's the heart of it. It's really about, you know, getting, looking at the data, looking at the processes, looking at where the kind of waste is. >>And then actually then looking at the right solutions. Then, as I say, continuous testing is massive for us. We've also got a good relationship with Apple towards looking at visual AI. And actually there's a common theme through that. And I mean, AI is becoming more and more prevalent. And I know, you know, sometimes what is AI and people have kind of this semantics of, is it true AI or not, but it's certainly, you know, AI machine learning is becoming more and more prevalent in the way that we work. And it's allowing us to be much more effective, be quicker in what we do and be more accurate. And, you know, whether it's finding defects running the right tests or, um, you know, being able to anticipate problems before they're happening in a production environment. >>Well, thank you so much for giving us this sort of insight outlook at dev ops sharing the successes that you're having, taking those challenges, converting them to opportunities and forgiving folks who might be in your shoes, or maybe slightly behind advice enter. They appreciate it. We appreciate your time. >>Well, it's been an absolute pleasure, really. Thank you for inviting me. I have a extremely enjoyed it. So thank you ever so much. >>Excellent. Me too. I've learned a lot for Glenn Martin. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube >>Driving revenue today means getting better, more valuable software features into the hands of your customers. If you don't do it quickly, your competitors as well, but going faster without quality creates risks that can damage your brand destroy customer loyalty and cost millions to fix dev ops from Broadcom is a complete solution for balancing speed and risk, allowing you to accelerate the flow of value while minimizing the risk and severity of critical issues with Broadcom quality becomes integrated across the entire DevOps pipeline from planning to production, actionable insights, including our unique readiness score, provide a three 60 degree view of software quality giving you visibility into potential issues before they become disasters. Dev ops leaders can manage these risks with tools like Canary deployments tested on a small subset of users, or immediately roll back to limit the impact of defects for subsequent cycles. Dev ops from Broadcom makes innovation improvement easier with integrated planning and continuous testing tools that accelerate the flow of value product requirements are used to automatically generate tests to ensure complete quality coverage and tests are easily updated. >>As requirements change developers can perform unit testing without ever leaving their preferred environment, improving efficiency and productivity for the ultimate in shift left testing the platform also integrates virtual services and test data on demand. Eliminating two common roadblocks to fast and complete continuous testing. When software is ready for the CIC CD pipeline, only DevOps from Broadcom uses AI to prioritize the most critical and relevant tests dramatically improving feedback speed with no decrease in quality. This release is ready to go wherever you are in your DevOps journey. Broadcom helps maximize innovation velocity while managing risk. So you can deploy ideas into production faster and release with more confidence from around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of dev ops virtual forum brought to you by Broadcom. >>Hi guys. Welcome back. So we have discussed the current state and the near future state of dev ops and how it's going to evolve from three unique perspectives. In this last segment, we're going to open up the floor and see if we can come to a shared understanding of where dev ops needs to go in order to be successful next year. So our guests today are, you've seen them all before Jeffrey Hammond is here. The VP and principal analyst serving CIO is at Forester. We've also Serge Lucio, the GM of Broadcom's enterprise software division and Glenn Martin, the head of QA transformation at BT guys. Welcome back. Great to have you all three together >>To be here. >>All right. So we're very, we're all very socially distanced as we've talked about before. Great to have this conversation. So let's, let's start with one of the topics that we kicked off the forum with Jeff. We're going to start with you spiritual co-location that's a really interesting topic that we've we've uncovered, but how much of the challenge is truly cultural and what can we solve through technology? Jeff, we'll start with you then search then Glen Jeff, take it away. >>Yeah, I think fundamentally you can have all the technology in the world and if you don't make the right investments in the cultural practices in your development organization, you still won't be effective. Um, almost 10 years ago, I wrote a piece, um, where I did a bunch of research around what made high-performance teams, software delivery teams, high performance. And one of the things that came out as part of that was that these teams have a high level of autonomy. And that's one of the things that you see coming out of the agile manifesto. Let's take that to today where developers are on their own in their own offices. If you've got teams where the team itself had a high level of autonomy, um, and they know how to work, they can make decisions. They can move forward. They're not waiting for management to tell them what to do. >>And so what we have seen is that organizations that embraced autonomy, uh, and got their teams in the right place and their teams had the information that they needed to make the right decisions have actually been able to operate pretty well, even as they've been remote. And it's turned out to be things like, well, how do we actually push the software that we've created into production that would become the challenge is not, are we writing the right software? And that's why I think the term spiritual co-location is so important because even though we may be physically distant, we're on the same plane, we're connected from a, from, from a, a shared purpose. Um, you know, surgeon, I worked together a long, long time ago. So it's been what almost 15, 16 years since we were at the same place. And yet I would say there's probably still a certain level of spiritual co-location between us, uh, because of the shared purposes that we've had in the past and what we've seen in the industry. And that's a really powerful tool, uh, to build on. So what do tools play as part of that, to the extent that tools make information available, to build shared purpose on to the extent that they enable communication so that we can build that spiritual co-location to the extent that they reinforce the culture that we want to put in place, they can be incredibly valuable, especially when, when we don't have the luxury of physical locate physical co-location. Okay. That makes sense. >>It does. I shouldn't have introduced us. This last segment is we're all spiritually co-located or it's a surge, clearly you're still spiritually co located with jump. Talk to me about what your thoughts are about spiritual of co-location the cultural impact and how technology can move it forward. >>Yeah. So I think, well, I'm going to sound very similar to Jeff in that respect. I think, you know, it starts with kind of a shared purpose and the other understanding, Oh, individuals teams, uh, contributed to kind of a business outcome, what is our shared goal or shared vision? What's what is it we're trying to achieve collectively and keeping it kind of aligned to that? Um, and so, so it's really starts with that now, now the big challenge, always these over the last 20 years, especially in large organization, there's been specialization of roles and functions. And so we, we all that started to basically measure which we do, uh, on a daily basis using metrics, which oftentimes are completely disconnected from kind of a business outcome or purpose. We, we kind of reverted back to, okay, what is my database all the time? What is my cycle time? >>Right. And, and I think, you know, which we can do or where we really should be focused as an industry is to start to basically provide a lens or these different stakeholders to look at what they're doing in the context of kind of these business outcomes. So, um, you know, probably one of my, um, favorites experience was to actually weakness at one of a large financial institution. Um, you know, Tuesday Golder's unquote development and operations staring at the same data, right. Which was related to, you know, in calming changes, um, test execution results, you know, Coverity coverage, um, official liabilities and all the all ran. It could have a direction level links. And that's when you start to put these things in context and represent that to you in a way that these different stakeholders can, can look at from their different lens. And, uh, and it can start to basically communicate and, and understand have they joined our company to, uh, to, to that kind of common view or objective. >>And Glen, we talked a lot about transformation with you last time. What are your thoughts on spiritual colocation and the cultural part, the technology impact? >>Yeah, I mean, I agree with Jeffrey that, you know, um, the people and culture, the most important thing, actually, that's why it's really important when you're transforming to have partners who have the same vision as you, um, who, who you can work with, have the same end goal in mind. And w I've certainly found that with our, um, you know, continuing relationship with Broadcom, what it also does though, is although, you know, tools can accelerate what you're doing and can join consistency. You know, we've seen within simplify, which is BTS flagship transformation program, where we're trying to, as it can, it says simplify the number of systems stacks that we have, the number of products that we have actually at the moment, we've got different value streams within that program who have got organizational silos. We were trying to rewrite, rewrite the wheel, um, who are still doing things manually. >>So in order to try and bring that consistency, we need the right tools that actually are at an enterprise grade, which can be flexible to work with in BT, which is such a complex and very dev, uh, different environments, depending on what area of BT you're in, whether it's a consumer, whether it's a mobile area, whether it's large global or government organizations, you know, we found that we need tools that can, um, drive that consistency, but also flex to Greenfield brownfield kind of technologies as well. So it's really important that as I say, for a number of different aspects, that you have the right partner, um, to drive the right culture, I've got the same vision, but also who have the tool sets to help you accelerate. They can't do that on their own, but they can help accelerate what it is you're trying to do in it. >>And a really good example of that is we're trying to shift left, which is probably a, quite a bit of a buzz phrase in their kind of testing world at the moment. But, you know, I could talk about things like continuous delivery direct to when a ball comes tools and it has many different features to it, but very simply on its own, it allows us to give the visibility of what the teams are doing. And once we have that visibility, then we can talk to the teams, um, around, you know, could they be doing better component testing? Could they be using some virtualized services here or there? And that's not even the main purpose of continuous delivery director, but it's just a reason that tools themselves can just give greater visibility of have much more intuitive and insightful conversations with other teams and reduce those organizational silos. >>Thanks, Ben. So we'd kind of sum it up, autonomy collaboration tools that facilitate that. So let's talk now about metrics from your perspectives. What are the metrics that matter? Jeff, >>I'm going to go right back to what Glenn said about data that provides visibility that enables us to, to make decisions, um, with shared purpose. And so business value has to be one of the first things that we look at. Um, how do we assess whether we have built something that is valuable, you know, that could be sales revenue, it could be net promoter score. Uh, if you're not selling what you've built, it could even be what the level of reuse is within your organization or other teams picking up the services, uh, that you've created. Um, one of the things that I've begun to see organizations do is to align value streams with customer journeys and then to align teams with those value streams. So that's one of the ways that you get to a shared purpose, cause we're all trying to deliver around that customer journey, the value with it. >>And we're all measured on that. Um, there are flow metrics which are really important. How long does it take us to get a new feature out from the time that we conceive it to the time that we can run our first experiments with it? There are quality metrics, um, you know, some of the classics or maybe things like defect, density, or meantime to response. Um, one of my favorites came from a, um, a company called ultimate software where they looked at the ratio of defects found in production to defects found in pre production and their developers were in fact measured on that ratio. It told them that guess what quality is your job to not just the test, uh, departments, a group, the fourth level that I think is really important, uh, in, in the current, uh, situation that we're in is the level of engagement in your development organization. >>We used to joke that we measured this with the parking lot metric helpful was the parking lot at nine. And how full was it at five o'clock. I can't do that anymore since we're not physically co-located, but what you can do is you can look at how folks are delivering. You can look at your metrics in your SCM environment. You can look at, uh, the relative rates of churn. Uh, you can look at things like, well, are our developers delivering, uh, during longer periods earlier in the morning, later in the evening, are they delivering, uh, you know, on the weekends as well? Are those signs that we might be heading toward a burnout because folks are still running at sprint levels instead of marathon levels. Uh, so all of those in combination, uh, business value, uh, flow engagement in quality, I think form the backbone of any sort of, of metrics, uh, a program. >>The second thing that I think you need to look at is what are we going to do with the data and the philosophy behind the data is critical. Um, unfortunately I see organizations where they weaponize the data and that's completely the wrong way to look at it. What you need to do is you need to say, you need to say, how is this data helping us to identify the blockers? The things that aren't allowing us to provide the right context for people to do the right thing. And then what do we do to remove those blockers, uh, to make sure that we're giving these autonomous teams the context that they need to do their job, uh, in a way that creates the most value for the customers. >>Great advice stuff, Glenn, over to your metrics that matter to you that really make a big impact. And, and, and also how do you measure quality kind of following onto the advice that Jeff provided? >>That's some great advice. Actually, he talks about value. He talks about flow. Both of those things are very much on my mind at the moment. Um, but there was this, I listened to a speaker, uh, called me Kirsten a couple of months ago. It taught very much around how important flow management is and removing, you know, and using that to remove waste, to understand in terms of, you know, making software changes, um, what is it that's causing us to do it longer than we need to. So where are those areas where it takes long? So I think that's a very important thing for us. It's even more basic than that at the moment, we're on a journey from moving from kind of a waterfall to agile. Um, and the problem with moving from waterfall to agile is with waterfall, the, the business had a kind of comfort that, you know, everything was tested together and therefore it's safer. >>Um, and with agile, there's that kind of, you know, how do we make sure that, you know, if we're doing things quick and we're getting stuff out the door that we give that confidence, um, that that's ready to go, or if there's a risk that we're able to truly articulate what that risk is. So there's a bit about release confidence, um, and some of the metrics around that and how, how healthy those releases are, and actually saying, you know, we spend a lot of money, um, um, an investment setting up our teams, training our teams, are we actually seeing them deliver more quickly and are we actually seeing them deliver more value quickly? So yeah, those are the two main things for me at the moment, but I think it's also about, you know, generally bringing it all together, the dev ops, you know, we've got the kind of value ops AI ops, how do we actually bring that together to so we can make quick decisions and making sure that we are, um, delivering the biggest bang for our buck, absolutely biggest bang for the buck, surge, your thoughts. >>Yeah. So I think we all agree, right? It starts with business metrics, flow metrics. Um, these are kind of the most important metrics. And ultimately, I mean, one of the things that's very common across a highly functional teams is engagements, right? When, when you see a team that's highly functioning, that's agile, that practices DevOps every day, they are highly engaged. Um, that that's, that's definitely true. Now the, you know, back to, I think, uh, Jeff's point on weaponization of metrics. One of the key challenges we see is that, um, organizations traditionally have been kind of, uh, you know, setting up benchmarks, right? So what is a good cycle time? What is a good lead time? What is a good meantime to repair? The, the problem is that this is very contextual, right? It varies. It's going to vary quite a bit, depending on the nature of application and system. >>And so one of the things that we really need to evolve, um, as an industry is to understand that it's not so much about those flow metrics is about our, these four metrics ultimately contribute to the business metric to the business outcome. So that's one thing. The second aspect, I think that's oftentimes misunderstood is that, you know, when you have a bad cycle time or, or, or what you perceive as being a buy cycle time or better quality, the problem is oftentimes like all, do you go and explore why, right. What is the root cause of this? And I think one of the key challenges is that we tend to focus a lot of time on metrics and not on the eye type patterns, which are pretty common across the industry. Um, you know, if you look at, for instance, things like lead time, for instance, it's very common that, uh, organizational boundaries are going to be a key contributor to badly time. >>And so I think that there is, you know, the only the metrics there is, I think a lot of work that we need to do in terms of classifying, descend type patterns, um, you know, back to you, Jeff, I think you're one of the cool offers of waterscrumfall as a, as, as a key pattern, the industry or anti-spatter. Um, but waterscrumfall right is a key one, right? And you will detect that through kind of a defect arrival rates. That's where that looks like an S-curve. And so I think it's beyond kind of the, the metrics is what do you do with those metrics? >>Right? I'll tell you a search. One of the things that is really interesting to me in that space is I think those of us had been in industry for a long time. We know the anti-patterns cause we've seen them in our career maybe in multiple times. And one of the things that I think you could see tooling do is perhaps provide some notification of anti-patterns based on the telemetry that comes in. I think it would be a really interesting place to apply, uh, machine learning and reinforcement learning techniques. Um, so hopefully something that we'd see in the future with dev ops tools, because, you know, as a manager that, that, you know, may be only a 10 year veteran or 15 year veteran, you may be seeing these anti-patterns for the first time. And it would sure be nice to know what to do, uh, when they start to pop up, >>That would right. Insight, always helpful. All right, guys, I would like to get your final thoughts on this. The one thing that you believe our audience really needs to be on the lookout for and to put on our agendas for the next 12 months, Jeff will go back to you. Okay. >>I would say look for the opportunities that this disruption presents. And there are a couple that I see, first of all, uh, as we shift to remote central working, uh, we're unlocking new pools of talent, uh, we're, it's possible to implement, uh, more geographic diversity. So, so look to that as part of your strategy. Number two, look for new types of tools. We've seen a lot of interest in usage of low-code tools to very quickly develop applications. That's potentially part of a mainstream strategy as we go into 2021. Finally, make sure that you embrace this idea that you are supporting creative workers that agile and dev ops are the peanut butter and chocolate to support creative, uh, workers with algorithmic capabilities, >>Peanut butter and chocolate Glen, where do we go from there? What are, what's the one silver bullet that you think folks to be on the lookout for now? I, I certainly agree that, um, low, low code is, uh, next year. We'll see much more low code we'd already started going, moving towards a more of a SAS based world, but low code also. Um, I think as well for me, um, we've still got one foot in the kind of cow camp. Um, you know, we'll be fully trying to explore what that means going into the next year and exploiting the capabilities of cloud. But I think the last, um, the last thing for me is how do you really instill quality throughout the kind of, um, the, the life cycle, um, where, when I heard the word scrum fall, it kind of made me shut it because I know that's a problem. That's where we're at with some of our things at the moment we need to get beyond that. We need >>To be releasing, um, changes more frequently into production and actually being a bit more brave and having the confidence to actually do more testing in production and go straight to production itself. So expect to see much more of that next year. Um, yeah. Thank you. I haven't got any food analogies. Unfortunately we all need some peanut butter and chocolate. All right. It starts to take us home. That's what's that nugget you think everyone needs to have on their agendas? >>That's interesting. Right. So a couple of days ago we had kind of a latest state of the DevOps report, right? And if you read through the report, it's all about the lost city, but it's all about sweet. We still are receiving DevOps as being all about speed. And so to me, the key advice is in order to create kind of a spiritual collocation in order to foster engagement, we have to go back to what is it we're trying to do collectively. We have to go back to tie everything to the business outcome. And so for me, it's absolutely imperative for organizations to start to plot their value streams, to understand how they're delivering value into aligning everything they do from a metrics to deliver it, to flow to those metrics. And only with that, I think, are we going to be able to actually start to really start to align kind of all these roles across the organizations and drive, not just speed, but business outcomes, >>All about business outcomes. I think you guys, the three of you could write a book together. So I'll give you that as food for thought. Thank you all so much for joining me today and our guests. I think this was an incredibly valuable fruitful conversation, and we appreciate all of you taking the time to spiritually co-located with us today, guys. Thank you. Thank you, Lisa. Thank you. Thank you for Jeff Hammond serves Lucio and Glen Martin. I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you for watching the broad cops Broadcom dev ops virtual forum.

>>Yeah. Hey, welcome back. Friday, Jeffrey here with the Cube, come to you from our Palo Alto studios today, talking about event that we're gonna have in November. It's pretty exciting. And to talk about it and give us a little bit of a preview, we're joined in the segment by Jeffrey Hammond. He's the vice president and principal analyst at Forrester. Jeffrey, great to see you. >>It's good to be here, Jeff. Thanks for having me. >>Absolutely so lot of social media memes about. You know, what's driving your digital transformation is the CEO, the CEO or CO of it, and I think we all know what the answer is. But what's what's happened is, as we've, you know, accelerated digital transformation, and we had the lights light switch moment, everybody working from home. We're now six months, eight months into this, and this is gonna be going on for a while. So specifically in the context of Dev Ops, where such a foundation of that is us getting together every morning in a room and having a quick stand up and talking about what our challenges isn't going out to develop. We have been able to do that for six months, and we're probably not gonna be able to do it for a little while longer. So how is Dev? Ops in 2021? The Age of Covert and even Post Cove? It's gonna be different from what we had say 2019. >>Yeah, Jeff. A couple years ago I wrote a piece called Designing Developer Spaces, and it was all about creating physical spaces for agile teams. Toe work in because as creative teams, they needed to have an environment that supported them. And the idea of remote working was kind of like unaudited e. You know, there was a list up on git hub of companies. It's a or did remote developers. And it was maybe 100 companies long at that point. And, you know, now you know, in in 2020 every company is a remote development company. And so all those investments in physical spaces to support cross functional co located teams aren't something that we're able to take advantage of today, and as a result, it's forcing companies Thio become even more disciplined with respect to the things that they do to help development teams work together. It's enforcing them to to, you know, focus on what I would call spiritual co location, because physical co location is no longer an option. And you can't do that without having and even higher attention toe automation on Dev ops practices that enable it, but also an increased focus on enabling digital collaboration, moving from things like the physical con bond wall that you put index cards on onto tools that help you replicate that sort of capability. But do it in a digital world when you have 100% remote developers, right, >>right, so so just begs a lot of questions. You know? What should people be measuring? How should they be measuring? I mean, we have all kinds of measurement tools, and obviously the devolves process is continuous thing that's happening every day, pushing out new releases every day. How dio the managers kind of rethink about how they're measuring outcomes. I don't wanna say success because it's really outcomes and not activity. >>Yeah, it's a really timely question, Jeff. You know, I've been getting a lot of questions from from large enterprise development shops about Well, how doe I make sure that my employees are still productive now that I can't see them. Should I be measuring individual productivity? You know my answers. You know, I don't think so. You really want to be able Thio? You really want to be able Thio measure the team level, But you may want to allow individuals to begin toe look at their own productivity metrics and benchmarks themselves because they can't see the person next to them in the other desk or have that conversation and know that they're doing a good job. So the way that managers works changes significantly. Andi. That's one of the things that we'll talk about in November, >>right? And I'm just curious. How much stuff can we pull from? Generic leadership is well, because it's the same situation. I love your I love your concept of spiritual alignment that's also got to come not only from the Dev Ops team, but from all the senior leadership now who don't necessarily have the opportunity to reinforce those messages in the hallway or whatever the kind of the normal communication channels that they used before. But this this is well beyond Dev ops, but really, you know, leadership in general, I would say, >>Yeah, it comes down to data collaboration and shared vision. You know, those principles are not unique to software development, but they're extremely important for any type of creative work. And and that's what software development is. So we can learn a lot from from from from the businesses, the whole. But then we need to apply it specifically in the process and context of developing software. And that's where Dev Ops creates the link to enable that happened. >>Yeah, really? An interesting kind of fork in the road, if you will. Dev Ops has been around for 20 some odd years. Fundamental change in the way software respect and built and delivered. But as you said, I mean, even by definition, um, cross functional co located teams simply aren't enabled today and probably won't be for a little while longer. So I think this is probably, ah, lot of information that people are really excited to hear. >>Yeah, especially because we're now out of the sprint phase. We're moving into a marathon. We're gonna have to deal with this for probably at least the next 8 to 12 months. So we've got to start thinking differently for the long term and and and how we keep our employees productive. But we also keep them happy and make sure that they aren't burning out so that they're developing great software. That really matters. >>Yeah, that's great. Well, thanks for the little tease we look forward to getting. Ah, a lot more meat in this topic and diving in in November. So, Jeffrey, Thanks for stopping by and again. His Dev Ops Virtual Form, November 18th, 11 a.m. Eastern 80 and Pacific. Jeffrey, we'll see you there. >>Can't wait. It'll be a lot of, um >>Alright. He's Jeffrey. I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube, So get ready. Mark your calendars for November. It's the Dev Ops Virtual Forum. Um, November 18 11 a.m. Eastern eight, Pacific Sea There. Thanks for watching.

>>Hey, welcome back Friday, Jeffrey here with the Cube coming to you from our Palo Alto studios today, talking about event that we're gonna have in November. It's pretty exciting. And to talk about it and give us a little bit of a preview, we're joined in the segment by Jeffrey Hammond. He's the vice president and principal analyst at Forrester. Jeffrey, great to see you. >>It's good to be here, Jeff. Thanks for having me. >>Absolutely so lot of social media memes about. You know, what's driving your digital transformation is the CEO, the CEO or CO of it, and I think we all know what the answer is. But what's what's happened is, as we've, you know, accelerated digital transformation, and we had the lights light switch moment, everybody working from home. We're now six months, eight months into this, and this is gonna be going on for a while. So specifically in the context of Dev Ops, where such a foundation of that is us getting together every morning in a room and having a quick stand up and talking about what our challenges isn't going out to develop. We have been able to do that for six months, and we're probably not gonna be able to do it for a little while longer. So how is Dev? Ops in 2021? The Age of Covert and even Post Cove is gonna be different from what we had say, 2019. >>Yeah, Jeff. A couple years ago I wrote a piece called Designing Developer Spaces. And it was all about creating physical spaces for agile teams. Toe work in because as creative teams, they needed to have an environment that supported them. And the idea of remote working was kind of like unaudited e. You know, there was a list up on git hub of of companies that supported remote developers. And it was maybe 100 companies long at that point. And, you know, now you know, in 2020 every company is a remote development company. And so all those investments in physical spaces, too, for cross functional co located teams aren't something that we're able to take advantage of today, and as a result, it's forcing companies Thio become even more disciplined with respect to the things that they do to help development teams work together. It's enforcing them to to, you know, focus on what I would call spiritual co location because physical co location is no longer an option. And you can't do that without having and even higher attention toe automation on Dev ops practices that enable it, but also an increased focus on enabling digital collaboration. Moving from things like the physical con bond wall that you put index cards on onto tools that help you replicate that sort of capability. But do it in a digital world when you have 100% remote developers, right? >>Right, so so just begs a lot of questions. You know? What should people be measuring? How should they be measuring? I mean, we have all kinds of measurement tools, and obviously the devolves process is continuous thing that's happening every day, pushing out new releases every day. How dio the managers kind of rethink about how they're measuring outcomes. I don't wanna say success because it's really outcomes and not activity. >>Yeah, it's a really timely question, Jeff. You know, I've been getting a lot of questions from from large enterprise development shops about Well, how doe I make sure that my employees are still productive now that I can't see them. Should I be measuring individual productivity? You know my answers. You know, I don't think so. You really want to be able Thio? You really want to be able Thio measure the team level, But you may want to allow individuals to begin toe look at their own productivity metrics and benchmarks themselves because they can't see the person next to them in the other desk or have that conversation and know that they're doing a good job. So the way that managers works changes significantly. Andi. That's one of the things that we'll talk about in November, >>right? And I'm just curious. How much stuff can we pull from? Generic leadership is well, because it's the same situation. I love your I love your concept of spiritual alignment that's also got to come not only from the Dev Ops team, but from all the senior leadership now who don't necessarily have the opportunity to reinforce those messages in the hallway or whatever the kind of the normal communication channels that they used before. But this this is well beyond Dev ops, but really, you know, leadership in general, I would say >>Yeah, it comes down to data collaboration and shared vision. You know, those principles were not unique to software development, but they're extremely important for any type of creative work. And and that's what software development is. So we can learn a lot from from from from the businesses, the whole. But then we need to apply it specifically in the process and context of developing software. And that's where Dev Ops creates the link to enable that happen. >>Yeah, really? An interesting kind of fork in the road, if you will. Dev Ops has been around for 20 some odd years. Fundamental change in the way software respect and built and delivered. But as you said, I mean, even by definition, um, cross functional co located teams simply aren't enabled today and probably won't be for a little while longer. So I think this is probably, ah, lot of information that people are really excited to hear. >>Yeah, especially because we're now out of the sprint phase. We're moving into a marathon. We're gonna have to deal with this for probably at least the next 8 to 12 months. So we've got to start thinking differently for the long term and and and how we keep our employees productive, but we also keep them happy and make sure that they aren't burning out so that they're developing great software. That really matters. >>Yeah, that's great. Well, thanks for the little tease we look forward to getting. Ah, a lot more meat in this topic and diving in in November. So, Jeffrey, Thanks for stopping by and again. His Dev Ops Virtual Form, November 18th, 11 a.m. Eastern 80 and Pacific. Jeffrey, we'll see you there. >>Can't wait. It'll be a lot of, um >>Alright. He's Jeffrey. I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube, so get ready. Mark your calendars for November. It's the Dev Ops Virtual Forum. Um, November 18. 11 a.m. Eastern eight, Pacific Sea There. Thanks for watching. Yeah.

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering RSA Conference 2020 San Francisco, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are Thursday, day four of the RSA Show here in Moscone in San Francisco. It's a beautiful day outside, but the show is still going, 40,000-plus people. A couple of challenges with the coronavirus, and some other things going on, but everybody's here, everybody's staying the course, and I think it's really a good message going forward as to what's going to happen in the show season. We go to a lot of shows. Is 2020 the year we're going to know everything with the benefit of hindsight? It's not quite working out so far that way, but we're bringing in the experts to share the knowledge, and we're excited for our next guest, who's going to help us get to know what the answers are. He's Oliver Sherman, senior director, Enterprise Product Marketing for Juniper Networks. Oliver, great to see you. >> Thanks for having me. >> Absolutely, so first off, just general impressions of the show. I'm sure you've been coming here for a little while. >> We have, and I think the show's going very well, as you pointed out, there's a couple of challenges that are around, but I think everybody's staying strong, and pushing through, and really driving the agenda of security. >> So I've got some interesting quotes from you doing a little research for this segment. You said 2019 was the year of enforcement, but 2020 is the year of intelligence. What did you mean by that? >> Specifically, it's around Juniper. We have a Juniper connected security message and strategy that we proved last year by increasing the ability to enforce on all of your infrastructure without having to rip and replace technologies. For instance, on our widely rolled out MX routing platform, we offer second tell to block things like command and control traffic, or on our switching line for campus and data centers, we prevent lateral threat propagation with second tell, allowing you to block hosts as they're infected, and as we rounded that out, and it's a little bit in 2020 we were able to now deliver that on our Mist, or our wireless acquistion that we did last year around this time, so showing the integration of that product portfolio. >> Yeah, we met Bob Friday from Mist. >> Oliver: Excellent. >> He, doing the AI, some of the ethics around AI. >> Oliver: Sure. >> At your guys conference last year. It was pretty interesting conversation. Let's break down what you said a little bit deeper. So you're talking about inside your own product suite, and managing threats across once they get to that level to keep things clean across that first layer of defense. >> Right, well, I mean, whether you're a good packet or a bad packet, you have to traverse the network to be interesting. We've all put our phones in airplane mode at Black Hat or events like that because we don't want anybody on it, but they're really boring when they're offline, but they're also really boring to attackers when they're offline. As soon as you turn them on, you have a problem, or could have a problem, but as things traverse the network, what better place to see who and what's on your network than on the gears, and at the end of the day, we're able to provide that visibility, we're able to provide that enforcement, so as you mentioned, 2020 is now the year of an awareness for us, so the Threat Aware Network. We're able to do things like look at encrypted traffic, do heuristics and analysis to figure out should that even be on my network because as you bring it into a network, and you have to decrypt it, a, there's privacy concerns with that in these times, but also, it's computationally expensive to do that, so it becomes a challenge from both a financial perspective, as well as a compliance perspective, so we're helping solve that so you can offset that traffic, and be able to ensure your network's secure. >> So is that relatively new, and I apologize. I'm not deep into the weeds of feature functionality, but that sounds pretty interesting that you can actually start to do the analysis without encrypting the data, and get some meaningful, insightful information. >> Absolutely, we actually announced it on Monday at 4:45 a.m. Pacific, so it is new. >> Brand new. >> Yes. >> And what's the secret sauce to be able to do that because one would think just by rule encryption would eliminate the ability to really do the analysis, so what analysis can you still do while still keeping the data encrypted? >> You're absolutely right. We're seeing 70 to 80% of internet traffic is now encrypted. Furthermore, bad actors are using that to obfuscate themselves, right, obviously, and then, the magic to that, though, to look at it without having to crack open the package is using things like heuristics that look at connections per second, or connection patterns, or looking at significant exchanges, or even IP addresses to know this is not something you want to let in, and we're seeing a very high rate of success to block things like IoT botnets, for instance, so you'll be seeing more and more of that from us throughout the year, but this is the initial step that we're taking. >> Right, that's great because so much of it it sounds like, a, a lot of it's being generated by machines, but two, it sounds like the profile of the attacks keeps changing quite a bit from a concentrated attacks to more, it sounds like now, everyone's doing the slow creeper to try to get it under the covers. >> Right, and really, you're using your network to your full extent. I mean, a lot of things that we're doing including encrypted traffic analysis is an additional feature on our platform, so that comes with what you already have, so rather than walking in and saying, "Buy my suite of products, this will all" "solve all your problems," as we've done for the past, or as other vendors have done for the past 10, 20 years, and it's never worked. So you why not add things that you already have so you're allowed to amortize your assets, build your best of breed security, and do it within a multi-vendor environment, but also, do it with your infrastructure. >> Right, so I want to shift gears a little bit. Doing some research before you got on, you've always been technical lead. You've been doing technical lead roles. You had a whole bunch of them, and we don't have internet, unfortunately, here, so I can't read them off. >> Oliver: That's fine. >> But now, you've switched over. You've put the marketing hat on. I'm just curious the different, softer, squishy challenge of trying to take the talent that you have, the technical definitions that you have, the detailed compute and stuff you're doing around things like you just described, and now, putting the marketing hat, and trying to get that message out to the market, help people understand what you're trying to do, and break through, quite frankly, some crazy noise that we're sitting here surrounded by hundreds, if not thousands of vendors. >> I think that's really the key, and yes, I've been technical leads. I've run architecture teams. I've run development teams, and really, from a marketing perspective, it's to ensure that we're delivering a message that is, that the market will consume that is actually based in reality. I think a lot of times you see a lot of products that are put together with duct tape, baling twine, et cetera, but then, also have a great Powerpoint that makes it look good, but from a go to market perspective, from whether it's your sellers, meaning the sellers that work for Juniper, whether it's our partners, whether it's our customers, they have to believe in what's out there, and if it's tried and true, and we understand it from an engineering perspective, and we can say it's not a marketing texture, it's a strategy. >> Right. >> That really makes a difference, and we're really seeing that if you look at our year over year growth in security, if you look at what analysts are saying, if you look at what testing houses are saying about our product, that Juniper's back, and that's why I'm in this spot. >> And it really begs to have a deeper relationship with the customer, that you're not selling them a one-off market texture slide. You're not having a quick point solution that's suddenly put together, but really, have this trusted, ongoing relationship that's going to evolve over time. The products are going to evolve over time because the threats are evolving over time, right? >> Absolutely, and to help them get more out of what they already have, and from a go to market perspective, our partners have an addressful market that's naturally through the install base that we have, we're able to provide additional value and services to those customers that may want to lean on a partner to actually build some of these solutions for them. >> All right, well, Oliver, well thanks for stopping by. I'm glad I'm not too late on the encrypted analysis game, so just a couple of days. >> Absolutely. >> Thanks for stopping by. Best to you, and good luck with 2020, the year we'll know everything. >> Absolutely, thanks for having me. >> All right, he's Oliver, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at RSA 2020 here in Moscone. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (gentle electronic music)

>> From Cambridge, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering MIT Chief Data Officer and Information Quality Symposium 2019. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. (futuristic music) >> Welcome back to Cambridge, Massachusetts everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and we extract the signal from the noise. This is day two, we're sort of wrapping up the Chief Data Officer event. It's MIT CDOIQ, it started as an information quality event and with the ascendancy of big data the CDO emerged and really took center stage here. And it's interesting to know that it's kind of come full circle back to information quality. People are realizing all this data we have, you know the old saying, garbage in, garbage out. So the information quality worlds and this chief data officer world have really come colliding together. Robert Abate is here, he's the Vice President and CDO of Global IDS and also the co-chair of next year's, the 14th annual MIT CDOIQ. Robert, thanks for coming on. >> Oh, well thank you. >> Now you're a CDO by background, give us a little history of your career. >> Sure, sure. Well I started out with an Electrical Engineering degree and went into applications development. By 2000, I was leading the Ralph Lauren's IT, and I realized when Ralph Lauren hired me, he was getting ready to go public. And his problem was he had hired eight different accounting firms to do eight different divisions. And each of those eight divisions were reporting a number, but the big number didn't add up, so he couldn't go public. So he searched the industry to find somebody who could figure out the problem. Now I was, at the time, working in applications and had built this system called Service Oriented Architectures, a way of integrating applications. And I said, "Well I don't know if I could solve the problem, "but I'll give it a shot." And what I did was, just by taking each silo as it's own problem, which was what EID Accounting Firm had done, I was able to figure out that one of Ralph Lauren's policies was if you buy a garment, you can return it anytime, anywhere, forever, however long you own it. And he didn't think about that, but what that meant is somebody could go to a Bloomingdale's, buy a garment and then go to his outlet store and return it. Well, the cross channels were different systems. So the outlet stores were his own business, retail was a different business, there was a completely different, each one had their own AS/400, their own data. So what I quickly learned was, the problem wasn't the systems, the problem was the data. And it took me about two months to figure it out and he offered me a job, he said well, I was a consultant at the time, he says, "I'm offering you a job, you're going to run my IT." >> Great user experience but hard to count. >> (laughs) Hard to count. So that's when I, probably 1999 was when that happened. I went into data and started researching-- >> Sorry, so how long did it take you to figure that out? You said a couple of months? >> A couple of months, I think it was about two months. >> 'Cause jeez, it took Oracle what, 10 years to build Fusion with SOA? That's pretty good. (laughs) >> This was a little bit of luck. When we started integrating the applications we learned that the messages that we were sending back and forth didn't match, and we said, "Well that's impossible, it can't not match." But what didn't match was it was coming from one channel and being returned in another channel, and the returns showed here didn't balance with the returns on this side. So it was a data problem. >> So a forensics showdown. So what did you do after? >> After that I went into ICICI Bank which was a large bank in India who was trying to integrate their systems, and again, this was a data problem. But they heard me giving a talk at a conference on how SOA had solved the data challenge, and they said, "We're a bank with a wholesale, a retail, "and other divisions, "and we can't integrate the systems, can you?" I said, "Well yeah, I'd build a website "and make them web services and now what'll happen is "each of those'll kind of communicate." And I was at ICICI Bank for about six months in Mumbai, and finished that which was a success, came back and started consulting because now a lot of companies were really interested in this concept of Service Oriented Architectures. Back then when we first published on it, myself, Peter Aiken, and a gentleman named Joseph Burke published on it in 1996. The publisher didn't accept the book, it was a really interesting thing. We wrote the book called, "Services Based Architectures: A Way to Integrate Systems." And the way Wiley & Sons, or most publishers work is, they'll have three industry experts read your book and if they don't think what you're saying has any value, they, forget about it. So one guy said this is brilliant, one guy says, "These guys don't know what they're talking about," and the third guy says, "I don't even think what they're talking about is feasible." So they decided not to publish. Four years later it came back and said, "We want to publish the book," and Peter said, "You know what, they lost their chance." We were ahead of them by four years, they didn't understand the technology. So that was kind of cool. So from there I went into consulting, eventually took a position as the Head of Enterprise and Director of Enterprise Information Architecture with Walmart. And Walmart, as you know, is a huge entity, almost the size of the federal government. So to build an architecture that integrates Walmart would've been a challenge, a behemoth challenge, and I took it on with a phenomenal team. >> And when was this, like what timeframe? >> This was 2010, and by the end of 2010 we had presented an architecture to the CIO and the rest of the organization, and they came back to me about a week later and said, "Look, everybody agrees what you did was brilliant, "but nobody knows how to implement it. "So we're taking you away, "you're no longer Director of Information Architecture, "you're now Director of Enterprise Information Management. "Build it. "Prove that what you say you could do, you could do." So we built something called the Data CAFE, and CAFE was an acronym, it stood for: Collaborative Analytics Facility for the Enterprise. What we did was we took data from one of the divisions, because you didn't want to take on the whole beast, boil the ocean. We picked Sam's Club and we worked with their CFO, and because we had information about customers we were able to build a room with seven 80 inch monitors that surrounded anyone in the room. And in the center was the Cisco telecommunications so you could be a part of a meeting. >> The TelePresence. >> TelePresence. And we built one room in one facility, and one room in another facility, and we labeled the monitors, one red, one blue, one green, and we said, "There's got to be a way where we can build "data science so it's interactive, so somebody, "an executive could walk into the room, "touch the screen, and drill into features. "And in another room "the features would be changing simultaneously." And that's what we built. The room was brought up on Black Friday of 2013, and we were able to see the trends of sales on the East Coast that we quickly, the executives in the room, and these are the CEO of Walmart and the heads of Sam's Club and the like, they were able to change the distribution in the Mountain Time Zone and west time zones because of the sales on the East Coast gave them the idea, well these things are going to sell, and these things aren't. And they saw a tremendous increase in productivity. We received the 2014, my team received the 2014 Walmart Innovation Project of the Year. >> And that's no slouch. Walmart has always been heavily data-oriented. I don't know if it's urban legend or not, but the famous story in the '80s of the beer and the diapers, right? Walmart would position beer next to diapers, why would they do that? Well the father goes in to buy the diapers for the baby, picks up a six pack while he's on the way, so they just move those proximate to each other. (laughs) >> In terms of data, Walmart really learned that there's an advantage to understanding how to place items in places that, a path that you might take in a store, and knowing that path, they actually have a term for it, I believe it's called, I'm sorry, I forgot the name but it's-- >> Selling more stuff. (laughs) >> Yeah, it's selling more stuff. It's the way you position items on a shelf. And Walmart had the brilliance, or at least I thought it was brilliant, that they would make their vendors the data champion. So the vendor, let's say Procter & Gamble's a vendor, and they sell this one product the most. They would then be the champion for that aisle. Oh, it's called planogramming. So the planogramming, the way the shelves were organized, would be set up by Procter & Gamble for that entire area, working with all their other vendors. And so Walmart would give the data to them and say, "You do it." And what I was purporting was, well, we shouldn't just be giving the data away, we should be using that data. And that was the advent of that. From there I moved to Kimberly-Clark, I became Global Director of Enterprise Data Management and Analytics. Their challenge was they had different teams, there were four different instances of SAP around the globe. One for Latin America, one for North America called the Enterprise Edition, one for EMEA, Europe, Middle East, and Africa, and one for Asia-Pacific. Well when you have four different instances of SAP, that means your master data doesn't exist because the same thing that happens in this facility is different here. And every company faces this challenge. If they implement more than one of a system the specialty fields get used by different companies in different ways. >> The gold standard, the gold version. >> The golden version. So I built a team by bringing together all the different international teams, and created one team that was able to integrate best practices and standards around data governance, data quality. Built BI teams for each of the regions, and then a data science and advanced analytics team. >> Wow, so okay, so that makes you uniquely qualified to coach here at the conference. >> Oh, I don't know about that. (laughs) There are some real, there are some geniuses here. >> No but, I say that because these are your peeps. >> Yes, they are, they are. >> And so, you're a practitioner, this conference is all about practitioners talking to practitioners, it's content-heavy, There's not a lot of fluff. Lunches aren't sponsored, there's no lanyard sponsor and it's not like, you know, there's very subtle sponsor desks, you have to have sponsors 'cause otherwise the conference's not enabled, and you've got costs associated with it. But it's a very intimate event and I think you guys want to keep it that way. >> And I really believe you're dead-on. When you go to most industry conferences, the industry conferences, the sponsors, you know, change the format or are heavily into the format. Here you have industry thought leaders from all over the globe. CDOs of major Fortune 500 companies who are working with their peers and exchanging ideas. I've had conversations with a number of CDOs and the thought leadership at this conference, I've never seen this type of thought leadership in any conference. >> Yeah, I mean the percentage of presentations by practitioners, even when there's a vendor name, they have a practitioner, you know, internal practitioner presenting so it's 99.9% which is why people attend. We're moving venues next year, I understand. Just did a little tour of the new venue, so, going to be able to accommodate more attendees, so that's great. >> Yeah it is. >> So what are your objectives in thinking ahead a year from now? >> Well, you know, I'm taking over from my current peer, Dr. Arka Mukherjee, who just did a phenomenal job of finding speakers. People who are in the industry, who are presenting challenges, and allowing others to interact. So I hope could do a similar thing which is, find with my peers people who have real world challenges, bring them to the forum so they can be debated. On top of that, there are some amazing, you know, technology change is just so fast. One of the areas like big data I remember only five years ago the chart of big data vendors maybe had 50 people on it, now you would need the table to put all the vendors. >> Who's not a data vendor, you know? >> Who's not a data vendor? (laughs) So I would think the best thing we could do is, is find, just get all the CDOs and CDO-types into a room, and let us debate and talk about these points and issues. I've seen just some tremendous interactions, great questions, people giving advice to others. I've learned a lot here. >> And how about long term, where do you see this going? How many CDOs are there in the world, do you know? Is that a number that's known? >> That's a really interesting point because, you know, only five years ago there weren't that many CDOs to be called. And then Gartner four years ago or so put out an article saying, "Every company really should have a CDO." Not just for the purpose of advancing your data, and to Doug Laney's point that data is being monetized, there's a need to have someone responsible for information 'cause we're in the Information Age. And a CIO really is focused on infrastructure, making sure I've got my PCs, making sure I've got a LAN, I've got websites. The focus on data has really, because of the Information Age, has turned data into an asset. So organizations realize, if you utilize that asset, let me reverse this, if you don't use data as an asset, you will be out of business. I heard a quote, I don't know if it's true, "Only 10 years ago, 250 of the Fortune 10 no longer exists." >> Yeah, something like that, the turnover's amazing. >> Many of those companies were companies that decided not to make the change to be data-enabled, to make data decision processing. Companies still use data warehouses, they're always going to use them, and a warehouse is a rear-view mirror, it tells you what happened last week, last month, last year. But today's businesses work forward-looking. And just like driving a car, it'd be really hard to drive your car through a rear-view mirror. So what companies are doing today are saying, "Okay, let's start looking at this as forward-looking, "a prescriptive and predictive analytics, "rather than just what happened in the past." I'll give you an example. In a major company that is a supplier of consumer products, they were leading in the industry and their sales started to drop, and they didn't know why. Well, with a data science team, we were able to determine by pulling in data from the CDC, now these are sources that only 20 years ago nobody ever used to bring in data in the enterprise, now 60% of your data is external. So we brought in data from the CDC, we brought in data on maternal births from the national government, we brought in data from the Census Bureau, we brought in data from sources of advertising and targeted marketing towards mothers. Pulled all that data together and said, "Why are diaper sales down?" Well they were targeting the large regions of the country and putting ads in TV stations in New York and California, big population centers. Birth rates in population centers have declined. Birth rates in certain other regions, like the south, and the Bible Belt, if I can call it that, have increased. So by changing the marketing, their product sales went up. >> Advertising to Texas. >> Well, you know, and that brings to one of the points, I heard a lecture today about ethics. We made it a point at Walmart that if you ran a query that reduced a result to less than five people, we wouldn't allow you to see the result. Because, think about it, I could say, "What is my neighbor buying? "What are you buying?" So there's an ethical component to this as well. But that, you know, data is not political. Data is not chauvinistic. It doesn't discriminate, it just gives you facts. It's the interpretation of that that is hard CDOs, because we have to say to someone, "Look, this is the fact, and your 25 years "of experience in the business, "granted, is tremendous and it's needed, "but the facts are saying this, "and that would mean that the business "would have to change its direction." And it's hard for people to do, so it requires that. >> So whether it's called the chief data officer, whatever the data czar rubric is, the head of analytics, there's obviously the data quality component there whatever that is, this is the conference for, as I called them, your peeps, for that role in the organization. People often ask, "Will that role be around?" I think it's clear, it's solidifying. Yes, you see the chief digital officer emerging and there's a lot of tailwinds there, but the information quality component, the data architecture component, it's here to stay. And this is the premiere conference, the premiere event, that I know of anyway. There are a couple of others, perhaps, but it's great to see all the success. When I first came here in 2013 there were probably about 130 folks here. Today, I think there were 500 people registered almost. Next year, I think 600 is kind of the target, and I think it's very reasonable with the new space. So congratulations on all the success, and thank you for stepping up to the co-chair role, I really appreciate it. >> Well, let me tell you I thank you guys. You provide a voice at these IT conferences that we really need, and that is the ability to get the message out. That people do think and care, the industry is not thoughtless and heartless. With all the data breaches and everything going on there's a lot of fear, fear, loathing, and anticipation. But having your voice, kind of like ESPN and a sports show, gives the technology community, which is getting larger and larger by the day, a voice and we need that so, thank you. >> Well thank you, Robert. We appreciate that, it was great to have you on. Appreciate the time. >> Great to be here, thank you. >> All right, and thank you for watching. We'll be right back with out next guest as we wrap up day two of MIT CDOIQ. You're watching theCUBE. (futuristic music)

>> Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE covering VeeamON 2019 brought to you by Veeam! >> Welcome back to Miami, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. We're here at the Fontainebleau Hotel. VeeamON day one of two-day coverage of the Veeam conference, very swaggy hotel. Dave Russell is here. He's the Vice President of NFI Strategy at Veeam. David, good to see you again. >> Good to see you. >> Thanks so much for coming onto theCUBE. >> Yeah, thanks for having me again. >> You're very welcome. So let's see, you're well over, let's see, a year out, just about a year out of Gartner. Right? >> Yeah, yeah. >> And so okay you've been injected with the Kool-Aid fully, I presume, right? >> There you go, in the green, yes. >> But we're still going to talk a little bit about the magic water, but before we get into that, talk about your first year here. >> Yeah. >> Your impressions. Do they meet, exceed your expectations? >> It exceeded my expectations, but I can honestly say I'm not doing what I thought I was going to be doing here, but it actually turned out to be better. The other thing I will honestly tell you is I'm now on Pacific Coast time at the moment. Arizona, we're too unsophisticated for Daylights Saving, right so I'm either Mountain or Pacific but I'm Pacific now. But by 10 a.m. my time, I pretty much what I thought I was going to do that day is out the window and I'm doing something else and it's fun though. I mean now especially with the investment that we had earlier in the year and the cash reserves we ended last year with, looking at a lot of partnership capabilities, looking at ecosystem activities, certainly involved with customer activity. We're redoing our marketing and how we're focusing our go-to-market so it's a whole variety of things that sort of change hourly. >> So on the, I think we just talked about the M&A side. You've always been a dot connector in your, right? Because you talk to all the vendors, you talk to all the customers and you could see the picture. You have a huge observation space so part of your job on strategy is to try to what? Figure out where the gaps are. >> Yeah. >> And then drive strategy around do we build, do we buy? Maybe you can talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah and it really does net down to what you said. It's a build/buy decision. It's an acceleration to market kind of decision and then the hard part is what are you willing to trade off and of course the real answer is as little as humanly possible. But you have to decide, just because you can do it, just 'cause you have the money doesn't necessarily mean you should pull the trigger. So if anything, it's curious because people like myself and a couple of my colleagues, we almost are more discerning. So we look at, okay, the technology, is it really viable? Do our due diligence, right? But then we also look at well, does this fit culturally? Is the integration point really there? Is the customer value really going to be significantly improved and if you cannot answer that very favorably, then keep the money. >> So you worked at IBM for a number of years, you worked at Gartner for a number of years. Now you're back working for a vendor. >> Yeah. >> Compare and contrast those roles. I mean Gartner, you do a lot of writing, you do a lot of traveling, you talk to a zillion people. I'm sure you talk to a lot of people here too, but you're coming at it from a very biased perspective whereas Gartner of course you're unbiased. You're serving the end customer. So talk about the difference in those two roles. >> So I approach it a little uniquely in that I'm biased. I mean I'm paid by a vendor, right? And so there's a certain inherent bias in there, but I go into a customer conversation and say "Maybe you shouldn't be using Veeam for certain things." So I'll give you an example. We have Unix capabilities with Solaris AIX. There are other vendors that do that even better than we do. They have rich application integration. If someone says that's my number one problem, honestly we're not your best choice. Now the reality is most of the world is moving towards more physical and virtual Windows and Linux. So I'll come in, say, a large enterprise and I'll say, "Okay, if you're like most shops," and I'll always undersell it. "Like probably 85% of your workload "is physical virtual Windows Linux." and they always interrupt me and go, "No, no, no, it's 92%." Like, "Okay, well we can help with that 92%." >> Yeah, yeah. >> The other 7%, I'm honestly going to tell you, we're not best of breed. >> Yeah that's a safe balance view that the AIX Solaris piece. >> Series. (Dave laughs) There's certain things. >> Yeah. >> We want to stick to our swim lane. We think it's a pretty wide lane, but there's no reason to come out of it. >> So your role as strategy, talk a little bit about how you're turning that strategy into action and specifics at Veeam. >> Yeah a big part of it has to do with cloud. >> I know that's the word that we've been talking about for a long, long time. So there's the aspirational aspect of Cloud and the operational. The aspirational is I want to be able to move in and out. I want mobility, I want the ability to exit. The operational is I want to be able to do this efficiently, meaning I want to be able to either send data to the cloud, my on-prem backup or I want to be able to protect SAAS-based workloads or infrastructure as a service workload so cloud-native workloads and then over time, I might want to be able to leverage that for something other than availability. So how can you rapidly make the data and only the portion of data that I need available to me when I need it? >> I was taking some notes during the key notes and I was just doing like a little, not really a tag cloud, but I was trying to identify as I heard them and grabbed them, the attributes of cloud data protection. I want to throw some out to you. You tell me. We'll play kind of word association, I guess. So I have fast recovery, API-based, open, simple, transparent, data-oriented, automated, cloud pricing, federated to accomodate the edge. Are these some of the attributes that we should associate with cloud data protection, maybe some of the things that I'm missing. How do you look at the attributes of a company and its products providing cloud data protection? >> Yeah so a big part of it, I actually like the phrase hybrid cloud even better than people say multi-cloud. The reason I like that is because hybrid presumes that you can have on premises as well. So like if it was the Dave and Dave company tomorrow, we'd probably be born in the cloud. Everything would be software as a service. We'd get some public cloud space. Now if we'd been in business for 20 years, we've got investments that we've made and we don't want to get rid of that any sooner than we have to. So hybrid cloud I like, but I think you nailed it in that what do every one of those attributes have in common? It's trying to get your most precious resource to you in a way that you want to consume it with as least amount of friction as possible. We want to reduce the aggravation associated with being able to access that rapidly. >> When you think about the customer conversations that you've had at Veeam and even going back to your Gartner days, I've always felt this notion of not hybrid, I see hybrid and multi-cloud as different. I've always looked at multi-cloud as multi-vendor. >> Yeah. >> Yeah I've got line of business, I've got shadow IT, I've got different IT projects and I've got multiple clouds and it's just, to me it was always less of a strategy than sort of this is where we are and now people need to put together a hybrid strategy. So IT's been asked to come clean up this mess as it always is. What's your take on the hybrid landscape and how we got here but more specifically, customer strategies when you consult with your customers? >> Yeah you're right that there's a lot of departmental buying, there's a lot of, in some cases, it's best of breed so I'm very willing to go look at multiple providers because I didn't sign up to go deploy the third best solution. Everyone wants what they think will be the most appropriate tool for them and rightfully so. So I think that's how we got, to your point, we didn't have a strategy that said I want 10 vendors. We arrived at an implementation choice that resulted in 10 vendors being deployed and then to your point further, then we had to layer on something on top of that. That's really where we come in and simple as it sounds, we really want to promote choice, choice of infrastructure, choice of cloud, choice of hypervisor, choice of operating system. >> So great discussion vector is the best of breed versus sort of integration. >> Yeah. >> And my question is that's been a decades-long. >> Yeah. >> Sort of trade-off that people have made. You see it in the software business, the hardware business and all through the industry. Is the API economy changing that. Can you be both, I mean Veeam, let's agree. Veeam is a best-of-breed provider. While your portfolio's growing, you're a billion-dollar company, you take a company like Dell who's got this ridiculously large portfolio. They can come into a customer and say well even with services or at IBM, we can wrap the big blue blanket around you and integrate everything. With the API economy, does that change the game on that argument of best of breed versus integration and convenience? >> It's a nuanced answer. The answer is a little yes and a little no. >> It depends, right? >> Let me decompose that because that's a cop-out, but the "it depends" aspect is really, APIs are wonderful to create an ecosystem and other integration points. If that's about offering your expandability to do something, that's a positive. If that really means that well because I can't deliver what you need, you got to go and write it yourself, that is a negative. So if the API is leveraging something for even greater value but beyond what the tools are originally designed to do, I think that's net positive, but if you have to exploit the API to just to get the product to work, why did I buy your product when I have to go hire someone to write code to work on your product? That's, you don't want that business. >> Okay so the last Gartner Magic Quadrant that came out was one that you sort of spearheaded back in 2017. It was like this perfect storm of backup analysts leaving Gartner and so there's been a little bit of delay in terms of the new one coming out which is coming our shortly as I understand it, but one of the observations that you can make if you look at the 2016-2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant is that Veeam moved from lower right to upper right which is rare. Can you explain that a little bit? You were saying that it usually goes in a different pattern. Elucidate, please. >> Yeah. Yeah so the magic in the Magic Quadrant is if you could actually jump from one quadrant to straight to leaders and that would be a very atypical progression. Usually it's a backwards Z. You come into the lower left, probably get over to the lower right, fall back, but go up to the upper left and then maybe you get to leaders in the upper right. The magic part in Veeam, the thing that they were able to do is go from visionary lower right to leader upper right. >> Okay and why do you think they were able to do that? I mean there are numerous attributes, but presumably 350,000 I think is the number of customers helped and so you've got a lot of references and proof points, the technology itself, but it's rare. Why do you think Veeam has been able to succeed in that regard? >> I think it's because Veeam has been good about getting answers to the most pressing problems. Again Veeam doesn't do everything. It doesn't support every single operating system, but the vast majority of the concentration of where customer issues are and where customer environments are getting deployed at, we can address very well and actually this weekend, I got here Friday night. So all day Saturday, all day Sunday and yesterday 'til 5 p.m. I took our SE training and so I've deployed Veeam, worked with active directories, all kinds of things for 72 hours basically and it was really that easy to use. In fact, my most difficult thing is I stayed in class until 6:30 at night because I'd never done active directory. I've never been an exchange admin before so I had to kind of come up to speed on those tools a little bit, but once I got that, the product was incredibly powerful, but also very intuitive. So you still have a little bit of that independent analyst DNA in you so I'm going to ask you to try to put that independent hat on. When you think about Veeam's traditional base of SMB, they're very successful there, obviously superglued itself to the virtualization trend. The last couple of years, Veeam has tried to move up-market, develop some relationships with some large players and has had some success there. Is the product well-suited for that larger enterprise and where do you see that going in terms of the up-market progression? >> Yeah so in theory, that's what I'm here to drive, the enterprise word is in my title, but in reality I focus more broadly than that. But if I just think about enterprise, I ran the numbers last week and company inception to date, we've actually derived over $2 billion of software-only revenue from the enterprise market and that's been accelerating. Now in 2017-18 and the first quarter of this year, almost $1 billion. So we're moving and we're moving fast. We had our sales kick off like most companies do. January, go to sales kick off and Ratmir says, "Hey don't chase just the big deals, the $2 million deals. "We've never sold a $2 million "without having a $200,000 deal first." The very next week, we got a $2 million deal on the first paper so he shot low. He should've said five million, but the interesting thing about Veeam and to answer your question, I think we resonate with the kind of challenges a large enterprise has. We allow them to move at their own scale if they want to move in a very large fashion, they can with Veeam. I would honestly tell them move as appropriate for you. As assets age, as you're willing to take on the change in an environment, do so, but I think Veeam is interesting. It's the same piece of software that I installed on my laptop this weekend that can also go to a Fortune 100 company. The same piece of software that manages 50,000 agents, we have at one shop, 50,000 Windows agents. We can do that with same code base and the only thing that's different is we just horizontally scale out how we deploy the capacity and then how we deploy the mover agents. >> I tweeted out this morning, Ratmir was standing in front of a chart with all these features and over the time and that's been part of the hallmark of Veeam is not checkbox features but real substantive features and you've had a consistent progression. Even Ratmir said, we don't have a big long-term roadmap that we share with our customers even internally. Yeah we have a direction and a vision, but very focused, almost like a bit of an Agile development methodology but the point is that, and you see that some companies are really good at this, some companies, not so good at this, but just consistently delivering features that are in-demand, that customers want, listening to their customers and just nailing it and that seems to be the hallmark of Veeam and as they say, some companies just don't have that in their DNA. Your thoughts on that? >> Yeah I think what it really comes down to is at the end of the day, every developer thinks like a customer and they do that because they spend a lot of time on our Veeam forums and I'll be honest, when I was a mainframe backup developer, I didn't talk to that many customers. I was just writing code and I didn't know how people were actually putting the product to use in production. I didn't always know what feature might be most helpful for them. >> You were guessing. >> I was trying to think of the art of the possible, hopefully an educated guess, but I was really just trying to say what might be good, what might be of resonance versus actually having someone goes on a forum and says Veeam, what I would like you to do is X. That's one of the reasons why we do have, to your point, we don't have a 10-year roadmap where we say this feature is coming in 12 months, this feature is coming in 24 months. It's fluid and in some cases, we actually moved up delivering our physical agent management by a year because we started selling more and more of those and people said I need that feature functionality faster. We're willing to trade-off some of our other feature functionality. So if we can be, as long as we can continue to respond to the market, I think we're well-positioned. >> How does a capability like that surface itself? Obviously by talking to customers, but how does it get into the development pipeline so quickly? >> Yeah well in some cases, we've got a huge amount of not just, our part of R&D. It's the research, it's experimentation, it's incubation of new things. So when we find that sweet intersection point, then we can quickly operationalize that. In other cases, we just have to be nimble. We have to react fast. >> Is it a command and control culture though where somebody says okay this is what we're doing or is it more sort of the team gets together and says oh this really makes sense based on what the customers are telling us, let's go. How does that decision get made? >> Yeah well ultimately it is a command and control in the sense that our co-founder, one of our co-founders runs sales and marketing. Our other co-founders runs R&D and they ultimately get sign-off on their respective areas, but it is collaborative in the sense of we do bring forward, here's what we see in market, here's what see in our customer forums. Here's what our ecosystem of partners are telling us, here's our view of the top five things we ought to go do. >> I was struck by the other slide that Ratmir had. It was the $15 billion slide and it was probably, backup and recover was maybe I don't know seven out of the 15 if I remember, but there were all these other segments. It was sort of analytics and disaster recovery and data management, all new pockets of opportunity. $15 billion today, obviously growing with especially the cloud. How do you see that landscape and how does that affect the way you look at strategy? >> Yeah so I actually put that bubble chart together. >> Oh, I like it. >> The rationale between the bubbles, we have core, we put backup in the middle because that's what we do but also that's how we ingest data and now we can do other things around it. So the reason for those bubbles and they were of varying sizes and the bubbles were sort of in and out of to varying degrees the main backup bubble according to how much intersection we thought as a company we could have with that. Where we thought we could add value, where we thought there was an ecosystem potential. So for example, analytics. We're not going to become the next best analytics company tomorrow, not even years from now. We could partner and we can provide data and we get better access to data to be able to do that. So we'd want to facilitate that. In other cases, maybe we really do want to go own and acquire. >> Well and so to your earlier comments there, I didn't use the term, the phrase land and expand, but that's clearly what you guys are doing starting with the $200,000 sale and growing it to a $2 million sale. So those bubbles are potentially cohort sales. >> Yes. >> That you can sell sort of like bananas in bunches I like to say, right? >> Yeah. And part of that is who do you sell that to. And so if you're able to go and address some of those ancillary bubbles or markets, now you've got a different entree point into the organization. If you're already involved with an organization, now you can offer more value because you can get more out of your data that you've already protected. So it opens up new conversations for us to have. It opens up entirely new buying centers for us too. >> Well how is the role of whom you sell to changing? I mean it was backup admin historically, right or maybe a Veeamware admin. Veeam admin. How is that changing? >> So greatest example I would tell you are events. So we acquired a company last January or a year ago January called N2W Software. So they're predominantly at Amazon re:Invent conferences. You go to Amazon re:Invent and no one's heard of Veeam and if anyone's heard of either of the two companies, it's definitely N2WS and someone's seen it in the marketplace. That demographic tends to be totally different from the demographic if you go to the on-premises data center type of conference where they have heard of Veeam and it's a very different sort of mindset. To your point, they grew up in a very different landscape. Now instead of someone who's well-steeped in server storage and networking and maybe majored in one, possibly two of those things, now you've got a generalist where he or she is probably in their 20s, has a very different point of view of what it should take to get something working and has a very different view of how they want to be sold to, how you can go and reach them. >> So at the cloud show, there might be a development persona. >> Yes. >> That you're selling to. Obviously VMWare, VMWorld, we know what that is. It's IT guys, right, is the predominant and how do you see cloud changing that? Is it cloud architects or sort of cloud leaders? CTOs increasingly? Data Protection becomes more and more important to digital business. So how are you seeing that role change due to cloud? >> So right now we have to basically have more touchpoints. Our typical legacy fan of our customer, our customer base, our product's sweet spot still remains and it's in some cases will pull us into the cloud. In other cases, we have to go talk to someone that's entirely different. But again, that's more of an administrative view. But to your point, going up the stack now, if you go to the not even Vice President of Infrastructure, you go to the CIO, he or she says, "I am tired of thinking about boxes. "I am tired of thinking about where this resides. "I want to think business outcome." So for us that's actually a great conversation because it all comes back to data. That's what we're in the business of doing. We capture, protect and move data. >> So that brings it back to strategy. We got to run, but summarize in your words, just sort of the strategy of Veeam and where you see this whole thing going. >> Yeah I will simplistically say it's more of the same. We want to continue to offer what we think is a best of breed solution for on-prem and increasingly cloud availability, but also we want to offer real customer value in terms of now being able to leverage that data, get more value out of that whether that's DevOps, running analytics against that, security test patch, whatever it may be, we want to be able to give you just the data you need, so have granularity, and offer speed and ease of use to do that. >> So as data becomes more and more important, you're seeing companies go beyond backup, trying to get more out of there, their backup, moving to data protection, data management, not just an insurance policy anymore. Dave Russell, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. It was great to have you. >> Thank you so much. >> You're welcome. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with Peter Burris as my cohost. We're at VeeamON Live from Miami. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

(upbeat digital music) >> Narrator: Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering Citrix Synergy, Atlanta, 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE, our coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019, day one, continues. Lisa Martin here with Keith Townsend, in Atlanta, Georgia, and we're pleased to welcome the SVP of Sales and Services from Citrix APJ, Colin Brookes. Colin, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me, Lisa, great to be here. >> So Keith and I, excited to have you here, as well. This has been a really exciting start to our day. >> Colin: Yes. The keynote this morning kicked off with David, PJ was there, Microsoft was there, there were some customers featured. Employee experience is so critical to a business's digital transformation, but we often, and theCUBE covers tech innovation all over the world, we don't hear it as a leading edge for companies who really can't transform digitally and be competitive, and identify new products and new services, if the employees don't have access to the apps they need, whether they're SaaS, mobile, web. Talk to us about employee experience, and particularly as it relates to customers down in APJ, as a critical factor in businesses success. >> Yeah sure, it's a great question, and the employee experience is just as you described, it's almost overwhelming the amount of technology that's thrown at people. Which initially is all there to try and make life easier, but it's just adding on top of existing applications and existing systems, and it isn't really making life easier. So what we found is that the employee experience is actually getting more and more frustrating, which means less productivity, which doesn't help the bottom line and the production of the organization, obviously. So our solutions are all around trying to enhance that employee experience, making sure that people have got absolute choice of anything they need, such as the applications that you mentioned on any device that they're using, and also, wherever they happen to be. So it's normally around the future of work, when we're talking about employee experience. And we're trying to make sure that no matter where you are, not just the office which is the traditional workplace of the past, if you're at home, if you're in the library, if you're on a plane, in the car, you should be able to work exactly the same way. And those are the types of solutions that we're bringing to market, to make just that thing happen. >> So Colin, talk to us about, your team is the tip of the spear. They are the first to hear the customer's success stories, they are the first to hear the frustrations. We're in an environment that Citrix is trying to solve a $7,000,000,000,000 challenge of becoming more efficient. IT is a huge part of that. Your frontline, your Sales Engineers, your AEs are having these kind of conversations. Talk to us about their experience of moving the conversation beyond IT into these new areas that Citrix is entering. >> Yeah, again, another great, great question, and that's one of the pitfalls that we normally fall into talking about products all of the time rather than the outcome, which is what we're trying to help our customers with. So perhaps, if I give you an example of some of the places that I travel around in APJ. So, I look after the APJ region, Asia, Pacific, and Japan. It's a huge, vast geography, with multiple cultures, obviously, very heterogenous. An example, say, for Japan, where I was in Japan last week, the Olympics are coming there in 2020. People who have seen Japan, or been to Japan, you'll know about the huge commute that people have to do. There's millions of people in Tokyo, for example, and their business day is long anyway, but when you add on to that one to two hours commute in the morning, and then the same at the end of the day, the normal everyday stressors are just magnified exponentially. And then with the Olympics coming along, you can imagine an extra few hundred thousand, or an extra couple of million people being in Tokyo, that commute is just going to get worse. So the government have actually launched something, I think it was actually in 2017, whereby we're trying to enable employees to work more remotely, which might not sound too new, but it's amazing how many organizations still feel the employees need to be in the office to work. So we're helping them to make sure that people can work just as efficiently at home as they can in the office. And it doesn't just have to be at home. We were talking earlier, Lisa, that traditional office used to be a place, and work, a place you went to, whereas now it can be at home, in the library, traveling in the car. It can be on the plane on the way to countries. I'm in a plane most of the time, every other week at least, but I'm still able and lucky enough to work extremely productively no matter where I am, and on any device. So that's the other thing that we're trying to bring to our customers. it's the ability to have access to any application that we want, so we have complete choice, on any device that we want. So whether I'm on my phone, whether I'm on my tablet, or I'm on my iPad, it should look and feel the same, and I should be able to get the same types of productivity levels. And now you can, with the solutions that we provide. So, in answer to you question, our customers are trying to find solutions to enable their employees to feel they have the best possible experience, and stay productive anywhere they are in the world. >> Well, and really, Citrix is taking it farther than that. It isn't just delivering the same experience on mobile versus desktop, versus tablet, and ensuring that you can do your job, Colin, from anywhere in the world in an airline seat, whatnot. It's also making that experience, the productivity apps, so much more connected. And the video example that David Henshall showed this morning, I thought, was fantastic. >> Colin: Right, wasn't it, yeah? >> It was showing a Senior Marketing Manager, whose a Marketing Manager, whose responsible for Rockstar marketing campaigns, who might be a people manager, and she logs in and goes to check email, and then all these other things pop up over the course of a couple of minutes, and she's in and out of seven to 10 apps, not connected. >> Colin: Exactly. >> Tell our audience a little bit more about how Citrix Workspace Intelligent Experience is really transforming that experience, allowing those workers to get back to their daily responsibilities. >> You need to come in work in APJ, that was perfect. (laughing) >> Lisa: Okay! (chuckling) >> I've got job just for you. Yeah, so, the day to day activities that we all go through, the lady in the video was the Head of Marketing, I believe it was, but most of her day is spent being distracted. I think the statistics that David gave was that something like 85% of the workforce are distracted throughout the day. You flip that around, that means only 15% or so are actually being productive. It's frightening, isn't it? So the examples that you saw were her signing some simple expenses, but that isn't as simple as it sounds. She needs to be almost an expert in the application that signs off the expenses. What we do with the Intelligent Workspace from Citrix is we pick out the bit's that actually she only every really needs to use, which are probably a small percentage, one, two, three, maybe five percent of the full, wonderful application that that expense report may be, she doesn't need to use all of that. so what we do with the Intelligent Workspace is we just bring forward onto her workspace the buttons that she needs, a summary of the expense, an accept or an approve, or a reject, and she can carry on straight away. And what you saw was about a 10 minute session within an application to approve an expense, reduced to less that 30 seconds. When you do that across the whole day, I think the numbers that David gave was our ambition, is to probably give people one day back of their week. That's 20%, that's a huge amount that we'll be able to find. Almost thinking of it like a time machine. We're going to give you some of your time back to actually be productive and do the things that you've been employed to do. She'd been employed to be creative in marketing, and now she can. >> So, you gave us the use case of the remote worker in Japan, great use case, but APJ, huge region. >> Colin: Yes. >> And you're not IT, and IT Vanders are not the only ones that have APJ regions, so talk to us about the importance of the relationship with Ajour and Google. David shared one stat, he said we're entering the yoda bite, which was a new word for even me... >> Lisa: Yeah! >> I'm a geek, the yoda bite era, and as data sets grow and the need to perform analysis against that data, but yet, we're in a very dispersed region. >> Colin: Sure. >> Keith: How important is the relationships with Microsoft and Google to enable that type of analysis of data? >> Yeah, sure. So look, the relationship with all of our partners is extremely important, especially within the APJ region. As you mention, it's such a vast geography, and I think people that have not actually lived in the APJ region just don't realize how vast it is. I'm often asked if I can go from where I am, where I'm based in Singapore, to nip over to Japan or down to Sydney to go and sort out some problems. >> Keith: It's only an eight hour flight. >> It's 10, 12 hours, but it's also a different time zone, and you know, then you talk back to the UK or the States, you lose a day with the time zone there. So, I mean, I love it, don't get me wrong, but it is a vast, and it's not just the geography, it's such a diverse culture area, as well. So everybody behaves slightly differently. Coming back to your Microsoft and Google, we're not a database company, we're not a data center organization, our solutions are going to provide these wonderful experiences for people. But we need the help and support, and we're very lucky to have it of the likes of the Microsoft, and the Google, and all of our other partners that have this infrastructure in place, and that effectively, shrink that geography for us, does that make sense? >> It does. >> So let's dig into the Citrix Workspace Intelligent Experience a little bit further, 'cause you talked about something that really struck me, saying with this video example that which David shared, and we were both talking about it here. So for our audience, it was this great video of a Marketing Manager's daily activities, I kind of mentioned on it a minute ago, but you mentioned that with Intelligent Experience, you're going to surface. Say, I'm a marketing person... >> Colin: Yep. >> And I need to get into Sales Force, 'cause like in this video, my boss has asked me the status of a deal that maybe marketing influenced, and I don't want to have to know a ton about Sales Force. What, how is Citrix using AI and data to evaluate per user what components of each of those applications should be shown to say, me, that Marketing Manager? >> Yeah, I think he gave the great example of the photocopier, didn't he? Whereby you walk up to these machines these days and they've a hundred different buttons on them. (laughs) >> Yes. >> And we basically just want to take a photocopy, and they make it simply one large, green button, and that's probably the one that we always use. It's the one percent of the functionality on the photocopier, and it's the same with the applications. That you and I are not super users, but these applications are wonderful applications, but they're built for the super user a lot of the times, with every part of the functionality within them, which makes it quite complicated for you and I to use when we want very simple tasks. So the Artificial Intelligence of the machine learning is used to, each time we go into one of the applications, to figure out what do we do on a day to day basis, what's normally the thing that we're trying to process? And the more and more that we do that, the smarter and smarter the application becomes. And it also, instead of just guiding us along the way, it's almost starting to think for us, and put the things in front of us that we only need for that day, which is great. So rather than me having to now look at my to do list, it's there for me already in the the Intelligent Workspace, and I can just go through things, skim across the applications where I need to be without going deep, four, five, six different layers, and I'm wasting time on things that I'm not really being paid to do. So, that's how it works. The more I go in, the more it learns about me and my behaviors, and if I go in one particular application, it probably means that I'm also going to be looking at another application that's connected, moving forward, and that's the sort of intelligence that we've built into the system. >> So going from that marketing person being reactive or staring at the copier, that brought back some memories today, I'm like, whoa, I haven't seen one of those in a while, but being reactive, to proactive, to eventually predictive. >> Absolutely, that's a great way of putting it. You definitely need to come to APJ. (laughs) >> Okay! >> Need to start writing these sound bites down. Yeah, that's exactly it, and not only, like, she's using the example of the lady, she's feeling less stressed, she's able to have more time being creative, which is what she's been employed for. So this is what turns 'round into the employee experience, which equates to better productivity, which is the bottom line for the organizations. And this is what it's all about at the end of the day. The organizations want to be more efficient, and they want to be more productive, and they want to make more profit. And we're enabling them to do that via enabling the user experience to be the absolute best that it can possibly be, whilst at the same time, making sure that everything is extremely secure. (crosstalk) >> Oh, sorry, Keith, go ahead. >> I want to get into a question around culture when it comes to APJ. You know, we have, to your point, very different cultures. There's Japan, whose embracing the concept of robots, so we've seen, like, software robots in different industries, and Japan embracing that idea of automating and making these tasks simpler. But yet, culturally, Australia's very different. There's maybe a little bit more hesitation to embrace robotics. How is your Sales Force bringing along the two different cultures so that, you know, you can have full experiences from one region, and bring that to, bring the best of class to...? >> Yeah, that's another great question. I think we have 57 different nationalities in our Australia and New Zealand team. The culture within Australia is multinational, as well, because of that. So although it's Australia, it's not just Australians that are there, and you find that across the whole of APJ, every office that I happen to work into has got a multitude of different nationalities. A bit less so in Japan and South Korea, but all of the others are very very mixed. So it helps that you're bringing people from different parts of the organization, even from the States or from the Mir, into the APJ region, so that they can cross culture and learn from other people. But it is one of the fascinating things of living in APJ that they're diverse cultures, and one of the reasons why I choose to live down in that part of the world. I have to act, sometimes, as the buffer between the North American mentality of everything's the same, and everybody speaks the same language, and why can they do it this way? And how I then have to translate that for the boys and girls in Japan, and the same in Australia and New Zealand. So it's a thing that's you're learning about every single day, and every single year. It is a fascinating place to live, fascinating place to live. >> Well, I imagine that really can be used as an internal engine for Citrix in the APJ region, because you mention, what, 57 nationalities in two countries alone represented on your team? About leveraging that as an opportunity for even maybe the rest of Citrix and your partners, too, to understand the nuances, why it's important to understand cultural differences as they relate to how technology is used, different security and compliance regulations. It's got to be an advantage. >> It is an advantage, and you also find that depending on the country that you're working, when they're at different stages of their journey, so moving to the cloud, for instance, it's as people have been moving to the cloud for many, many years, but you'll be amazed how many of the largest organizations in the world are still on that journey. And it's not a journey of you're suddenly have an unpremixed application on a Friday, and now we're in the cloud on a Monday, it just carries on going. I think there was a statistic that David mentioned this morning, that something like 95% of the applications that we currently have today are still going to be here in four or five years, plus all of the new applications that we're building every single day. So it is an advantage to be in such a melting pot of cultures and different personalities, you're absolutely right. >> And I'm sure having a boy from Manchester is a facilitator of all of that, right? >> There you go, there you go, I slot straight in. I think I'm the 58th nationality to go in there from Manchester. (laughs) >> There you go. Well, Colin, thank you so much for joining Keith and me on theCUBE at Synergy. We're excited to hear about what you guys are doing down in APJ, and excited to hear more of what's to come from Synergy 2019. >> Thank you so much. >> We appreciate it. So, for Keith Townsend, I am Lisa Martin, you're watching us on theCUBE live, day one of our two day coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Live from Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon, and CloudNativeCon North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation, and the Antigo System Partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone live here in Seattle for the theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon and CloundNativeCon 2018. I'm John Furrier, theCUBE with Stu Miniman, breaking down all the action. Three days of coverage, we're in day two. A lot of action at Open-source. 8,000 attendees, up from 4,000 North America, they were in China, they were all over Europe. The community's growing in a massive way. We had two great guests from Red Hat, all making it happen, part of the community. We've got Diane Mueller, whose theCUBE alumni director of community development, many times on theCUBE, good to see you, and Rob Szumski, principal product manager, both at Red Hat. Guys, thanks for coming on. Great to see you again. >> Yeah, glad to be here. - Great to be here. >> So the world's changing a lot, and there was some news recently around Red Hat. I can't remember what it was. Recently, something big news, but you guys have been big players in Open-source for years. We always cover it, we always wax on about the origination of it and how the evolution, but the CloudNative piece has gotten so real, and your role in it particularly, we've had many conversations, going maybe back to the OpenStack days of how OpenShift was developing, then the bet on Kubernetes that you made, Core OS acquisition, those two things I think, to me, at least from my perspective, really catalyzed a lot of things at the right time, right? So, from there, just a lot of things has just been happening really in a good way. Big tail wind for you guys, CloudNative app developers are using Open-source, CI/CD pipeline, and then also policy based up under the hood, completely big shift in moving the game down the field. So big congratulations first of all. But what's new? What's the update? >> The update is Operators. I think the next big thing that we are really focusing on, and that's a game changer for all the second day operations type things, and we'll make Rob talk about it in detail, is the rise of Kubernetes' Operators. It's not a scary thing, it's not like terminator day, or anything like that, but it is really the thing that helps us make the service catalogs, the Kubernetes marketplaces really accessible to all of the data bases as a service, and all of the other things, and takes out some of the complexity of delivering applications and database  as a Service to anybody running Kubernetes anywhere. >> Take a minute to explain Operator, real quick, and then we can jump into it, because I think this is a fundamental trend, that we're seeing. Developer trend is pretty obvious, it's been that word for awhile, CloudScale, ML, machine learning, and all the goodness around application development, but the Operator side of it has been an IT thing. But now you guys have a different, a new approach that's winning. What is it? What is Operator? >> Well, it's Kubernetes that has the approach, and I'll let you-- >> Yeah, so it's basically like the rise of containers was great, because you could take a single container and package an application and give to somebody, and know that they can run it successfully. And Operator does that for a distributed system in the exact same way. So you're using all the Kubernetes primitives, so you're not reinventing service discovery, and seeker management, and all that. And you can give somebody an entire Kafka stack, or a machine learning stack, or whatever it is, these very complex distributed systems, and have them run it without having to be an expert. They need to know Kafka at a high level, but not exactly all the underpinnings of it, because that's all baked in the software. >> And the benefit and the impact of the organization is what? >> And just to clarify, so this was added in, I believe Kubernetes is like 1.7, it's something that's in there, it's not something Red Hat specific- >> Yeah, it's like-- >> So you're extending Kubernetes so that you have a custom resource definition, which is an extensible mechanism for saying, hey, I've got a deployment or a staple set, but what if I want to have a new object called a MongoDB? That knows how to deploy, and manage, and upgrade MongoDB. So that's the extension mechanism that we're using. >> Yeah, so you got to think, there's certain applications that this is going to make, just a lot easier how I manage them, deploy them, things like that. Any specific examples you want to share as to-- >> All the clustered data bases. >> There's a lot of the application side in this model have been very excited about this. >> So its all the vendors and partners that want a hybrid Cloud story, just targeting Kubernetes, and we're using Kubernetes under the hood, and then everybody wants to run like a staple data base tier, whether that's Mongo and Couchbase, and Cassandra, whatever. And these are all distributed systems. >> Alright, so I want you to just perch, you said a hybrid Cloud. Explain that model, because there's just something in general discussion that is hybrid or multi means I'm running multiple places, I'm not necessarily stretching an application, but I have instances there, just want to make sure we're on the same page. >> So this would be more the compatibility that you're programming against when you're building an operator, is Kubernetes. It's not a Cloud offering, it's not OpenShift, so you're just targeting Kubernetes, and so you can run MongoDB on prem, in the Cloud, and have it function the exact same, by standing up one of these Operators. And then if that Operator has higher level constructs for how to do multi-cluster aware data rebalancing, you can take advantage of that too. >> And the Open-source status of this product is what? >> It's all Open-source, it's all in the github repos, there's a Google group for Operator framework, that anyone can come and participate in. We hold SIG meetings on the third Friday of every month, 9 a.m. Pacific Time, and it's a completely Open-source project. There's a whole framework around it, so there's the Operator SDK, the Operator Lifecycle Management, and Operator metering, all the tooling there to help people build and manage these Operators, and it's all being built out there in the open with the community's support and feedback loops. >> What's the feedback? What's the top feedback you guys are getting right now? Seeing right now? >> I have to say, this is really, like I've been hanging out with you guys like for the past three, four months on this topic, trying to get my head around it and everything, and we came here and we had two sessions, an intro session and a deep dive session, intro yesterday, deep dive today. Today's deep dive, the room was about 250 people, and they're were people outside of it-- >> Security guards blocking people from coming in. >> Nobody could come in and it's like, it's insane. It's like, everybody needs these things, and everybody wants to figure out that, and when you ask people in the room whose building one, half the room raises their hands. It's just crazy. This thing crept up on us really, maybe not on Core OS, okay, it crept up on me very quickly, and it's very rapid adoption. We have a Kubernetes Operators workshop on Friday, so not only do we have pre-conference days of like OpenShift Cons that are huge now, but now we're starting to book end, CNCF events and put on other things, just because, and that, we had 100 seats that we were hoping we would fill, and it sold out in like minutes once it got in there, and there's a waiting list of like 300 people. It is like one of, aside from Knative, and all the other wonderful hot things too, it is one of the most interesting developments I think right now. >> Thirst for the content. Would it impact? >> Yeah, and you can get all of the documentation is out there now, and people are already building them. We have a list of 50 community Operators. It's just, it's phenomenal how quickly it's growing. >> You know, Diane and Rob, it's funny because you know, we do so many of these theCUBE interviews, and this is our 10th year doing theCUBE coming up, and I remember the conversations going back in the OpenStack days, we would ask questions like, if you had a magic wand, what would you like, hope to have happened, right? And you know, those are parts of the evolution, where it's like, it's aspirational, things are being built. It seems now with Kubernetes, it's almost like, wait a minute, it's actually, this is like the goodness is so compelling, above and below Kubernetes that it's almost like uncomprehendible. You think about, oh this is actually happening. Finally the kinds of steady state kind of operational things that have been a pain in the butt for years-- >> Yeah, the toil, it's gone, for the most part. >> Yeah. >> So Rob, I've been having a lot of just thinking back to, you're employee number two at Core OS, when I first talked to Core OS, it was, we're going to build all of these individual tools, and we're going to Open-source them, and it's going to be good. We watched this just rising ecosystem and the CNCF, and it feels like what's nice and what's different that I see, compared to some previous things, is it's not one product or even a small group of companies. It's, I have this tool kit, and some of them work together, but many of them are independently used. We've talked to your peers earlier about it, etCD. etCD is totally stand alone, doesn't need to be Kubernetes. What have you seen, if you go back to that original vision, would Core OS just been, part of this whole ecosystem, and done it, if this was available, and has this delivering on a promise that your team had hoped to work on? >> Yeah, so we've always filled in where we see gaps, and so something like etCD, the concept is not new, and it comes from Google, and they have a system internally, and as Brandon got up on stage and said, we needed that coordinate, reboot, to grow out, to cluster of machines. It didn't exist so we had to build it. Same thing with how we wanted to manage Linux. There was no distro that even resembled what we were doing. Wanted to do automatic upgrades, people thought that was crazy, so we had to go build it. And so, but we always adopted the best of breed technology, when it existed. In our early bet Kubernetes, we just saw, this is the thing, and went for it. I don't even remember what version, but it was months and months before it was zero point oh, or one point oh, so it was, we've been doing it forever. And you just see the right thing, and it's the little nugget that you need, and if you don't see it, then you build it. >> What are you surprised about Rob, in terms of the ecosystem now, you mentioned some goodness is happening, still a lot more to do, visibility around value creation, you're starting to see spots where value can be created in the ecosystem, which is great. Still more work areas, but what's surprising you? What do you see as opportunities, challenges? Your thoughts, because this vision of ease of use and programmability, is happening, right? So there's still more work to do. What's your vision there? What's your thoughts? >> I mean, I think self service is key, so this is like the rise of the Cloud comes from self service for developers, and Kubernetes gives you the right abstraction, where self service for VM's, like OpenStack, which is not quite at the level of what you want. You don't want a VM, you actually wanted a place to deploy an application, you wanted load balancing, you wanted service discovery, you didn't want like a bare Ubuntu VM, and so Kubernetes raises you up to where you're productive, and then it's about building stuff on top. But what's interesting, in the space is, we're still kind of competing on Kubernetes installers, and stuff like that, so we're not even really into like the phase where people are being super productive on the platform, other than these leading companies. So I think we'll democratize that, and we'll have a whole new landscape. >> And so 2019 you see as what being a key theme for Kubernetes? >> I think it'll be Core stuff built on top, like all the serverless frameworks, a bunch of container natives storage solutions, solving some of these problems that folks are reaching out to external machine learning, but bringing that onto the cluster, GPU support, that type of stuff. It's all about the workloads. >> And tradition end users, you have a huge install base, with Red Hat, well documented, as the end users start coming in and looking at CloudNative, and doing a reimagine of their environment, whether it's IT span, IT investments, to have a run their coding and the deployments. It's going to change. 2019's going to have an impact on what I call mainstream enterprise, for lack of a better description. What's the impact of those guys, 'cause now, they now have head room, they can do more, what's the main stream enterprise look like right now with the impact of Kubernetes? >> I think they're going to start deploying applications and get like lower the time to business value, much, much lower. And I was just talking to a customer, and they ordered bare metal machines like a year ago, and they're still not racked and in the data center. And so people are still getting over that type of stuff, but once you have like a shared Kubernetes layer, you can onboard teams like crazy. I mean, name spaces are free, quote, unquote, and you can get 35 engineering teams on a Kubernetes cluster super easy. >> So they can ramp up in development teams basically, as they bring value in-house, versus outsourcing everything. They start getting development teams, this is where the action is. >> I think you're also going to see the rise of those end users contributing back things, to the Kubernetes community and as Lyft, and Uber, and everybody are great examples of that. Uber with Jaeger, and Lyft is, we were just in the Operators thing, and they raised their hand that they are about to Open-source it, a few Operators that they're building and stuff, and you're just going to see people that you didn't normally see. Often these large foundation driven things are vendor driven, but I think what you see here, is the end user community is now embracing the Open-source, is getting the legal teams there, allowing them to share their things, because one, they get more people to maintain them, and more people working on them, but it's really I think the rise of the end user we'll see, as they start participating more and more in here. And that's the promise of Open-source. >> And that's where CNCF really made it's bones. It wasn't really vendor led per se, it was really end users, the guys building out their stuff for the first time. You see Lyft for instance, great example, you guys did a Core OS, this is like the new generational model. Final question before we break. I want to get this out there. Get a plug in for Red Hat. What are you guys, what's the focus for the show? What's the news? What's the big story for Red Hat here at KubeCon this year? >> I think it's Operators, that's what we're here talking about. It's a really big push to once again get smarter workloads onto the cluster. We've got a really great hybrid story, we've got a really great over the air upgrade story that we're bringing from some of the Core OS technology, and then the next thing is, once it's easy to run 35 clusters, we need a bunch of workloads to put on there. And so we want to save folks from the toil of running all those workloads as well, just like we did at the cluster level. >> Awesome. >> Well put. I couldn't add more. One of the things that Core OS did, you hit the nail on the head earlier, is when there was something missing, they helped us build it, and with the Operator SDK, and the Lifecycle Management, and the metering, and whatever else the tooling is, they have really been inspirational inside of Red Hat. And so they filled a number of gaps, and it's just been all Operators all the time right now. >> It's great when a plan comes together. You guys got a great tail wind. Congratulations on all the success, and it's just the beginning of the wave. It's theCUBE, covering the wave of innovation here at KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2018, we'll be back with more live coverage. Day two of Three days of Kube Coverage. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

(uplifting music) >> Hi, I'm Peter Burris and welcome again to another CUBE Conversation from our wonderful studios here in Palo Alto, California. Another great topic to talk about, we've got Robert Schmid, who is the Chief IoT Technologist at Deloitte. Welcome to The Cube, Robert. >> Thanks for having me. >> You also have your own video cast, so why don't we get that out of the way. What is it? >> Yeah, every Friday at 9 AM Pacific I do a show called Coffee Chat with Mr. IoT and Miss Connected. I just actually added a co-host, I thought I needed someone to help me. And we talk about IoT. It's on YouTube, you can find it on the channel, and it's really odd for me, that you're going to ask me the questions and I'm going to have to answer. (laughing) So I'm going to try to eat my own, my own advice here and be short. >> Well you know maybe someday you can have one of the Wikibon folks in your podcast, or video cast, we'd love to do that. >> Yeah that'd be great. >> Alright let's start here though. Deloitte's a great name, been around for a long time, associated with customer value in very profound ways, complex applications. That certainly characterizes IoT. What's going on with IoT at Deloitte? >> For us, we started a whole practice around IoT, and I'm leading that practice, but the thing for us was, there were a lot of science experiments going on around IoT, technology based, but we really wanted to bring it to what's the value behind IoT? So we really focused on use cases, and today we see that most focuses are on industrial IoT, though we spend a lot of time around connected products as well. I personally actually today worked on a project in a factory in Chicago, on a shop floor, connecting machines and measuring data and providing value. I work with an airline at an airport, around their travel so really helping guide you throughout the day. Interesting fact, you know we swipe away a lot of notifications without actually doing anything with it but when airline tells you, "Please come in 10 minutes early, the TSA wait time is long." I know you and I got to be there. >> You pay attention. >> Yeah, we got to be there early. We actually react to those notifications so I work on that and I work with high tech companies around their platforms, how to make their platforms better. >> You've raised a lot of really, really important issues but let's start with this notion of use cases >> Sure. >> A factory floor with a lot of PLCs, spitting out information, mediated by individuals or users and the data, where's it end up? That's real different from an airport where a lot of the data's being generated by a human being as they move places or is intended to be consumed by a human being. What kind of common patterns are you seeing in these use cases that brings them all under this notion of IoT? >> I always think of IoT as taking sensor data and making decisions based on those and what's interesting to me is that it creates this real interesting dilemma that we thought we knew what goes on with users, how they work and what they do. We do surveys just to find out what they're saying, the survey's actually probably not what they do but now with sensors we know what they do all the way to machines where we have decades of people having experience about, "This sounds a little odd, the machine doesn't sound right" but then they don't know what to do with it and now we can measure that because really at the end of the day, vibration isn't anything else but sound, right? So for me this is all about, and what's common about this, is that we really take that, we think we know to we actually know because we can now measure with sensors what goes on in that area. >> So it's almost like taking a lot of that time motion analysis, operations research that we used to do periodically, episodically with human beings doing their best to record stuff and bringing a lot of that discipline continuously and in real time so that it can better inform overall decisions, right? >> Yeah, I mean almost near real time, many of these cases and that's a really interesting scenario for me, right? Because now can actually see what happens in the factory when I tune the mix or the blend of my raw materials, what happens to the product that gets made at the end of that. >> As we think about the challenges or the changes that we foresee going on, is there a difference in thinking about humans as users or humans as consumers of a lot of this data and machines? I know there is, but how is this, because kind of the machine side has always been associated with SCADA, OT and the disciplines and approaches for that side seem a little bit different than what's coming out of the mobile world which is still very, very closely associated with how we utilize or how we deploy these systems to inform decisions in either case, is that right? >> I don't really know if we do so much about decisions for machines. I think at the end of the day many of the decisions are still made by humans. I mean I think about this like, we have a heating element running over, at the end of the day it still is a human that goes and sort of like says, "Yeah, let's turn that off." >> But there's still automation that takes place? >> Absolutely there's automation but automation takes place today. >> Sure. >> None of this is particularly new. I mean OT has done automation forever, right? >> Right. >> I think the interesting part is now taking the learning and connecting the different data points together. I talked about the factory floor, I just showed, actually, at the show we created a virtual factory line, life size. You can download it, it's the virtual factory by Deloitte. If I get my phone going I can show you, but it's not. Right here. (laughing) I call it "the internet of rubber ducks". >> "The internet of rubber ducks"? >> The internet of rubber ducks. Yeah, it's kind of cute. You have these little yellow ducks and if you load the app you can see them being made. But it's actually really what goes on at the factory and it really shows how when you change the blend at the beginning of a production line, how it effects at the end of the factory line, the outcome, how much scrap you have. What's the scrap? What's the overall equipment efficiency? OEE and so forth. What happens is now we can connect data from the very beginning of the factory line with he very end of the factory line and then combine that with contextual data such for example as temperature or the vibration on the machine or the current which we haven't done before. This whole time series of data that we now correlate becomes really critical and I don't think that's something we've done really as much before. That has not driven automation in this zone. >> If we think about it, we're talking about sensors which as you said, SCADA's been around for a long time and it tends to automate very, very proximate to where that sensor tower might be but a lot of the information that went into decisions was actually then generated by a person, perhaps a shift supervisor or somebody else or a machine operator said, "I heard a rattle" but there's no time so it's difficult to correlate and now we're talking about up leveling a lot of that information so it becomes part of the natural flow out of the machine but still for human consumption to make decisions? >> Yeah, very much like that. As I said, I talked about the blend of the materials that go in and then now we can correlate that particular part of the sheet. We can look on video and see how it looked and check the quality and then see at the end how many pieces of product did we produce. Actually in that particular case, it's really fascinating, it wasn't so much about reducing cost, it was actually increasing output. For them each line costs about 10 million and with the findings we have and what we're doing with them, we can actually give them the ability not to build another line but actually produce more lines because they can sell more which is a great position to be in. >> Sure, absolutely. >> You actually impact the top line rather than just the bottom line. >> Well productivity fundamentally is a function of what work you can perform for what costs are required to perform that work and if you can improve the effectiveness of something, keep the cost the same but get more work out of it, that's a big, big plus on the bottom line. >> And they have the market to sell it in to, right? >> Absolutely. >> If you just make more and you can't sell it- >> Well there's that, too. >> Yeah, which is really the good thing about that particular example. >> But talk about how, for example, you noted that they can look at a video of how the plastic or the sheets coming off the machine or set of rollers perhaps but how does AI start to be incorporated in to this IoT discussion? And what kind of use cases are you seeing becoming appropriate or more appropriate or made more productive by some of these new technologies we bring, some of the analytics and some of the IoT elements together? >> We find that we do a variety of theories. We go in and we say, "Hm, how about this? How about that?" And then we have our data scientists go and look at models for that and see what goes on and then put machine learning in and then we take those machine learning models and feed it back into, we talked before a little bit about this, but age processing is really something where we now process some of those models on the edge. The algorithm development and all the analysis we send that to the Cloud, we do number crunching there and we really take advantage of the unlimited capacity. >> A lot of the training happens up at the Cloud? >> A lot of the training happens in the Cloud and then whatever models come down, we load those on the edge and we actually do make decisions right there on the edge or we give the operator the choices to make the decisions right there on the edge. >> Training up in the Cloud but the inferencing actually is proximate to the actual action so there's locality for the action based on what's in the model and there's a lot of training that can happen, quite frankly, where you don't have to underwrite the cost of the infrastructure to do it? >> Exactly. >> That suggests that there is going to be a fair amount of change in the industry over the next few years in this notion of moving from OT to IT or SCADA to IoT. This is not just a set of technology issues, there's some fundamental other questions that are going to be important. A lot of people just kind of assume, "Oh, well throw a bunch of general purpose stuff at these IoT related things and it's going to be the IT industry all over again." Or is really the expertise associated with the use case going to be more important? How is that use case going to be ultimately realized? Is it going to be a bunch of piece parts or is it going to be more of a holistic approach to really understanding the nature of the solution and making sure that the outcome is the first and focal point? >> I'm going to come back to your question in a second. I just always, I have to smile because, so I have a Masters in petroleum engineering. So when I studied, I built really fancy models, like differential models, indicial models and you know, I simulated fracturing and- >> Process control's built with that stuff. >> I lived a good part of my life in OT and then after I came out of university I really moved more and more into IT so I've spent most of my career in information technology, including being a CIO. I always thought that the most fancy math we'd ever do is percentage calculations and that was pretty fancy. (laughs) Now, I find myself in this awesome place where I can bring together some of that OT, some of that real deep data science work that I did early on in my life, now with some of the process and system implementation expertise and practice that have come out of IT. They really come together, I don't think one takes over the other. I think there's real sort of meeting each other and going like, "Wow, okay. I guess we really got to work together." So that's really fun. About your question around what solutions do we see today? I see a lot of very vertical, very one use case oriented solutions, that go all the way from the sensor to edge to Cloud to, hopefully, integration to the back office systems because without that you can't really take good action. But they're very narrow and so, like in the good old Cloud days when Cloud became really big, there were really good point solutions and the good Cloud providers sold to the business user right there and then and ran around IT. And I see the same in IoT happening right now. You get a very good solution for temperature control on a truck, for example, right? Which is a very narrow solution but the moment you want to start doing something with your warehouse where you have other sensors and you need a horizontal platform, those vertical solutions fall short. That's what I think is sort of like the interesting dilemma right now. You have these vertical pillars and you have the horizontal platforms that the big providers have and so it'll be interesting to see when we're going to see some consolidation in this space when some of the vertical solutions are going to get bought out by the horizontals to provide better use cases. It's a little bit like the ERPs who did every industry and then eventually they realized, "We need industry focused solutions." We'll see the same in the IT space. >> The IT industry has always supposed that we can transfer knowledge we gain in one domain into other customers, into other use cases. It almost sounds like what you're saying is we're going to have that vertical organization of expertise, which is absolutely essential to solve that complex, core business problem. High risk, high value, high uncertainty, often bespoke, never done before but over time we will see a degree of experience sharing and diffusion so that over time we might see better, more applicable platforms that are capable of providing that foundation for a broader set of use cases but that' going to be a natural process of accretion. Is that how you kind of see it? >> Yeah, I mean we're all going to need streaming capabilities. We're all going to need capabilities for machine learning, for cognitive, for video analytics. We'll all need that but I think it'll be specific to the individual use case in a sense of, I'll give you an example, I just had a data scientist show me how he started looking at 20 year old scientific research on gear boxes. What frequencies happen in gear boxes, specifically to certain scenarios. That's not replicable from a gearbox to a pump, you know? >> Right. >> You have different, so there is specific things and yes it might be the same gearbox in one factory that produces, I don't know, rubber ducks to another factory who makes metal sheets but it's still gearbox specific, right? I think this is the specificity we're going to see around models, around learning and around sensors to a certain extent. >> Excellent, Robert Schmid, Chief IoT Technologist at Deloitte, thanks very much for being on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me, Peter. It was a pleasure, thank you. (uplifting music)