(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to theCube's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, your host of "theCUBE." We've got great two remote guests coming into our Palo Alto Studios, some tech athletes, as we say, people that've been in the trenches, years of experience, Lena Smart, CISO at MongoDB, Cube alumni, and Tara Hernandez, VP of Developer Productivity at MongoDB as well. Thanks for coming in to this program and supporting our efforts today. Thanks so much. >> Thanks for having us. >> Yeah, everyone talk about the journey in tech, where it all started. Before we get there, talk about what you guys are doing at MongoDB specifically. MongoDB is kind of gone the next level as a platform. You have your own ecosystem, lot of developers, very technical crowd, but it's changing the business transformation. What do you guys do at Mongo? We'll start with you, Lena. >> So I'm the CISO, so all security goes through me. I like to say, well, I don't like to say, I'm described as the ones throat to choke. So anything to do with security basically starts and ends with me. We do have a fantastic Cloud engineering security team and a product security team, and they don't report directly to me, but obviously we have very close relationships. I like to keep that kind of church and state separate and I know I've spoken about that before. And we just recently set up a physical security team with an amazing gentleman who left the FBI and he came to join us after 26 years for the agency. So, really starting to look at the physical aspects of what we offer as well. >> I interviewed a CISO the other day and she said, "Every day is day zero for me." Kind of goofing on the Amazon Day one thing, but Tara, go ahead. Tara, go ahead. What's your role there, developer productivity? What are you focusing on? >> Sure. Developer productivity is kind of the latest description for things that we've described over the years as, you know, DevOps oriented engineering or platform engineering or build and release engineering development infrastructure. It's all part and parcel, which is how do we actually get our code from developer to customer, you know, and all the mechanics that go into that. It's been something I discovered from my first job way back in the early '90s at Borland. And the art has just evolved enormously ever since, so. >> Yeah, this is a very great conversation both of you guys, right in the middle of all the action and data infrastructures changing, exploding, and involving big time AI and data tsunami and security never stops. Well, let's get into, we'll talk about that later, but let's get into what motivated you guys to pursue a career in tech and what were some of the challenges that you faced along the way? >> I'll go first. The fact of the matter was I intended to be a double major in history and literature when I went off to university, but I was informed that I had to do a math or a science degree or else the university would not be paid for. At the time, UC Santa Cruz had a policy that called Open Access Computing. This is, you know, the late '80s, early '90s. And anybody at the university could get an email account and that was unusual at the time if you were, those of us who remember, you used to have to pay for that CompuServe or AOL or, there's another one, I forget what it was called, but if a student at Santa Cruz could have an email account. And because of that email account, I met people who were computer science majors and I'm like, "Okay, I'll try that." That seems good. And it was a little bit of a struggle for me, a lot I won't lie, but I can't complain with how it ended up. And certainly once I found my niche, which was development infrastructure, I found my true love and I've been doing it for almost 30 years now. >> Awesome. Great story. Can't wait to ask a few questions on that. We'll go back to that late '80s, early '90s. Lena, your journey, how you got into it. >> So slightly different start. I did not go to university. I had to leave school when I was 16, got a job, had to help support my family. Worked a bunch of various jobs till I was about 21 and then computers became more, I think, I wouldn't say they were ubiquitous, but they were certainly out there. And I'd also been saving up every penny I could earn to buy my own computer and bought an Amstrad 1640, 20 meg hard drive. It rocked. And kind of took that apart, put it back together again, and thought that could be money in this. And so basically just teaching myself about computers any job that I got. 'Cause most of my jobs were like clerical work and secretary at that point. But any job that had a computer in front of that, I would make it my business to go find the guy who did computing 'cause it was always a guy. And I would say, you know, I want to learn how these work. Let, you know, show me. And, you know, I would take my lunch hour and after work and anytime I could with these people and they were very kind with their time and I just kept learning, so yep. >> Yeah, those early days remind me of the inflection point we're going through now. This major C change coming. Back then, if you had a computer, you had to kind of be your own internal engineer to fix things. Remember back on the systems revolution, late '80s, Tara, when, you know, your career started, those were major inflection points. Now we're seeing a similar wave right now, security, infrastructure. It feels like it's going to a whole nother level. At Mongo, you guys certainly see this as well, with this AI surge coming in. A lot more action is coming in. And so there's a lot of parallels between these inflection points. How do you guys see this next wave of change? Obviously, the AI stuff's blowing everyone away. Oh, new user interface. It's been called the browser moment, the mobile iPhone moment, kind of for this generation. There's a lot of people out there who are watching that are young in their careers, what's your take on this? How would you talk to those folks around how important this wave is? >> It, you know, it's funny, I've been having this conversation quite a bit recently in part because, you know, to me AI in a lot of ways is very similar to, you know, back in the '90s when we were talking about bringing in the worldwide web to the forefront of the world, right. And we tended to think in terms of all the optimistic benefits that would come of it. You know, free passing of information, availability to anyone, anywhere. You just needed an internet connection, which back then of course meant a modem. >> John: Not everyone had though. >> Exactly. But what we found in the subsequent years is that human beings are what they are and we bring ourselves to whatever platforms that are there, right. And so, you know, as much as it was amazing to have this freely available HTML based internet experience, it also meant that the negatives came to the forefront quite quickly. And there were ramifications of that. And so to me, when I look at AI, we're already seeing the ramifications to that. Yes, are there these amazing, optimistic, wonderful things that can be done? Yes. >> Yeah. >> But we're also human and the bad stuff's going to come out too. And how do we- >> Yeah. >> How do we as an industry, as a community, you know, understand and mitigate those ramifications so that we can benefit more from the positive than the negative. So it is interesting that it comes kind of full circle in really interesting ways. >> Yeah. The underbelly takes place first, gets it in the early adopter mode. Normally industries with, you know, money involved arbitrage, no standards. But we've seen this movie before. Is there hope, Lena, that we can have a more secure environment? >> I would hope so. (Lena laughs) Although depressingly, we've been in this well for 30 years now and we're, at the end of the day, still telling people not to click links on emails. So yeah, that kind of still keeps me awake at night a wee bit. The whole thing about AI, I mean, it's, obviously I am not an expert by any stretch of the imagination in AI. I did read (indistinct) book recently about AI and that was kind of interesting. And I'm just trying to teach myself as much as I can about it to the extent of even buying the "Dummies Guide to AI." Just because, it's actually not a dummies guide. It's actually fairly interesting, but I'm always thinking about it from a security standpoint. So it's kind of my worst nightmare and the best thing that could ever happen in the same dream. You know, you've got this technology where I can ask it a question and you know, it spits out generally a reasonable answer. And my team are working on with Mark Porter our CTO and his team on almost like an incubation of AI link. What would it look like from MongoDB? What's the legal ramifications? 'Cause there will be legal ramifications even though it's the wild, wild west just now, I think. Regulation's going to catch up to us pretty quickly, I would think. >> John: Yeah, yeah. >> And so I think, you know, as long as companies have a seat at the table and governments perhaps don't become too dictatorial over this, then hopefully we'll be in a good place. But we'll see. I think it's a really interest, there's that curse, we're living in interesting times. I think that's where we are. >> It's interesting just to stay on this tech trend for a minute. The standards bodies are different now. Back in the old days there were, you know, IEEE standards, ITF standards. >> Tara: TPC. >> The developers are the new standard. I mean, now you're seeing open source completely different where it was in the '90s to here beginning, that was gen one, some say gen two, but I say gen one, now we're exploding with open source. You have kind of developers setting the standards. If developers like it in droves, it becomes defacto, which then kind of rolls into implementation. >> Yeah, I mean I think if you don't have developer input, and this is why I love working with Tara and her team so much is 'cause they get it. If we don't have input from developers, it's not going to get used. There's going to be ways of of working around it, especially when it comes to security. If they don't, you know, if you're a developer and you're sat at your screen and you don't want to do that particular thing, you're going to find a way around it. You're a smart person. >> Yeah. >> So. >> Developers on the front lines now versus, even back in the '90s, they're like, "Okay, consider the dev's, got a QA team." Everything was Waterfall, now it's Cloud, and developers are on the front lines of everything. Tara, I mean, this is where the standards are being met. What's your reaction to that? >> Well, I think it's outstanding. I mean, you know, like I was at Netscape and part of the crowd that released the browser as open source and we founded mozilla.org, right. And that was, you know, in many ways kind of the birth of the modern open source movement beyond what we used to have, what was basically free software foundation was sort of the only game in town. And I think it is so incredibly valuable. I want to emphasize, you know, and pile onto what Lena was saying, it's not just that the developers are having input on a sort of company by company basis. Open source to me is like a checks and balance, where it allows us as a broader community to be able to agree on and enforce certain standards in order to try and keep the technology platforms as accessible as possible. I think Kubernetes is a great example of that, right. If we didn't have Kubernetes, that would've really changed the nature of how we think about container orchestration. But even before that, Linux, right. Linux allowed us as an industry to end the Unix Wars and as someone who was on the front lines of that as well and having to support 42 different operating systems with our product, you know, that was a huge win. And it allowed us to stop arguing about operating systems and start arguing about software or not arguing, but developing it in positive ways. So with, you know, with Kubernetes, with container orchestration, we all agree, okay, that's just how we're going to orchestrate. Now we can build up this huge ecosystem, everybody gets taken along, right. And now it changes the game for what we're defining as business differentials, right. And so when we talk about crypto, that's a little bit harder, but certainly with AI, right, you know, what are the checks and balances that as an industry and as the developers around this, that we can in, you know, enforce to make sure that no one company or no one body is able to overly control how these things are managed, how it's defined. And I think that is only for the benefit in the industry as a whole, particularly when we think about the only other option is it gets regulated in ways that do not involve the people who actually know the details of what they're talking about. >> Regulated and or thrown away or bankrupt or- >> Driven underground. >> Yeah. >> Which would be even worse actually. >> Yeah, that's a really interesting, the checks and balances. I love that call out. And I was just talking with another interview part of the series around women being represented in the 51% ratio. Software is for everybody. So that we believe that open source movement around the collective intelligence of the participants in the industry and independent of gender, this is going to be the next wave. You're starting to see these videos really have impact because there are a lot more leaders now at the table in companies developing software systems and with AI, the aperture increases for applications. And this is the new dynamic. What's your guys view on this dynamic? How does this go forward in a positive way? Is there a certain trajectory you see? For women in the industry? >> I mean, I think some of the states are trying to, again, from the government angle, some of the states are trying to force women into the boardroom, for example, California, which can be no bad thing, but I don't know, sometimes I feel a bit iffy about all this kind of forced- >> John: Yeah. >> You know, making, I don't even know how to say it properly so you can cut this part of the interview. (John laughs) >> Tara: Well, and I think that they're >> I'll say it's not organic. >> No, and I think they're already pulling it out, right. It's already been challenged so they're in the process- >> Well, this is the open source angle, Tara, you are getting at it. The change agent is open, right? So to me, the history of the proven model is openness drives transparency drives progress. >> No, it's- >> If you believe that to be true, this could have another impact. >> Yeah, it's so interesting, right. Because if you look at McKinsey Consulting or Boston Consulting or some of the other, I'm blocking on all of the names. There has been a decade or more of research that shows that a non homogeneous employee base, be it gender or ethnicity or whatever, generates more revenue, right? There's dollar signs that can be attached to this, but it's not enough for all companies to want to invest in that way. And it's not enough for all, you know, venture firms or investment firms to grant that seed money or do those seed rounds. I think it's getting better very slowly, but socialization is a much harder thing to overcome over time. Particularly, when you're not just talking about one country like the United States in our case, but around the world. You know, tech centers now exist all over the world, including places that even 10 years ago we might not have expected like Nairobi, right. Which I think is amazing, but you have to factor in the cultural implications of that as well, right. So yes, the openness is important and we have, it's important that we have those voices, but I don't think it's a panacea solution, right. It's just one more piece. I think honestly that one of the most important opportunities has been with Cloud computing and Cloud's been around for a while. So why would I say that? It's because if you think about like everybody holds up the Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, back in the '70s, or Sergey and Larry for Google, you know, you had to have access to enough credit card limit to go to Fry's and buy your servers and then access to somebody like Susan Wojcicki to borrow the garage or whatever. But there was still a certain amount of upfrontness that you had to be able to commit to, whereas now, and we've, I think, seen a really good evidence of this being able to lease server resources by the second and have development platforms that you can do on your phone. I mean, for a while I think Africa, that the majority of development happened on mobile devices because there wasn't a sufficient supply chain of laptops yet. And that's no longer true now as far as I know. But like the power that that enables for people who would otherwise be underrepresented in our industry instantly opens it up, right? And so to me that's I think probably the biggest opportunity that we've seen from an industry on how to make more availability in underrepresented representation for entrepreneurship. >> Yeah. >> Something like AI, I think that's actually going to take us backwards if we're not careful. >> Yeah. >> Because of we're reinforcing that socialization. >> Well, also the bias. A lot of people commenting on the biases of the large language inherently built in are also problem. Lena, I want you to weigh on this too, because I think the skills question comes up here and I've been advocating that you don't need the pedigree, college pedigree, to get into a certain jobs, you mentioned Cloud computing. I mean, it's been around for you think a long time, but not really, really think about it. The ability to level up, okay, if you're going to join something new and half the jobs in cybersecurity are created in the past year, right? So, you have this what used to be a barrier, your degree, your pedigree, your certification would take years, would be a blocker. Now that's gone. >> Lena: Yeah, it's the opposite. >> That's, in fact, psychology. >> I think so, but the people who I, by and large, who I interview for jobs, they have, I think security people and also I work with our compliance folks and I can't forget them, but let's talk about security just now. I've always found a particular kind of mindset with security folks. We're very curious, not very good at following rules a lot of the time, and we'd love to teach others. I mean, that's one of the big things stem from the start of my career. People were always interested in teaching and I was interested in learning. So it was perfect. And I think also having, you know, strong women leaders at MongoDB allows other underrepresented groups to actually apply to the company 'cause they see that we're kind of talking the talk. And that's been important. I think it's really important. You know, you've got Tara and I on here today. There's obviously other senior women at MongoDB that you can talk to as well. There's a bunch of us. There's not a whole ton of us, but there's a bunch of us. And it's good. It's definitely growing. I've been there for four years now and I've seen a growth in women in senior leadership positions. And I think having that kind of track record of getting really good quality underrepresented candidates to not just interview, but come and join us, it's seen. And it's seen in the industry and people take notice and they're like, "Oh, okay, well if that person's working, you know, if Tara Hernandez is working there, I'm going to apply for that." And that in itself I think can really, you know, reap the rewards. But it's getting started. It's like how do you get your first strong female into that position or your first strong underrepresented person into that position? It's hard. I get it. If it was easy, we would've sold already. >> It's like anything. I want to see people like me, my friends in there. Am I going to be alone? Am I going to be of a group? It's a group psychology. Why wouldn't? So getting it out there is key. Is there skills that you think that people should pay attention to? One's come up as curiosity, learning. What are some of the best practices for folks trying to get into the tech field or that's in the tech field and advancing through? What advice are you guys- >> I mean, yeah, definitely, what I say to my team is within my budget, we try and give every at least one training course a year. And there's so much free stuff out there as well. But, you know, keep learning. And even if it's not right in your wheelhouse, don't pick about it. Don't, you know, take a look at what else could be out there that could interest you and then go for it. You know, what does it take you few minutes each night to read a book on something that might change your entire career? You know, be enthusiastic about the opportunities out there. And there's so many opportunities in security. Just so many. >> Tara, what's your advice for folks out there? Tons of stuff to taste, taste test, try things. >> Absolutely. I mean, I always say, you know, my primary qualifications for people, I'm looking for them to be smart and motivated, right. Because the industry changes so quickly. What we're doing now versus what we did even last year versus five years ago, you know, is completely different though themes are certainly the same. You know, we still have to code and we still have to compile that code or package the code and ship the code so, you know, how well can we adapt to these new things instead of creating floppy disks, which was my first job. Five and a quarters, even. The big ones. >> That's old school, OG. There it is. Well done. >> And now it's, you know, containers, you know, (indistinct) image containers. And so, you know, I've gotten a lot of really great success hiring boot campers, you know, career transitioners. Because they bring a lot experience in addition to the technical skills. I think the most important thing is to experiment and figuring out what do you like, because, you know, maybe you are really into security or maybe you're really into like deep level coding and you want to go back, you know, try to go to school to get a degree where you would actually want that level of learning. Or maybe you're a front end engineer, you want to be full stacked. Like there's so many different things, data science, right. Maybe you want to go learn R right. You know, I think it's like figure out what you like because once you find that, that in turn is going to energize you 'cause you're going to feel motivated. I think the worst thing you could do is try to force yourself to learn something that you really could not care less about. That's just the worst. You're going in handicapped. >> Yeah and there's choices now versus when we were breaking into the business. It was like, okay, you software engineer. They call it software engineering, that's all it was. You were that or you were in sales. Like, you know, some sort of systems engineer or sales and now it's,- >> I had never heard of my job when I was in school, right. I didn't even know it was a possibility. But there's so many different types of technical roles, you know, absolutely. >> It's so exciting. I wish I was young again. >> One of the- >> Me too. (Lena laughs) >> I don't. I like the age I am. So one of the things that I did to kind of harness that curiosity is we've set up a security champions programs. About 120, I guess, volunteers globally. And these are people from all different backgrounds and all genders, diversity groups, underrepresented groups, we feel are now represented within this champions program. And people basically give up about an hour or two of their time each week, with their supervisors permission, and we basically teach them different things about security. And we've now had seven full-time people move from different areas within MongoDB into my team as a result of that program. So, you know, monetarily and time, yeah, saved us both. But also we're showing people that there is a path, you know, if you start off in Tara's team, for example, doing X, you join the champions program, you're like, "You know, I'd really like to get into red teaming. That would be so cool." If it fits, then we make that happen. And that has been really important for me, especially to give, you know, the women in the underrepresented groups within MongoDB just that window into something they might never have seen otherwise. >> That's a great common fit is fit matters. Also that getting access to what you fit is also access to either mentoring or sponsorship or some sort of, at least some navigation. Like what's out there and not being afraid to like, you know, just ask. >> Yeah, we just actually kicked off our big mentor program last week, so I'm the executive sponsor of that. I know Tara is part of it, which is fantastic. >> We'll put a plug in for it. Go ahead. >> Yeah, no, it's amazing. There's, gosh, I don't even know the numbers anymore, but there's a lot of people involved in this and so much so that we've had to set up mentoring groups rather than one-on-one. And I think it was 45% of the mentors are actually male, which is quite incredible for a program called Mentor Her. And then what we want to do in the future is actually create a program called Mentor Them so that it's not, you know, not just on the female and so that we can live other groups represented and, you know, kind of break down those groups a wee bit more and have some more granularity in the offering. >> Tara, talk about mentoring and sponsorship. Open source has been there for a long time. People help each other. It's community-oriented. What's your view of how to work with mentors and sponsors if someone's moving through ranks? >> You know, one of the things that was really interesting, unfortunately, in some of the earliest open source communities is there was a lot of pervasive misogyny to be perfectly honest. >> Yeah. >> And one of the important adaptations that we made as an open source community was the idea, an introduction of code of conducts. And so when I'm talking to women who are thinking about expanding their skills, I encourage them to join open source communities to have opportunity, even if they're not getting paid for it, you know, to develop their skills to work with people to get those code reviews, right. I'm like, "Whatever you join, make sure they have a code of conduct and a good leadership team. It's very important." And there are plenty, right. And then that idea has come into, you know, conferences now. So now conferences have codes of contact, if there are any good, and maybe not all of them, but most of them, right. And the ideas of expanding that idea of intentional healthy culture. >> John: Yeah. >> As a business goal and business differentiator. I mean, I won't lie, when I was recruited to come to MongoDB, the culture that I was able to discern through talking to people, in addition to seeing that there was actually women in senior leadership roles like Lena, like Kayla Nelson, that was a huge win. And so it just builds on momentum. And so now, you know, those of us who are in that are now representing. And so that kind of reinforces, but it's all ties together, right. As the open source world goes, particularly for a company like MongoDB, which has an open source product, you know, and our community builds. You know, it's a good thing to be mindful of for us, how we interact with the community and you know, because that could also become an opportunity for recruiting. >> John: Yeah. >> Right. So we, in addition to people who might become advocates on Mongo's behalf in their own company as a solution for themselves, so. >> You guys had great successful company and great leadership there. I mean, I can't tell you how many times someone's told me "MongoDB doesn't scale. It's going to be dead next year." I mean, I was going back 10 years. It's like, just keeps getting better and better. You guys do a great job. So it's so fun to see the success of developers. Really appreciate you guys coming on the program. Final question, what are you guys excited about to end the segment? We'll give you guys the last word. Lena will start with you and Tara, you can wrap us up. What are you excited about? >> I'm excited to see what this year brings. I think with ChatGPT and its copycats, I think it'll be a very interesting year when it comes to AI and always in the lookout for the authentic deep fakes that we see coming out. So just trying to make people aware that this is a real thing. It's not just pretend. And then of course, our old friend ransomware, let's see where that's going to go. >> John: Yeah. >> And let's see where we get to and just genuine hygiene and housekeeping when it comes to security. >> Excellent. Tara. >> Ah, well for us, you know, we're always constantly trying to up our game from a security perspective in the software development life cycle. But also, you know, what can we do? You know, one interesting application of AI that maybe Google doesn't like to talk about is it is really cool as an addendum to search and you know, how we might incorporate that as far as our learning environment and developer productivity, and how can we enable our developers to be more efficient, productive in their day-to-day work. So, I don't know, there's all kinds of opportunities that we're looking at for how we might improve that process here at MongoDB and then maybe be able to share it with the world. One of the things I love about working at MongoDB is we get to use our own products, right. And so being able to have this interesting document database in order to put information and then maybe apply some sort of AI to get it out again, is something that we may well be looking at, if not this year, then certainly in the coming year. >> Awesome. Lena Smart, the chief information security officer. Tara Hernandez, vice president developer of productivity from MongoDB. Thank you so much for sharing here on International Women's Day. We're going to do this quarterly every year. We're going to do it and then we're going to do quarterly updates. Thank you so much for being part of this program. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> Okay, this is theCube's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>Hi everyone. Welcome to the Cube special presentation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Foer, host of the Cube. We've got two great guests, one for calling in from Germany, our videoing in from Germany, one from Maryland. We've got VMware and aws. This is the customer successes with VMware cloud on AWS showcase, accelerating business transformation here in the showcase with Samir Candu Worldwide. VMware strategic alliance solution, architect leader with AWS Samir. Great to have you and Daniel Re Myer, principal architect global AWS synergy at VMware. Guys, you guys are, are working together. You're the key players in the re relationship as it rolls out and continues to grow. So welcome to the cube. >>Thank you. Greatly appreciate it. >>Great to have you guys both on, As you know, we've been covering this since 2016 when Pat Geling, then CEO and then then CEO AWS at Andy Chasy did this. It kind of got people by surprise, but it really kind of cleaned out the positioning in the enterprise for the success. OFM workloads in the cloud. VMware's had great success with it since, and you guys have the great partnerships. So this has been like a really strategic, successful partnership. Where are we right now? You know, years later we got this whole inflection point coming. You're starting to see, you know, this idea of higher level services, more performance are coming in at the infrastructure side. More automation, more serverless, I mean, and a, I mean it's just getting better and better every year in the cloud. Kinda a whole nother level. Where are we, Samir? Let's start with you on, on the relationship. >>Yeah, totally. So I mean, there's several things to keep in mind, right? So in 2016, right, that's when the partnership between AWS and VMware was announced, and then less than a year later, that's when we officially launched VMware cloud on aws. Years later, we've been driving innovation, working with our customers, jointly engineering this between AWS and VMware day in, day out. As far as advancing VMware cloud on aws. You know, even if you look at the innovation that takes place with a solution, things have modernized, things have changed, there's been advancements, you know, whether it's security focus, whether it's platform focus, whether it's networking focus, there's been modifications along the way, even storage, right? More recently, one of the things to keep in mind is we're looking to deliver value to our customers together. These are our joint customers. So there's hundreds of VMware and AWS engineers working together on this solution. >>And then factor in even our sales teams, right? We have VMware and AWS sales teams interacting with each other on a constant daily basis. We're working together with our customers at the end of the day too. Then we're looking to even offer and develop jointly engineered solutions specific to VMware cloud on aws, and even with VMware's, other platforms as well. Then the other thing comes down to is where we have dedicated teams around this at both AWS and VMware. So even from solutions architects, even to our sales specialists, even to our account teams, even to specific engineering teams within the organizations, they all come together to drive this innovation forward with VMware cloud on AWS and the jointly engineered solution partnership as well. And then I think one of the key things to keep in mind comes down to we have nearly 600 channel partners that have achieved VMware cloud on AWS service competency. So think about it from the standpoint there's 300 certified or validated technology solutions, they're now available to our customers. So that's even innovation right off the top as well. >>Great stuff. Daniel, I wanna get to you in a second. Upon this principal architect position you have in your title, you're the global a synergy person. Synergy means bringing things together, making it work. Take us through the architecture, because we heard a lot of folks at VMware explore this year, formerly world, talking about how the, the workloads on it has been completely transforming into cloud and hybrid, right? This is where the action is. Where are you? Is your customers taking advantage of that new shift? You got AI ops, you got it. Ops changing a lot, you got a lot more automation edges right around the corner. This is like a complete transformation from where we were just five years ago. What's your thoughts on the >>Relationship? So at at, at first, I would like to emphasize that our collaboration is not just that we have dedicated teams to help our customers get the most and the best benefits out of VMware cloud on aws. We are also enabling US mutually. So AWS learns from us about the VMware technology, where VMware people learn about the AWS technology. We are also enabling our channel partners and we are working together on customer projects. So we have regular assembled globally and also virtually on Slack and the usual suspect tools working together and listening to customers, that's, that's very important. Asking our customers where are their needs? And we are driving the solution into the direction that our customers get the, the best benefits out of VMware cloud on aws. And over the time we, we really have involved the solution. As Samia mentioned, we just added additional storage solutions to VMware cloud on aws. We now have three different instance types that cover a broad range of, of workload. So for example, we just added the I four I host, which is ideally for workloads that require a lot of CPU power, such as you mentioned it, AI workloads. >>Yeah. So I wanna guess just specifically on the customer journey and their transformation. You know, we've been reporting on Silicon angle in the queue in the past couple weeks in a big way that the OPS teams are now the new devs, right? I mean that sounds OP a little bit weird, but operation IT operations is now part of the, a lot more data ops, security writing code composing, you know, with open source, a lot of great things are changing. Can you share specifically what customers are looking for when you say, as you guys come in and assess their needs, what are they doing? What are some of the things that they're doing with VMware on AWS specifically that's a little bit different? Can you share some of and highlights there? >>That, that's a great point because originally VMware and AWS came from very different directions when it comes to speaking people at customers. So for example, aws very developer focused, whereas VMware has a very great footprint in the IT ops area. And usually these are very different, very different teams, groups, different cultures, but it's, it's getting together. However, we always try to address the customers, right? There are customers that want to build up a new application from the scratch and build resiliency, availability, recoverability, scalability into the application. But there are still a lot of customers that say, well we don't have all of the skills to redevelop everything to refactor an application to make it highly available. So we want to have all of that as a service, recoverability as a service, scalability as a service. We want to have this from the infrastructure. That was one of the unique selling points for VMware on premise and now we are bringing this into the cloud. >>Samir, talk about your perspective. I wanna get your thoughts, and not to take a tangent, but we had covered the AWS remar of, actually it was Amazon res machine learning automation, robotics and space. It was really kinda the confluence of industrial IOT software physical. And so when you look at like the IT operations piece becoming more software, you're seeing things about automation, but the skill gap is huge. So you're seeing low code, no code automation, you know, Hey Alexa, deploy a Kubernetes cluster. Yeah, I mean, I mean that's coming, right? So we're seeing this kind of operating automation meets higher level services meets workloads. Can you unpack that and share your opinion on, on what you see there from an Amazon perspective and how it relates to this? >>Yeah, totally. Right. And you know, look at it from the point of view where we said this is a jointly engineered solution, but it's not migrating to one option or the other option, right? It's more or less together. So even with VMware cloud on aws, yes it is utilizing AWS infrastructure, but your environment is connected to that AWS VPC in your AWS account. So if you wanna leverage any of the native AWS services, so any of the 200 plus AWS services, you have that option to do so. So that's gonna give you that power to do certain things, such as, for example, like how you mentioned with iot, even with utilizing Alexa or if there's any other service that you wanna utilize, that's the joining point between both of the offerings. Right off the top though, with digital transformation, right? You, you have to think about where it's not just about the technology, right? There's also where you want to drive growth in the underlying technology. Even in your business leaders are looking to reinvent their business. They're looking to take different steps as far as pursuing a new strategy. Maybe it's a process, maybe it's with the people, the culture, like how you said before, where people are coming in from a different background, right? They may not be used to the cloud, they may not be used to AWS services, but now you have that capability to mesh them together. Okay. Then also, Oh, >>Go ahead, finish >>Your thought. No, no, I was gonna say, what it also comes down to is you need to think about the operating model too, where it is a shift, right? Especially for that VS four admin that's used to their on-premises at environment. Now with VMware cloud on aws, you have that ability to leverage a cloud, but the investment that you made and certain things as far as automation, even with monitoring, even with logging, yeah. You still have that methodology where you can utilize that in VMware cloud on AWS two. >>Danielle, I wanna get your thoughts on this because at at explore and, and, and after the event, now as we prep for Cuban and reinvent coming up the big AWS show, I had a couple conversations with a lot of the VMware customers and operators and it's like hundreds of thousands of, of, of, of users and millions of people talking about and and peaked on VM we're interested in v VMware. The common thread was one's one, one person said, I'm trying to figure out where I'm gonna put my career in the next 10 to 15 years. And they've been very comfortable with VMware in the past, very loyal, and they're kind of talking about, I'm gonna be the next cloud, but there's no like role yet architects, is it Solution architect sre. So you're starting to see the psychology of the operators who now are gonna try to make these career decisions, like how, what am I gonna work on? And it's, and that was kind of fuzzy, but I wanna get your thoughts. How would you talk to that persona about the future of VMware on, say, cloud for instance? What should they be thinking about? What's the opportunity and what's gonna happen? >>So digital transformation definitely is a huge change for many organizations and leaders are perfectly aware of what that means. And that also means in, in to to some extent, concerns with your existing employees. Concerns about do I have to relearn everything? Do I have to acquire new skills? And, and trainings is everything worthless I learned over the last 15 years of my career? And the, the answer is to make digital transformation a success. We need not just to talk about technology, but also about process people and culture. And this is where VMware really can help because if you are applying VMware cloud on a, on AWS to your infrastructure, to your existing on-premise infrastructure, you do not need to change many things. You can use the same tools and skills, you can manage your virtual machines as you did in your on-premise environment. You can use the same managing and monitoring tools. If you have written, and many customers did this, if you have developed hundreds of, of scripts that automate tasks and if you know how to troubleshoot things, then you can use all of that in VMware cloud on aws. And that gives not just leaders, but but also the architects at customers, the operators at customers, the confidence in, in such a complex project, >>The consistency, very key point, gives them the confidence to go and, and then now that once they're confident they can start committing themselves to new things. Samir, you're reacting to this because you know, on your side you've got higher level services, you got more performance at the hardware level. I mean, lot improvement. So, okay, nothing's changed. I can still run my job now I got goodness on the other side. What's the upside? What's in it for the, for the, for the customer there? >>Yeah, so I think what it comes down to is they've already been so used to or entrenched with that VMware admin mentality, right? But now extending that to the cloud, that's where now you have that bridge between VMware cloud on AWS to bridge that VMware knowledge with that AWS knowledge. So I will look at it from the point of view where now one has that capability and that ability to just learn about the cloud, but if they're comfortable with certain aspects, no one's saying you have to change anything. You can still leverage that, right? But now if you wanna utilize any other AWS service in conjunction with that VM that resides maybe on premises or even in VMware cloud on aws, you have that option to do so. So think about it where you have that ability to be someone who's curious and wants to learn. And then if you wanna expand on the skills, you certainly have that capability to do so. >>Great stuff. I love, love that. Now that we're peeking behind the curtain here, I'd love to have you guys explain, cuz people wanna know what's goes on in behind the scenes. How does innovation get happen? How does it happen with the relationship? Can you take us through a day in the life of kind of what goes on to make innovation happen with the joint partnership? You guys just have a zoom meeting, Do you guys fly out, you write go do you ship thing? I mean I'm making it up, but you get the idea, what's the, what's, how does it work? What's going on behind the scenes? >>So we hope to get more frequently together in person, but of course we had some difficulties over the last two to three years. So we are very used to zoom conferences and and Slack meetings. You always have to have the time difference in mind if we are working globally together. But what we try, for example, we have reg regular assembled now also in person geo based. So for emia, for the Americas, for aj. And we are bringing up interesting customer situations, architectural bits and pieces together. We are discussing it always to share and to contribute to our community. >>What's interesting, you know, as, as events are coming back to here, before you get, you weigh in, I'll comment, as the cube's been going back out to events, we are hearing comments like what, what pandemic we were more productive in the pandemic. I mean, developers know how to work remotely and they've been on all the tools there, but then they get in person, they're happy to see people, but there's no one's, no one's really missed the beat. I mean it seems to be very productive, you know, workflow, not a lot of disruption. More if anything, productivity gains. >>Agreed, right? I think one of the key things to keep in mind is, you know, even if you look at AWS's and even Amazon's leadership principles, right? Customer obsession, that's key. VMware is carrying that forward as well. Where we are working with our customers, like how Daniel said met earlier, right? We might have meetings at different time zones, maybe it's in person, maybe it's virtual, but together we're working to listen to our customers. You know, we're taking and capturing that feedback to drive innovation and VMware cloud on AWS as well. But one of the key things to keep in mind is yes, there have been, there has been the pandemic, we might have been disconnected to a certain extent, but together through technology we've been able to still communicate work with our customers. Even with VMware in between, with AWS and whatnot. We had that flexibility to innovate and continue that innovation. So even if you look at it from the point of view, right? VMware cloud on AWS outposts, that was something that customers have been asking for. We've been been able to leverage the feedback and then continue to drive innovation even around VMware cloud on AWS outposts. So even with the on premises environment, if you're looking to handle maybe data sovereignty or compliance needs, maybe you have low latency requirements, that's where certain advancements come into play, right? So the key thing is always to maintain that communication track. >>And our last segment we did here on the, on this showcase, we listed the accomplishments and they were pretty significant. I mean go, you got the global rollouts of the relationship. It's just really been interesting and, and people can reference that. We won't get into it here, but I will ask you guys to comment on, as you guys continue to evolve the relationship, what's in it for the customer? What can they expect next? Cuz again, I think right now we're in at a, an inflection point more than ever. What can people expect from the relationship and what's coming up with reinvent? Can you share a little bit of kind of what's coming down the pike? >>So one of the most important things we have announced this year, and we will continue to evolve into that direction, is independent scale of storage. That absolutely was one of the most important items customer asked us for over the last years. Whenever, whenever you are requiring additional storage to host your virtual machines, you usually in VMware cloud on aws, you have to add additional notes. Now we have three different note types with different ratios of compute, storage and memory. But if you only require additional storage, you always have to get also additional compute and memory and you have to pay. And now with two solutions which offer choice for the customers, like FS six one, NetApp onap, and VMware cloud Flex Storage, you now have two cost effective opportunities to add storage to your virtual machines. And that offers opportunities for other instance types maybe that don't have local storage. We are also very, very keen looking forward to announcements, exciting announcements at the upcoming events. >>Samir, what's your, what's your reaction take on the, on what's coming down on your side? >>Yeah, I think one of the key things to keep in mind is, you know, we're looking to help our customers be agile and even scale with their needs, right? So with VMware cloud on aws, that's one of the key things that comes to mind, right? There are gonna be announcements, innovations and whatnot with outcoming events. But together we're able to leverage that to advance VMware cloud on AWS to Daniel's point storage, for example, even with host offerings. And then even with decoupling storage from compute and memory, right now you have the flexibility where you can do all of that. So to look at it from the standpoint where now with 21 regions where we have VMware cloud on AWS available as well, where customers can utilize that as needed when needed, right? So it comes down to, you know, transformation will be there. Yes, there's gonna be maybe where workloads have to be adapted where they're utilizing certain AWS services, but you have that flexibility and option to do so. And I think with the continuing events that's gonna give us the options to even advance our own services together. >>Well you guys are in the middle of it, you're in the trenches, you're making things happen, you've got a team of people working together. My final question is really more of a kind of a current situation, kind of future evolutionary thing that you haven't seen this before. I wanna get both of your reaction to it. And we've been bringing this up in, in the open conversations on the cube is in the old days it was going back this generation, you had ecosystems, you had VMware had an ecosystem they did best, had an ecosystem. You know, we have a product, you have a product, biz dev deals happen, people sign relationships and they do business together and they, they sell to each other's products or do some stuff. Now it's more about architecture cuz we're now in a distributed large scale environment where the role of ecosystems are intertwining. >>And this, you guys are in the middle of two big ecosystems. You mentioned channel partners, you both have a lot of partners on both sides. They come together. So you have this now almost a three dimensional or multidimensional ecosystem, you know, interplay. What's your thoughts on this? And, and, and because it's about the architecture, integration is a value, not so much. Innovation is only, you gotta do innovation, but when you do innovation, you gotta integrate it, you gotta connect it. So what is, how do you guys see this as a, as an architectural thing, start to see more technical business deals? >>So we are, we are removing dependencies from individual ecosystems and from individual vendors. So a customer no longer has to decide for one vendor and then it is a very expensive and high effort project to move away from that vendor, which ties customers even, even closer to specific vendors. We are removing these obstacles. So with VMware cloud on aws moving to the cloud, firstly it's, it's not a dead end. If you decide at one point in time because of latency requirements or maybe it's some compliance requirements, you need to move back into on-premise. You can do this if you decide you want to stay with some of your services on premise and just run a couple of dedicated services in the cloud, you can do this and you can mana manage it through a single pane of glass. That's quite important. So cloud is no longer a dead and it's no longer a binary decision, whether it's on premise or the cloud. It it is the cloud. And the second thing is you can choose the best of both works, right? If you are migrating virtual machines that have been running in your on-premise environment to VMware cloud on aws, by the way, in a very, very fast cost effective and safe way, then you can enrich later on enrich these virtual machines with services that are offered by aws. More than 200 different services ranging from object based storage, load balancing and so on. So it's an endless, endless possibility. >>We, we call that super cloud in, in a, in a way that we be generically defining it where everyone's innovating, but yet there's some common services. But the differentiation comes from innovation where the lock in is the value, not some spec, right? Samir, this is gonna where cloud is right now, you guys are, are not commodity. Amazon's completely differentiating, but there's some commodity things. Having got storage, you got compute, but then you got now advances in all areas. But partners innovate with you on their terms. Absolutely. And everybody wins. >>Yeah. And a hundred percent agree with you. I think one of the key things, you know, as Daniel mentioned before, is where it it, it's a cross education where there might be someone who's more proficient on the cloud side with aws, maybe more proficient with the viewers technology, but then for partners, right? They bridge that gap as well where they come in and they might have a specific niche or expertise where their background, where they can help our customers go through that transformation. So then that comes down to, hey, maybe I don't know how to connect to the cloud. Maybe I don't know what the networking constructs are. Maybe I can leverage that partner. That's one aspect to go about it. Now maybe you migrated that workload to VMware cloud on aws. Maybe you wanna leverage any of the native AWS services or even just off the top 200 plus AWS services, right? But it comes down to that skill, right? So again, solutions architecture at the back of, back of the day, end of the day, what it comes down to is being able to utilize the best of both worlds. That's what we're giving our customers at the end of the >>Day. I mean, I just think it's, it's a, it's a refactoring and innovation opportunity at all levels. I think now more than ever, you can take advantage of each other's ecosystems and partners and technologies and change how things get done with keeping the consistency. I mean, Daniel, you nailed that, right? I mean, you don't have to do anything. You still run the fear, the way you working on it and now do new things. This is kind of a cultural shift. >>Yeah, absolutely. And if, if you look, not every, not every customer, not every organization has the resources to refactor and re-platform everything. And we gave, we give them a very simple and easy way to move workloads to the cloud. Simply run them and at the same time they can free up resources to develop new innovations and, and grow their business. >>Awesome. Samir, thank you for coming on. Danielle, thank you for coming to Germany, Octoberfest, I know it's evening over there, your weekend's here. And thank you for spending the time. Samir final give you the final word, AWS reinvents coming up. Preparing. We're gonna have an exclusive with Adam, but Fry, we do a curtain raise, a dual preview. What's coming down on your side with the relationship and what can we expect to hear about what you got going on at reinvent this year? The big show? >>Yeah, so I think, you know, Daniel hit upon some of the key points, but what I will say is we do have, for example, specific sessions, both that VMware's driving and then also that AWS is driving. We do have even where we have what I call a chalk talks. So I would say, and then even with workshops, right? So even with the customers, the attendees who are there, whatnot, if they're looking for to sit and listen to a session, yes that's there. But if they wanna be hands on, that is also there too. So personally for me as an IT background, you know, been in CIS admin world and whatnot, being hands on, that's one of the key things that I personally am looking forward. But I think that's one of the key ways just to learn and get familiar with the technology. Yeah, >>Reinvents an amazing show for the in person. You guys nail it every year. We'll have three sets this year at the cube. It's becoming popular. We more and more content. You guys got live streams going on, a lot of content, a lot of media, so thanks, thanks for sharing that. Samir Daniel, thank you for coming on on this part of the showcase episode of really the customer successes with VMware Cloud Ons, really accelerating business transformation withs and VMware. I'm John Fur with the cube, thanks for watching. Hello everyone. Welcome to this cube showcase, accelerating business transformation with VMware cloud on it's a solution innovation conversation with two great guests, Fred and VP of commercial services at aws and NA Ryan Bard, who's the VP and general manager of cloud solutions at VMware. Gentlemen, thanks for joining me on this showcase. >>Great to be here. >>Hey, thanks for having us on. It's a great topic. You know, we, we've been covering this VMware cloud on abus since, since the launch going back and it's been amazing to watch the evolution from people saying, Oh, it's the worst thing I've ever seen. It's what's this mean? And depress work were, we're kind of not really on board with kind of the vision, but as it played out as you guys had announced together, it did work out great for VMware. It did work out great for a D and it continues two years later and I want just get an update from you guys on where you guys see this has been going. I'll see multiple years. Where is the evolution of the solution as we are right now coming off VMware explorer just recently and going in to reinvent, which is only a couple weeks away, feels like tomorrow. But you know, as we prepare a lot going on, where are we with the evolution of the solution? >>I mean, first thing I wanna say is, you know, PBO 2016 was a someon moment and the history of it, right? When Pat Gelsinger and Andy Jessey came together to announce this and I think John, you were there at the time I was there, it was a great, great moment. We launched the solution in 2017, the year after that at VM Word back when we called it Word, I think we have gone from strength to strength. One of the things that has really mattered to us is we have learned froms also in the processes, this notion of working backwards. So we really, really focused on customer feedback as we build a service offering now five years old, pretty remarkable journey. You know, in the first years we tried to get across all the regions, you know, that was a big focus because there was so much demand for it. >>In the second year we started going really on enterprise grade features. We invented this pretty awesome feature called Stretch clusters, where you could stretch a vSphere cluster using VSA and NSX across two AZs in the same region. Pretty phenomenal four nine s availability that applications start started to get with that particular feature. And we kept moving forward all kinds of integration with AWS direct connect transit gateways with our own advanced networking capabilities. You know, along the way, disaster recovery, we punched out two, two new services just focused on that. And then more recently we launched our outposts partnership. We were up on stage at Reinvent, again with Pat Andy announcing AWS outposts and the VMware flavor of that VMware cloud and AWS outposts. I think it's been significant growth in our federal sector as well with our federal and high certification more recently. So all in all, we are super excited. We're five years old. The customer momentum is really, really strong and we are scaling the service massively across all geos and industries. >>That's great, great update. And I think one of the things that you mentioned was how the advantages you guys got from that relationship. And, and this has kind of been the theme for AWS since I can remember from day one. Fred, you guys do the heavy lifting as as, as you always say for the customers here, VMware comes on board, takes advantage of the AWS and kind of just doesn't miss a beat, continues to move their workloads that everyone's using, you know, vSphere and these are, these are big workloads on aws. What's the AWS perspective on this? How do you see it? >>Yeah, it's pretty fascinating to watch how fast customers can actually transform and move when you take the, the skill set that they're familiar with and the advanced capabilities that they've been using on Preem and then overlay it on top of the AWS infrastructure that's, that's evolving quickly and, and building out new hardware and new instances we'll talk about. But that combined experience between both of us on a jointly engineered solution to bring the best security and the best features that really matter for those workloads drive a lot of efficiency and speed for the, for the customer. So it's been well received and the partnership is stronger than ever from an engineering standpoint, from a business standpoint. And obviously it's been very interesting to look at just how we stay day one in terms of looking at new features and work and, and responding to what customers want. So pretty, pretty excited about just seeing the transformation and the speed that which customers can move to bmc. Yeah, >>That's what great value publish. We've been talking about that in context too. Anyone building on top of the cloud, they can have their own supercloud as we call it. If you take advantage of all the CapEx and and investment Amazon's made and AWS has made and, and and continues to make in performance IAS and pass all great stuff. I have to ask you guys both as you guys see this going to the next level, what are some of the differentiations you see around the service compared to other options on the market? What makes it different? What's the combination? You mentioned jointly engineered, what are some of the key differentiators of the service compared to others? >>Yeah, I think one of the key things Fred talked about is this jointly engineered notion right from day one. We were the earlier doctors of AWS Nitro platform, right? The reinvention of E two back five years ago. And so we have been, you know, having a very, very strong engineering partnership at that level. I think from a VMware customer standpoint, you get the full software defined data center or compute storage networking on EC two, bare metal across all regions. You can scale that elastically up and down. It's pretty phenomenal just having that consistency globally, right on aws EC two global regions. Now the other thing that's a real differentiator for us that customers tell us about is this whole notion of a managed service, right? And this was somewhat new to VMware, but we took away the pain of this undifferentiated heavy lifting where customers had to provision rack, stack hardware, configure the software on top, and then upgrade the software and the security batches on top. >>So we took, took away all of that pain as customers transitioned to VMware cloud and aws. In fact, my favorite story from last year when we were all going through the lock for j debacle industry was just going through that, right? Favorite proof point from customers was before they put even race this issue to us, we sent them a notification saying we already patched all of your systems, no action from you. The customers were super thrilled. I mean these are large banks, many other customers around the world, super thrilled they had to take no action, but a pretty incredible industry challenge that we were all facing. >>Nora, that's a great, so that's a great point. You know, the whole managed service piece brings up the security, you kind of teasing at it, but you know, there's always vulnerabilities that emerge when you are doing complex logic. And as you grow your solutions, there's more bits. You know, Fred, we were commenting before we came on camera, there's more bits than ever before and, and at at the physics layer too, as well as the software. So you never know when there's gonna be a zero day vulnerability out there. Just, it happens. We saw one with fornet this week, this came outta the woodwork. But moving fast on those patches, it's huge. This brings up the whole support angle. I wanted to ask you about how you guys are doing that as well, because to me we see the value when we, when we talk to customers on the cube about this, you know, it was a real, real easy understanding of how, what the cloud means to them with VMware now with the aws. But the question that comes up that we wanna get more clarity on is how do you guys handle support together? >>Well, what's interesting about this is that it's, it's done mutually. We have dedicated support teams on both sides that work together pretty seamlessly to make sure that whether there's a issue at any layer, including all the way up into the app layer, as you think about some of the other workloads like sap, we'll go end to end and make sure that we support the customer regardless of where the particular issue might be for them. And on top of that, we look at where, where we're improving reliability in, in as a first order of, of principle between both companies. So from an availability and reliability standpoint, it's, it's top of mind and no matter where the particular item might land, we're gonna go help the customer resolve. That works really well >>On the VMware side. What's been the feedback there? What's the, what are some of the updates? >>Yeah, I think, look, I mean, VMware owns and operates the service, but we have a phenomenal backend relationship with aws. Customers call VMware for the service for any issues and, and then we have a awesome relationship with AWS on the backend for support issues or any hardware issues. The BASKE management that we jointly do, right? All of the hard problems that customers don't have to worry about. I think on the front end, we also have a really good group of solution architects across the companies that help to really explain the solution. Do complex things like cloud migration, which is much, much easier with VMware cloud aws, you know, we are presenting that easy button to the public cloud in many ways. And so we have a whole technical audience across the two companies that are working with customers every single day. >>You know, you had mentioned, I've got a list here, some of the innovations the, you mentioned the stretch clustering, you know, getting the GOs working, Advanced network, disaster recovery, you know, fed, Fed ramp, public sector certifications, outposts, all good. You guys are checking the boxes every year. You got a good, good accomplishments list there on the VMware AWS side here in this relationship. The question that I'm interested in is what's next? What recent innovations are you doing? Are you making investments in what's on the lists this year? What items will be next year? How do you see the, the new things, the list of accomplishments, people wanna know what's next. They don't wanna see stagnant growth here, they wanna see more action, you know, as as cloud kind of continues to scale and modern applications cloud native, you're seeing more and more containers, more and more, you know, more CF C I C D pipe pipelining with with modern apps, put more pressure on the system. What's new, what's the new innovations? >>Absolutely. And I think as a five yearold service offering innovation is top of mind for us every single day. So just to call out a few recent innovations that we announced in San Francisco at VMware Explorer. First of all, our new platform i four I dot metal, it's isolate based, it's pretty awesome. It's the latest and greatest, all the speeds and feeds that we would expect from VMware and aws. At this point in our relationship. We announced two different storage options. This notion of working from customer feedback, allowing customers even more price reductions, really take off that storage and park it externally, right? And you know, separate that from compute. So two different storage offerings there. One is with AWS Fsx, with NetApp on tap, which brings in our NetApp partnership as well into the equation and really get that NetApp based, really excited about this offering as well. >>And the second storage offering for VMware cloud Flex Storage, VMware's own managed storage offering. Beyond that, we have done a lot of other innovations as well. I really wanted to talk about VMware cloud Flex Compute, where previously customers could only scale by hosts and a host is 36 to 48 cores, give or take. But with VMware cloud Flex Compute, we are now allowing this notion of a resource defined compute model where customers can just get exactly the V C P memory and storage that maps to the applications, however small they might be. So this notion of granularity is really a big innovation that that we are launching in the market this year. And then last but not least, talk about ransomware. Of course it's a hot topic in industry. We are seeing many, many customers ask for this. We are happy to announce a new ransomware recovery with our VMware cloud DR solution. >>A lot of innovation there and the way we are able to do machine learning and make sure the workloads that are covered from snapshots and backups are actually safe to use. So there's a lot of differentiation on that front as well. A lot of networking innovations with Project Knot star for ability to have layer flow through layer seven, you know, new SaaS services in that area as well. Keep in mind that the service already supports managed Kubernetes for containers. It's built in to the same clusters that have virtual machines. And so this notion of a single service with a great TCO for VMs and containers and sort of at the heart of our office, >>The networking side certainly is a hot area to keep innovating on. Every year it's the same, same conversation, get better, faster networking, more, more options there. The flex computes. Interesting. If you don't mind me getting a quick clarification, could you explain the Drew screen resource defined versus hardware defined? Because this is kind of what we had saw at Explore coming out, that notion of resource defined versus hardware defined. What's the, what does that mean? >>Yeah, I mean I think we have been super successful in this hardware defined notion. We we're scaling by the hardware unit that we present as software defined data centers, right? And so that's been super successful. But we, you know, customers wanted more, especially customers in different parts of the world wanted to start even smaller and grow even more incrementally, right? Lower their costs even more. And so this is the part where resource defined starts to be very, very interesting as a way to think about, you know, here's my bag of resources exactly based on what the customers request for fiber machines, five containers, its size exactly for that. And then as utilization grows, we elastically behind the scenes, we're able to grow it through policies. So that's a whole different dimension. It's a whole different service offering that adds value and customers are comfortable. They can go from one to the other, they can go back to that post based model if they so choose to. And there's a jump off point across these two different economic models. >>It's kind of cloud of flexibility right there. I like the name Fred. Let's get into some of the examples of customers, if you don't mind. Let's get into some of the ex, we have some time. I wanna unpack a little bit of what's going on with the customer deployments. One of the things we've heard again on the cube is from customers is they like the clarity of the relationship, they love the cloud positioning of it. And then what happens is they lift and shift the workloads and it's like, feels great. It's just like we're running VMware on AWS and then they would start consuming higher level services, kind of that adoption next level happens and because it it's in the cloud, so, So can you guys take us through some recent examples of customer wins or deployments where they're using VMware cloud on AWS on getting started, and then how do they progress once they're there? How does it evolve? Can you just walk us through a couple of use cases? >>Sure. There's a, well there's a couple. One, it's pretty interesting that, you know, like you said, as there's more and more bits you need better and better hardware and networking. And we're super excited about the I four and the capabilities there in terms of doubling and or tripling what we're doing around a lower variability on latency and just improving all the speeds. But what customers are doing with it, like the college in New Jersey, they're accelerating their deployment on a, on onboarding over like 7,400 students over a six to eight month period. And they've really realized a ton of savings. But what's interesting is where and how they can actually grow onto additional native services too. So connectivity to any other services is available as they start to move and migrate into this. The, the options there obviously are tied to all the innovation that we have across any services, whether it's containerized and with what they're doing with Tanu or with any other container and or services within aws. >>So there's, there's some pretty interesting scenarios where that data and or the processing, which is moved quickly with full compliance, whether it's in like healthcare or regulatory business is, is allowed to then consume and use things, for example, with tech extract or any other really cool service that has, you know, monthly and quarterly innovations. So there's things that you just can't, could not do before that are coming out and saving customers money and building innovative applications on top of their, their current app base in, in a rapid fashion. So pretty excited about it. There's a lot of examples. I think I probably don't have time to go into too, too many here. Yeah. But that's actually the best part is listening to customers and seeing how many net new services and new applications are they actually building on top of this platform. >>Nora, what's your perspective from the VMware sy? So, you know, you guys have now a lot of headroom to offer customers with Amazon's, you know, higher level services and or whatever's homegrown where's being rolled out? Cuz you now have a lot of hybrid too, so, so what's your, what's your take on what, what's happening in with customers? >>I mean, it's been phenomenal, the, the customer adoption of this and you know, banks and many other highly sensitive verticals are running production grade applications, tier one applications on the service over the last five years. And so, you know, I have a couple of really good examples. S and p Global is one of my favorite examples. Large bank, they merge with IHS market, big sort of conglomeration. Now both customers were using VMware cloud and AWS in different ways. And with the, with the use case, one of their use cases was how do I just respond to these global opportunities without having to invest in physical data centers? And then how do I migrate and consolidate all my data centers across the global, which there were many. And so one specific example for this company was how they migrated thousand 1000 workloads to VMware cloud AWS in just six weeks. Pretty phenomenal. If you think about everything that goes into a cloud migration process, people process technology and the beauty of the technology going from VMware point A to VMware point B, the the lowest cost, lowest risk approach to adopting VMware, VMware cloud, and aws. So that's, you know, one of my favorite examples. There are many other examples across other verticals that we continue to see. The good thing is we are seeing rapid expansion across the globe that constantly entering new markets with the limited number of regions and progressing our roadmap there. >>Yeah, it's great to see, I mean the data center migrations go from months, many, many months to weeks. It's interesting to see some of those success stories. So congratulations. One >>Of other, one of the other interesting fascinating benefits is the sustainability improvement in terms of being green. So the efficiency gains that we have both in current generation and new generation processors and everything that we're doing to make sure that when a customer can be elastic, they're also saving power, which is really critical in a lot of regions worldwide at this point in time. They're, they're seeing those benefits. If you're running really inefficiently in your own data center, that is just a, not a great use of power. So the actual calculators and the benefits to these workloads is, are pretty phenomenal just in being more green, which I like. We just all need to do our part there. And, and this is a big part of it here. >>It's a huge, it's a huge point about the sustainability. Fred, I'm glad you called that out. The other one I would say is supply chain issues. Another one you see that constrains, I can't buy hardware. And the third one is really obvious, but no one really talks about it. It's security, right? I mean, I remember interviewing Stephen Schmidt with that AWS and many years ago, this is like 2013, and you know, at that time people were saying the cloud's not secure. And he's like, listen, it's more secure in the cloud on premise. And if you look at the security breaches, it's all about the on-premise data center vulnerabilities, not so much hardware. So there's a lot you gotta to stay current on, on the isolation there is is hard. So I think, I think the security and supply chain, Fred is, is another one. Do you agree? >>I I absolutely agree. It's, it's hard to manage supply chain nowadays. We put a lot of effort into that and I think we have a great ability to forecast and make sure that we can lean in and, and have the resources that are available and run them, run them more efficiently. Yeah, and then like you said on the security point, security is job one. It is, it is the only P one. And if you think of how we build our infrastructure from Nitro all the way up and how we respond and work with our partners and our customers, there's nothing more important. >>And naron your point earlier about the managed service patching and being on top of things, it's really gonna get better. All right, final question. I really wanna thank you for your time on this showcase. It's really been a great conversation. Fred, you had made a comment earlier. I wanna kind of end with kind of a curve ball and put you eyes on the spot. We're talking about a modern, a new modern shift. It's another, we're seeing another inflection point, we've been documenting it, it's almost like cloud hitting another inflection point with application and open source growth significantly at the app layer. Continue to put a lot of pressure and, and innovation in the infrastructure side. So the question is for you guys each to answer is what's the same and what's different in today's market? So it's kind of like we want more of the same here, but also things have changed radically and better here. What are the, what's, what's changed for the better and where, what's still the same kind of thing hanging around that people are focused on? Can you share your perspective? >>I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll tackle it. You know, businesses are complex and they're often unique that that's the same. What's changed is how fast you can innovate. The ability to combine manage services and new innovative services and build new applications is so much faster today. Leveraging world class hardware that you don't have to worry about that's elastic. You, you could not do that even five, 10 years ago to the degree you can today, especially with innovation. So innovation is accelerating at a, at a rate that most people can't even comprehend and understand the, the set of services that are available to them. It's really fascinating to see what a one pizza team of of engineers can go actually develop in a week. It is phenomenal. So super excited about this space and it's only gonna continue to accelerate that. That's my take. All right. >>You got a lot of platform to compete on with, got a lot to build on then you're Ryan, your side, What's your, what's your answer to that question? >>I think we are seeing a lot of innovation with new applications that customers are constant. I think what we see is this whole notion of how do you go from desktop to production to the secure supply chain and how can we truly, you know, build on the agility that developers desire and build all the security and the pipelines to energize that motor production quickly and efficiently. I think we, we are seeing, you know, we are at the very start of that sort of of journey. Of course we have invested in Kubernetes the means to an end, but there's so much more beyond that's happening in industry. And I think we're at the very, very beginning of this transformations, enterprise transformation that many of our customers are going through and we are inherently part of it. >>Yeah. Well gentlemen, I really appreciate that we're seeing the same thing. It's more the same here on, you know, solving these complexities with distractions. Whether it's, you know, higher level services with large scale infrastructure at, at your fingertips. Infrastructures, code, infrastructure to be provisioned, serverless, all the good stuff happen in Fred with AWS on your side. And we're seeing customers resonate with this idea of being an operator, again, being a cloud operator and developer. So the developer ops is kind of, DevOps is kind of changing too. So all for the better. Thank you for spending the time and we're seeing again, that traction with the VMware customer base and of us getting, getting along great together. So thanks for sharing your perspectives, >>I appreciate it. Thank you so >>Much. Okay, thank you John. Okay, this is the Cube and AWS VMware showcase, accelerating business transformation. VMware cloud on aws, jointly engineered solution, bringing innovation to the VMware customer base, going to the cloud and beyond. I'm John Fur, your host. Thanks for watching. Hello everyone. Welcome to the special cube presentation of accelerating business transformation on vmc on aws. I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube. We have dawan director of global sales and go to market for VMware cloud on adb. This is a great showcase and should be a lot of fun. Ashish, thanks for coming on. >>Hi John. Thank you so much. >>So VMware cloud on AWS has been well documented as this big success for VMware and aws. As customers move their workloads into the cloud, IT operations of VMware customers has signaling a lot of change. This is changing the landscape globally is on cloud migration and beyond. What's your take on this? Can you open this up with the most important story around VMC on aws? >>Yes, John. The most important thing for our customers today is the how they can safely and swiftly move their ID infrastructure and applications through cloud. Now, VMware cloud AWS is a service that allows all vSphere based workloads to move to cloud safely, swiftly and reliably. Banks can move their core, core banking platforms, insurance companies move their core insurance platforms, telcos move their goss, bss, PLA platforms, government organizations are moving their citizen engagement platforms using VMC on aws because this is one platform that allows you to move it, move their VMware based platforms very fast. Migrations can happen in a matter of days instead of months. Extremely securely. It's a VMware manage service. It's very secure and highly reliably. It gets the, the reliability of the underlyings infrastructure along with it. So win-win from our customers perspective. >>You know, we reported on this big news in 2016 with Andy Chas, the, and Pat Geling at the time, a lot of people said it was a bad deal. It turned out to be a great deal because not only could VMware customers actually have a cloud migrate to the cloud, do it safely, which was their number one concern. They didn't want to have disruption to their operations, but also position themselves for what's beyond just shifting to the cloud. So I have to ask you, since you got the finger on the pulse here, what are we seeing in the market when it comes to migrating and modern modernizing in the cloud? Because that's the next step. They go to the cloud, you guys have done that, doing it, then they go, I gotta modernize, which means kind of upgrading or refactoring. What's your take on that? >>Yeah, absolutely. Look, the first step is to help our customers assess their infrastructure and licensing and entire ID operations. Once we've done the assessment, we then create their migration plans. A lot of our customers are at that inflection point. They're, they're looking at their real estate, ex data center, real estate. They're looking at their contracts with colocation vendors. They really want to exit their data centers, right? And VMware cloud and AWS is a perfect solution for customers who wanna exit their data centers, migrate these applications onto the AWS platform using VMC on aws, get rid of additional real estate overheads, power overheads, be socially and environmentally conscious by doing that as well, right? So that's the migration story, but to your point, it doesn't end there, right? Modernization is a critical aspect of the entire customer journey as as well customers, once they've migrated their ID applications and infrastructure on cloud get access to all the modernization services that AWS has. They can correct easily to our data lake services, to our AIML services, to custom databases, right? They can decide which applications they want to keep and which applications they want to refactor. They want to take decisions on containerization, make decisions on service computing once they've come to the cloud. But the most important thing is to take that first step. You know, exit data centers, come to AWS using vmc or aws, and then a whole host of modernization options available to them. >>Yeah, I gotta say, we had this right on this, on this story, because you just pointed out a big thing, which was first order of business is to make sure to leverage the on-prem investments that those customers made and then migrate to the cloud where they can maintain their applications, their data, their infrastructure operations that they're used to, and then be in position to start getting modern. So I have to ask you, how are you guys specifically, or how is VMware cloud on s addressing these needs of the customers? Because what happens next is something that needs to happen faster. And sometimes the skills might not be there because if they're running old school, IT ops now they gotta come in and jump in. They're gonna use a data cloud, they're gonna want to use all kinds of machine learning, and there's a lot of great goodness going on above the stack there. So as you move with the higher level services, you know, it's a no brainer, obviously, but they're not, it's not yesterday's higher level services in the cloud. So how are, how is this being addressed? >>Absolutely. I think you hit up on a very important point, and that is skills, right? When our customers are operating, some of the most critical applications I just mentioned, core banking, core insurance, et cetera, they're most of the core applications that our customers have across industries, like even, even large scale ERP systems, they're actually sitting on VMware's vSphere platform right now. When the customer wants to migrate these to cloud, one of the key bottlenecks they face is skill sets. They have the trained manpower for these core applications, but for these high level services, they may not, right? So the first order of business is to help them ease this migration pain as much as possible by not wanting them to, to upscale immediately. And we VMware cloud and AWS exactly does that. I mean, you don't have to do anything. You don't have to create new skill set for doing this, right? Their existing skill sets suffice, but at the same time, it gives them that, that leeway to build that skills roadmap for their team. DNS is invested in that, right? Yes. We want to help them build those skills in the high level services, be it aml, be it, be it i t be it data lake and analytics. We want to invest in them, and we help our customers through that. So that ultimately the ultimate goal of making them drop data is, is, is a front and center. >>I wanna get into some of the use cases and success stories, but I want to just reiterate, hit back your point on the skill thing. Because if you look at what you guys have done at aws, you've essentially, and Andy Chassey used to talk about this all the time when I would interview him, and now last year Adam was saying the same thing. You guys do all the heavy lifting, but if you're a VMware customer user or operator, you are used to things. You don't have to be relearn to be a cloud architect. Now you're already in the game. So this is like almost like a instant path to cloud skills for the VMware. There's hundreds of thousands of, of VMware architects and operators that now instantly become cloud architects, literally overnight. Can you respond to that? Do you agree with that? And then give an example. >>Yes, absolutely. You know, if you have skills on the VMware platform, you know, know, migrating to AWS using via by cloud and AWS is absolutely possible. You don't have to really change the skills. The operations are exactly the same. The management systems are exactly the same. So you don't really have to change anything but the advantages that you get access to all the other AWS services. So you are instantly able to integrate with other AWS services and you become a cloud architect immediately, right? You are able to solve some of the critical problems that your underlying IT infrastructure has immediately using this. And I think that's a great value proposition for our customers to use this service. >>And just one more point, I want just get into something that's really kind of inside baseball or nuanced VMC or VMware cloud on AWS means something. Could you take a minute to explain what on AWS means? Just because you're like hosting and using Amazon as a, as a work workload? Being on AWS means something specific in your world, being VMC on AWS mean? >>Yes. This is a great question, by the way, You know, on AWS means that, you know, VMware's vse platform is, is a, is an iconic enterprise virtualization software, you know, a disproportionately high market share across industries. So when we wanted to create a cloud product along with them, obviously our aim was for them, for the, for this platform to have the goodness of the AWS underlying infrastructure, right? And, and therefore, when we created this VMware cloud solution, it it literally use the AWS platform under the eighth, right? And that's why it's called a VMs VMware cloud on AWS using, using the, the, the wide portfolio of our regions across the world and the strength of the underlying infrastructure, the reliability and, and, and sustainability that it offers. And therefore this product is called VMC on aws. >>It's a distinction I think is worth noting, and it does reflect engineering and some levels of integration that go well beyond just having a SaaS app and, and basically platform as a service or past services. So I just wanna make sure that now super cloud, we'll talk about that a little bit in another interview, but I gotta get one more question in before we get into the use cases and customer success stories is in, in most of the VM world, VMware world, in that IT world, it used to, when you heard migration, people would go, Oh my God, that's gonna take months. And when I hear about moving stuff around and doing cloud native, the first reaction people might have is complexity. So two questions for you before we move on to the next talk. Track complexity. How are you addressing the complexity issue and how long these migrations take? Is it easy? Is it it hard? I mean, you know, the knee jerk reaction is month, You're very used to that. If they're dealing with Oracle or other old school vendors, like, they're, like the old guard would be like, takes a year to move stuff around. So can you comment on complexity and speed? >>Yeah. So the first, first thing is complexity. And you know, what makes what makes anything complex is if you're, if you're required to acquire new skill sets or you've gotta, if you're required to manage something differently, and as far as VMware cloud and AWS on both these aspects, you don't have to do anything, right? You don't have to acquire new skill sets. Your existing idea operation skill sets on, on VMware's platforms are absolutely fine and you don't have to manage it any differently like, than what you're managing your, your ID infrastructure today. So in both these aspects, it's exactly the same and therefore it is absolutely not complex as far as, as far as, as far as we cloud and AWS is concerned. And the other thing is speed. This is where the huge differentiation is. You have seen that, you know, large banks and large telcos have now moved their workloads, you know, literally in days instead of months. >>Because because of VMware cloud and aws, a lot of time customers come to us with specific deadlines because they want to exit their data centers on a particular date. And what happens, VMware cloud and AWS is called upon to do that migration, right? So speed is absolutely critical. The reason is also exactly the same because you are using the exactly the same platform, the same management systems, people are available to you, you're able to migrate quickly, right? I would just reference recently we got an award from President Zelensky of Ukraine for, you know, migrating their entire ID digital infrastructure and, and that that happened because they were using VMware cloud database and happened very swiftly. >>That's been a great example. I mean, that's one political, but the economic advantage of getting outta the data center could be national security. You mentioned Ukraine, I mean Oscar see bombing and death over there. So clearly that's a critical crown jewel for their running their operations, which is, you know, you know, world mission critical. So great stuff. I love the speed thing. I think that's a huge one. Let's get into some of the use cases. One of them is, the first one I wanted to talk about was we just hit on data, data center migration. It could be financial reasons on a downturn or our, or market growth. People can make money by shifting to the cloud, either saving money or making money. You win on both sides. It's a, it's a, it's almost a recession proof, if you will. Cloud is so use case for number one data center migration. Take us through what that looks like. Give an example of a success. Take us through a day, day in the life of a data center migration in, in a couple minutes. >>Yeah. You know, I can give you an example of a, of a, of a large bank who decided to migrate, you know, their, all their data centers outside their existing infrastructure. And they had, they had a set timeline, right? They had a set timeline to migrate the, the, they were coming up on a renewal and they wanted to make sure that this set timeline is met. We did a, a complete assessment of their infrastructure. We did a complete assessment of their IT applications, more than 80% of their IT applications, underlying v vSphere platform. And we, we thought that the right solution for them in the timeline that they wanted, right, is VMware cloud ands. And obviously it was a large bank, it wanted to do it safely and securely. It wanted to have it completely managed, and therefore VMware cloud and aws, you know, ticked all the boxes as far as that is concerned. >>I'll be happy to report that the large bank has moved to most of their applications on AWS exiting three of their data centers, and they'll be exiting 12 more very soon. So that's a great example of, of, of the large bank exiting data centers. There's another Corolla to that. Not only did they manage to manage to exit their data centers and of course use and be more agile, but they also met their sustainability goals. Their board of directors had given them goals to be carbon neutral by 2025. They found out that 35% of all their carbon foot footprint was in their data centers. And if they moved their, their ID infrastructure to cloud, they would severely reduce the, the carbon footprint, which is 35% down to 17 to 18%. Right? And that meant their, their, their, their sustainability targets and their commitment to the go to being carbon neutral as well. >>And that they, and they shift that to you guys. Would you guys take that burden? A heavy lifting there and you guys have a sustainability story, which is a whole nother showcase in and of itself. We >>Can Exactly. And, and cause of the scale of our, of our operations, we are able to, we are able to work on that really well as >>Well. All right. So love the data migration. I think that's got real proof points. You got, I can save money, I can, I can then move and position my applications into the cloud for that reason and other reasons as a lot of other reasons to do that. But now it gets into what you mentioned earlier was, okay, data migration, clearly a use case and you laid out some successes. I'm sure there's a zillion others. But then the next step comes, now you got cloud architects becoming minted every, and you got managed services and higher level services. What happens next? Can you give us an example of the use case of the modernization around the NextGen workloads, NextGen applications? We're starting to see, you know, things like data clouds, not data warehouses. We're not gonna data clouds, it's gonna be all kinds of clouds. These NextGen apps are pure digital transformation in action. Take us through a use case of how you guys make that happen with a success story. >>Yes, absolutely. And this is, this is an amazing success story and the customer here is s and p global ratings. As you know, s and p global ratings is, is the world leader as far as global ratings, global credit ratings is concerned. And for them, you know, the last couple of years have been tough as far as hardware procurement is concerned, right? The pandemic has really upended the, the supply chain. And it was taking a lot of time to procure hardware, you know, configure it in time, make sure that that's reliable and then, you know, distribute it in the wide variety of, of, of offices and locations that they have. And they came to us. We, we did, again, a, a, a alar, a fairly large comprehensive assessment of their ID infrastructure and their licensing contracts. And we also found out that VMware cloud and AWS is the right solution for them. >>So we worked there, migrated all their applications, and as soon as we migrated all their applications, they got, they got access to, you know, our high level services be our analytics services, our machine learning services, our, our, our, our artificial intelligence services that have been critical for them, for their growth. And, and that really is helping them, you know, get towards their next level of modern applications. Right Now, obviously going forward, they will have, they will have the choice to, you know, really think about which applications they want to, you know, refactor or which applications they want to go ahead with. That is really a choice in front of them. And, but you know, the, we VMware cloud and AWS really gave them the opportunity to first migrate and then, you know, move towards modernization with speed. >>You know, the speed of a startup is always the kind of the Silicon Valley story where you're, you know, people can make massive changes in 18 months, whether that's a pivot or a new product. You see that in startup world. Now, in the enterprise, you can see the same thing. I noticed behind you on your whiteboard, you got a slogan that says, are you thinking big? I know Amazon likes to think big, but also you work back from the customers and, and I think this modern application thing's a big deal because I think the mindset has always been constrained because back before they moved to the cloud, most IT, and, and, and on-premise data center shops, it's slow. You gotta get the hardware, you gotta configure it, you gotta, you gotta stand it up, make sure all the software is validated on it, and loading a database and loading oss, I mean, mean, yeah, it got easier and with scripting and whatnot, but when you move to the cloud, you have more scale, which means more speed, which means it opens up their capability to think differently and build product. What are you seeing there? Can you share your opinion on that epiphany of, wow, things are going fast, I got more time to actually think about maybe doing a cloud native app or transforming this or that. What's your, what's your reaction to that? Can you share your opinion? >>Well, ultimately we, we want our customers to utilize, you know, most of our modern services, you know, applications should be microservices based. When desired, they should use serverless applic. So list technology, they should not have monolithic, you know, relational database contracts. They should use custom databases, they should use containers when needed, right? So ultimately, we want our customers to use these modern technologies to make sure that their IT infrastructure, their licensing, their, their entire IT spend is completely native to cloud technologies. They work with the speed of a startup, but it's important for them to, to, to get to the first step, right? So that's why we create this journey for our customers, where you help them migrate, give them time to build the skills, they'll help them mo modernize, take our partners along with their, along with us to, to make sure that they can address the need for our customers. That's, that's what our customers need today, and that's what we are working backwards from. >>Yeah, and I think that opens up some big ideas. I'll just say that the, you know, we're joking, I was joking the other night with someone here in, in Palo Alto around serverless, and I said, you know, soon you're gonna hear words like architectural list. And that's a criticism on one hand, but you might say, Hey, you know, if you don't really need an architecture, you know, storage lists, I mean, at the end of the day, infrastructure is code means developers can do all the it in the coding cycles and then make the operations cloud based. And I think this is kind of where I see the dots connecting. Final thought here, take us through what you're thinking around how this new world is evolving. I mean, architecturals kind of a joke, but the point is, you know, you have to some sort of architecture, but you don't have to overthink it. >>Totally. No, that's a great thought, by the way. I know it's a joke, but it's a great thought because at the end of the day, you know, what do the customers really want? They want outcomes, right? Why did service technology come? It was because there was an outcome that they needed. They didn't want to get stuck with, you know, the, the, the real estate of, of a, of a server. They wanted to use compute when they needed to, right? Similarly, what you're talking about is, you know, outcome based, you know, desire of our customers and, and, and that's exactly where the word is going to, Right? Cloud really enforces that, right? We are actually, you know, working backwards from a customer's outcome and using, using our area the breadth and depth of our services to, to deliver those outcomes, right? And, and most of our services are in that path, right? When we use VMware cloud and aws, the outcome is a, to migrate then to modernize, but doesn't stop there, use our native services, you know, get the business outcomes using this. So I think that's, that's exactly what we are going through >>Actually, should actually, you're the director of global sales and go to market for VMware cloud on Aus. I wanna thank you for coming on, but I'll give you the final minute. Give a plug, explain what is the VMware cloud on Aus, Why is it great? Why should people engage with you and, and the team, and what ultimately is this path look like for them going forward? >>Yeah. At the end of the day, we want our customers to have the best paths to the cloud, right? The, the best path to the cloud is making sure that they migrate safely, reliably, and securely as well as with speed, right? And then, you know, use that cloud platform to, to utilize AWS's native services to make sure that they modernize their IT infrastructure and applications, right? We want, ultimately that our customers, customers, customer get the best out of, you know, utilizing the, that whole application experience is enhanced tremendously by using our services. And I think that's, that's exactly what we are working towards VMware cloud AWS is, is helping our customers in that journey towards migrating, modernizing, whether they wanna exit a data center or whether they wanna modernize their applications. It's a essential first step that we wanna help our customers with >>One director of global sales and go to market with VMware cloud on neighbors. He's with aws sharing his thoughts on accelerating business transformation on aws. This is a showcase. We're talking about the future path. We're talking about use cases with success stories from customers as she's thank you for spending time today on this showcase. >>Thank you, John. I appreciate it. >>Okay. This is the cube, special coverage, special presentation of the AWS Showcase. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.

>>Hey everyone. Lisa Martin of the cube here, HPE and AMD better together with Shi is the name of our segment. And I'm here with four guests. Please. Welcome Charlie Mulrooney global presales engineering manager at Athi John saws also of Shi joins this global pre-sales technical consultant. And back with me are Terry Richardson, north American channel chief and Dr. John Fry, chief technologist, sustainable transformation at HPE. Welcome gang. Great to have you all here. >>Thank you, Lisa. Thanks. You good to be here? >>All right, Charlie, let's go ahead and start with you. Keeping the earth sustainable and minimizing carbon emissions. Greenhouse gases is a huge priority for businesses, right? Everywhere. Globally. Can you talk Charlie about what Shi is seeing in the marketplace with respect to sustainable? It? >>Sure. So starting about a year and a half, two years ago, we really noticed that our customers certainly our largest enterprise customers were putting into their annual reports, their chairman's letters, their sec filings that they had sustainability initiatives ranging from achieving carbon neutral or carbon zero goals starting with 2050 dates. And then since then we've seen 20, 40, and 2030 targets to achieve net neutrality and RFPs, RFIs that we're fielding. Certainly all now contain elements of that. So this is certainly top of mind for our largest customers, our fortune two 50 and fortune 500 customers. For sure. We're, we're seeing an onslaught of requests for this. We get into many conversations with the folks that are leading these efforts to understand, you know, here's what we have today. What can we do better? What can we do different to help make an impact on those goals? >>So making an impact top of mind, pretty much for everyone, as you mentioned, John SAS, let's bring you into the conversation. Now, when you're in customer conversations, what are some of the things that you talk about with respect tohis approach to sustainability, sustainable it, are you seeing more folks that are implementing things tactically versus strategically what's going on in the customer space? >>Well, so Charlie touched on something really important that, you know, the, the wake up moment for us was receiving, you know, proposal requests or customer meeting requests that were around sustainability. And it was really around two years ago, I suppose, for the first time. And those requests started coming from European based companies, cuz they had a bit of a head start over the us based global companies even. And what we found was that sustainability was already well down the road and that they were doing very interesting things to use renewable energy for data centers utilize the, they were already considering sustainability for new technologies as a high priority versus just performance cost and other factors that you typically have at the top. So as we started working with them, I guess at beginning it was more tactical cuz we really had to find a way to respond. >>We were starting to be asked about our own efforts and in regards to sustainability, we have our headquarters in Somerset and our second headquarters in Austin, Texas, those are lead gold certified. We've been installing solar panels, reducing waste across the company, recycling efforts and so forth charging stations for electric vehicles, all that sort of thing to make our company more sustainable in, in, in our offices and in our headquarters. But it's a lot more than that. And what we found was that we wanted to look to our vast number of, of customers and partners. We have over 30,000 partners that would work with globally and tens of thousands of customers. And we wanted to find best practices and technologies and services that we could talk about with these customers and apply and help integrate together as a, as a really large global reseller and integrator. We can have a play there and bring these things together from multiple partners that we work with to help solve customer problems. And so over time it's become more strategic and we've been as a company building the, the, the, the, the forward efforts through organizing a true formal sustainability team and growing that, and then also reporting for CDP Ecova and so forth. And it's really that all has been coming about in the last couple of years. And we take it very seriously. >>It sounds like, and it also sounds like from the customer's perspective, they're shifting from that tactical, maybe early initial approach to being more strategic, to really enabling sustainable it across their organization. And I imagine from a business driver's perspective, John saws and Charlie, are you hearing customers? You talked about it being part of RFPs, but also where are customers in terms of, we need to have a sustainable it strategy so that we can attract and retain the right investors we can attract and retain customers. Charlie, John, what are your thoughts on that? >>Yeah, that's top of mind with, with all the folks that we're talking to, I would say there's probably a three way tie for the importance of attracting and retaining investors. As you said, plus customers, customers are shopping, their customers are shopping for who has aligned their ESG priorities and sustainable priorities with their own and who is gonna help them with their own reporting of, you know, scope two and ultimately scope three reporting from greenhouse gas emissions and then the attracting and retaining talent. It's another element now of when you're bringing on new talent to your organization, they have a choice and they're thinking with their decision to accept a role or not within your organization of what your strategies are and do they align. So we're seeing those almost interchangeable in terms of priorities with, with the customers we're talking to. And it was a little surprising, cuz it, we thought initially this is really focused on investors attracting the investors, but it really has become quite a bit more than that. And it's been actually very interesting to see the development of that prioritization >>More comprehensive across the organization. Let's bring Dr. John Fry into the conversation and Terry your next. So stay tuned. Dr. Fry, can you talk about HPE and S H I partnering together? What are some of the key aspects of the relationship that help one another support and enable each other's aggressive goals where sustainability is concerned? >>Yeah, it's a great question. And one of the things about the sustainability domain in solving these climate challenges that we all have is we've got to come together and partner to solve them. No one company's going to solve them by themselves and for our collective customers the same way. From an HPE perspective, we bring the expertise on our products. We bring in sustainable it point of view, where we've written many white papers on the topic and even workbooks that help companies implement a sustainable it program. But our direct sales forces can't reach all of our customers. And in many cases we don't have the local knowledge that our business partners like Shi bring to the table. So they extend the reach, they bring their own expertise. Their portfolio that they offer to the customer is wider than just enterprise products. So by working together, we can do a better job of helping the customer meet their own needs, give them the right technology solutions and enhance that customer experience because they get more value from us collectively. >>It really is better together, which is in a very appropriate name for our segment here. Terry, let's bring you into the conversation. Talk to us about AMD. How is it helping customers to create that sustainable it strategy? And what are some of the differentiators that what AMD is doing that, that are able to be delivered through partners like Shi? >>Well, Lisa, you used the word enabling just a short while ago. And fundamentally AMD enables HPE and partners like Shi to bring differentiated solutions to customers. So in the data center space, we began our journey in 2017 with some fundamental design elements for our processor technology that were really keenly focused on improving performance, but also efficiency. So now the, the most common measure that we see for the types of customers that Charlie and John were talking about is really that measure of performance per wat. And you'll continue to see AMD enabled customers to, to try to find ways to, to do more in a sustainable way within the constraints that they may be facing, whether it's availability of power data center space, or just needing to meet overall sustainability goals. So we have skills and expertise and tools that we make available to HPE and two Shi to help them have even stronger differentiated conversations with customers. >>Sounds like to me, Terry, that it's, that AMD can be even more of an more than an enabler, but really an accelerator of what customers are able to do from a strategic perspective on sustainability. >>You you're right about that. And, and we actually have tools, greenhouse gas, TCO tools that can be leveraged to really quantify the impact of some of the, the new technology decisions that customers are making to allow them to achieve their goals. So we're really proud of the work that we're doing in partnership with companies like HPE and Shi >>Better together. As we said at the beginning in just a minute ago, Charlie, let's bring you back in, talk to us a little bit about what Shi is doing to leverage sustainable it and enable your customers to meet their sustainability goals and their initiatives. >>So for quite a while, we've had some offerings to help customers, especially in the end user compute side. A lot of customers were interested in, I've got assets for, you know, let's say a large sales force that had been carrying tablets or laptops and, you know, those need to be refreshed. What do I do with those? How do I responsibly retire or recycle those? And we've been offering solutions for that for quite some time. It's within the last year or two, when we started offering for them guarantees and assurances assurances of how they can, if that equipment is reusable by somebody else, how can we issue them? You know, credits for carbon credits for reuse of that equipment somewhere else. So it's not necessarily going to be e-waste, it's something that can be recycled and reused. We have other programs with helping extend the life of, of some systems where they look at well, I have a awful lot of data on these machines where historically they might want to just retire those because the, the, the sensitivity of the data needed to be handled very specifically. We can help them properly remove the sensitive data and still allow reuse of that equipment. So we've been able to come up with some creative solutions specifically around end user compute in the past, but we are looking to new ways now to really help extend that into data center infrastructure and beyond to really help with what are the needs, what are the, the best ways to help our customers handle the things that are challenging them. >>That's a great point that you bring up. Charlie and security kind of popped into my head here, John Saul's question for you when you're in customer conversations and you're talking about, or maybe they're talking about help us with waste reduction with recycling, where are you having those customer conversations? Cause I know sustainability is a board level, it's a C level discussion, but where are you having those conversations within the customer organization? >>Well, so it's a, it's a combination of organizations within the customer. These are these global organizations. Typically when we're talking about asset life cycle management, asset recovery, how do you do that in a sustainable green way and securely the customers we're dealing with? I mean, security is top sustainability is right up there too. O obviously, but Charlie touched on a lot of those things and these are global rollouts, tens of thousands of employees typically to, to have mobile devices, laptops, and phones, and so forth. And they often are looking for a true managed service around the world that takes into consideration things like the most efficient way to ship products to, to the employees. And how do you do that in a sustainably? You need to think about that. Does it all go to a central location or to each individual's home during the pandemic that made a lot of sense to do it that way? >>And I think the reason I wanted to touch on those things is that, well for, for example, one European pharmaceutical that states in their reports that they're already in scope one in scope two they're fully net zero at this point. And, and they say, but that only solves 3% of our overall sustainability goals. 97% is scope three, it's travel, it's shipping. It's, it's, it's all the, the, all these things that are out of their direct control a lot of times, but they're coming to us now as a, as a supplier and as, and, and we're filling out, you know, forms and RFPs and so forth to show that we can be a sustainable supplier in their supply chain because that's their next big goal >>Sustain sustainable supply chain. Absolutely. Yes. Dr. John Fry and Terry, I want to kind of get your perspectives. Charlie talked about from a customer requirements perspective, customers coming through RFP saying, Hey, we've gotta work with vendors who have clear sustainability initiatives that are well underway, HPE and AMD hearing the same thing Dr. Fry will start with you. And then Terry >>Sure, absolutely. We receive about 2,500 customer questionnaires just on sustainability every year. And that's come up from a few hundred. So yeah, absolutely accelerating. Then the conversations turn deeper. Can you help us quantify our carbon emissions and power consumption? Then the conversation has recently gone even further to when can HPE offer net zero or carbon neutral technology solutions to the customer so that they don't have to account for those solutions in their own carbon footprint. So the questions are getting more sophisticated, the need for the data and the accuracy of the data is climbing. And as we see potential regulatory disclosure requirements around carbon emissions, I think this trend is just gonna continue up. >>Yeah. And we see the same thing. We get asked more and more from our customers and partners around our own corporate sustainability goals. But the surveying that survey work that we've done with customers has led us to, you know, understand that, you know, approximately 75% of customers are gonna make sustainability goals, a key component of their RFIs in 2023, which is right around the corner. And, and, you know, 60% of those same customers really expect to have business level KPIs in the new year that are really related to sustainability. So this is not just a, a kind of a buzzword topic. This is, this is kind of business imperatives that, you know, the company, the companies like HPE and AMD and the partners like I, that really stand behind it and really are proactive in getting out in front of customers to help are really gonna be ahead of the game. >>That's a great point that you make Terry there that this isn't, we're not talking about a buzzword here. We're talking about a business imperative for businesses of probably all sizes across all industries and Dr. Far, you mentioned regulations. And something that we just noticed is that the S E C recently said, it's proposing some rules where companies must disclose greenhouse gas emissions. If they were, if that were to, to come into play, I'm gonna pun back to Charlie and John saws. How would Shi and, and frankly at HPE and AMD be able to help companies comply if that type of regulation were to be implemented. Charlie. >>Yeah. So we are in the process right now of building out a service to help customers specifically with that, with the reporting, we know reporting is a challenge. The scope two reporting is a challenge and scope three that I guess people thought was gonna be a ways out now, all of a sudden, Hey, if you have made a public statement that you're going to make an impact on your scope three targets, then you have to report on them. So that, that has become really important very quickly as word about this requirement is rumbling around there's concern. So we are actually working right now on something it's a little too early to fully disclose, but stay tuned, cuz we have something coming. That's interesting. >>Definitely PED my, my ears are, are, are perk here. Charlie, we'll stay tuned for that. Dr. Fry. Terry, can you talk about together with Shi HPE and AMD enabling customers to manage access to the da data obviously, which is critical and it's doing nothing but growing and proliferating key folks need access to it. We talked a little bit about security, but how are from a better together perspective, Dr. Fry will start with you, how are you really helping organizations on that sustainability journey to ensure that data can be accessible to those who need it when they need it? And at these days what it's real time requirements. >>Yeah. It's, it's an increasing challenge. In fact, we have changed the H HP story the way we talk about H HP's value proposition to talk about data first modernization. So how often do you collect data? Where do you store it? How do you avoid moving it? How do you make sure if you're going to collect data, you get insights from that data that change your business or add business value. And then how long do you retain that data afterward and all of that factors into sustainable it, because when I talk to technology executives, what they tell me again, and again, is there's this presumption within their user community, that storage is free. And so when, when they have needs for collecting data, for example, if, if once an hour would do okay, but the system would collect it once a minute, the default, the user asks for of course, once a minute. And then are you getting insights from that data? Or are we moving it that becomes more important when you're moving data back and forth between the public cloud or the edge, because there is quite a network penalty for moving that equipment across your network. There's huge power and carbon implications of doing that. So it's really making a better decision about what do we collect, why do we collect it, what we're gonna do with it when we collect and how we store it. >>And, and for years, customers have really talked about, you know, modernization and the need to modernize their data center. You know, I, I fundamentally believe that sustainability is really that catalyst to really drive true modernization. And as they think forward, you know, when we work with, with HPE, you know, they offer a variety of purpose-built servers that can play a role in, you know, specific customer workloads from the largest, super computers down to kind of general purpose servers. And when we work with partners like Shi, not only can they deliver the full suite of offerings for on premise deployments, they're also very well positioned to leverage the public cloud infrastructure for those workloads that really belong there. And, and that certainly can help customers kind of achieve an end to end sustainability goal. >>That's a great point that, that it needs to be strategic, but it also needs to be an end to end goal. We're just about out of time, but I wanted to give John saws the last word here, take us out, John, what are some of the things Charlie kind of teased some of the things that are coming out that piqued my interest, but what are some of the things that you are excited about as HPE AMD and Shi really help customers achieve their sustainability initiatives? >>Sure. Couple comments here. So Charlie, yeah, you touched on some upcoming capabilities that Shi will have around the area of monitoring and management. See, this is difficult for all customers to be able to report in this formal way. This is a train coming at everybody very quickly and they're not ready. Most customers aren't ready. And if we can help as, as a reseller integrator assessments, to be able to understand what they're currently running compare to different scenarios of where they could go to in a future state, that seems valuable if we can help in that way. That's, those are things that we're looking into specifically, you know, greenhouse gas, emissions, relevant assessments, and, and, and within the comments of, of, of Terry and, and John around the, the power per wat and the vast portfolio of, of technologies that they, that they had to address various workloads is, is fantastic. >>We'd be able to help point to technologies like that and move customers in that direction. I think as a, as an integrator and a technical advisor to customers, I saw an article on BBC this morning that I, I, I think if, if we think about how we're working with our customers and we can help them maybe think differently about how they're using their technology to solve problems. The BBC article mentioned this was Ethereum, a cryptocurrency, and they have a big project called merge. And today was a go live date. And BBC us news outlets have been reporting on it. They basically changed the model from a model called power of work, which takes a, a lot of compute and graphic, GPU power and so forth around the world. And it's now called power of stake, which means that the people that validate that their actions in this environment are correct. >>They have to put up a stake of their own cryptocurrency. And if they're wrong, it's taken from them. This new model reduces the emissions of their environment by 99 plus percent. The June emissions from Ethereum were, it was 120 telos per, per year, a Terra terat hours per year. And they reduced it actually, that's the equivalent of what the net Netherlands needed for energy, so comparable to a medium sized country. So if you can think differently about how to solve problems, it may be on-prem, it may be GreenLake. It may be, it may be the public cloud in some cases or other, you know, interesting, innovative technologies that, that AMD HPE, other partners that we can bring in along, along with them as well, we can solve problems differently. There is a lot going on >>The opportunities that you all talked about to really make such a huge societal impact and impact to our planet are exciting. We thank you so much for talking together about how HPE AMD and SSHA are really working in partnership in synergy to help your customers across every organization, really become much more focused, much more collaborative about sustainable it. Guys. We so appreciate your time and thank you for your insights. >>Thank you, Lisa. Thank you. My >>Pleasure. Thank you, Lisa. You're watching the cube, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage.

(futuristic music) >> Hey everyone. Lisa Martin here for theCUBE back with you, three guests join me. Dan Molina is here, the co-president and chief technology officer at NTH Generation. And I'm joined once again by Terry Richardson, North American channel chief for AMD and Dr. John Fry, chief technologist, sustainable transformation at HPE. Gentlemen, It's a pleasure to have you on theCUBE Thank you for joining me. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Dan. Let's have you kick things off. Talk to us about how NTH Generation is addressing the environmental challenges that your customers are having while meeting the technology demands of the future. That those same customers are no doubt having. >> It's quite an interesting question, Lisa, in our case we have been in business since 1991 and we started by providing highly available computing solutions. So this is great for me to be partnered here with HPE and the AMD because we want to provide quality computing solutions. And back in the day, since 1991 saving energy saving footprint or reducing footprint in the data center saving on cooling costs was very important. Over time those became even more critical components of our solutions design. As you know, as a society we started becoming more aware of the benefits and the must that we have a responsibility back to society to basically contribute with our social and environmental responsibility. So one of the things that we continue to do and we started back in 1991 is to make sure that we're deciding compute solutions based on clients' actual needs. We go out of our way to collect real performance data real IT resource consumption data. And then we architect solutions using best in the industry components like AMD and HPE to make sure that they were going to be meeting those goals and energy savings, like cooling savings, footprint reduction, knowing that instead of maybe requiring 30 servers, just to mention an example maybe we're going to go down to 14 and that's going to result in great energy savings. Our commitment to making sure that we're providing optimized solutions goes all the way to achieving the top level certifications from our great partner, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Also go deep into micro processing technologies like AMD but we want to make sure that the designs that we're putting together actually meet those goals. >> You talked about why sustainability is important to NTH from back in the day. I love how you said that. Dan, talk to us a little bit about what you're hearing from customers as we are seeing sustainability as a corporate initiative horizontally across industries and really rise up through the C-suite to the board. >> Right, it is quite interesting Lisa We do service pretty much horizontally just about any vertical, including public sector and the private sector from retail to healthcare, to biotech to manufacturing, of course, cities and counties. So we have a lot of experience with many different verticals. And across the board, we do see an increased interest in being socially responsible. And that includes not just being responsible on recycling as an example, most of our conversations or engagements that conversation happens, 'What what's going to happen with the old equipment ?' as we're replacing with more modern, more powerful, more efficient equipment. And we do a number of different things that go along with social responsibility and environment protection. And that's basically e-waste programs. As an example, we also have a program where we actually donate some of that older equipment to schools and that is quite quite something because we're helping an organization save energy, footprint. Basically the things that we've been talking about but at the same time, the older equipment even though it's not saving that much energy it still serves a purpose in society where maybe the unprivileged or not as able to afford computing equipment in certain schools and things of that nature. Now they can benefit and being productive to society. So it's not just about energy savings there's so many other factors around social corporate responsibility. >> So sounds like Dan, a very comprehensive end to end vision that NTH has around sustainability. Let's bring John and Terry into the conversation. John, we're going to start with you. Talk to us a little bit about how HPE and NTH are partnering together. What are some of the key aspects of the relationship from HPE's perspective that enable you both to meet not just your corporate sustainable IT objectives, but those of your customers. >> Yeah, it's a great question. And one of the things that HPE brings to bear is 20 years experience on sustainable IT, white papers, executive workbooks and a lot of expertise for how do we bring optimized solutions to market. If the customer doesn't want to manage those pieces himself we have our 'As a service solutions, HPE GreenLake. But our sales force won't get to every customer across the globe that wants to take advantage of this expertise. So we partner with companies like NTH to know the customer better, to develop the right solution for that customer and with NTH's relationships with the customers, they can constantly help the customer optimize those solutions and see where there perhaps areas of opportunity that may be outside of HPE's own portfolio, such as client devices where they can bring that expertise to bear, to help the customer have a better total customer experience. >> And that is critical, that better overall comprehensive total customer experience. As we know on the other end, all customers are demanding customers like us who want data in real time, we want access. We also want the corporate and the social responsibility of the companies that we work with. Terry, bringing you into the conversation. Talk to us a little about AMD. How are you helping customers to create what really is a sustainable IT strategy from what often starts out as sustainability tactics? >> Exactly. And to pick up on what John and and Dan were saying, we're really energized about the opportunity to allow customers to accelerate their ability to attain some of their more strategic sustainability goals. You know, since we started on our current data center, CPU and GPU offerings, each generation we continue to focus on increasing the performance capability with great sensitivity to the efficiency, right? So as customers are modernizing their data center and achieving their own digital transformation initiatives we are able to deliver solutions through HPE that really address a greater performance per watt which is a a core element in allowing customers to achieve the goals that John and Dan talked about. So, you know, as a company, we're fully on board with some very public positions around our own sustainability goals, but working with terrific partners like NTH and HPE allows us to together bring those enabling technologies directly to customers >> Enabling and accelerating technologies. Dan, let's go back to you. You mentioned some of the things that NTH is doing from a sustainability approach, the social and the community concern, energy use savings, recycling but this goes all the way from NTH's perspective to things like outreach and fairness in the workplace. Talk to us a little bit about some of those other initiatives that NTH has fired up. >> Absolutely, well at NTH , since the early days, we have invested heavily on modern equipment and we have placed that at NTH labs, just like HPE labs we have NTH labs, and that's what we do a great deal of testing to make sure that our clients, right our joint clients are going to have high quality solutions that we're not just talking about it and we actually test them. So that is definitely an investment by being conscious about energy conservation. We have programs and scripts to shut down equipment that is not needed at the time, right. So we're definitely conscious about it. So I wanted to mention that example. Another one is, we all went through a pandemic and this is still ongoing from some perspectives. And that forced pretty much all of our employees, at least for some time to work from home. Being an IT company, we're very proud that we made that transition almost seamlessly. And we're very proud that you know people who continue to work from home, they're saving of course, gasoline, time, traffic, all those benefits that go with reducing transportation, and don't get me wrong, I mean, sometimes it is important to still have face to face meetings, especially with new organizations that you want to establish trust. But for the most part we have become a hybrid workforce type of organization. At the same time, we're also implementing our own hybrid IT approach which is what we talk to our clients about. So there's certain workloads, there are certain applications that truly belong in in public cloud or Software as a Service. And there's other workloads that truly belong, to stay in your data center. So a combination and doing it correctly can result in significant savings, not just money, but also again energy, consumption. Other things that we're doing, I mentioned trading programs, again, very proud that you know, we use a e-waste programs to make sure that those IT equipment is properly disposed of and it's not going to end in a landfill somewhere but also again, donating to schools, right? And very proud about that one. We have other outreach programs. Normally at the end of the year we do some substantial donations and we encourage our employees, my coworkers to donate. And we match those donations to organizations like Operation USA, they provide health and education programs to recover from disasters. Another one is Salvation Army, where basically they fund rehabilitation programs that heal addictions change lives and restore families. We also donate to the San Diego Zoo. We also believe in the whole ecosystem, of course and we're very proud to be part of that. They are supporting more than 140 conservation projects and partnerships in 70 countries. And we're part of that donation. And our owner has been part of the board or he was for a number of years. Mercy House down in San Diego, we have our headquarters. They have programs for the homeless. And basically that they're servicing. Also Save a Life Foundation for the youth to be educated to help prevent sudden cardiac arrest for the youth. So programs like that. We're very proud to be part of the donations. Again, it's not just about energy savings but it's so many other things as part of our corporate social responsibility program. Other things that I wanted to mention. Everything in our buildings, in our offices, multiple locations. Now we turn into LED. So again, we're eating our own dog food as they say but that is definitely some significant energy savings. And then lastly, I wanted to mention, this is more what we do for our customers, but the whole HPE GreenLake program we have a growing number of clients especially in Southern California. And some of those are quite large like school districts, like counties. And we feel very proud that in the old days customers would buy IT equipment for the next three to five years. Right? And they would buy extra because obviously they're expecting some growth while that equipment must consume energy from day one. With a GreenLake type of program, the solution is sized properly. Maybe a little bit of a buffer for unexpected growth needs. And anyway, but with a GreenLake program as customers need more IT resources to continue to expand their workloads for their organizations. Then we go in with 'just in time' type of resources. Saving energy and footprint and everything else that we've been talking about along the way. So very proud to be one of the go-tos for Hewlett Packard Enterprise on the GreenLake program which is now a platform, so. >> That's great. Dan, it sounds like NTH generation has such a comprehensive focus and strategy on sustainability where you're pulling multiple levers it's almost like sustainability to the NTH degree ? See what I did there ? >> (laughing) >> I'd like to talk with all three of you now. And John, I want to start with you about employees. Dan, you talked about the hybrid work environment and some of the silver linings from the pandemic but I'd love to know, John, Terry and then Dan, in that order how educated and engaged are your employees where sustainability is concerned? Talk to me about that from their engagement perspective and also from the ability to retain them and make them proud as Dan was saying to work for these companies, John ? >> Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that we see in technology, and we hear it from our customers every day when we're meeting with them is we all have a challenge attracting and retaining new employees. And one of the ways that you can succeed in that challenge is by connecting the work that the employee does to both the purpose of your company and broader than that global purpose. So environmental and social types of activities. So for us, we actually do a tremendous amount of education for our employees. At the moment, all of our vice presidents and above are taking climate training as part of our own climate aspirations to really drive those goals into action. But we're opening that training to any employee in the company. We have a variety of employee resource groups that are focused on sustainability and carbon reduction. And in many cases, they're very loud advocates for why aren't we pushing a roadmap further? Why aren't we doing things in a particular industry segment where they think we're not moving quite as quickly as we should be. But part of the recognition around all of that as well is customers often ask us when we suggest a sustainability or sustainable IT solution to them. Their first question back is, are you doing this yourselves? So for all of those reasons, we invest a lot of time and effort in educating our employees, listening to our employees on that topic and really using them to help drive our programs forward. >> That sounds like it's critical, John for customers to understand, are you doing this as well? Are you using your own technology ? Terry, talk to us about from the AMD side the education of your employees, the engagement of them where sustainability is concerned. >> Yeah. So similar to what John said, I would characterize AMD is a very socially responsible company. We kind of share that alignment in point of view along with NTH. Corporate responsibility is something that you know, most companies have started to see become a lot more prominent, a lot more talked about internally. We've been very public with four key sustainability goals that we've set as an organization. And we regularly provide updates on where we are along the way. Some of those goals extend out to 2025 and in one case 2030 so not too far away, but we're providing milestone updates against some pretty aggressive and important goals. I think, you know, as a technology company, regardless of the role that you're in there's a way that you can connect to what the company's doing that I think is kind of a feel good. I spend more of my time with the customer facing or partner facing resources and being able to deliver a tool to partners like NTH and strategic partners like HPE that really helps quantify the benefit, you know in a bare metal, in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and a TCO tool to really quantify what an implementation of a new and modern solution will mean to a customer. And for the first time they have choice. So I think employees, they can really feel good about being able to to do something that is for a greater good than just the traditional corporate goals. And of course the engineers that are designing the next generation of products that have these as core competencies clearly can connect to the impact that we're able to make on the broader global ecosystem. >> And that is so important. Terry, you know, employee productivity and satisfaction directly translates to customer satisfaction, customer retention. So, I always think of them as inextricably linked. So great to hear what you're all doing in terms of the employee engagement. Dan, talk to me about some of the outcomes that NTH is enabling customers to achieve, from an outcomes perspective those business outcomes, maybe even at a high level or a generic level, love to dig into some of those. >> Of course. Yes. So again, our mission is really to deliver awesome in everything we do. And we're very proud about that mission, very crispy clear, short and sweet and that includes, we don't cut corners. We go through the extent of, again, learning the technology getting those certifications, testing those in the lab so that when we're working with our end user organizations they know they're going to have a quality solution. And part of our vision has been to provide industry leading transformational technologies and solutions for example, HPE and AMD for organizations to go through their own digital transformation. Those two words have been used extensively over the last decade, but this is a multi decade type of trend, super trend or mega trend. And we're very proud that by offering and architecting and implementing, and in many cases supporting, with our partners, those, you know, best in class IT cyber security solutions were helping those organizations with those business outcomes, their own digital transformation. If you extend that Lisa , a Little bit further, by helping our clients, both public and private sector become more efficient, more scalable we're also helping, you know organizations become more productive, if you scale that out to the entire society in the US that also helps with the GDP. So it's all interrelated and we're very proud through our, again, optimized solutions. We're not just going to sell a box we're going to understand what the organization truly needs and adapt and architect our solutions accordingly. And we have, again, access to amazing technology, micro processes. Is just amazing what they can do today even compared to five years ago. And that enables new initiatives like artificial intelligence through machine learning and things of that nature. You need GPU technology , that specialized microprocessors and companies like AMD, like I said that are enabling organizations to go down that path faster, right? While saving energy, footprint and everything that we've been talking about. So those are some of the outcomes that I see >> Hey, Dan, listening to you talk, I can't help but think this is not a stretch for NTH right? Although, you know, terms like sustainability and reducing carbon footprint might be, you know more in vogue, the type of solutions that you've been architecting for customers your approach, dates back decades, and you don't have to change a lot. You just have new kind of toys to play with and new compelling offerings from great vendors like HPE to position to your customers. But it's not a big change in what you need to do. >> We're blessed from that perspective that's how our founders started the company. And we only, I think we go through a very extensive interview process to make sure that there will be a fit both ways. We want our new team members to get to know the the rest of the team before they actually make the decision. We are very proud as well, Terry, Lisa and John, that our tenure here at NTH is probably well over a decade. People get here and they really value how we help organizations through our dedicated work, providing again, leading edge technology solutions and the results that they see in our own organizations where we have made many friends in the industry because they had a problem, right? Or they had a very challenging initiative for their organization and we work together and the outcome there is something that they're very, very proud of. So you're right, Terry, we've been doing this for a long time. We're also very happy again with programs like the HPE GreenLake. We were already doing optimized solutions but with something like GreenLake is helping us save more energy consumption from the very beginning by allowing organizations to pay for only what they need with a little bit of buffer that we talked about. So what we've been doing since 1991 combined with a program like GreenLake I think is going to help us even better with our social corporate responsibility. >> I think what you guys have all articulated beautifully in the last 20 minutes is how strategic and interwoven the partnerships between HP, AMD and NTH is what your enabling customers to achieve those outcomes. What you're also doing internally to do things like reduce waste, reduce carbon emissions, and ensure that your employees are proud of who they're working for. Those are all fantastic guys. I wish we had more time cause I know we are just scratching the surface here. We appreciate everything that you shared with respect to sustainable IT and what you're enabling the end user customer to achieve. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Thanks. >> Thank you. >> My pleasure. From my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. In a moment, Dave Vellante will return to give you some closing thoughts on sustainable IT You're watching theCUBE. the leader in high tech enterprise coverage.

foreign [Music] Lisa Martin of the cube here hpe and AMD better together with Shi is the name of our segment and I'm here with four guests please welcome Charlie mulrooney Global pre-sales engineering manager at SHI John saw is also of shi joins us Global pre-sales Technical consultant and back with me are Terry Richardson North American Channel Chief and Dr John Fry Chief technologist of sustainable transformation at hpe welcome gang great to have you here all here Thank you Lisa thank you good to be here all right Charlie let's go ahead and start with you keeping the Earth sustainable and minimizing carbon emissions greenhouse gases is a huge priority for businesses right everywhere globally can you talk truly about what Shi is seeing in the marketplace with respect to sustainable I.T sure so starting about a year and a half two years ago we really noticed that our customers certainly our largest Enterprise customers were putting into their annual reports their Chairman's letters their SEC filings that they had sustainability initiatives ranging from achieving carbon neutral uh or carbon zero goals starting with 20 50 dates and then since then we've seen 20 40 and 2030 targets to achieve net neutrality and rfps rfis that we're Fielding certainly all now contain elements of that so this is certainly top of mind for our largest customers our Fortune 250 and Fortune 500 customers for sure where we're seeing an onslaught of requests for this we get into many conversations with the folks that are leading these efforts to understand you know here's what we have today what can we do better what can we do different to help make it an impact on those goals so making an impact top of Mind pretty much for everyone as you mentioned John Sal's let's bring you into the conversation now when you're in customer conversations what are some of the things that you talk about with respect to shi's approach to sustainability sustainable I.T are you seeing more folks that are implementing things tactically versus strategically what's going on in the customer space well so Charlie touched on something really important that you know the the wake-up moment for us was receiving you know proposal requests or customer meeting requests that were around sustainability and it was really around two years ago I suppose for the first time and those requests started coming from european-based companies because they had a bit of a head start uh over the U.S based global companies even um and what we found was that sustainability was already well down the road and that they were doing very interesting things to uh use renewable energy for data centers uh utilized they were already considering sustainability for new technologies as a high priority versus just performance costs and other factors that you typically had at the top so as we started working with them uh I guess that beginning was more tactical because we really had to find a way to respond uh we were starting to be asked about our own efforts and in regards to sustainability we have our headquarters in Somerset and our second Headquarters in Austin Texas um those are the gold certified we've been installing solar panels producing waste across the company recycling efforts and so forth charging stations for electric vehicles all that sort of thing to make our company more sustainable in in uh in our offices and in our headquarters um but it's a lot more than that and what we found was that we wanted to look to our vast number of supply of customers and partners we have over 30 000 partners that would work with globally and tens of thousands of customers and we wanted to find best practices and Technologies and services that we could uh talk about with these customers and apply and help integrate together as a as a really large Global uh reseller and integrator we can have a play there and bring these things together from multiple uh partners that we work with to help solve customer problems and so over time it's become more strategic and we've been uh as a company building the uh the the the forward efforts through organizing a true formal sustainability team and growing that um and then also reporting for CDP echovatus and so forth and it's really that all has been coming about in the last couple of years and we take it very seriously it sounds like it also sounds like from the customer's perspective they're shifting from that tactical maybe early initial approach to being more strategic to really enabling sustainable I.T across their organization and I imagine from a business driver's perspective John saws and Charlie are you hearing customers you talked about it being part of rfps but also where are customers in terms of we need to have a sustainable I.T strategy so that we can attract and retain the right investors we can attract and retain customers Charlie John what are your thoughts on that yeah that's top of mind with uh with all the folks that we're talking to uh I would say there's probably a three-way tie for the importance of uh attracting and retaining investors as you said plus customers customers are shopping their customers are shopping for who has aligned their ESG priorities in sustainable priorities uh with their own and who is going to help them with their own reporting of you know spoke to and ultimately scope three reporting from greenhouse gas emissions and then the attracting and retaining Talent uh it's another element now of when you're bringing on a new talent to your organization they have a choice and they're thinking with their decision to accept a role or not within your organization of what your strategies are and do they align so we're seeing those almost interchangeable in terms of priorities with with the customers we're talking to it was a little surprising because we thought initially this is really focused on investors attracting the investors but it really has become quite a bit more than that and it's been actually very interesting to see the development of that prioritization more comprehensive across the organization let's bring Dr John Fry into the conversation and Terry your neck so stay tuned Dr Frey can you talk about hpe and Shia partnering together what are some of the key aspects of the relationship that help one another support and enable each other's aggressive goals where sustainability is concerned yeah it's a great question and one of the things about the sustainability domain in solving these climate challenges that we all have is we've got to come together and partner to solve them no one company's going to solve them by themselves and for our Collective customers the same way from an hpe perspective we bring the expertise on our products we bring in a sustainable I.T point of view where we've written many white papers on the topic and even workbooks that help companies Implement a sustainable I.T program but our direct sales forces can't reach all of our customers and in many cases we don't have the local knowledge that our business partners like Shi bring to the table so they extend the reach they bring their own expertise their portfolio that they offer to the customer is wider than just Enterprise Products so by working together we can do a better job of helping the customer meet their own needs give them the right Technology Solutions and enhance that customer experience it's because they get more value from us collectively it really is better together which is a very appropriate name for our segment here Terry let's bring you into the conversation talk to us about AMD how is it helping customers to create that sustainable I.T strategy and what are some of the differentiators that what AMD is doing that that are able to be delivered through Partners like Shi well Lisa you use the word enabling um just a short while ago and fundamentally AMD enables hpe and partners like Shi to bring differentiated solutions to customers so in the data center space We Begin our journey in 2017 with some fundamental Design Elements for our processor technology that we're really keenly focused on improving performance but also efficiency so now the the most common measure that we see for the types of customers that Charlie and John were talking about was really that measure of performance per watt and you'll continue to see AMD enable um customers to to try to find ways to to do more in a sustainable way within the constraints that they may be facing whether it's availability of power data center space or just needing to meet overall sustainability goals so we have skills and expertise and tools that we make available to hpe and to Shi to help them have even stronger differentiated conversations with customers sounds like to me Terry that it's that AMD can be even more of an more than an enabler but really an accelerator of what customers are able to do from a strategic perspective on sustainability you're right about that and and we actually have tools greenhouse gas TCO tools that can be leveraged to really quantify the impact of some of the the new technology decisions that customers are making to allow them to achieve their goals so we're really proud of the work that we're doing in partnership with companies like hpe and Shi Better Together as we've said at the beginning and just a minute ago Charlie let's bring you back in talk to us a little bit about what Shi is doing to leverage sustainable I.T and enable your customers to meet their sustainability goals and their initiatives so for quite a while we've had uh some offerings to help customers especially in the end user compute side a lot of customers were interested in I've got assets for you know let's say a large sales force that had been carrying tablets or laptops and you know those need to be refreshed what do I do with those how do I responsibly retire or recycle those and we've been offering solutions for that for quite some time it's within the last year or two when we started offering for them guarantees and Assurance assurances of how they can if that equipment is reusable by somebody else how can we issue them you know credits for uh carving credits for reuse of that equipment somewhere else so it's not necessarily going to be E-Waste it's uh something that can be recycled and reused we have other programs with helping extend the life of of some systems where they look at boy I have an awful lot of data on these machines where historically they might want to just retire those because the the sensitivity of the data needed to be handled very specifically we can help them properly remove the sensitive data and still allow reuse of that equipment so we've been able to accomplish some Creative Solutions specifically around end user compute in the past but we are looking to new ways now to to really help extend that into Data Center infrastructure and Beyond to really help with what are the needs what are the the best ways to help our customers handle the things that are challenging them [Music] that's a great point that you bring up Charlie and the security kind of popped into my head here John saw his question for you when you're in customer conversations and you're talking about or maybe they're talking about help us with waste reduction with recycling where are you having those customer conversations I know sustainability is a board level it's a c-level discussion but where are you having those conversations within the customer organization well so it's a it's a combination of um organizations within the customer these are these Global organizations typically when we're talking about asset like cycle management asset recovery how do you do that in a sustainable Green Way and securely the customers we're dealing with I mean security is top sustainability is right up there too obviously but uh um Charlie touched on a lot of those things and these are Global rollouts tens of thousands of employees typically to to have mobile devices laptops and phones and so forth um and they often are looking for a true managed service around the world that takes into consideration things like the most efficient way to ship products to to the employees and how do you do that in a sustainable way you need to think about that does it all go to a central location um or to each individual's home during the pandemic that made a lot of sense to do it that way I think the reason I wanted to touch on those things is that well for for example one European pharmaceutical that the states and their reports that they are already in scope one in scope two they're fully uh Net Zero at this point and and they say but that only solves three percent of our overall sustainability goals uh 97 is scope three it's travel it's shipping it's it's uh it's all the all these things that are out of their direct control a lot of times but they're coming to us now as a as a supplier and ask and and we're filling out forms and rfps and so forth uh to show that we can be a sustainable supplier in their supply chain because that's their next big goal so sustainable supply chain absolutely Dr John Fry and Terry I want to kind of get your perspectives Charlie talked about from a customer requirements perspective customers coming through RFP saying hey we've got to work with vendors who have clear sustainability initiatives that are well underway hpe and AMD hearing the same thing Dr Fry will start with you and then Terry sure absolutely we receive about 2500 customer questionnaires just on sustainability every year and that's come up from a few hundred so yeah absolutely accelerating then the conversations turn deeper can you help us quantify our carbon emissions and power consumption then the conversation has recently gone even further to when can hpe offer Net Zero or carbon neutral Technology Solutions to the customer so that they don't have to account for those Solutions in their own carbon footprint so the questions are getting more sophisticated the need for the data and the accuracy of the data is climbing and as we see potential regulatory disclosure requirements around carbon emissions I think this trend is just going to continue up yeah and we see the same thing uh we get asked more and more from our customers and partners around our own corporate sustainability goals but the surveying that the survey work that we've done with customers has led us to you know understand that you know approximately 75 percent of customers are going to make sustainability goals a key component of their rfis in 2023 which is right around the corner and you know 60 of those same customers really expect to have business level kpis uh in the new year that are really related to sustainability so this is not just a a kind of a buzzword topic this is this is kind of business imperatives that you know the company the companies like hpe and AMD and the partners like Shi that really stand behind it and really are proactive in getting out in front of customers to help are really going to be ahead of the game that's a great point that you make Terry there that this isn't we're not talking about a buzzword here we're talking about a business imperative for businesses of probably all sizes across all Industries and Dr Farr you mentioned regulations and something that we just noticed is that the SEC recently said it's proposing some rules where companies must disclose greenhouse gas emissions um if they were if that were to to come into play I'm going to come back to Charlie and John saws how would Shi and frankly at hpe and AMD be able to help companies comply if that type of Regulation were to be implemented Charlie yeah so we are in the process right now of building out a service to help customers specifically with that with the reporting we know reporting is a challenge uh the scope 2 reporting is a challenge and scope three that I guess people thought was going to be a ways out now all of a sudden hey if you have made a public statement that you're going to make an impact on your scope three uh targets and you have to report on them so that that has become really important very quickly uh as word about this requirement is rumbling around uh there's concern so we are actually working right now on something it's a little too early to fully disclose but stay tuned because we have something coming that's interesting definitely peaked my ears are are parked here Charlie well stay tuned for that Dr Brian Terry can you talk about together with Shi hpe and AMD enabling customers to manage access to the data obviously which is critical and it's doing nothing but growing and proliferating key folks need access to it we talked a little bit about security but how are from a Better Together perspective Dr Fry will start with you how are you really helping organizations on that sustainability journey to ensure that data can be accessible to those who need it when they need it and these days what is real-time requirements yeah it's an increasing challenge in fact we have changed the HP Story the way we talk about hpe's value proposition to talk about data first modernization so how often do you collect data where do you store it how do you avoid moving it how do you make sure if you're going to collect data you get insights from that data that change your business or add business value and then how long do you retain that data afterward and all of that factors into sustainable I.T because when I talk to technology Executives what they tell me again and again is there's this presumption within their user community that storage is free and so when when they have needs for collecting data for example if if once an hour would do okay but the system would collect it once a minute the default the user asks for of course is once a minute and then are you getting insights from that data or are we moving it that becomes more important when you're moving data back and forth between the public cloud or the edge because there is quite a network penalty for moving that equipment across your network there's huge power and carbon implications of doing that so it's really making a better decision about what do we collect why do we collect it what we're going to do with it when we collect and how we store it and for years customers have really talked about you know modernization and the need to modernize their data center you know I fundamentally believe that sustainability is really that Catalyst to really Drive true modernization and as they think forward um you know when we work with with hpe you know they offer a variety of purpose-built servers that can play a role in you know specific customer workloads from the larger supercomputers down to kind of general purpose servers and when we work with Partners like Shi not only can they deliver the full Suite of um offerings for on-premise deployments they're also very well positioned to leverage the public Cloud infrastructure for those workloads that really belong there and that certainly can help customers kind of achieve an end-to-end sustainability goal that's a great point that that it needs to be strategic but it also needs to be an end-to-end goal we're just about out of time but I wanted to give John saws the last word here take us out John what are some of the things Charlie kind of teased some of the things that are coming out that piqued my interest but what are some of the things that you're excited about as hpe AMD and Shi really help customers achieve their sustainability initiatives sure um a couple of comments here um so Charlie yeah you touched on some upcoming capabilities uh that uh Shi will have around the area of monitoring and management see this is difficult for all customers to be able to report in this formal way this is a train coming at everybody very quickly and um they're not ready most customers aren't ready and if we can help um as as a reseller integrator assessments to be able to understand what they're currently running compared to different scenarios of where they could go to in a future state that seems valuable if we can help in that way that's those are things that we're looking into specifically uh you know greenhouse gas emissions relevant assessments and and um and what in the comments uh of Terry and John around the power per watt and um the vast um uh portfolio of technologies that they that they had to address various workloads is uh is fantastic we'd be able to help point to Technologies like that and move customers in that direction I think as a as an integrator and a technical advisor to customers I saw an article on BBC this morning that I I think if we think about how we're working with our customers and we can help them maybe think differently about how they're using their technology to solve problems um the BBC article mentioned this was ethereum a cryptocurrency and they have a big project called merge and today was a go live date and BBC US news outlets have been reporting on it they basically changed the model from a model called The Power of work which takes a a lot of compute and graphic GPU power and so forth around the world and it's now called a power of stake which means that the people that validate that their actions in this environment are correct they have to put up a stake of their own cryptocurrency and if they're wrong it's taken from them this new model reduces the emissions of their um uh environment by 99 plus percent the June emissions from ethereum were it was 120 uh terawatts per per year terawatt hours per year and they reduced it um actually that's the equivalent of what the Netherlands needed for energy so the comparable to a medium-sized country so if you can think differently about how to solve problems it may be on-prem it may be extremely it may be that may be the public cloud in some cases or other you know interesting Innovative Technologies that the AMD hpe other partners that we can bring in along along with them as well we can solve problems differently there is a lot going on the opportunities that you all talked about to really make such a huge societal impact and impact to our planet are exciting we thank you so much for talking together about how hpe AMD and sha are really working in partnership in Synergy to help your customers across every organization really become much more focused much more collaborative about sustainable I.T guys we so appreciate your time and thank you for your insights Thank you Lisa thank you my pleasure for my guests I'm Lisa Martin in a moment Dan Molina is going to join me he's the co-president and chief technology officer of nth generation you're watching the cube the leader in high tech Enterprise coverage [Music]

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone. Lisa Martin here of theCUBE. I have three guests now here with me. Please welcome Dave Fafel, chief technology officer at WEI. And welcome back to the program, Terry Richardson, North American channel chief at AMD, and Dr. John Fry, chief technologist, sustainable transformation at HPE. Gentlemen, it's great to have you on the program. Thanks so much for hopping on. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> (indistinct) >> So, Dave, let's start with you, a lot of acronyms here. Talk to us about WEI and its approach to sustainability. >> Yeah, absolutely, sure. So, WEI is a innovative, full service, customer-centric, IT solutions provider. We're experts in business technology improvement, in driving efficiency, helping our customers to optimize their IT environments. That's what we do. And of course, sustainability is really now part of the core function in architecting IT solutions these days. It has to be. I look at sustainability and I hear the word sustainability and I think efficiency. And that's the way that our organization designs solutions for our customers today. >> Talk about the impetus. You mentioned being customer centric you talked about efficiency, all incredibly important to all of us on this Zoom, but Dave, talk about the impetus for WEI to develop and implement this sustainability initiative. Well, I mean, so look, for WEI, it's part of our business model, it's part of our culture. So it's natural that that comes out in the solutions that we design for our customers, but we're trying to solve business problems for our customers, We're not just geeks building something really cool with the latest technology, we're trying to solve real world problems and sustainability addresses real world issues. And so, our customers are looking for us to help them either implement their sustainability programs, or to mature their sustainability programs. And IT has a big responsibility in that. And so, when we're working with them to solve these problems we're really solving that business problem, solving that sustainability, IT initiative that they have. >> And we're going to dig and unpack that in a little bit. John, I want to bring you into the conversation. HPE and AMD have been long partnering on advancing sustainability goals for quite a long time now. Can you talk about how HPE and WEI are partnering? What are some of the key aspects of the relationship that help support not only the goals that Dave talked about but HPE's sustainability goals? >> Yeah, absolutely. One of the things in sustainability is partnership is really leadership. No one company can do this by themselves, and customers really need that input and perspective from all of their partners as part of this process. So, for us as HPE, 65% of our carbon footprint, for example, is when our customers use our technology products. So, for us to lower our carbon footprint, it also requires us helping the customer do that. And that's where the power of the AMD and HPE relationship comes together, but we can't give our expertise widely to every customer in the world. And so, we use our channel partners like WEI to not only extend our reach, but they bring that deep knowledge of the customer and all of their operations across technology, even places where HPE does not offer that technology, in the client space, for example, or in the printer space. And so, what it allows us to do is develop better solutions for the customer. WEI has a deep relationship with the customer. They have a deep expertise in local nuances if there's regulations or local constraints. In fact, in many cities in the world, you can't, for example, build new data centers because of power infrastructure constraints. So, that's where we leverage partners like WEI to improve the customer experience and make sure that we give the best solutions to the customer. >> All about improving those customer experiences as demand for technology does nothing but increase. Terry, let's bring you into the conversation now. Speaking of customer centricity, we find that sustainability is very complicated, that a lot of large companies might have the resources to figure it out, but some of the smaller and mid-size companies might not quite have the boots on the street. What should some of the smaller organizations do, Terry, in your perspective to get started where sustainability is concerned? >> Well, I first off, appreciate the opportunity to be here and it's really terrific to have such a strong partnership with both HPE and WEI in order to deliver innovative solutions to customers. I think what AMD brings to the table is a real choice for customers that they haven't had. All of our personnel are really expert in articulating a differentiated value proposition that hits on a little bit what John talked about which is higher performance but with very, very efficient systems. And we've been offering those to the market since 2017 and we continued to get better. And now, there's an absolute opportunity to do more with same amount of servers, or do a workload with far fewer servers, that require far less energy. So, bringing in the AMD resources to assist the efforts of HPE and WEI, I would say, would be a good step for customers. >> Are there any Terry, sticking with you, any recommendations or tools particularly that you've seen really help customers get kicked off well, and strategically? >> Yeah, there actually are a couple that are readily available and I would encourage through WEI, customers take a close look. Two that really come to mind. We have a virtualization TCO tool that helps optimize configurations for virtual environments. And one of our newest tools is one that's focused on bare metal and greenhouse gas emissions TCO. So, really quantifying the impact to customers and expressed in terms that are familiar and help them achieve their sustainability initiatives. >> Excellent, that's great that those resources are available for customers, especially those smaller ones that might need a bit more guidance and handholding. Dave, let's come back to you. Let's now unpack the sustainability initiatives at WEI that you're really leveraging and implementing to meet the demands of customers and their future technology demands. >> Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's a great question, what we're getting to. So, look, we're going to combine, the advancements in technology from an AMD and from an HPE into an architecture that's really usable for a customer. So, 10 years ago, we were all looking at consolidation ratios for virtualization as one driver to a more efficient IT environment. And so, look, we've done this over the last decade, where we've added as many virtual machines to a server as we can get and as many containers to a physical machine as we can get, and now we've got to find other ways to drive efficiency. And so, when we see technology from AMD that's maybe having the socket count from a CPU perspective with a 30 plus percent reduction in power consumption and heat output, that's huge. So, we're architecting these solutions, using that best of breed technology but also implementing technology that was previously consumed more by larger enterprise customers for that small and medium customer base that you mentioned earlier. And that is implementing infrastructure as a service as a way to more efficiently utilize IT resources. So, we'll design the right systems, we'll put them into a consumption model that allows us to dial up and down when we need to, as opposed to having to build oversized environments that consume too much power, that produce too much heat and that aren't really driving toward those sustainability initiatives. So, we want to change not only the technology but also the models of which we consume IT. That's how we're driving that forward with customers today. >> And Dave, another question for you. How are you seeing from a cultural perspective this be adopted and accepted across the customer base? 'Cause change management is challenging but we all know sustainability is a focus of pretty much every business on the planet. >> It is, but fortunately we've got good partners like AMD and HPE, so they make it easy for the channel to implement these things. If you take a look at HPE's GreenLake solutions, for instance. These are tool sets that allow us to go and easily implement that for customers and reduce that change or cost of change for them. In fact, it actually allows them to take the models that they're currently used to and yet still leverage that new consumption model that I just referred to. >> Got it, awesome, thank you. John, let's go back to you. There's a tremendous opportunity here for customers from a sustainability standpoint, across every industry. And I was looking at some data that HPE shared that said for example, 25% of compute in data centers is comatose. First of all, I think the description is brilliant. What are some of the outcomes that customers can expect in working with HPE and AMD and WEI in terms of better leveraging their technology investments today and in the future? >> Yeah, it's a great question. And we do see a tremendous amount of equipment in the average data center that's not doing any useful work. And so, comatose is a great name for that. We also see a tremendous amount of equipment that's being dramatically underutilized as well. So, when the three companies come together and share that expertise with the customer and the customer follows through on that you can expect a whole lot of things. So, you reduce over-provisioning, you have the IT assets in your infrastructure doing useful work for you. The second thing you you tend to see is utilization levels going up. So, where the average utilization level across compute today even in a virtualized or containerized environment is about 30%. You see that almost doubling, for example, in good scenarios where the customer has that equipment doing a tremendous amount of additional work, keeping them from needing to add additional assets to the infrastructure. So, all of that drives cost savings, both CapEx and OPEX, cost savings opportunities. It drives efficiency savings. If you have less equipment being more well utilized and better managed, you tend not to have over temperature situations or equipment that goes down for no explainable reason that then drives staff work to go find out and fix workloads that go down. In fact, many of our customers are measured on service level agreements. They want to keep that infrastructure running all the time to keep their customers happy as well. And finally, one that sometimes is missed is employee satisfaction. Technology companies are having a tough enough time finding and attracting and retaining employees to start with but those employees want to see how what they're doing contributes to purpose. So, as our customers can use these employees to do more productive work, show them how it connects to the purpose of their company and show them how it makes the world a better place at the same time, they can do a better job of holding on to those employees that they so value. >> That's such a great point, John, that you bring up that employee retention but also talent attraction and retention for your customers. Dave, back to you. Are you seeing more and more customers come to WEI, saying, "We have sustainability initiatives. "We can only partner with companies that are also really focused on this because we need to make sure that our employees are satisfied and that we can attract and retain customers." Is that something that you're seeing an increase of? >> Yeah, absolutely. So very often, we're asked to explain how we're implementing sustainability in our business, that the partners that we work with are also doing the same and I'll give you an example of that. So, we've been talking about IT efficiency and good utilization of IT equipment but let's not forget that life cycles of IT equipment result in that equipment leaving a customer site eventually. So, we've got to be responsible in the way that we handle that. And so, this is the area where WEI has put together programs to connect the sustainability aspect of IT recycling, if you will, with the social aspect of corporate social responsibility. And that is, what do we do with this stuff? So, we offer programs to customers where we say, "Hey, look, let's take back some of that IT equipment, there's value in this." It may be that we need to go and recycle this in a responsible way. And we can extract valuable components out of this that result in funds to do something with. Well, what can we do with those funds? Can we put those towards social programs? So, this is where we, again, tie together sustainability and social responsibility. We've been talking about data centers but this also extends to other IT devices. So, if we're pulling back laptops, as an example, from a customer environment, well, those may still have a useful life someplace. Can we bring those to disadvantaged communities and utilize those for educational purposes and other things? Again, this is how WEI connects our customers with these opportunities to enhance their CSR programs. >> Tremendous opportunities there for customers across every industry. Dave, sticking with you for a second. From a differentiation perspective, talk about what the partnership with HPE and AMD delivers WEI from a unique value prop perspective. >> Yeah, so we touched on it a little bit already, and that is, you've got the incredible technology from AMD and from HPE that work seamlessly together but is also focused on driving down the cost of computing. I mean, just the overall efficiency built into design of these solutions makes it easy for an IT consultant like us to build an efficient architecture. But it's not just the technology. It's also the models, or the IT provisioning and consumption models that are important. And again, that's where the relationship between HPE and WEI comes together, because we get to leverage some of these other programs. I mentioned before GreenLake, as an example. This gives us the opportunity to build that infrastructure as service model for our customers who would otherwise maybe go out to a hyperscaler for a similar solution. But as we know, most of our customers even small and medium businesses, can't move everything out to the cloud. They have to use their own data centers. They have to keep data on site and on-prem. So, building that model for them drives efficiency and quite honestly, that's the thing that they're looking for, it's driving cost savings, it's driving efficiency, it's aiding their CSR initiatives. >> Got it. Let's chat now about the strategic versus the tactical. Terry, I would like to get your feedback and then John, yours as well. We talked a little bit about this already but how do you help advise organizations that might be in that tactical mode, approaching sustainability from a tactical mode and really up level that to a strategy that's around sustainable IT? Terry, what are some of the things that you're seeing in the marketplace? Well, at AMD we're fortunate to be passionate about partnerships and sustainability. We're fortunate to work with companies of all shapes and sizes and in different geographies around the world. Some are a little bit more advanced in the way they think about this, but it really is becoming a strategic imperative for companies. And I think certain companies don't know exactly how to proceed. So, the opportunity to educate and open their eyes to the way that you can do both, you can meet your IT goals and objectives, but also do it in a very socially responsible and sustainable way, to me is a win-win. And we welcome the opportunity to just have those conversations. I think some customers are not necessarily understanding how much IT can really contribute to their ability to meet their current and future sustainability goals. And we look forward to having as many conversations as possible 'cause it goes in the category of just the right thing to do. If you can power your IT and do things that are good for the planet and good for all. >> That's a great point. It really is the right thing to do. John, just question, last question for you, is similar to what I asked Terry, but I would like to know where are your customer conversations when it comes to really looking at IT as a big driver of sustainability? Who in the organization really needs to be the spearheads around that initiative? >> Yeah, great question. Often we see customers have one organization that sometimes is a sustainability organization. Sometimes the facility's a real estate organization or sometimes IT is spearheading this and often doing that in isolation. To your point, we really need to think about this as a sustainable IT strategy and get all the right organizations involved together. So, for example, for us, after seeing many customers that didn't know how to develop this strategy, we wrote a workbook called "Six Steps For Implementing A Sustainable IT Strategy." And the steps are things like figure out what your company goals already are that you've made public to your customers then grab the right stakeholders and bring them together. For example, you know you're going to have cost savings, so have the finance team in the room, You know this is going to save utilities, have the real estate team in the room. You know it's going to generate a sustainability benefit, have the sustainability team involved so that they can quantify the benefit in a meaningful manner. Have the communication and marketing teams because when companies implement a sustainable IT strategy they have a great story that they can then tell their customers about how they're doing a better job from an efficiency perspective and from an environmental perspective as well. So, when you bring all of those stakeholders together you can have a much broader and deeper strategy. It becomes a strategic imperative. And when your institutional investors, if you're publicly traded, or your customers come asking about your programs, you're ready to answer those questions in a credible manner. >> Sounds like it really needs to truly be a collaborative effort across the organization. You mentioned John's story and that goes back to employee retention, talent attraction and retention for your companies and your customers as well. We could go off on that but we're almost out of time. So, I want to go back to Dave to take us home here. You walked us through what WEI is doing from a sustainability initiative perspective, the impetus to develop that. What are some of the things that we can expect to see on the horizon from WEI where sustainability is concerned? What are you excited about? >> Well, that's a good question. So, we're excited about how we can continue to deploy those infrastructure as a service models. That's the next step in the direction. How do we automate these things, and then how do we quantify them? So, you've got to build the environment but then you've got to be able to measure it. And that's another area where WEI really adds value to this whole solution set is how are we measuring these things in the long term and developing a program that extends beyond just the implementation of this, but through its entire life cycle and the value of it? Because if you can quantify the value and if you can show what the savings really is and how it's helping customers meet their sustainability goals, well, guess what? They're going to want to implement more of this So, it's good business, and that's what we're excited about, is that next mile of implementation after we developed the initial architecture. >> That measurement is key. It sounds like then it really becomes a flywheel of sustainability. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining me today talking about from your three perspectives and how you're partnering together to really enable businesses across any industry to develop a sustainable IT strategy that they can implement and then create a flywheel of optimization. We appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, Lisa. >> Thank you. >> All right, my pleasure for my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. In a moment, John and Terry and I are going to be joined by Charles Mulrooney, global presales engineering manager at SHI and John Sahs, global presales technical consultant at SHI. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in global tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Sustainability has become one of the hottest topics, not just in enterprise tech, but across all industries. The relentless pace of technology improvement over the decades and orders of magnitude increases in density have created heat, power and cooling problems that are increasingly challenging to remediate. Intense efforts have been implemented over the years around data center design techniques to dissipate heat, use ambient air, liquid cooling and many other approaches that have been brought to bear to get power usage effectiveness, PUE, as close to one as possible. Welcome to Better Together Sustainability, presented by the CUBE and brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise and AMD. In this program we'll lay out today's challenges and how leading companies are engineering solutions to the problems just introduced, along with some recommendations, best practices and resources as to how you can initiate or enhance your sustainability journey. First up to help us better understand this important topic are John Fry, senior technologist IT efficiency and sustainability at Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Terry Richardson, North America channel chief for AMD. Gents, welcome. >> Great to be here. >> (indistinct). >> John, let's start at the high level here. Why is sustainability such an important topic today? Why now? Why is it such a challenge for customers and, and how are you guys approaching the solutions? >> The topic has been an important topic for a number of years, but what we're seeing across the world is more and more corporations are putting in place climate targets and sustainability goals. And at the same time, boards and CEOs are starting to be asked about the topic as well, making this topic much more important for technology leaders across the globe. At the same time, technology leaders are fighting with space, power and cooling constraints that caused them to rethink their approach to IT. To get a better sense of how wide this challenge is, we did a survey last year and we asked 500 technology leaders across the globe if they were implementing sustainable IT goals and metrics and programs within their infrastructure. Personally, I thought the answer would be about 40% of them had these programs. Actually it turned out to be 96% of them. And so when we asked them why they were implementing these programs and what was the primary driver, what we heard from them was three things. Those of them that were the early adopters and the ones that move were moving the fastest told us they were putting these programs in place to attract and retain institutional investors. If they're a publicly traded company, their investors were already asking their boards, their CEOs, wanting to know what their company was doing to drive efficiency within their technology operations. Those companies in the middle, the ones that were just moving along at the same pace as many other companies around the world, told us they were putting these programs in place to attract and retain their customers. Customers are increasingly asking the companies they do business with about their sustainability aspirations specifically how technology contributes to their carbon emissions and their sustainability goals. And so these customers want to make sure that they can keep their own customers. And finally, a third group, the digital followers, that group of companies that's a little slower adopting programs, more conservative in nature. They said they were implementing these programs to attract and retain employees. In fact, over the last year or so, every customer we've talked to when they describe their pain points and their challenges that we can try to help them meet, has had a difficulty in finding employees. And so what we know is these younger employees coming into the workforce, if you can show them how what they are going to be doing connects to the purpose of their company and connects to making the world a better place, you can attract them easier and you can retain them longer. So a variety of business reasons why companies are looking at these programs, but what we know is when they implement these programs they often reduce over-provisioning. They save money, they have a lower environmental footprint, and again they have an easier time attracting and retaining employees. So for all of these reasons, driving sustainability into your IT operations is a great thing to do. >> Yeah, I never would've expected 96%. And of course, investors, customers and employees. I mean, this is the big three. Terry what's AMD's perspective on this topic? In other words, what do you bring to the table and the partnership? I mean, I know processors, but what's unique about AMD's contribution? >> Yeah. Thanks Dave. And, and John, great to be with you. Appreciate the opportunity and the partnership. You know, we too are very focused on sustainability and enjoy our partnership with HPE very much in this area. You know, since 2017, when AMD introduced its epic processor family, there's been a couple of core design elements in that technology. One has to do with performance. And the second has to do with efficiency. Both are critically important to today's topic of sustainability because increasingly, customers are understanding and measuring performance per watt and fortunately, AMD really excels in this area. So whether we're talking about the larger super computers in the world, or even general purpose servers, customers can fundamentally do more with fewer AMD servers than competitive alternatives. And so, so we, we really bring a technology element on the processor side, CPU and GPU, to play a role in delivering real ability for customers to meet some of their core sustainability goals. And of course, in partnership with HPE, together we have really a compelling story. >> Great. Thank you, Terry. And, and John, wonder if you could talk to the differentiation that you bring from HPE's perspective, the total package. >> Yeah, of course. The first thing as partnership. As Terry mentioned, AMD and HPE have been working together since HPE was founded actually, to drive power efficiency up to meet the demands of our customers. At the same time, as our customers have asked more and more questions around technology sustainability, we've realized that we needed to not only develop a point of view on that from an HPE perspective, but actually write the white papers that give the customer guidance for sustainable IT strategies, for tech refresh cycles, give them some guidance on what are the right questions to ask technology vendors when they're buying technology equipment. So a series of white papers and you might not appreciate why, but this is a topic that you can't go get a college degree in and frankly can't even buy a book on. So for customers to get that knowledge, they want to get it from experienced professionals around the globe. And in fact, in the survey that I mentioned earlier, we asked customers, where's the number one place that you expect to get your sustainable IT information from? And they said, our technology vendors. So for us, it's really about driving that point of view, sharing it with customers, helping customers get better and even pointing out some of the unintended consequences. So a great example, Dave, you mentioned PUE earlier. Many customers have been driving PUE down for a number of years, but often the way that they did that was optimizing the data center building infrastructure. They got PUE pretty low. Now, one of the things that happens and customers need to be aware of this, particularly if they're focused on PUE as their primary metric, is when they optimize their IT stack and make that smaller, PUE actually goes up. And at first they think, well, wait a minute, that metric is going in the wrong direction. But when you remember it's a ratio, if you get that IT stack component smaller, then you're driving efficiency even if PUE goes the wrong direction. So part of the conversation then is you might want to look at PUE internally, but perhaps you've outgrown PUE and now have an opportunity to look at other metrics like carbon emissions per workload, or or power consumption per piece of equipment or rack. So all of this drives back to that upward trajectory that Terry was talking about where customers are really interested in power performance. So as we share those stories with customers, share the expertise how to move along this journey, that really provides great differentiation for HPE and AMD together. >> So that's interesting. So PUE is not necessarily the holy grail metric. There are other metrics that you, you should look at. Number one, and number two the way you interpret PUE is changing for the better. So thank you for that context. I wonder Terry, do, do you have any like proof points or examples that you can share? >> Yeah, so one that immediately comes to mind that was a manifestation of some terrific collaboration between AMD and HPE was their recently announced implementation of the Frontier supercomputer. That was a project that we collaborated on for a long time. And, and where we ended up was turning over to the government a supercomputer that is currently the highest performing in the world, broke the exaFLOP barrier. And probably even more importantly is number one on the Green500 list of the top super computers. And, and together we enjoy favorable rankings in other systems, but that's the one that, that really stands out in terms of at scale implementation to shine really a spotlight on what we can do together. Certainly for other customers doesn't have to be the world's largest super computer. It's not uncommon that we see customers just kind of in general purpose business applications in their data centers to be able to do more with less, you know, meaning, you know, you know a third of the servers oftentimes delivering not only a very strong TCO but the environmental benefit that gets associated with significantly reduced energy that can be expressed in reduction in, in overall CO2 emissions and other, other ways to express the benefit, whether it's, you know the equivalent of, of planting you know, acres of forest or whatever. So we're really proud of the proof points that we have and and look forward to the opportunity to together explain this more fully to customers and partners. >> Right? So John, Terry sort of alluded to this being more broad based. I know HPE has a very strong focus on HPC. Sorry for all the acronyms, but high performance computing. But the, so this is more broad based than just the super computing business, right John? >> Yeah, absolutely. We see these performance benefits for customers and industry standard servers as well. In fact, many customers, that's the primary type of equipment they use and they want better power performance. They either want to as Terry alluded to, use less equipment to do the same amount of work, or if they've run into a space or power or cooling constraint in their data centers, they want to be able to increase workloads in the same footprint. So it allows them to take better use of their data centers. And for some customers even the data center enclosure that they started with they can actually use a much smaller amount of space. In fact, we have some that even move over to co-location facilities as they improve that performance per watt, and can do more work in the smaller space. So it starts an industry standard server, but increasingly we're seeing customers considering liquid cooling solutions and that generally moves them into the high performance compute space as well right now. So those performance improvements exist across that entire spectrum. >> So since you brought up liquid cooling John, I mean can you share any best practices? I mean, like what do you do with all that heated liquid? >> Yeah, it's a great, great question. And we have seen a lot more interest from customers in liquid cooling and there's a variety of things that you can do, but if you're considering liquid cooling the opportunities to think broader than just the IT stack. So if you're going to use a cooling loop anyhow and you're going to generate warm liquid coming off the it equipment as waste, think about what you can do with that. We have a, a government customer here in the United States that designed their high performance computer while they were designing the building it went in. So they're able to use that hot air, hot water, excuse me coming off the IT equipment to heat the entire building. And that provides a great use of that warm water. In many parts of the world, that warm water can either be used on a hot water utility grid or it can even be used on a steam grid if you can get it warm enough. Other places we're aware of customers (indistinct) and greenhouses next to data centers and using both the warm air and the warm water from the data center to heat the greenhouse as well. So we're encouraging customers to take a step back, look at the entire system, look at anything coming out of that system that once was waste and start to think about how can we use that what was waste now as an input to another process. >> Right, that's system thinking and some, some pragmatic examples there. Can, can you each summarize, maybe start Terry, with you AMD's and HPE's respective climate goals that may, Terry then John chime in please. >> Yeah, I'll go first. We actually have four publicly stated goals. The first one is I think very aggressive but we've got a track record of doing something similar in our client business. And, and so kind of goal number one is a 30 X increase in energy efficiency for AMD processors and accelerators powering servers for AI and HPC by 2025. The second is broad based across the corporation is a 50% absolute reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from AMD operations by 2030. And then the third is 100% of AMD manufacturing suppliers will have published greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals by 2025. And we've declared that 80% or greater of our manufacturing suppliers will source renewable energy by 2025. Those are the, those are the four big publicly stated goals and objectives that we have in this area. >> You know what I like about those Terry? A lot of, a lot of these sustainability goals these moonshot goals is like by 2050, it's like, okay. But I, I like the focus on '25 and then of course there's one in there at the end of the decade. All right, John, maybe you could share with us HPE's approach. >> Yeah, absolutely. And we've had almost two decades of emissions reduction goals and our current goals, which we accelerated by 10 years last year, are to be carbon new or excuse me, net zero by 2040. And that's a science based target-approved goal. In fact, one of the first in the world. And we're doing that because we believe that 2050 is too long to wait. And so how we reach that net zero goal by 2040, is by 2030, an interim step is to reduce our scopes one and two, our direct and energy related emissions by 70% from 2020. And that includes sourcing 100% renewable energy across all of our operations. At the same time, the bigger part of our footprint is in our supply chain and when our customers use our products, so we're going to leverage our as a service strategy HPE GreenLake and our energy efficient portfolio of products to reduce our scope three carbon emissions 42% over that 2020 baseline by 2030, and as with AMD as well, we have a goal to have 80% of our suppliers by spend have their own science based targets so that we know that their commitments are scientifically validated. And then the longer step, how we reach net zero by 2040 is by reducing our entire footprint scopes one, two and three by 90% and then balance the rest. >> Yeah. So again, I mean, you know 2030 is only eight years away, a little more. And so if, if, if you have a, a target of 2030 you have to figure out, okay, how are you going to get there? The, if you say, you know, longer, you know in the century you got this balloon payment, you know that you're thinking about. So, so great job, both, both companies and and really making more specific goals that we can quantify you know, year by year. All right, last question, John. Are there any resources that you can share to help customers, you know, get started maybe if they want to get started on their own sustainability strategy or maybe they're part way through and they just want to see how they're doing. >> Yeah, absolutely much of what Terry and I have talked about are available in an executive workbook that we wrote called "Six Steps For Implementing a Sustainable IT Strategy" and that workbook's freely available online and we'll post the URL so that you can get a copy of it. And we really developed that workbook because what we found is, although we had white papers on a variety of these topics, executives said we really need a little bit more specific steps to work through this and implement that sustainable IT strategy. And the reason for that, by the way is that so many of our customers when they start this sustainable IT journey, they take a a variety of tactical steps, but they don't have an overarching strategy that they're really trying to drive. And often they don't do things like bring all the stakeholders they need together. Often they make improvements without measuring their baseline first. So in this workbook, we lead them step by step how to gather the right resources internally, how to make the progress, talk about the progress in a credible way, and then make decisions on where they go next to drive efficiencies. >> Yeah, really that system thinking is, is, is critical. Guys. Thanks so much for your time. Really appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Okay guys, thanks for your time today. I really appreciate it. In a moment, We're going to toss it over to Lisa Martin out of our Palo Alto studio and bring in Dave Faffel, chief technology officer at WEI, along with John and Terry, to talk about what WEI is doing in this space to address sustainability challenges. You're watching Better Together Sustainability brought to you by HPE and AMD in collaboration with the CUBE, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (lilting music)

>> Hi, I'm Natalie Ehrlich and welcome to the AWS startup showcase presented by The Cube. We have an amazing lineup of great guests who will share their insights on the latest innovations and solutions and leveraging cloud scale data in AI, security and life sciences. And now we're joined by the co-founders and co-CEOs of The Cube, Dave Vellante and John Furrier. Thank you gentlemen for joining me. >> Hey Natalie. >> Hey Natalie. >> How are you doing. Hey John. >> Well, I'd love to get your insights here, let's kick it off and what are you looking forward to. >> Dave, I think one of the things that we've been doing on the cube for 11 years is looking at the signal in the marketplace. I wanted to focus on this because AI is cutting across all industries. So we're seeing that with cybersecurity and life sciences, it's the first time we've had a life sciences track in the showcase, which is amazing because it shows that growth of the cloud scale. So I'm super excited by that. And I think that's going to showcase some new business models and of course the keynotes Ali Ghodsi, who's the CEO Data bricks pushing a billion dollars in revenue, clear validation that startups can go from zero to a billion dollars in revenues. So that should be really interesting. And of course the top venture capitalists coming in to talk about what the enterprise dynamics are all about. And what about you, Dave? >> You know, I thought it was an interesting mix and choice of startups. When you think about, you know, AI security and healthcare, and I've been thinking about that. Healthcare is the perfect industry, it is ripe for disruption. If you think about healthcare, you know, we all complain how expensive it is not transparent. There's a lot of discussion about, you know, can everybody have equal access that certainly with COVID the staff is burned out. There's a real divergence and diversity of the quality of healthcare and you know, it all results in patients not being happy, and I mean, if you had to do an NPS score on the patients and healthcare will be pretty low, John, you know. So when I think about, you know, AI and security in the context of healthcare in cloud, I ask questions like when are machines going to be able to better meet or make better diagnoses than doctors? And that's starting. I mean, it's really in assistance putting into play today. But I think when you think about cheaper and more accurate image analysis, when you think about the overall patient experience and trust and personalized medicine, self-service, you know, remote medicine that we've seen during the COVID pandemic, disease tracking, language translation, I mean, there are so many things where the cloud and data, and then it can help. And then at the end of it, it's all about, okay, how do I authenticate? How do I deal with privacy and personal information and tamper resistance? And that's where the security play comes in. So it's a very interesting mix of startups. I think that I'm really looking forward to hearing from... >> You know Natalie one of the things we talked about, some of these companies, Dave, we've talked a lot of these companies and to me the business model innovations that are coming out of two factors, the pandemic is kind of coming to an end so that accelerated and really showed who had the right stuff in my opinion. So you were either on the wrong side or right side of history when it comes to the pandemic and as we look back, as we come out of it with clear growth in certain companies and certain companies that adopted let's say cloud. And the other one is cloud scale. So the focus of these startup showcases is really to focus on how startups can align with the enterprise buyers and create the new kind of refactoring business models to go from, you know, a re-pivot or refactoring to more value. And the other thing that's interesting is that the business model isn't just for the good guys. If you look at say ransomware, for instance, the business model of hackers is gone completely amazing too. They're kicking it but in terms of revenue, they have their own they're well-funded machines on how to extort cash from companies. So there's a lot of security issues around the business model as well. So to me, the business model innovation with cloud-scale tech, with the pandemic forcing function, you've seen a lot of new kinds of decision-making in enterprises. You seeing how enterprise buyers are changing their decision criteria, and frankly their existing suppliers. So if you're an old guard supplier, you're going to be potentially out because if you didn't deliver during the pandemic, this is the issue that everyone's talking about. And it's kind of not publicized in the press very much, but this is actually happening. >> Well thank you both very much for joining me to kick off our AWS startup showcase. Now we're going to go to our very special guest Ali Ghodsi and John Furrier will seat with him for a fireside chat and Dave and I will see you on the other side. >> Okay, Ali great to see you. Thanks for coming on our AWS startup showcase, our second edition, second batch, season two, whatever we want to call it it's our second version of this new series where we feature, you know, the hottest startups coming out of the AWS ecosystem. And you're one of them, I've been there, but you're not a startup anymore, you're here pushing serious success on the revenue side and company. Congratulations and great to see you. >> Likewise. Thank you so much, good to see you again. >> You know I remember the first time we chatted on The Cube, you weren't really doing much software revenue, you were really talking about the new revolution in data. And you were all in on cloud. And I will say that from day one, you were always adamant that it was cloud cloud scale before anyone was really talking about it. And at that time it was on premises with Hadoop and those kinds of things. You saw that early. I remember that conversation, boy, that bet paid out great. So congratulations. >> Thank you so much. >> So I've got to ask you to jump right in. Enterprises are making decisions differently now and you are an example of that company that has gone from literally zero software sales to pushing a billion dollars as it's being reported. Certainly the success of Data bricks has been written about, but what's not written about is the success of how you guys align with the changing criteria for the enterprise customer. Take us through that and these companies here are aligning the same thing and enterprises want to change. They want to be in the right side of history. What's the success formula? >> Yeah. I mean, basically what we always did was look a few years out, the how can we help these enterprises, future proof, what they're trying to achieve, right? They have, you know, 30 years of legacy software and, you know baggage, and they have compliance and regulations, how do we help them move to the future? So we try to identify those kinds of secular trends that we think are going to maybe you see them a little bit right now, cloud was one of them, but it gets more and more and more. So we identified those and there were sort of three or four of those that we kind of latched onto. And then every year the passes, we're a little bit more right. Cause it's a secular trend in the market. And then eventually, it becomes a force that you can't kind of fight anymore. >> Yeah. And I just want to put a plug for your clubhouse talks with Andreessen Horowitz. You're always on clubhouse talking about, you know, I won't say the killer instinct, but being a CEO in a time where there's so much change going on, you're constantly under pressure. It's a lonely job at the top, I know that, but you've made some good calls. What was some of the key moments that you can point to, where you were like, okay, the wave is coming in now, we'd better get on it. What were some of those key decisions? Cause a lot of these startups want to be in your position, and a lot of buyers want to take advantage of the technology that's coming. They got to figure it out. What was some of those key inflection points for you? >> So if you're just listening to what everybody's saying, you're going to miss those trends. So then you're just going with the stream. So, Juan you mentioned that cloud. Cloud was a thing at the time, we thought it's going to be the thing that takes over everything. Today it's actually multi-cloud. So multi-cloud is a thing, it's more and more people are thinking, wow, I'm paying a lot's to the cloud vendors, do I want to buy more from them or do I want to have some optionality? So that's one. Two, open. They're worried about lock-in, you know, lock-in has happened for many, many decades. So they want open architectures, open source, open standards. So that's the second one that we bet on. The third one, which you know, initially wasn't sort of super obvious was AI and machine learning. Now it's super obvious, everybody's talking about it. But when we started, it was kind of called artificial intelligence referred to robotics, and machine learning wasn't a term that people really knew about. Today, it's sort of, everybody's doing machine learning and AI. So betting on those future trends, those secular trends as we call them super critical. >> And one of the things that I want to get your thoughts on is this idea of re-platforming versus refactoring. You see a lot being talked about in some of these, what does that even mean? It's people trying to figure that out. Re-platforming I get the cloud scale. But as you look at the cloud benefits, what do you say to customers out there and enterprises that are trying to use the benefits of the cloud? Say data for instance, in the middle of how could they be thinking about refactoring? And how can they make a better selection on suppliers? I mean, how do you know it used to be RFP, you deliver these speeds and feeds and you get selected. Now I think there's a little bit different science and methodology behind it. What's your thoughts on this refactoring as a buyer? What do I got to do? >> Well, I mean let's start with you said RFP and so on. Times have changed. Back in the day, you had to kind of sign up for something and then much later you're going to get it. So then you have to go through this arduous process. In the cloud, would pay us to go model elasticity and so on. You can kind of try your way to it. You can try before you buy. And you can use more and more. You can gradually, you don't need to go in all in and you know, say we commit to 50,000,000 and six months later to find out that wow, this stuff has got shelf where it doesn't work. So that's one thing that has changed it's beneficial. But the second thing is, don't just mimic what you had on prem in the cloud. So that's what this refactoring is about. If you had, you know, Hadoop data lake, now you're just going to have an S3 data lake. If you had an on-prem data warehouse now you just going to have a cloud data warehouse. You're just repeating what you did on prem in the cloud, architected for the future. And you know, for us, the most important thing that we say is that this lake house paradigm is a cloud native way of organizing your data. That's different from how you would do things on premises. So think through what's the right way of doing it in the cloud. Don't just try to copy paste what you had on premises in the cloud. >> It's interesting one of the things that we're observing and I'd love to get your reaction to this. Dave a lot** and I have been reporting on it is, two personas in the enterprise are changing their organization. One is I call IT ops or there's an SRE role developing. And the data teams are being dismantled and being kind of sprinkled through into other teams is this notion of data, pipelining being part of workflows, not just the department. Are you seeing organizational shifts in how people are organizing their resources, their human resources to take advantage of say that the data problems that are need to being solved with machine learning and whatnot and cloud-scale? >> Yeah, absolutely. So you're right. SRE became a thing, lots of DevOps people. It was because when the cloud vendors launched their infrastructure as a service to stitch all these things together and get it all working you needed a lot of devOps people. But now things are maturing. So, you know, with vendors like Data bricks and other multi-cloud vendors, you can actually get much higher level services where you don't need to necessarily have lots of lots of DevOps people that are themselves trying to stitch together lots of services to make this work. So that's one trend. But secondly, you're seeing more data teams being sort of completely ubiquitous in these organizations. Before it used to be you have one data team and then we'll have data and AI and we'll be done. ' It's a one and done. But that's not how it works. That's not how Google, Facebook, Twitter did it, they had data throughout the organization. Every BU was empowered. It's sales, it's marketing, it's finance, it's engineering. So how do you embed all those data teams and make them actually run fast? And you know, there's this concept of a data mesh which is super important where you can actually decentralize and enable all these teams to focus on their domains and run super fast. And that's really enabled by this Lake house paradigm in the cloud that we're talking about. Where you're open, you're basing it on open standards. You have flexibility in the data types and how they're going to store their data. So you kind of provide a lot of that flexibility, but at the same time, you have sort of centralized governance for it. So absolutely things are changing in the market. >> Well, you're just the professor, the masterclass right here is amazing. Thanks for sharing that insight. You're always got to go out of date and that's why we have you on here. You're amazing, great resource for the community. Ransomware is a huge problem, it's now the government's focus. We're being attacked and we don't know where it's coming from. This business models around cyber that's expanding rapidly. There's real revenue behind it. There's a data problem. It's not just a security problem. So one of the themes in all of these startup showcases is data is ubiquitous in the value propositions. One of them is ransomware. What's your thoughts on ransomware? Is it a data problem? Does cloud help? Some are saying that cloud's got better security with ransomware, then say on premise. What's your vision of how you see this ransomware problem being addressed besides the government taking over? >> Yeah, that's a great question. Let me start by saying, you know, we're a data company, right? And if you say you're a data company, you might as well just said, we're a privacy company, right? It's like some people say, well, what do you think about privacy? Do you guys even do privacy? We're a data company. So yeah, we're a privacy company as well. Like you can't talk about data without talking about privacy. With every customer, with every enterprise. So that's obviously top of mind for us. I do think that in the cloud, security is much better because, you know, vendors like us, we're investing so much resources into security and making sure that we harden the infrastructure and, you know, by actually having all of this infrastructure, we can monitor it, detect if something is, you know, an attack is happening, and we can immediately sort of stop it. So that's different from when it's on prem, you have kind of like the separated duties where the software vendor, which would have been us, doesn't really see what's happening in the data center. So, you know, there's an IT team that didn't develop the software is responsible for the security. So I think things are much better now. I think we're much better set up, but of course, things like cryptocurrencies and so on are making it easier for people to sort of hide. There decentralized networks. So, you know, the attackers are getting more and more sophisticated as well. So that's definitely something that's super important. It's super top of mind. We're all investing heavily into security and privacy because, you know, that's going to be super critical going forward. >> Yeah, we got to move that red line, and figure that out and get more intelligence. Decentralized trends not going away it's going to be more of that, less of the centralized. But centralized does come into play with data. It's a mix, it's not mutually exclusive. And I'll get your thoughts on this. Architectural question with, you know, 5G and the edge coming. Amazon's got that outpost stringent, the wavelength, you're seeing mobile world Congress coming up in this month. The focus on processing data at the edge is a huge issue. And enterprises are now going to be commercial part of that. So architecture decisions are being made in enterprises right now. And this is a big issue. So you mentioned multi-cloud, so tools versus platforms. Now I'm an enterprise buyer and there's no more RFPs. I got all this new choices for startups and growing companies to choose from that are cloud native. I got all kinds of new challenges and opportunities. How do I build my architecture so I don't foreclose a future opportunity. >> Yeah, as I said, look, you're actually right. Cloud is becoming even more and more something that everybody's adopting, but at the same time, there is this thing that the edge is also more and more important. And the connectivity between those two and making sure that you can really do that efficiently. My ask from enterprises, and I think this is top of mind for all the enterprise architects is, choose open because that way you can avoid locking yourself in. So that's one thing that's really, really important. In the past, you know, all these vendors that locked you in, and then you try to move off of them, they were highly innovative back in the day. In the 80's and the 90's, there were the best companies. You gave them all your data and it was fantastic. But then because you were locked in, they didn't need to innovate anymore. And you know, they focused on margins instead. And then over time, the innovation stopped and now you were kind of locked in. So I think openness is really important. I think preserving optionality with multi-cloud because we see the different clouds have different strengths and weaknesses and it changes over time. All right. Early on AWS was the only game that either showed up with much better security, active directory, and so on. Now Google with AI capabilities, which one's going to win, which one's going to be better. Actually, probably all three are going to be around. So having that optionality that you can pick between the three and then artificial intelligence. I think that's going to be the key to the future. You know, you asked about security earlier. That's how people detect zero day attacks, right? You ask about the edge, same thing there, that's where the predictions are going to happen. So make sure that you invest in AI and artificial intelligence very early on because it's not something you can just bolt on later on and have a little data team somewhere that then now you have AI and it's one and done. >> All right. Great insight. I've got to ask you, the folks may or may not know, but you're a professor at Berkeley as well, done a lot of great work. That's where you kind of came out of when Data bricks was formed. And the Berkeley basically was it invented distributed computing back in the 80's. I remember I was breaking in when Unix was proprietary, when software wasn't open you actually had the deal that under the table to get code. Now it's all open. Isn't the internet now with distributed computing and how interconnects are happening. I mean, the internet didn't break during the pandemic, which proves the benefit of the internet. And that's a positive. But as you start seeing edge, it's essentially distributed computing. So I got to ask you from a computer science standpoint. What do you see as the key learnings or connect the dots for how this distributed model will work? I see hybrids clearly, hybrid cloud is clearly the operating model but if you take it to the next level of distributed computing, what are some of the key things that you look for in the next five years as this starts to be completely interoperable, obviously software is going to drive a lot of it. What's your vision on that? >> Yeah, I mean, you know, so Berkeley, you're right for the gigs, you know, there was a now project 20, 30 years ago that basically is how we do things. There was a project on how you search in the very early on with Inktomi that became how Google and everybody else to search today. So workday was super, super early, sometimes way too early. And that was actually the mistake. Was that they were so early that people said that that stuff doesn't work. And then 20 years later you were invented. So I think 2009, Berkeley published just above the clouds saying the cloud is the future. At that time, most industry leaders said, that's just, you know, that doesn't work. Today, recently they published a research paper called, Sky Computing. So sky computing is what you get above the clouds, right? So we have the cloud as the future, the next level after that is the sky. That's one on top of them. That's what multi-cloud is. So that's a lot of the research at Berkeley, you know, into distributed systems labs is about this. And we're excited about that. Then we're one of the sky computing vendors out there. So I think you're going to see much more innovation happening at the sky level than at the compute level where you needed all those DevOps and SRE people to like, you know, build everything manually themselves. I can just see the memes now coming Ali, sky net, star track. You've got space too, by the way, space is another frontier that is seeing a lot of action going on because now the surface area of data with satellites is huge. So again, I know you guys are doing a lot of business with folks in that vertical where you starting to see real time data acquisition coming from these satellites. What's your take on the whole space as the, not the final frontier, but certainly as a new congested and contested space for, for data? >> Well, I mean, as a data vendor, we see a lot of, you know, alternative data sources coming in and people aren't using machine learning< AI to eat out signal out of the, you know, massive amounts of imagery that's coming out of these satellites. So that's actually a pretty common in FinTech, which is a vertical for us. And also sort of in the public sector, lots of, lots of, lots of satellites, imagery data that's coming. And these are massive volumes. I mean, it's like huge data sets and it's a super, super exciting what they can do. Like, you know, extracting signal from the satellite imagery is, and you know, being able to handle that amount of data, it's a challenge for all the companies that we work with. So we're excited about that too. I mean, definitely that's a trend that's going to continue. >> All right. I'm super excited for you. And thanks for coming on The Cube here for our keynote. I got to ask you a final question. As you think about the future, I see your company has achieved great success in a very short time, and again, you guys done the work, I've been following your company as you know. We've been been breaking that Data bricks story for a long time. I've been excited by it, but now what's changed. You got to start thinking about the next 20 miles stair when you look at, you know, the sky computing, you're thinking about these new architectures. As the CEO, your job is to one, not run out of money which you don't have to worry about that anymore, so hiring. And then, you got to figure out that next 20 miles stair as a company. What's that going on in your mind? Take us through your mindset of what's next. And what do you see out in that landscape? >> Yeah, so what I mentioned around Sky company optionality around multi-cloud, you're going to see a lot of capabilities around that. Like how do you get multi-cloud disaster recovery? How do you leverage the best of all the clouds while at the same time not having to just pick one? So there's a lot of innovation there that, you know, we haven't announced yet, but you're going to see a lot of it over the next many years. Things that you can do when you have the optionality across the different parts. And the second thing that's really exciting for us is bringing AI to the masses. Democratizing data and AI. So how can you actually apply machine learning to machine learning? How can you automate machine learning? Today machine learning is still quite complicated and it's pretty advanced. It's not going to be that way 10 years from now. It's going to be very simple. Everybody's going to have it at their fingertips. So how do we apply machine learning to machine learning? It's called auto ML, automatic, you know, machine learning. So that's an area, and that's not something that can be done with, right? But the goal is to eventually be able to automate a way the whole machine learning engineer and the machine learning data scientist altogether. >> You know it's really fun and talking with you is that, you know, for years we've been talking about this inside the ropes, inside the industry, around the future. Now people starting to get some visibility, the pandemics forced that. You seeing the bad projects being exposed. It's like the tide pulled out and you see all the scabs and bad projects that were justified old guard technologies. If you get it right you're on a good wave. And this is clearly what we're seeing. And you guys example of that. So as enterprises realize this, that they're going to have to look double down on the right projects and probably trash the bad projects, new criteria, how should people be thinking about buying? Because again, we talked about the RFP before. I want to kind of circle back because this is something that people are trying to figure out. You seeing, you know, organic, you come in freemium models as cloud scale becomes the advantage in the lock-in frankly seems to be the value proposition. The more value you provide, the more lock-in you get. Which sounds like that's the way it should be versus proprietary, you know, protocols. The protocol is value. How should enterprises organize their teams? Is it end to end workflows? Is it, and how should they evaluate the criteria for these technologies that they want to buy? >> Yeah, that's a great question. So I, you know, it's very simple, try to future proof your decision-making. Make sure that whatever you're doing is not blocking your in. So whatever decision you're making, what if the world changes in five years, make sure that if you making a mistake now, that's not going to bite you in about five years later. So how do you do that? Well, open source is great. If you're leveraging open-source, you can try it out already. You don't even need to talk to any vendor. Your teams can already download it and try it out and get some value out of it. If you're in the cloud, this pay as you go models, you don't have to do a big RFP and commit big. You can try it, pay the vendor, pay as you go, $10, $15. It doesn't need to be a million dollar contract and slowly grow as you're providing value. And then make sure that you're not just locking yourself in to one cloud or, you know, one particular vendor. As much as possible preserve your optionality because then that's not a one-way door. If it turns out later you want to do something else, you can, you know, pick other things as well. You're not locked in. So that's what I would say. Keep that top of mind that you're not locking yourself into a particular decision that you made today, that you might regret in five years. >> I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your with our community and The Cube. And as always great to see you. I really enjoy your clubhouse talks, and I really appreciate how you give back to the community. And I want to thank you for coming on and taking the time with us today. >> Thanks John, always appreciate talking to you. >> Okay Ali Ghodsi, CEO of Data bricks, a success story that proves the validation of cloud scale, open and create value, values the new lock-in. So Natalie, back to you for continuing coverage. >> That was a terrific interview John, but I'd love to get Dave's insights first. What were your takeaways, Dave? >> Well, if we have more time I'll tell you how Data bricks got to where they are today, but I'll say this, the most important thing to me that Allie said was he conveyed a very clear understanding of what data companies are outright and are getting ready. Talked about four things. There's not one data team, there's many data teams. And he talked about data is decentralized, and data has to have context and that context lives in the business. He said, look, think about it. The way that the data companies would get it right, they get data in teams and sales and marketing and finance and engineering. They all have their own data and data teams. And he referred to that as a data mesh. That's a term that is your mock, the Gany coined and the warehouse of the data lake it's merely a node in that global message. It meshes discoverable, he talked about federated governance, and Data bricks, they're breaking the model of shoving everything into a single repository and trying to make that the so-called single version of the truth. Rather what they're doing, which is right on is putting data in the hands of the business owners. And that's how true data companies do. And the last thing you talked about with sky computing, which I loved, it's that future layer, we talked about multi-cloud a lot that abstracts the underlying complexity of the technical details of the cloud and creates additional value on top. I always say that the cloud players like Amazon have given the gift to the world of 100 billion dollars a year they spend in CapEx. Thank you. Now we're going to innovate on top of it. Yeah. And I think the refactoring... >> Hope by John. >> That was great insight and I totally agree. The refactoring piece too was key, he brought that home. But to me, I think Data bricks that Ali shared there and why he's been open and sharing a lot of his insights and the community. But what he's not saying, cause he's humble and polite is they cracked the code on the enterprise, Dave. And to Dave's points exactly reason why they did it, they saw an opportunity to make it easier, at that time had dupe was the rage, and they just made it easier. They was smart, they made good bets, they had a good formula and they cracked the code with the enterprise. They brought it in and they brought value. And see that's the key to the cloud as Dave pointed out. You get replatform with the cloud, then you refactor. And I think he pointed out the multi-cloud and that really kind of teases out the whole future and landscape, which is essentially distributed computing. And I think, you know, companies are starting to figure that out with hybrid and this on premises and now super edge I call it, with 5G coming. So it's just pretty incredible. >> Yeah. Data bricks, IPO is coming and people should know. I mean, what everybody, they created spark as you know John and everybody thought they were going to do is mimic red hat and sell subscriptions and support. They didn't, they developed a managed service and they embedded AI tools to simplify data science. So to your point, enterprises could buy instead of build, we know this. Enterprises will spend money to make things simpler. They don't have the resources, and so this was what they got right was really embedding that, making a building a managed service, not mimicking the kind of the red hat model, but actually creating a new value layer there. And that's big part of their success. >> If I could just add one thing Natalie to that Dave saying is really right on. And as an enterprise buyer, if we go the other side of the equation, it used to be that you had to be a known company, get PR, you fill out RFPs, you had to meet all the speeds. It's like going to the airport and get a swab test, and get a COVID test and all kinds of mechanisms to like block you and filter you. Most of the biggest success stories that have created the most value for enterprises have been the companies that nobody's understood. And Andy Jazz's famous quote of, you know, being misunderstood is actually a good thing. Data bricks was very misunderstood at the beginning and no one kind of knew who they were but they did it right. And so the enterprise buyers out there, don't be afraid to test the startups because you know the next Data bricks is out there. And I think that's where I see the psychology changing from the old IT buyers, Dave. It's like, okay, let's let's test this company. And there's plenty of ways to do that. He illuminated those premium, small pilots, you don't need to go on these big things. So I think that is going to be a shift in how companies going to evaluate startups. >> Yeah. Think about it this way. Why should the large banks and insurance companies and big manufacturers and pharma companies, governments, why should they burn resources managing containers and figuring out data science tools if they can just tap into solutions like Data bricks which is an AI platform in the cloud and let the experts manage all that stuff. Think about how much money in time that saves enterprises. >> Yeah, I mean, we've got 15 companies here we're showcasing this batch and this season if you call it. That episode we are going to call it? They're awesome. Right? And the next 15 will be the same. And these companies could be the next billion dollar revenue generator because the cloud enables that day. I think that's the exciting part. >> Well thank you both so much for these insights. Really appreciate it. AWS startup showcase highlights the innovation that helps startups succeed. And no one knows that better than our very next guest, Jeff Barr. Welcome to the show and I will send this interview now to Dave and John and see you just in the bit. >> Okay, hey Jeff, great to see you. Thanks for coming on again. >> Great to be back. >> So this is a regular community segment with Jeff Barr who's a legend in the industry. Everyone knows your name. Everyone knows that. Congratulations on your recent blog posts we have reading. Tons of news, I want to get your update because 5G has been all over the news, mobile world congress is right around the corner. I know Bill Vass was a keynote out there, virtual keynote. There's a lot of Amazon discussion around the edge with wavelength. Specifically, this is the outpost piece. And I know there is news I want to get to, but the top of mind is there's massive Amazon expansion and the cloud is going to the edge, it's here. What's up with wavelength. Take us through the, I call it the power edge, the super edge. >> Well, I'm really excited about this mostly because it gives a lot more choice and flexibility and options to our customers. This idea that with wavelength we announced quite some time ago, at least quite some time ago if we think in cloud years. We announced that we would be working with 5G providers all over the world to basically put AWS in the telecom providers data centers or telecom centers, so that as their customers build apps, that those apps would take advantage of the low latency, the high bandwidth, the reliability of 5G, be able to get to some compute and storage services that are incredibly close geographically and latency wise to the compute and storage that is just going to give customers this new power and say, well, what are the cool things we can build? >> Do you see any correlation between wavelength and some of the early Amazon services? Because to me, my gut feels like there's so much headroom there. I mean, I was just riffing on the notion of low latency packets. I mean, just think about the applications, gaming and VR, and metaverse kind of cool stuff like that where having the edge be that how much power there. It just feels like a new, it feels like a new AWS. I mean, what's your take? You've seen the evolutions and the growth of a lot of the key services. Like EC2 and SA3. >> So welcome to my life. And so to me, the way I always think about this is it's like when I go to a home improvement store and I wander through the aisles and I often wonder through with no particular thing that I actually need, but I just go there and say, wow, they've got this and they've got this, they've got this other interesting thing. And I just let my creativity run wild. And instead of trying to solve a problem, I'm saying, well, if I had these different parts, well, what could I actually build with them? And I really think that this breadth of different services and locations and options and communication technologies. I suspect a lot of our customers and customers to be and are in this the same mode where they're saying, I've got all this awesomeness at my fingertips, what might I be able to do with it? >> He reminds me when Fry's was around in Palo Alto, that store is no longer here but it used to be back in the day when it was good. It was you go in and just kind of spend hours and then next thing you know, you built a compute. Like what, I didn't come in here, whether it gets some cables. Now I got a motherboard. >> I clearly remember Fry's and before that there was the weird stuff warehouse was another really cool place to hang out if you remember that. >> Yeah I do. >> I wonder if I could jump in and you guys talking about the edge and Jeff I wanted to ask you about something that is, I think people are starting to really understand and appreciate what you did with the entrepreneur acquisition, what you do with nitro and graviton, and really driving costs down, driving performance up. I mean, there's like a compute Renaissance. And I wonder if you could talk about the importance of that at the edge, because it's got to be low power, it has to be low cost. You got to be doing processing at the edge. What's your take on how that's evolving? >> Certainly so you're totally right that we started working with and then ultimately acquired Annapurna labs in Israel a couple of years ago. I've worked directly with those folks and it's really awesome to see what they've been able to do. Just really saying, let's look at all of these different aspects of building the cloud that were once effectively kind of somewhat software intensive and say, where does it make sense to actually design build fabricate, deploy custom Silicon? So from putting up the system to doing all kinds of additional kinds of security checks, to running local IO devices, running the NBME as fast as possible to support the EBS. Each of those things has been a contributing factor to not just the power of the hardware itself, but what I'm seeing and have seen for the last probably two or three years at this point is the pace of innovation on instance types just continues to get faster and faster. And it's not just cranking out new instance types because we can, it's because our awesomely diverse base of customers keeps coming to us and saying, well, we're happy with what we have so far, but here's this really interesting new use case. And we needed a different ratio of memory to CPU, or we need more cores based on the amount of memory, or we needed a lot of IO bandwidth. And having that nitro as the base lets us really, I don't want to say plug and play, cause I haven't actually built this myself, but it seems like they can actually put the different elements together, very very quickly and then come up with new instance types that just our customers say, yeah, that's exactly what I asked for and be able to just do this entire range of from like micro and nano sized all the way up to incredibly large with incredible just to me like, when we talk about terabytes of memory that are just like actually just RAM memory. It's like, that's just an inconceivably large number by the standards of where I started out in my career. So it's all putting this power in customer hands. >> You used the term plug and play, but it does give you that nitro gives you that optionality. And then other thing that to me is really exciting is the way in which ISVs are writing to whatever's underneath. So you're making that, you know, transparent to the users so I can choose as a customer, the best price performance for my workload and that that's just going to grow that ISV portfolio. >> I think it's really important to be accurate and detailed and as thorough as possible as we launch each one of these new instance types with like what kind of processor is in there and what clock speed does it run at? What kind of, you know, how much memory do we have? What are the, just the ins and outs, and is it Intel or arm or AMD based? It's such an interesting to me contrast. I can still remember back in the very very early days of back, you know, going back almost 15 years at this point and effectively everybody said, well, not everybody. A few people looked and said, yeah, we kind of get the value here. Some people said, this just sounds like a bunch of generic hardware, just kind of generic hardware in Iraq. And even back then it was something that we were very careful with to design and optimize for use cases. But this idea that is generic is so, so, so incredibly inaccurate that I think people are now getting this. And it's okay. It's fine too, not just for the cloud, but for very specific kinds of workloads and use cases. >> And you guys have announced obviously the performance improvements on a lamb** does getting faster, you got the per billing, second billings on windows and SQL server on ECE too**. So I mean, obviously everyone kind of gets that, that's been your DNA, keep making it faster, cheaper, better, easier to use. But the other area I want to get your thoughts on because this is also more on the footprint side, is that the regions and local regions. So you've got more region news, take us through the update on the expansion on the footprint of AWS because you know, a startup can come in and these 15 companies that are here, they're global with AWS, right? So this is a major benefit for customers around the world. And you know, Ali from Data bricks mentioned privacy. Everyone's a privacy company now. So the huge issue, take us through the news on the region. >> Sure, so the two most recent regions that we announced are in the UAE and in Israel. And we generally like to pre-announce these anywhere from six months to two years at a time because we do know that the customers want to start making longer term plans to where they can start thinking about where they can do their computing, where they can store their data. I think at this point we now have seven regions under construction. And, again it's all about customer trice. Sometimes it's because they have very specific reasons where for based on local laws, based on national laws, that they must compute and restore within a particular geographic area. Other times I say, well, a lot of our customers are in this part of the world. Why don't we pick a region that is as close to that part of the world as possible. And one really important thing that I always like to remind our customers of in my audience is, anything that you choose to put in a region, stays in that region unless you very explicitly take an action that says I'd like to replicate it somewhere else. So if someone says, I want to store data in the US, or I want to store it in Frankfurt, or I want to store it in Sao Paulo, or I want to store it in Tokyo or Osaka. They get to make that very specific choice. We give them a lot of tools to help copy and replicate and do cross region operations of various sorts. But at the heart, the customer gets to choose those locations. And that in the early days I think there was this weird sense that you would, you'd put things in the cloud that would just mysteriously just kind of propagate all over the world. That's never been true, and we're very very clear on that. And I just always like to reinforce that point. >> That's great stuff, Jeff. Great to have you on again as a regular update here, just for the folks watching and don't know Jeff he'd been blogging and sharing. He'd been the one man media band for Amazon it's early days. Now he's got departments, he's got peoples on doing videos. It's an immediate franchise in and of itself, but without your rough days we wouldn't have gotten all the great news we subscribe to. We watch all the blog posts. It's essentially the flow coming out of AWS which is just a tsunami of a new announcements. Always great to read, must read. Jeff, thanks for coming on, really appreciate it. That's great. >> Thank you John, great to catch up as always. >> Jeff Barr with AWS again, and follow his stuff. He's got a great audience and community. They talk back, they collaborate and they're highly engaged. So check out Jeff's blog and his social presence. All right, Natalie, back to you for more coverage. >> Terrific. Well, did you guys know that Jeff took a three week AWS road trip across 15 cities in America to meet with cloud computing enthusiasts? 5,500 miles he drove, really incredible I didn't realize that. Let's unpack that interview though. What stood out to you John? >> I think Jeff, Barr's an example of what I call direct to audience a business model. He's been doing it from the beginning and I've been following his career. I remember back in the day when Amazon was started, he was always building stuff. He's a builder, he's classic. And he's been there from the beginning. At the beginning he was just the blog and it became a huge audience. It's now morphed into, he was power blogging so hard. He has now support and he still does it now. It's basically the conduit for information coming out of Amazon. I think Jeff has single-handedly made Amazon so successful at the community developer level, and that's the startup action happened and that got them going. And I think he deserves a lot of the success for AWS. >> And Dave, how about you? What is your reaction? >> Well I think you know, and everybody knows about the cloud and back stop X** and agility, and you know, eliminating the undifferentiated, heavy lifting and all that stuff. And one of the things that's often overlooked which is why I'm excited to be part of this program is the innovation. And the innovation comes from startups, and startups start in the cloud. And so I think that that's part of the flywheel effect. You just don't see a lot of startups these days saying, okay, I'm going to do something that's outside of the cloud. There are some, but for the most part, you know, if you saw in software, you're starting in the cloud, it's so capital efficient. I think that's one thing, I've throughout my career. I've been obsessed with every part of the stack from whether it's, you know, close to the business process with the applications. And right now I'm really obsessed with the plumbing, which is why I was excited to talk about, you know, the Annapurna acquisition. Amazon bought and a part of the $350 million, it's reported, you know, maybe a little bit more, but that isn't an amazing acquisition. And the reason why that's so important is because Amazon is continuing to drive costs down, drive performance up. And in my opinion, leaving a lot of the traditional players in their dust, especially when it comes to the power and cooling. You have often overlooked things. And the other piece of the interview was that Amazon is actually getting ISVs to write to these new platforms so that you don't have to worry about there's the software run on this chip or that chip, or x86 or arm or whatever it is. It runs. And so I can choose the best price performance. And that's where people don't, they misunderstand, you always say it John, just said that people are misunderstood. I think they misunderstand, they confused, you know, the price of the cloud with the cost of the cloud. They ignore all the labor costs that are associated with that. And so, you know, there's a lot of discussion now about the cloud tax. I just think the pace is accelerating. The gap is not closing, it's widening. >> If you look at the one question I asked them about wavelength and I had a follow up there when I said, you know, we riff on it and you see, he lit up like he beam was beaming because he said something interesting. It's not that there's a problem to solve at this opportunity. And he conveyed it to like I said, walking through Fry's. But like, you go into a store and he's a builder. So he sees opportunity. And this comes back down to the Martine Casada paradox posts he wrote about do you optimize for CapEx or future revenue? And I think the tell sign is at the wavelength edge piece is going to be so creative and that's going to open up massive opportunities. I think that's the place to watch. That's the place I'm watching. And I think startups going to come out of the woodwork because that's where the action will be. And that's just Amazon at the edge, I mean, that's just cloud at the edge. I think that is going to be very effective. And his that's a little TeleSign, he kind of revealed a little bit there, a lot there with that comment. >> Well that's a to be continued conversation. >> Indeed, I would love to introduce our next guest. We actually have Soma on the line. He's the managing director at Madrona venture group. Thank you Soma very much for coming for our keynote program. >> Thank you Natalie and I'm great to be here and will have the opportunity to spend some time with you all. >> Well, you have a long to nerd history in the enterprise. How would you define the modern enterprise also known as cloud scale? >> Yeah, so I would say I have, first of all, like, you know, we've all heard this now for the last, you know, say 10 years or so. Like, software is eating the world. Okay. Put it another way, we think about like, hey, every enterprise is a software company first and foremost. Okay. And companies that truly internalize that, that truly think about that, and truly act that way are going to start up, continue running well and things that don't internalize that, and don't do that are going to be left behind sooner than later. Right. And the last few years you start off thing and not take it to the next level and talk about like, not every enterprise is not going through a digital transformation. Okay. So when you sort of think about the world from that lens. Okay. Modern enterprise has to think about like, and I am first and foremost, a technology company. I may be in the business of making a car art, you know, manufacturing paper, or like you know, manufacturing some healthcare products or what have you got out there. But technology and software is what is going to give me a unique, differentiated advantage that's going to let me do what I need to do for my customers in the best possible way [Indistinct]. So that sort of level of focus, level of execution, has to be there in a modern enterprise. The other thing is like not every modern enterprise needs to think about regular. I'm competing for talent, not anymore with my peers in my industry. I'm competing for technology talent and software talent with the top five technology companies in the world. Whether it is Amazon or Facebook or Microsoft or Google, or what have you cannot think, right? So you really have to have that mindset, and then everything flows from that. >> So I got to ask you on the enterprise side again, you've seen many ways of innovation. You've got, you know, been in the industry for many, many years. The old way was enterprises want the best proven product and the startups want that lucrative contract. Right? Yeah. And get that beach in. And it used to be, and we addressed this in our earlier keynote with Ali and how it's changing, the buyers are changing because the cloud has enabled this new kind of execution. I call it agile, call it what you want. Developers are driving modern applications, so enterprises are still, there's no, the playbooks evolving. Right? So we see that with the pandemic, people had needs, urgent needs, and they tried new stuff and it worked. The parachute opened as they say. So how do you look at this as you look at stars, you're investing in and you're coaching them. What's the playbook? What's the secret sauce of how to crack the enterprise code today. And if you're an enterprise buyer, what do I need to do? I want to be more agile. Is there a clear path? Is there's a TSA to let stuff go through faster? I mean, what is the modern playbook for buying and being a supplier? >> That's a fantastic question, John, because I think that sort of playbook is changing, even as we speak here currently. A couple of key things to understand first of all is like, you know, decision-making inside an enterprise is getting more and more de-centralized. Particularly decisions around what technology to use and what solutions to use to be able to do what people need to do. That decision making is no longer sort of, you know, all done like the CEO's office or the CTO's office kind of thing. Developers are more and more like you rightly said, like sort of the central of the workflow and the decision making process. So it'll be who both the enterprises, as well as the startups to really understand that. So what does it mean now from a startup perspective, from a startup perspective, it means like, right. In addition to thinking about like hey, not do I go create an enterprise sales post, do I sell to the enterprise like what I might have done in the past? Is that the best way of moving forward, or should I be thinking about a product led growth go to market initiative? You know, build a product that is easy to use, that made self serve really works, you know, get the developers to start using to see the value to fall in love with the product and then you think about like hey, how do I go translate that into a contract with enterprise. Right? And more and more what I call particularly, you know, startups and technology companies that are focused on the developer audience are thinking about like, you know, how do I have a bottom up go to market motion? And sometime I may sort of, you know, overlap that with the top down enterprise sales motion that we know that has been going on for many, many years or decades kind of thing. But really this product led growth bottom up a go to market motion is something that we are seeing on the rise. I would say they're going to have more than half the startup that we come across today, have that in some way shape or form. And so the enterprise also needs to understand this, the CIO or the CTO needs to know that like hey, I'm not decision-making is getting de-centralized. I need to empower my engineers and my engineering managers and my engineering leaders to be able to make the right decision and trust them. I'm going to give them some guard rails so that I don't find myself in a soup, you know, sometime down the road. But once I give them the guard rails, I'm going to enable people to make the decisions. People who are closer to the problem, to make the right decision. >> Well Soma, what are some of the ways that startups can accelerate their enterprise penetration? >> I think that's another good question. First of all, you need to think about like, Hey, what are enterprises wanting to rec? Okay. If you start off take like two steps back and think about what the enterprise is really think about it going. I'm a software company, but I'm really manufacturing paper. What do I do? Right? The core thing that most enterprises care about is like, hey, how do I better engage with my customers? How do I better serve my customers? And how do I do it in the most optimal way? At the end of the day that's what like most enterprises really care about. So startups need to understand, what are the problems that the enterprise is trying to solve? What kind of tools and platform technologies and infrastructure support, and, you know, everything else that they need to be able to do what they need to do and what only they can do in the most optimal way. Right? So to the extent you are providing either a tool or platform or some technology that is going to enable your enterprise to make progress on what they want to do, you're going to get more traction within the enterprise. In other words, stop thinking about technology, and start thinking about the customer problem that they want to solve. And the more you anchor your company, and more you anchor your conversation with the customer around that, the more the enterprise is going to get excited about wanting to work with you. >> So I got to ask you on the enterprise and developer equation because CSOs and CXOs, depending who you talk to have that same answer. Oh yeah. In the 90's and 2000's, we kind of didn't, we throttled down, we were using the legacy developer tools and cloud came and then we had to rebuild and we didn't really know what to do. So you seeing a shift, and this is kind of been going on for at least the past five to eight years, a lot more developers being hired yet. I mean, at FinTech is clearly a vertical, they always had developers and everyone had developers, but there's a fast ramp up of developers now and the role of open source has changed. Just looking at the participation. They're not just consuming open source, open source is part of the business model for mainstream enterprises. How is this, first of all, do you agree? And if so, how has this changed the course of an enterprise human resource selection? How they're organized? What's your vision on that? >> Yeah. So as I mentioned earlier, John, in my mind the first thing is, and this sort of, you know, like you said financial services has always been sort of hiring people [Indistinct]. And this is like five-year old story. So bear with me I'll tell you the firewall story and then come to I was trying to, the cloud CIO or the Goldman Sachs. Okay. And this is five years ago when people were still like, hey, is this cloud thing real and now is cloud going to take over the world? You know, am I really ready to put my data in the cloud? So there are a lot of questions and conversations can affect. The CIO of Goldman Sachs told me two things that I remember to this day. One is, hey, we've got a internal edict. That we made a decision that in the next five years, everything in Goldman Sachs is going to be on the public law. And I literally jumped out of the chair and I said like now are you going to get there? And then he laughed and said like now it really doesn't matter whether we get there or not. We want to set the tone, set the direction for the organization that hey, public cloud is here. Public cloud is there. And we need to like, you know, move as fast as we realistically can and think about all the financial regulations and security and privacy. And all these things that we care about deeply. But given all of that, the world is going towards public load and we better be on the leading edge as opposed to the lagging edge. And the second thing he said, like we're talking about like hey, how are you hiring, you know, engineers at Goldman Sachs Canada? And he said like in hey, I sort of, my team goes out to the top 20 schools in the US. And the people we really compete with are, and he was saying this, Hey, we don't compete with JP Morgan or Morgan Stanley, or pick any of your favorite financial institutions. We really think about like, hey, we want to get the best talent into Goldman Sachs out of these schools. And we really compete head to head with Google. We compete head to head with Microsoft. We compete head to head with Facebook. And we know that the caliber of people that we want to get is no different than what these companies want. If you want to continue being a successful, leading it, you know, financial services player. That sort of tells you what's going on. You also talked a little bit about like hey, open source is here to stay. What does that really mean kind of thing. In my mind like now, you can tell me that I can have from given my pedigree at Microsoft, I can tell you that we were the first embraces of open source in this world. So I'll say that right off the bat. But having said that we did in our turn around and said like, hey, this open source is real, this open source is going to be great. How can we embrace and how can we participate? And you fast forward to today, like in a Microsoft is probably as good as open source as probably any other large company I would say. Right? Including like the work that the company has done in terms of acquiring GitHub and letting it stay true to its original promise of open source and community can I think, right? I think Microsoft has come a long way kind of thing. But the thing that like in all these enterprises need to think about is you want your developers to have access to the latest and greatest tools. To the latest and greatest that the software can provide. And you really don't want your engineers to be reinventing the wheel all the time. So there is something available in the open source world. Go ahead, please set up, think about whether that makes sense for you to use it. And likewise, if you think that is something you can contribute to the open source work, go ahead and do that. So it's really a two way somebody Arctic relationship that enterprises need to have, and they need to enable their developers to want to have that symbiotic relationship. >> Soma, fantastic insights. Thank you so much for joining our keynote program. >> Thank you Natalie and thank you John. It was always fun to chat with you guys. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> John we would love to get your quick insight on that. >> Well I think first of all, he's a prolific investor the great from Madrona venture partners, which is well known in the tech circles. They're in Seattle, which is in the hub of I call cloud city. You've got Amazon and Microsoft there. He'd been at Microsoft and he knows the developer ecosystem. And reason why I like his perspective is that he understands the value of having developers as a core competency in Microsoft. That's their DNA. You look at Microsoft, their number one thing from day one besides software was developers. That was their army, the thousand centurions that one won everything for them. That has shifted. And he brought up open source, and .net and how they've embraced Linux, but something that tele before he became CEO, we interviewed him in the cube at an Xcel partners event at Stanford. He was open before he was CEO. He was talking about opening up. They opened up a lot of their open source infrastructure projects to the open compute foundation early. So they had already had that going and at that price, since that time, the stock price of Microsoft has skyrocketed because as Ali said, open always wins. And I think that is what you see here, and as an investor now he's picking in startups and investing in them. He's got to read the tea leaves. He's got to be in the right side of history. So he brings a great perspective because he sees the old way and he understands the new way. That is the key for success we've seen in the enterprise and with the startups. The people who get the future, and can create the value are going to win. >> Yeah, really excellent point. And just really quickly. What do you think were some of our greatest hits on this hour of programming? >> Well first of all I'm really impressed that Ali took the time to come join us because I know he's super busy. I think they're at a $28 billion valuation now they're pushing a billion dollars in revenue, gap revenue. And again, just a few short years ago, they had zero software revenue. So of these 15 companies we're showcasing today, you know, there's a next Data bricks in there. They're all going to be successful. They already are successful. And they're all on this rocket ship trajectory. Ali is smart, he's also got the advantage of being part of that Berkeley community which they're early on a lot of things now. Being early means you're wrong a lot, but you're also right, and you're right big. So Berkeley and Stanford obviously big areas here in the bay area as research. He is smart, He's got a great team and he's really open. So having him share his best practices, I thought that was a great highlight. Of course, Jeff Barr highlighting some of the insights that he brings and honestly having a perspective of a VC. And we're going to have Peter Wagner from wing VC who's a classic enterprise investors, super smart. So he'll add some insight. Of course, one of the community session, whenever our influencers coming on, it's our beat coming on at the end, as well as Katie Drucker. Another Madrona person is going to talk about growth hacking, growth strategies, but yeah, sights Raleigh coming on. >> Terrific, well thank you so much for those insights and thank you to everyone who is watching the first hour of our live coverage of the AWS startup showcase for myself, Natalie Ehrlich, John, for your and Dave Vellante we want to thank you very much for watching and do stay tuned for more amazing content, as well as a special live segment that John Furrier is going to be hosting. It takes place at 12:30 PM Pacific time, and it's called cracking the code, lessons learned on how enterprise buyers evaluate new startups. Don't go anywhere.

>>Ly from San Diego, California. It's the cube covering to clock in cloud native con brought to you by red hat, the cloud native computing foundation and its ecosystem Marsh. >>Welcome back to San Diego. I'm Stewman and my cohost is Justin Warren. And coming back to our program, one of our cube alumni and be coach hair of this coupon cloud native con prion Lyles who is also a senior staff engineer at VMware. Brian, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me on. And do you want to have a shout out of course to a Vicky Chung who is your coach hair. She has been doing a lot of work. She came to our studio ahead of it to do a preview and unfortunately she's supposed to be sitting here but a little under the weather. And we know there was nothing worse than, you know, doing travel and you know, fighting an illness. But she's a little sick today, but um, uh, she knows that we'll, we'll, we'll still handle it. Alright, so Brian, 12,000 people here in attendance. >>Uh, more keynotes than most of us can keep a track of. So, first of all, um, congratulations. Uh, things seem to be going well other than maybe, uh, choosing the one day of the year that it rained in, uh, you know, San Diego, uh, which we we can't necessarily plan for. Um, I'd love you to bring us a little bit insight as to some of the, the, the goals and the themes that, uh, you know, you and Vicki and the, the, the, the, the community we're, we're looking at for, for this coupon. So you're right, let's help thousand people and so many sponsors and so many ideas and so many projects, it's really hard to have a singular theme. But a few months ago we came up with was, well, if, if Kubernetes in this cloud software make us better or basically advances, then we can do more advanced things. >>And then our end users can be more advanced. And it was like a three pong thing. And if you look, go back and look at our keynotes, he would say, Hey, we're looking at our software. Hey, we're looking at an amazing things that we did, especially cat by that five G keynote yesterday. And the notice that we had, it was me talking about how we could look forward and then, and then notice we had in talking about security and then we had Walmart and target talking about how they're using it and, and that was all on purpose. It's trying to tell a story that people can go back and look at. Yeah, I liked the, the message that you were, you were trying to put out there around how we need to make Kubernetes a little bit easier, but how we need to change the way that we talk about it as well. >>So maybe you could, uh, fill us in a little bit more. Let's say, unfortunately, Kubernetes is not going to get an easier, um, that's like saying we wish Linux was easier to use. Um, Linux has a huge ABI and API interface. It's not going to get easier. So what we need to do is start doing what we did with Linux and Linux is the Colonel. Um, this should be some Wars happened over the years and you notice some distributions are easier to use. Another. So if you use the current fedora or you the current Ubuntu or even like mint, it's getting really easy to use. And I'm not suggesting that we need Kubernetes distributions. That's actually the furthest thing, but we do need to work on building our ecosystem on top of Kubernetes because I mentioned like CIS CD, um, observability security audit management and who knows what else we need to start thinking about those things as pretty much first-class items. >>Just as important as Kubernetes. Kubernetes is the Colonel. Yeah. Um, in the keynotes, there's, as you said, there's such a broad landscape here. Uh, uh, I've heard some horror stories that people like, Oh, Hey, where do I start? And they're like, Oh, here's the CNCF landscape. And they're like, um, I can't start there. There's too much there. Uh, you, you picked out and highlighted, um, some of the lesser known pieces. Uh, th there's some areas that are a little bit mature. What, what are some of the more exciting things that you've seen going on right now, your system and this ecosystem? >> Um, I'm not even gonna. I highlighted open policy agent as a, as an interesting product. I don't know if it's the right answer, actually. I kind of wish there was a competitor just so I could determine if it was the right answer. >>But things like OPA and then like open telemetry, um, two projects coming together and having even bigger goals. Uh, let's make a severability easy. What I would also like to see is a little bit more, more maturity and the workflow space. So, you know, the CII and CD space. And I know with Argo and flux merging to Argo flux, uh, that's very interesting. And just a little bit of a tidbit is that I, I also co-chair the CNCF SIG application delivery, uh, special interest group, but, uh, we're thinking about that, that space right there. So I would love to see more in the workflow space, but then also I would like to see more security tools and not just old school check, check, check, but, um, think about what Aqua security is doing. And I'm, I don't know if they're now Snick or S, I don't know how to say it, but, um, there's, there's companies out there rethinking security. >>Let's do that. Yeah. I spoke to Snick a couple of days ago and it's, I'm pretty sure it's sneak. Apparently it stands for, so now you know, which that was news to me that, so now I know interesting. But they have a lot of good projects coming up. Yeah. You mentioned that the ecosystem and that you like that there's competitors for particular projects to kind of explore which way is the right way of doing things. We have a lot of exhibitors here and we have a lot of competitors out there trying to come into this ecosystem. It seems to actually be growing even bigger. Are we going to see a period of consolidation where some of these competing options, we decided that actually no, we don't want to use that. We want to go over here. I mean according to crossing the chasm, yes, but we need to figure out where we are on the maturity chart for, for the whole ecosystem. >>So I think in a healthy, healthy ecosystem, people don't succeed and products go away, but then what we see is in maybe six months or a year or two later, those same founders are out there creating new products. So not everyone's going to win on their first shot. So I think that's fine because, you know, we've all had failures in the past, but we're still better for those failures. Yeah, I've heard it described as a kind of Cambridge and explosion at the moment. So hopefully we don't get an asteroid that comes in and, uh, and hopefully it is out cause yeah. Um, one of the things really, really noticed is, uh, if you went back a year or even two years ago, we were talking about very much the infrastructure, the building blocks of what we had. Uh, I really noticed front and center, especially in the keynote here, talking a lot about the workload. >>You're talking about the application. We're talking about, uh, you know, much more up the stack and uh, from kind of that application, uh, uh, piece down, even, uh, some friends of mine that were new to this ecosystem was like, I don't understand what language they're talking. I'm like, well, they're talking to the app devs. That's why, you know, they're not speaking to you. Is that, was that intentional? >> Well, I mean for me it is because I like to speak to the app devs and I realized that infrastructure comes and goes. I've been doing this for decades now and I've seen the rise of Cisco as, as a networking platform and I've seen their ups and downs. I've worked in security. But what I know is fundamentals are, are just that. And I would like to speak to the developers now because we need to get back to the developers because they create the value. >>I mean the only people who win at selling via our selling Kubernetes are vendors of Kubernetes. So, you know, I work for one and then there's the clouds and then there's other companies as well. So the thing that stays constant are people are building applications and ultimately if Kubernetes and the cloud native landscape can't take care of those application developers remember happened, remember, um, OpenStack, and not in like a negative way, but remember OpenStack, it got to be so hard that people couldn't even focus on what gave value. >> Unlike obvious fact leaves on it. It's still being used a lot in, in service providers and so on. So technology never really goes away completely. It just may fade off and live in a corner and then we move on to whatever's the next newest and greatest thing and then end up reinventing ourselves and having to do all of the same problems again. >>It feels a little bit like that with sometimes the Kubernetes way where haven't we already sold this? Linux is still here, Linux is still, and Linux is still growing. I mean Linux is over Virgin five right now and Linux is adapting and bringing in new things in a Colonel and moving things out to the user land. Kubernetes needs to figure out how to do that as well. Yeah, no Brian, I think it's a great point. You know, I'm an infrastructure guy and we know the only reason infrastructure exists is to serve up that application. What Matt managed to the business, my application, my data. Um, you and your team have some open source projects that you're involved in. Maybe give us a little bit about right? So oxen is a, so let me tell you the quick story. Joe Beda and I talked about how do we approach developers where they are. >>And one thing came up really early in that conversation was, well, why don't we just tell developers where things are broken? So come to find out using Kubernetes object model and a little bit of computer science, like just a tiny little bit. You can actually build this graph where everything is connected and then all you need to do then is determine if for any type of object, is it working or is it not working? So now look at this. Now I can actually show you what's broken and what's not broken. And what makes octane a little bit different is that we also wrapped it with a dashboard that shows everything inside of a Kubernetes cluster. And then we made it extensible. And just, just a crazy thing. I made a plugin API one weekend because I'm like, Oh, that would be kind of cool. And just at this conference alone, nine to 10 people to walk up to me and said, Oh, um, we use oxygen and we use your plugin system. >>And now we've done things that I can't imagine, and I think I might've said this, I know I've said it somewhere recently, but the hallmark of a good platform is when people start creating things you could never imagine on it. And that's what Linux did. That's what Kubernetes is doing. And octane is doing it in the small right now. So kudos to me and me really and my team that's really exciting. So fry, Oakton, Coobernetti's and Tansu both are seven sided. Uh, was, was that, that, that uh, uh, moving to, uh, to, to eight, uh, so no marketing. Okay. And I don't profess to understand what marketing is. Someone just named it. And I said, you know what, I'm a developer. I don't really mind w as long as you can call it something, that's fine. I do like the idea that we should evolve the number of platonic solids. >>There's another answer too. So if you think about what seven is, it, um, people were thinking ahead and said, well, someone could actually take that and use it as another connotation. So I was like, all right, we'll just get out of that. That's why it's called octane, but still nautical theme. Okay, great. Brian. So much going on. You know, even outside of this facility, there's things going on. Uh, any hidden gems that just the, you know, our audience that's watching or people that we'll look back at this event and say, Hey, you know, here's some cool little things there. I mean, they hit the Twitters, I'm sure they'll see the therapy dogs and whatnot, but you know, for the people geeking out, some of those hidden gems that you'd want to share. Um, some of the hidden gems or I'll, I'll throw up to, um, watch what these end-user companies are doing and watch what, like the advanced companies like Walmart and target and capital one are doing. >>I just think there's a lot of lessons to be learned and think about this. They have a crazy amount of money. They're actually investing time in this. It might be a good idea. And other hidden gyms are, are companies that are embracing the, the extension model of Kubernetes through custom resource definitions and building things. So the other day I had the tests on, on the stage, and they're not the only example of this, but running my sequel and Coobernetti's and it pretty much works all well, let's see what we can run with this. So I think that there's going to be a lot more companies that are going to invest in this space and, and, and actually deliver on these types of products. And, and I think that's a very interesting space. Yeah. We, we spoke to Bloomberg just before and uh, we talked to the tests, we spoke to Subaru from the test yesterday. >>Uh, seeing how people are using Kubernetes to build these systems, which can then be built upon themselves. Right. I think that's, that's probably for me, one of the more interesting things is that we end up with a platform and then we build more platforms on top of it. But we, we're creating these higher levels of abstraction, which actually gets us closer to just being able to do the work that we want to do as developers. I don't need to think about how all of the internals work, which again to your keynote today is like, I don't want to write machine code and I just want to solve this sort of business problem. If we can embed that into the, into this ecosystem, then it just makes everyone's lives much, much easier. So you basically, that is my secret. I'm really, I know people hate it for attractions and they say they will, but no one hates an abstraction. >>You don't actually turn the crank in your motor to make the car run. You press the accelerator and it goes. Yeah. Um, so we need to figure out the correct attractions and we do that through iteration and failure, but I'm liking that people are pushing the boundaries and uh, like Joe beta and Kelsey Hightower said is that Kubernetes is a platform of platforms. It is basically an API for writing API APIs. Let's take advantage of that and write API APIs. All right. Well, Brian, thank you. Thank Vicky. Uh, please, uh, you know, share, congratulations to the team for everything done here. And while you might be stepping down as, or we do hope you'll come and join us back on the cube at a future event. No, I enjoyed talking to you all, so thank you. Alright, thanks so much Brian for Justin Warren we'll be back with more of our water wall coverage. CubeCon cloud native con here in San Diego. Thanks for watching the queue.

(upbeat music) >> Live, from Copenhagen, Denmark. It's theCUBE. Covering Nutanix.NEXT 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.NEXT. We are in Copenhagen, Denmark. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, hosting alongside Stu Miniman. We're joined by Fran Scott. She is a science and engineering presenter. Thanks so much for coming on the show. >> No worries at all. It's good to be here actually. >> So you are a well known face to UK audiences. You are a three times BAFTA nominated science and engineering presenter. Well-known. >> Give her a winner. (laughter) >> You're the Susan Lucci of science. You are the pyrotechnician and you lead the Christmas lectures at the Royal Institute. >> Yeah. I head up the demonstration team at the Royal Institution. We come up with all the science demonstrations, so the visual ways to show the science ideas. I head up that team. We build the demonstrations and we show science to people rather than just tell them about it. >> So mostly, you have a very cool job. (chuckles) >> I love my job. >> I want to hear how you got into this. What was it? What inspired you? >> Oh gosh, two very different questions. In terms of what inspired me, I was very lucky enough to be able to pursue what I love. And I came from a family where answers weren't given out willy-nilly. If you didn't know something, it wasn't a bad thing. It was like a, "Let's look it up. Let's look it up." I grew up in an atmosphere where you could be anything because you didn't have to know what you had to be. You could just have a play with it. I love being hands-on and making things, and I grew up on a farm, so I was quite practical. But I also loved science. Went to university, did neuroscience at university. I enjoyed the learning part but, where I was in terms of the science hierarchy, I found out that once you actually go into a lab, there's a lot of lab work and not much learning straight away, and it was the learning that I loved. And so my friends actually got me into science communication. They took me to the science museum and they were like, "Fran, you will love this." And I was like, "Will I?" And I was like, "You are so right." I got a job at the science museum in London by just approaching someone on that visit and being like, "How do I get a job here?" And they were like, "Well, you got to do this, this, this." I was like, "I can do that." I got the job there and I realized I loved science demonstrations and building stuff. Eventually I just combined that love of science and being practical together. And now I produce and write, build science props and science stage shows. And then it became a thing. (laughter) Hand it to me, I love it. >> So Fran, our audience is very much the technology community. Very supportive of STEM initiatives. Give us a little flavor as to some of the things you're working on. Where is there need for activities? >> I suppose the biggest example of that would be a show that I did a few years ago where there was a big push for new coders within the UK. And I was getting approached time and time again for visual ways to show computer coding. Or programming, as we used to call it back in the day. I didn't have an answer because then, I wasn't a coder. So I was like, "Well, I'll learn. And then I'll figure out a demonstration because this is what I do. So why don't I do it on coding?" And so yeah, I set about. I learnt code. And I came up with an explosions based coding show. Error 404. And we toured around the country with that. Google picked it up and it was a huge success just because it was something that people wanted to learn about. And people were stumped as to how to show coding visually. But because this is what we do day in and day out with different subjects, we could do it with coding just like we do it with physics. >> What do you think is the key? A lot of your audience is kids. >> Yes and family audiences. >> So what is the key to getting people excited about science? >> I think science itself is exciting if people are allowed to understand how brilliant it is. I think some of the trouble comes from when people take the step too big, and so you'd be like, "Hang on but, why is that cool? Why?" Because they don't under... Well they would understand if they were fed to them in a way that they get it. The way I say it is, anyone can understand anything as long as you make the steps to get there small enough. Sometimes the steps are too big for you to understand the amazingness of that thing that's happening. And if you don't understand that amazingness, of course you're going to lose interest. Because everyone around you is going, "Ah, this is awesome, this is awesome!" And you're like, "What? What's awesome?" I think it's up to us as adults and as educators to just try and not patronize the children, definitely not, but just give them those little steps so they can really see the beauty of what it is that we're in awed by. >> One of the things that is a huge issue in the technology industry is the dearth of women in particular, in the ranks of technology and then also in leadership roles. As a woman in science and also showing little girls everywhere all over the UK what it is to be a woman in science, that's a huge responsibility. How do you think of that, and how are you in particular trying to speak to them and say, "You can do this"? >> I've done a lot of research onto this because this was the reason I went into what I'm into. I worked a lot of the time behind the scenes just trying to get the science right. And then I realized there was no one like me doing science presenting. The girl was always the little bit of extra on the side and it was the man who was the knowledgeable one that was showing how to do the science. And the woman was like, "Oh, well that's amazing." And I was like, "Hang on. Let's try and flip this." And it just so happened that I didn't care if it was me. I just wanted a woman to do it. And it just happened that that was me. But now that I'm in that position, one, well I run a business as well. I run a business where we can train other new presenters to do it. It's that giving back. So yes, I train other presenters. I also make sure there's opportunity for other presenters. But I also try, and actually I work with a lot of TV shows, and work on their language. And work on the combination of like, "Okay, so you've got a man doing that, you got women doing this. Let's have a look at more diversity." And just trying to show the kids that there are people like them doing science. There's that classic phrase that, "You can't be what you can't see." So yes, it comes responsibility, but also there's a lot of fun. And if you can do the science, be intelligent, be fun, and just be normal and just enjoy your job, then people go, "Hang on," whether they're a boy or a girl, they go, "I want a bit of that," in terms of, "I want that as my job." And so by showing that, then I'm hopefully encouraging more people to do it. But it's about getting out and encouraging the next generation to do it as well. >> Fran, you're going to be moderating a panel in the keynote later this afternoon. Give our audience a little bit. What brought you to this event? What's going into it? And for those that don't get to see it live, what they're missing. >> I am one lucky woman. So the panel I'm moderating, it's all about great design and I am a stickler for great design. As a scientist, prop-builder, person that does engineering day in and day out, I love something when it's perfectly designed. If there is such a thing as a perfect design. So this panel that we've got, Tobias Manisfitz, Satish Ramachandran, and Peter Kreiner from Noma. And so they all come with their own different aspect of design. Satish works at Nutanix. Peter works at Noma, the restaurant here in Copenhagen. And Tobias, he designs the visual effects for things such as Game of Thrones and Call of Duty. And so yes, they each design things for... They're amazing at their level but in such a different way and for a different audience. I'm going to be questioning them on what is great design to them and what frictionless design means and just sort of picking their amazing brains. >> I love that fusion of technology and design as something they talked about in the keynote this morning. Think of Apple or Tesla, those two things coming together. I studied engineering and I feel like there was a missing piece of my education to really go into the design. Something I have an appreciation for, that I've seen in my career. But it's something special to bring those together. >> Yeah. I think care is brought in mostly because yes, one, I love design. But also I've worked a lot with LEGO. And so I was brought in to be the engineering judge on the UK version of LEGO Masters. Apparently, design in children's builds is the same as questioning the owner of NOMA restaurant. (chuckles) >> So what do you think? Obviously you're doing the panel tomorrow. What is in your mind the key to great design? Because as you said, you're a sucker for anything that is just beautiful and seamless and intuitive. And we all know what great design is when we hold it in our hands or look at it. But it is this very ineffable quality of something that... >> So the panel's later today actually. But in terms of great design, yes, we all know when we have great design. But the trouble comes in creating good design. I think the key, and it's always obvious when you say it out loud, but it's that hand in hand partnership with aesthetics and practicality. You can't have something that's just beautiful. But you can't have something that just works. You need to have it as a mixture of both. It's those engineers talking with the designers, the designers talking with the engineers. The both of them talking with the consumers. And from that, good design comes. But don't forget, good design means they're for different people as well. >> What are some of the most exciting things you're working on, because you are a professional pyrotechnician. We've never had someone like this on theCUBE before. This is amazing. This is a first time ever. >> I was strictly told no fire. >> Yes, thank you. We appreciate that. >> Well at the moment, as I said at the beginning, I'm lucky enough to head up the demo team at the Royal Institution. We are just heading into our Christmas lectures. Now if you don't know these Christmas lectures, they were the first science ever done to a juvenile audience. Back in 1825 was when they started. It's a tradition in the UK and so this year, we're just starting to come up with the demonstrations for them. And this year they presented by Hannah Fry, and so they're going to be on maths and algorithms and how that makes you lucky or does it make you lucky? We've been having some really fun meetings. I can't give away too much, but there definitely be some type of stunt involved. That's all I can say. But there's going to be a lot of building. I really need to get back, get my sore out, get stuff made. >> Excellent. And who is the scientist you most admire? >> Oh my word. >> Living or dead? >> Who is the scientist I most admire? (sighs) I do have... Oh gosh, this is... >> The wheels are churning. >> It's a cheesy one though, but Da Vinci. Just for his multi-pronged approach and the fact that he had so much going on in his brain that he couldn't even get everything down on paper. He'd half draw something and then something else would come to him. >> I had the opportunity of interviewing Walter Isaacson last year, and he loved... It was the, as we talked about, the science and the design and the merging of those. But reading that biography of him, what struck me is he never finished anything because it would never meet the perfection in his mind to get it done. I've seen that in creative people. They'll start things and then they'll move on to the next thing and there. Me as a engineering by training, it's like no, no. You need to finish work. Manufacturing from standpoint, work in progress is the worst thing you could have out there. >> He would be a rubbish entrepreneur. (chuckling) >> Right, but we're so lucky to have had his brain. >> Exactly. I think that's the thing. I think it gives us an insight into what the brain is capable of and what you can design without even knowing you're designing something. >> Well Fran, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. This was so fun. >> Thanks for having me. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of .NEXT. (upbeat music)

from San Mateo its the cube covering scaler innovation day brought to you by scaler Livan welcome to the special innovation day with the cube here in San Mateo California heart of Silicon Valley John for the cube our next guest as Steve Newman the co-founder scaler congratulations thanks for having us you guys got a great company here Thanks yeah go ahead glad to have you here so tell the story what's the backstory you guys found it interesting pedigree of founders all tech entrepreneurs tech tech savvy tech athletes as we say tell the backstory how'd it all start and had it all come together so I also traced the story back to I was part of the team that built the original Google Docs and a lot of the early people here at scaler either were part of that Google Docs team or you know they're people we met while we were at Google and really scaler is an outgrowth of the it's a solution to problems we were having trying to run that system at Google you know Google Docs of course became part of a whole ecosystem with Google Drive and Google sheets and there's that you know all these applications working together it's a very complicated system and keeping that humming behind the scenes became a very complicated problem well congratulate ago Google Docs is used by a lot of people so been great success scale is different though you guys are taking a different approach than the competition what's unique about it can you share kind of like the history of where it's going and where it came from and where it's going yeah so you know maybe it'd be helpful like just to kind of set the context a little bit to the blackboard yeah so you know I you know I talked about it's kind of probably put a little flesh on what I was saying about you know there's a very complicated system that we're trying to run in the whole Google Drive ecosystem too there are all these trends in the industry nowadays you know the move to the cloud and micro services and kubernetes and serverless and can use deployment is all everything like these are all great innovations makes you know people are building more complex applications they're evolving faster but it's making things a lot more complicated and to make that concrete imagine that you're running an e-commerce site back in the calm web 1.0 era so you're gonna have a web server maybe a patchy you've got a MySQL database behind that with your inventory and your shopping carts you may be an email gateway and some kind of payment gateway and that's about it that's your that's your system each one of these pieces involved you know going to Fry's buying a computer driving it over the data center slotting it into a rack you know a lot of sweat went into every one of those boxes but there's only about four boxes it's your whole system if you wanted to go faster you threw more hardware at it more ram exactly and like and you know not literally through but literally carried you literally brought in more hardware and so you know took a lot of work just to do the you know that simple system fast forward a couple of decades if you're running uh running an e-commerce site today well you know you're certainly not seeing the inside of a data center you know stripe will run the payments for you you know somebody's on will run the database server and say you know like this is much much you know you know one guy can get this going in an afternoon literally but nobody's running this today this is not a competitive operation today if you're an e-commerce today you also have personalization and advertising based on the surf service history or purchase history and you know there's a separate flow for gifts and you know then printing the you know interfacing to your delivery service and and you know you've got 150 blocks on this diagram and maybe your engineering team doesn't have to be so much larger because each one of those box is so much easier to run but it's still a complicated system and trying to actually understand what's working what's not working why isn't it working and and tracking that down and fixing it this is the challenge day and this and this is where we come in and that's the main focus for today is that you can figure it out but the complexity of the moving parts is the problem exactly so you know and so you see oh you know 10% of the time that somebody comes in to open their shopping cart it fails well you know the problem pops out here but the the root cause turns out to be a problem with your database system back here and and figuring that out you know that's that's the challenge okay so with cloud technology economics has changed how is cloud changing the game so it's interesting you know changes changes the game for our customers and it changes the game for us so for a customer you know kind of we touched on this a little bit like things are a lot easier people run stuff for you you know you're not running your own hardware you're not you know you're often you're not even running your own software you're just consuming a service it's a lot easier to scale up and down so you can do much more ambitious things and you can move a lot faster but you have these complexity problems for us what it presents an an economy of scale opportunity so to you know we step in to help you on the telemetry side what's happening in my system why is it happening when did it start happening what's causing it to happen that all takes a lot of data log data other kinds of data so every one of those components is generating data and by the way for our customers know that they're running a hundred and 50 services instead of four they are generating a lot more data and so traditionally if you're trying to manage that yourself running your own log management cluster or whatever solution you know it's a real challenge to you as you scale up as your system gets more complex you've got so much data to manage we've taken an approach where we're able to service all of our customers out of a single centralized cluster meaning we get an economy of scale each one of our customers gets to work with a basically log management engine that's to scale to our scale rather than the individual customers scale so the older versions of log management had the same kind of complexity challenges you just drew a lot ecommerce as the data types increase so does their complexity is that so the complexity increases and but you also get into just a data scale problem you know suddenly you're generating terabytes of data but you don't you know the you only want to devote a certain budget to the computing resources that are gonna process that data because we can share our processing across all of our customers we we fundamentally changed economics it's a little bit like when you go and run a search and Google thousands literally thousands of servers in that tenth of a second that Google is processing the query 3,000 servers on the Google site may have been involved those aren't your 3,000 servers you know you're sharing those with you know 50 million other people in your data center region but but for a millisecond there those 3,000 servers are all for you and that's that's a big part of how Google is able to give such amazing results so quickly but in still economically yeah economically for them and that's basically on a smaller scale that's what we're doing is you know taking the same hardware and making it all of it available to all of the customers people talk about metrics as the solution to scaling problems is that correct so this is a really interesting question so you know metrics are great you know basically the you know if you look up the definition of a metric it's basically just a measurement on number and you know and it's a great way to boil down you know so I've had 83 million people visit my website today and they did 163 million things in this add mirror and that's you can't make sense of that you can boil it down to you know this is the amount of traffic on the site this was the error rate this was the average response time so these you know these are great it's a great summarization to give you an overall flavor of what's going on the challenge with metrics is that they tend to measure they can be a great way to measure your problems your symptoms sites up it's down it's fast its slow when you want to get to then to the cause of that problem all right exactly why is the site now and I know something's wrong with the database but what's the error message and what you know what's the exact detail here and a metric isn't going to give that to you and in particular when people talk about metrics they tend to have in mind a specific approach to metrics where this flood of events and data very early is distilled down let's count the number of requests measure the average time and then throw away the data and keep the metric that's efficient you know throwing away data means you don't have to pay to manage the data and it gives you this summary but then as soon as you want to drill down you don't have any more data so if you want to look at a different metric one that you didn't set up in advance you can't do it and if you need to go into the the details you can't do an interesting story about that you know when you were at Google you mentioned you the problem statements came from Google but one of things I love about Google is they really kind of nailed the sre model and they clearly decoupled roles you know developers and site reliability engineers who are essentially one-to-many relationship with all the massive hardware and that's a nice operating model it's had a lot of efficiencies was tied together but you guys are kind of saying in a way that does developers use the cloud they become their own sres in a way because this cloud can give them that kind of Google like scale and in smaller ways not like Google size but but that's similar dynamic where there's a lot of compute and a lot of things happening on behalf of the application or the engineers developer as developers become the operator through their role what challenges do they have and what do you see that happening because that's interesting trim because as applications become larger cloud can service them at scale they then become their own sres what yeah well how does that roll out most how do you see that yes I mean and so this is something we see happening at more and more of our customers and one of the implications of that is you have all these people these developers who are now responsible for operations but but they're not special you know they're not that specialist SRE team they're specialists in developing code not in operations they're you know they they minor in operations and and they don't think of it as their real job you know that's the distraction something goes wrong all right they're they're called upon to help fix it they want to get it done as quickly as possible so they can get back to their real job so they're not gonna make the same mental investment in becoming an expert at operations and an expert at the operations tools and the telemetry tools you know they're not gonna be a log management expert on metrics expert um and so they need they need tools that have a gentle learning Kurt have a gentle learning curve and are gonna make it easy for them to get Ian's not really know what they're doing on this side of things but find an answer solve the problem and get back out and that's kind of a concept you guys have of speed to truth exactly so and we mean a couple of things by that sort of most literally we our tool is it's a high performance solution you you hand us your terabytes of log data you ask some question you know what's the trend on this error in this service over the last day and we you know we give you a quick answer Big Data scan through a give you a quick answer but really it's you know that's just part of the overall chain of events which goes from the you know the developer with a problem until they have a solution so they they have to figure out even how to approach the problem what question to ask us you know they have to pose the query and in our interface and so we've done a lot of work to to simplify that learning curve where instead of a complicated query language you can click a button get a graph and then start breaking down that just visually break that down which okay here's the error rate but how does that break down by server or user or whatever dimension and be able to drill down and explore in a you know very kind of straightforward way how would you describe the culture at scaler I mean you guys been around for a while you still growing fast growing startup you haven't done the B round yet got any you guys self-funded it got customers early they pushed you again now 300 plus customers what's the culture like here so you know it's been this has been a fun company to build in part because you know we're into you know the the heart of this company is the engineering team our customers our engineers so you know we're kind of the kind of the same group and that keeps the you know it kind of keeps the inside in the outside very close together and I think that's been a part of the culture we've built is you know we all know why we're building this what it's for you know we use scalar extensively internally but you but even you know even if we weren't we're it's the kind of thing we've used in the past and we're gonna use in the future and so you know I think people are really excited here because you know we understand why and you have an opinion of the future on how it should roll out what's the big problem statement you guys are solving as a company what's it how would you boil that down if asked so by a customer and engineer out there what real problem are you solving that's core problem big problem that's gonna be helping me you know at the end of the day it's giving people the confidence to keep you know building these kind of complicated systems and move quickly because because and this is the business pressure everyone is under you know whatever business you're in it has a digital element and your competitors are in the same you know doing the same thing and they are building these sophisticated systems and they're adding functionality and they're moving quickly you need to be able to do the same thing but it's easy then to get tangled up in this complexity so at the end of the day you know we're giving people the ability to understand those systems and and and the functionality and the software's getting stronger and stronger more complicated with service meshes and micro services as applications start to have these the ability to stand up and tear down services on the fly that's so annoying and they'll even wield more data exact you get more data it gets more complicated actually if you don't mind there's a little story I'd like to tell so hold on just will I clear this out this is going back back to Google and again you know kind of part of the inspiration of you know how he came to build scalar and this doesn't be a story of frustration of you know probably get ourselves into that operation and motivation yep so we were we were working on this project it was building a file system that could tie together Google Docs Google sheets Google Drive Google photos and the black diagram looks kind of like the thing I just erased but there was one particular problem we had that took us months and literally months and months and months to track down you know you'd like to solve a problem in a few minutes or a few hours but this one took months and it had to do with the the indexing system so you have all these files in Google Drive you wanna be able to search and so we had modeled out how we were gonna build this or this search engine you'd think you know Google searches a solve problem but actually so Google web search is four things the whole world can see there's also like Gmail search which is four things that only one person can see so it's lots of separate little indexes those are both solve problems at Google Google Drive is for things a few people can see you share it with your coworker or your whoever and it's actually a very different problem and but we looked at the statistics and we found that the average document our average file was shared with about 1.1 people in other words things were mostly private or maybe you share with one or two people so we said we're just gonna make if something's shared to three people we're just gonna make three copies of it and then now we have just the Gmail problem each copy is for one person and we did the math on how how much work is this going to be to build these indexes and in round numbers we were looking at something like at the time this would be so much larger now but at the time we had maybe one billion documents and files in the system each one was shared to about 1.1 people maybe it was a thousand words long on average and maybe it would change be edited once per day on average so we had about a trillion word updates per day if you multiply all that together and so we allocate it we put in a request and purchase machines to handle that much traffic and we started bringing up the system and immediately collapsed it was completely overloaded and we checked our numbers and we check them again yeah 1.1 about a billion whatever and but then work into the system with just way beyond them and we looked at our metrics so you know measuring the number documents measuring each of these things all the metrics looked right to make a month's long story short these metrics and averages were hiding some funny business there turned out there was this type of use case read of occasional documents that were shared to thousands of people and one of there was a specific example it was the signup sheet for the Google company picnic this is a spreadsheet it was shared to about 5,000 people so it wasn't the whole company but you know a big chunk of Mountain View which meant it was I don't know let's say 20 thousand words long because it had you know the name and a couple other things for each person this is one document but shared to 5,000 people and you know during the period people were signing up maybe it was changing a couple thousand times per day so you multiply out just this document and you get 200 billion word updates for that one document in a day where we're estimating a trillion for the whole earth and so there was something like a hundred documents in this kid Google was hamstringing your own thing we were hamstrung our own thing there were about a hundred examples like this so now we're up to 20 trillion and like that was the whole problem these hundred files and we would have never found that until we got way down into the details of the the logs which in this two months just took month so because we didn't have the tools because we didn't have scaler yeah and I think this is the kind of anomaly you might see with Web Services evolving with micro services which someone has an API interface with some other SAS as apps start to rely on each other this is a new dynamic we're seeing as SLA s are also tied together so the question is whose fault is it exactly you have to whose fault is it and also things get so much more varied now you know again web 1.0 e-commerce you buy a thing you buy a thing that's all the same now you're building a social media site or whatever you've got 8 followers you've got 8 million followers this person has three movies rented on Netflix this person has three thousand movies everything's different and so then you get these funny things hiding yeah you're flying blind if you don't get all the data exposed it's like it's like you know blind person trying to read Braille as we heard earlier see if thanks so much for sharing the insight great story I'm John furry you're here for the q4 innovation day at scalers headquarters thanks for watching

live from Las Vegas it's the queue covering Adobe summit 2019 brought to you by Adobe welcome back everyone live cube coverage here in Las Vegas for Adobe summit 2019 I'm John fry with Jeff Frick two days of wall-to-wall coverage our next guest is Josh Van Tonder group product marketing manager to Dobby thanks for joining us thanks pleasure you're managing the marketing of the products of experienced manager within the platform great event here really the keynote we have agreed a good view good review this morning it's a great platform a lot of elements to it journey it's the Holy Grail that's super interesting and I mean I think you can see the Holy Grail you know it's it's just great actually hearing from the customers right I think it comes to life when you hear the stories they're telling kind of the solutions they're bringing a market on top of it it's it's it's very exhilarating for the product teams to see it all in action and coming to life through the customers you know we cover hundreds of events a year we hear all the stories everyone talks about innovation it's really happening here is gadot bees transform to cloud years ago so now you start to see Marketo Magento coming through the mix full platform architecture open API is open data this is the beginning of a sea change we started to seeing customers having the end-to-end experience where each functional element can do its job and connect with the data this is progressive that's great stuff it's great stuff so so where where are we what's going on with the product what's what's going on how our customers dealing with this because you got Best Buy up there forty million emails personalized yep personalization at scale yep I mean I think the the crux of what's going on is I think a lot of the organizations I mean essentially the name of the game is delivering personalized experiences right I mean how do you how do you get someone to have that moment that moment of truth where they they get to see and interact with the brand in a way that's relevant to that right I mean I think we all we all respond that way I think you know even statistics show that our own statistics show that so we've done some surveys of other consumers um it's 51 percent say I'm much more likely to buy something from a if it's personalized and 49 1% are gonna say look I'm gonna be more loyal to you because it is relevant to me which makes sense I think you and I would probably agree that if it's it's the nail on the head I want to bring up a point that the in the keynote the CEO said he said people don't buy products they buy experiences okay and this is now kind of become the the kind of the mission of all companies just seeing a big frame with direct-to-consumer yeah in all verticals not just B to B to C directly consumer so now companies can go direct to the consumer so how does that change like the ite equation because the old days were you know Bill stack and rack servers load some soft yeah sell it to a customer but now you're dealing with a user experience model that's everywhere yeah that's an interesting basis I mean a the crux of the issue is under the underneath that is it takes contents and data together to kind of deliver the great experience and at the end of the day IT is front and center as the enabler strategically for how that gets delivered I think what we've been seeing is they're they're sort of I would say four key pillars elements that that they've been using to turn their portfolio to be a strategic advantage so one is how do you manage omni-channel right I mean I guess it's getting further with your message so it's if that's essentially an omni-channel thing the other is being faster about getting to market with that message so you know maybe how does cloud play into that how does how do you enable the marketing teams and then I think the last thing and this is this is one that's been a hot topic is where does where does AI simultaneously help drive that better experience so I think those are sort of the pieces we're seeing coming into play from an IT standpoint where they they have a lot of a lot of influence to advance the overall business mission you know Jeff and I were talking about our intro about how the cloud has really in changed the game with Adobe and the customer base you know the old cloud conversation around DevOps and around the building applications work waterfall processes are gonna be dismantled by agility process based processes you started to see that now with content and creative yet we're agility and feed and data are now the new thing so a Content developer is kind of like a software developer for software you guys are providing cloud tech capabilities for content developers yeah creative developers that's right kind of metaphor there what's how do you view that how do customers react to that that's interesting I mean I think you you know usually you bring up the one side is cloud agility and the corollary to that it's just overall content velocity if you will right so I think from a cloud standpoint the the model would be you know how do i how do I get to market faster and in more geographies how to get to more geographies how do I you know support rolling out new infrastructure or new products more more quickly on the cloud infrastructure and then how do I deal with growth right how do i ami system if you look at it from the content lens which i think is what you're getting at there's a similar paradigm in terms of this agility so from an IT standpoint how do you enable someone that's on the marketing team to discover their content to reuse it more effectively and then deploy it more effectively and there are many pieces to the ité equation that fundamentally empower if you will let that velocity in terms of being able to manage discover and and frankly optimize that content as you get it out there so it's an interesting thing that I think we've been doing a lot of looking at a lot of product innovation specifically from an Adobe standpoint in terms of actually enabling that that product velocity which I mean the platform out there basically is the architecture for the platform to do that yes elements so this is just a perfect storm that's come together finally in terms of capability because we've talked about 360 view of the customer ad nauseam and and we've talked about omni-channel for many many many years but I think the execution on those was was was certainly lagging behind the vision but is it now because of the integration of the platform is it because the Big Data architectures is it because now you know it's it's it's you're reading real-time data on ingest you're not going back this normal data what is it this now and abling just actually execute on the vision that we've been talking about for years yeah I mean I think there there are multiple pieces kind of coming together that are helping so I think you know as you said I think in some sense what you're getting at is there there were historically many silos of how these things have historically been managed and what we're seeing is is a trend towards centralizing that information because ultimately you can drive more insights by looking at it and it's just you get more velocity for reusing it so you know to look at it from let's just take an example of the V omni-channel so if we look at it purely from delivering content what we as say an IOT device comes to market or you have these more advanced single page apps on the web page or an Alexa right what we saw is a rise of separate systems in some sense to manage those but now we're seeing a trend where gosh if we were to have all that content in one place if we had all the analytics behind that in one place we can more effectively personalize the customer journey across each of those and that's effectively what you're hearing a lot of today is can I have sort of a centralized but hybrid model that supports through api's getting that information to different touch points and then the data engine that will allow the personalization across each of that those touch points and that I think is the fundamentally the part that's unlocking a lot of value and is it the acceptance of the of the AI and and kind of the machine learning that's going to help you do it because you can't you can create 40 million emails with the people right you mean you have to have automation and you have to have some intelligence behind that you just can't do it manually so is that where we finally kind of broken through so that I can send 40 million different emails in one campaign with some intelligence and some logic behind who's got what yeah I think you hit the nail and I had that right I mean I think if personalization is the name of the game and you're interacting on more touch points with more pieces of contents how do you get it right for each audience and so that's where AI is it's just adds tremendous a tremendous velocity and help for businesses to get that right so I think you can think of it almost this pipeline to deliver the experience so on one hand how do you create that experience hey I can play a role how do you manage it internally hey I can play a role in terms of discovering the assets and we're using it delivering it it can play a role and actually getting the right content out there I'll give you some examples of that in a second but and then the final piece is it has you know the actual optimization of that right so to give you some examples what we've seen happening is you can literally use the AI the the data on interactions of how people interacting across your system and actually create interfaces on-the-fly for specific segments of audiences right so instead of say I as a marketer creating that interface you know using web development or tooling why not have the system actually recompose what is being served up you know maybe a certain layout with multiple columns works for some audiences maybe it just needs to be one banner with a certain type of image a I can actually do that for you by looking at the analytics of you know how do you react to certain things versus me and drawing corollaries so there's a lot of police places along that chain where AI is the impact is productivity obviously because you know the right to queries or figure out what's come in that's presented to you that's good that's kind of the impact of the marketer right it's about yeah it's about scaling the market or right I mean I think that's one of the big challenges from a business standpoint is you know your team's never big enough to serve every person every single customer as a marketer so that's where a I essentially unlocks that that scale it gives you a marketing team of thousands where you may only have a team of a hundred or twenty depending on the size of the order to tune that up in terms of a customer I've got an Adobe I'm Adobe customer I go the Adobe cloud experience cloud how do I tune this up I mean is there a way that you guys have figured out that allows them to kind of get it up and running fast without a lot of complexity yeah that's like that's a good question it's I mean that's actually it's really critical because that from a marketing standpoint you know IT can bring to bear a number of different technologies but unless they're easy to adopt you're not gonna go anywhere so I think the trick is almost giving marketers the easy button so I think that's that's where a lot of the magic and AI happens is you pick one specific problem you know in Adobe's case we pick a problem where we know we have a lot of intelligence about creative assets and we have visibility and how those are being used so if we bring those together we can solve specific problems about discovering content or how we deliver that optimally but the wit to answer your specific question it's almost as though we try to give an easy button for the marketer right so I feed you a bunch of say audience segments and then I plug you into my my analytics data press a button and I ideally it's gonna just figure it out for me write it and and then test if it works that's the key thing is once you get in a market test it right and and it can do that for you and I don't think there's enough you know kind of highlight on that where you know those dramatic before to do a/b testing now you can test everything you know at such scale it's such detail into your point you think you know your segments and you can create your own segments but you can actually let the Machine create segments based on actual behavior of people which I guess really is enabled by most you know so many of your interactions now with brands is digital so give you that opportunity to grab a piece of that exhaust do the analytics and get some insight out of it yeah that's exactly right I mean I you know data the scale of data I mean everybody's flooded with data right now but it's really where's the needle in the haystack and I think that's that's where AI plays a crucial role I mean it it can do things like figure out anomalies on on your interactions across a large swath of users right if something something you see in the data is it's statistically normal or not and should I pay attention to it and what should i do from it so AI starts to play a role in that it can even do simple things like we all have mobile phones we all want to watch more video on mobile phones the problem is as a business as a marketing team and and I'm sure even you know you folks have the same situation is the content that you create may not be ready to be consumed appropriately on each device right so if I pick up my mol device has it been optimized properly so you can do things like have a I pick the focal points in a video and crop out the rest and follow the focal point and only show that on the phone so well certainly gonna call you up because we have a lot of video we don't have twenty videos here today so a lot of luck but this is the norm people gonna have more velocity of videos that's that's podcasts yep blog posts so the waterfalls I was getting earlier this waterfall thing is over it's more of an agile environment so I got to ask the customer question is that reality yet grounded in the customer base or is it still early adopters or I guess the question is what's the pattern that you're seeing in customers Bart what makes a good market or what makes a good organization to embrace the kind of change that's on our doorstep right now it's a good that's a good question and it I think it takes two to tango I think there's a an IT elements and a marketing elements and I think we're seeing an evolution and how how the two work together in this new model so from an IT standpoint they are the enabler for example to get content onto multiple multiple different channels from a from our marketers standpoint they ultimately are the ones that define and help articulate the right message and type of content if IT and marketers are working well together the more the the IT team is going to enable that market or T marketing team to essentially iterate quickly in content so there's a whole set of things that can be done to enable the marketing team to be agile and getting that content out there so I think you know the evolution I would say is is in in how the two teams are working so I think your waterfall model and past I'd say it's entirely gone but it has been reframed in a ways exploring it that's a good way to test to see if if IT and CM a CIO and the CMO working together yeah probably aligned to four change right they're not maybe not it's so I mean I'll give you a very specific example so one thing that we've been seeing in our world is so for example on cloud you know there's a lot of things you can do more quickly traditionally there have been some waterfall development models what we've seen is IT now has a DevOps process where they're very fast and rolling out application updates but if you can actually standardize that if you can create a pipeline for Creek getting code onto the onto the different environments if you test it and roll it out faster what that means for marketing and business is the time to market goes down so for example we've actually been baking that into our products can we literally here's a best-in-class pipeline for doing an agile development model it's already pre-built into the the infrastructure to enable IT to kind of go faster on the behalf of so here's a question for you put you on the spot sure in all the stores major shifts is always gaps there's always gaps in new markets or white spaces so there's three areas technology gaps skills gaps and culture gaps yep can you talk about what you see as the key gaps that people are starting to get over on figure out how to fill those gaps because they can become direct walkers if they're not resolved so tech gap skills gap and culture gap so just because we talking tech a lot let's reverse it and talk you know sort of the the team and organization elements I mean you think one thing that we've we've definitely been seeing is is if you will the the alignment of what was traditionally a channel management is now moving more closely into the CDO or CMO arm which I think is a good thing right I think what we see as some of our leading customers is the marketing and and chief digital officer x' have increasingly more alignment and a seat at the table of how the individual channel line of businesses are operating and that's a very good thing because it does help close the loop on the customer journey across those channels which I think it's traditionally been a bit of a dilemma so I would say that's one thing we're seeing much more is that the channels the channel management actually going under directly or more alignment with the marketing arm or something like a CDO so on the org side that's one area and that helps with the velocity right and they're rearranging the org structures to align with how does content me to be shared across these teams do you really own that channel is it is it do we do we have a customer journey that is owned across all channels right and I think that's an important conversation that these companies have been struggling with in our and I've evolved a lot in the last few years and we talked about the tech gap already but skills gap what skills are out there that are needed obviously day the machine learning yeah a big one date the machine learning stuff I mean I think Adobe's fuel horse on the races I think we're trying to democratize some of that so as I said earlier the hope is for the marketing team we we give them a neat easy path to to unlock that there are areas where there's been big growth like so for example the front and frameworks and development for single page applications that's an area from an IT standpoint where we've seen a tremendous growth in that technology set and and how that plays a role with the rest of the infrastructure yeah and and and simply how does that actually align with the traditional tools they've been using for managing their websites I think what we've seen is that they're now skill wise and technology wise actually taking of you that you you still have one centralized platform but ultimately you'll have IT developer resources that plug in to say one central hybrid content management system for example any new personas popping out of this just shift that's going on with cloud and and creativity experience cloud any new roles that are emerging that you see popping out yeah I mean I so I mean one example we've seen and it's it's it's been an evolution but you know for example we've seen the rise of something called journey managers right which just goes back to what I was mentioning earlier which are our people that their business and tack align but they're interested in understanding how does a customer actually move across a specific journey so they're mapped to if you will a task a customer's trying to do and how do i optimize that you know assuming and knowing that you know if Josh is going to try and get some customer support he's not just always going to call the support line he's going to try other things and how do I simplify that for him and taking a very holistic view so I think that's that's one thing we've seen more of and it's it's a you know a great way to approach it fascinating insights Josh thanks for coming on I'll give you the final word I put a plug in for what you're working on experience manager what's new what's happening yeah absolutely so we're I'm part of the experience manager team so we're part of the organization that that helps our brands deliver and manage digital experiences so essentially we're enabling if you will omni channel delivery and management of those experiences and a key thrusts for us are around enabling IT to get content effectively across channels and also experience intelligence how do we how do we deliver AI and machine learning innovation to make the marketers job easier for getting personalized experiences to market and enabling IT to support them more efficiently so there's a number of innovations and exciting things that we're very excited about it someone for the congratulations Josh van Tonder group product marketing manager at adobe experience manager his product breaking down what's going on here at Adobe summit and in the industry I'm Jennifer Jeff rick stay with us for more coverage here at adobe summit after this short break

>> Live, from Orlando, Florida. It's theCube covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity, and theCube's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone, to theCube's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Stu Miniman. We have two guests for this segment, we have Ross Smith, the Principle Program Manager at Microsoft, and Greg Taylor, who is the Director of Product Marketing at Microsoft. Thank you so much for joining us! >> Thanks for having us. >> So, I want to start off by talking about messaging. You are both legends in the Microsoft messaging world, sorry to be obsequious here. >> That just means we're old. >> You've been around a while, it's not your first rodeo. >> No, no. >> So, talk a little bit about what's new, what the enhancements you're doing for Enterprise, it is the most used app. >> Yeah. >> So we're launching Exchange Server 2019 this year. It's another version of on-premises exchange, it's incredible. We had 2000 people registered for the session, we had 1000 in the room. There's still some love for on-prem exchange, no doubt, so that's been a big thing we're talking about at Ignite this year. For those customers, and I'll be honest it's very much a release aimed at large Enterprise customers who want to keep some exchange on-prem. We strongly believe that small-medium business should be in the cloud, so we've focused on the kind of features that really large Enterprises really want to get from Exchange. >> Yeah, and then from a app perspective, we've been heavily invested with ALUP, Fry, WES and Android to bring a unique and valuable experience for both consumers and commercial users using both Office 365 and Exchange on-premises. So we now have a hundred million users using Outlook Mobile today, and it's been a great experience and we continue to evolve the app on a weekly basis, now. >> Can you talk a little bit about the evolution of the app and what kinds of features and enhancements you're using for both the consumers and Enterprise? >> Right, yeah. So the app originally began as a consumer acquisition, which we've now targeted and rebranded it as Outlook, and we've been heavily focused on bringing Enterprise features that our users know and love. Office 365 Groups is a great example of an experience that we built into the app that no other native mail client or third-party mail client can deliver today. We've delivered other Enterprise security-specific features like Azure Active Directory conditional access so customers can lock down what mobile apps can access the service and prevent any other client from doing so. And then, of course, there's in-tune app protection policies which allow us to, and customers to, ensure only the corporate data is protected and exclude the personal data, so that we can ensure there's no data leakage scenarios going. >> I wonder if we can step back for a second. I think about messaging, it's very diverse. I remember back in the '90s, I was helping companies get access to this whole "internet thing" and LANs and setting up and oh, we're going to go from faxes and memos to emails, show how old I am in this business, too. But today, our mobile devices, a lot of what we're doing companies, whether they have their own data-centers or doing their cloud, there's usually lots of different ways we communicate. My joke is, the best way to communicate with someone is probably the one they prefer to and hopefully aren't buried in. >> Yes. Because we all have the Slacks and all those other things out there. How do you view the word's game, how does the Exchange and Outlook and those fit into the overall portfolio and interact with everything else. >> From the Exchange side, email is dead. I've heard email is dead for I don't know how many years and well, email is still one of the primary communication methods we all use and rely upon. And so Exchange was one of the applications that kind of coined the mission-critical application moniker, right? 22 years ago, 20 years ago, Exchange was one of the mission-critical apps. But we actually kind of think of Exchange now as almost a service, a commodity, like the power. And most people, it's kind of interesting, we have the front and the back end of things, right? I'm thinking about the messaging infrastructure of the back, and Ross is now working on the client side. Most people see the client features and think of them as Outlook and client features, but a lot of them are Exchange features which are servicing the client. It's been a real kind of evolution. We've got to a point where nobody really cares about the back end, unless it's not there, then that's a problem, but most of the things servicing the client. >> And so what we see is that the transition from typical on-premises infrastructure to the cloud service usually, generally begins with email into the Office 365 stack, and that starts lighting up additional features. And then from a mobility perspective, we're seeing that that begins the on-ramp into mobile. Because, like Greg mentioned, we've had email capability on mobile devices integrated into Exchange for 17 years now, so it's a very ubiquitous thing to have on a mobile device, so it's just a natural progression just to use email on a mobile device. And then that begins lighting up as customers begin to move to Office 365, they start lighting up additional features like teams integration or Skype for business or any of the other Office apps. And then they just light up naturally. And then through all of our protection mechanisms we're able to ensure that that entire experience is secure from a IT business, and protecting it. >> Just speaking of the evolution of messaging in and of itself, what do you see, people who've been in the industry a long time, what do you see as next, I mean, where do we go from here? Email, they say, is dead, we know it's not dead, but what are the next kinds of generation of features and enhancements that you see customers really needing, and that you're working on at Microsoft? >> Alright, I think that Exchange was really interesting from an Office 365 perspective, as Exchange isn't really just a messaging engine anymore, it's a data store that we are, through things like Graph and all the other applications, is giving businesses a whole new way of looking at the data, and so we're pulling data from all the different places. Exchange is becoming almost a plumbing kind of infrastructure piece, but it's a key data source and I think the data is still there, the communication is still there, but I think much of the future development is in the client-side apps and how people interact with the data, and the back-end just becomes the infrastructure, right? >> Actually you bring up a great point. A premise that my Head of Research at Wikibon had is talking about Microsoft's position in AI today, and Office 365 and the messaging that you have, there's so much data there if you wanted it. What are people worrying about? How can a company understand that? How can Microsoft help businesses in general? There's a touchpoint that even an infrastructure as a service-provider wouldn't have, but you really get to the end-point and the end users in productivity, and that's a huge opportunity for Microsoft in the future as long as you're not messing with our data, you're not as heavy into, you know some of the other messaging people out there, that you're like, wait, why am I getting ads for that stuff, or, I think I talked about that stuff. >> And that's a great point, Stu, because going back to Outlook Mobile as an example, right? We're heavily invested in AI-driven capabilities into that app, zero-touch search, as an instance. You can go right in the app, tap one button and you see your favorite contacts, you get your Discover information from the Office Graph your next itinerary and travel information, and we're lighting up that functionality across the board throughout the app. Location-rich data, using Cortana time-to-leave services, so that you can get to a meeting at the right time, as opposed to a typical oh, it reminded me at 15 minutes and I got to hop 45 minutes down the other end of, where are we, West? In the West building, right? So we're building all that functionality into clients like Outlook Mobile and the rest of the stack to help drive that type of capabilities. >> And all of that data's in the back end, right? You said email is this repository of incredible business information, and so the question is how you leverage that, how do you take what's in there and surface it in a way that makes sense to the users? It's a fascinating time at the moment, where the data's there, we just got to know how to use it in the right way. And I agree, using it in the right way and not using it to sell stuff, that's absolutely our approach to it, so, super important. >> And do you work closely with clients to come up with this new kind of functionality? One of the biggest challenges that so many technology companies face is staying on the cutting edge of these ideas and innovation, so how closely are you working with customers to dream up new functionality? >> Yeah, we're working with customers all the time. We do it through a variety of different channels. We have UserVoice, which allows customers and end users to directly interface and provide their ideas. We have private preview programs, where we target customers about specific new feature sets. TAP programs, like we're doing with Exchange 2019, as well as future releases within Office 365 that enable that type of experience. >> Exchange, I think, historically, has always been very customer focused, very community focused. We have a great bunch of MVPs, the TAP program, the Technology Adoption Program, is a bunch of customers that deploy our pre-production code in production for us, so we've got some real big customers who, they're running versions of Exchange that the world hasn't seen. >> One of the themes we heard in Satya's keynote yesterday is business productivity, and we know one of the biggest challenges out there is, you get this new stuff, and you're like, well, I'm going to pretty much just try to use it the way I always have been doing it, and some of us have been using emails for decades and decades and I look at my own usage and wow, I'm probably a bit out of date. If I could just wipe my brain and say 'okay, here's this cool new tool' that could do all this stuff, we wouldn't even call it email, we'd call it something different. I know you guys do things like the Channel 9 broadcast, I'm sure there's lots of things on the website, how do you help customers learn to use the new stuff and get rid of some of the things, the old habits that they had in using these technologies. And can you get everybody to stop 'reply to all' in the big group, that would be super helpful. >> Work on that please. >> That's interesting, we're building it into the apps, to be honest. We're doing a lot of work whenever we release new features to light up an experience within the app that guide the user on how to use that new functionality to help them understand what they can do with the app, as well as simplifying the overall app structure. You look at some of our apps, they become very bloated in terms of all the widgets you have available and knobs to control it and we're trying to simplify that stack. We're refreshing with Outlook 2019 and Office Pro Plus. We're refreshing the user interface on desktop, we're doing the same in Mac. We've done it in Outlook for iOS, we're redoing OA, as well, and Office 365, all to enhance and simplify the experience, and, as well, provide a consistent experience across all the endpoints, which will help. >> If the question is here, how do we wean people off email, how do we get them off email. >> Just their old habits and patterns. >> And you know, it's kind of funny, but it still works. I remember having a conversation with somebody once who, it was a presentation we did once, and it was a team who did more of a social kind of thing, and their view was, they put a picture of the Queen of England up on a slide and said 'Email is old, like the Queen of England.' And my response was, well so are fire and the wheel, but they seem to be hanging around pretty well, so far. So I think there are certain things for which email is still king, but it's evolving and changing. I think we're still waiting for the real killer app that replaces email. >> It's not Yammer. >> It's not what? (laughter) >> It's not Yammer. >> I'm not going on camera saying that. The way I prefer to think of it is, I don't really matter what the client is or how you all interact with it, if we can all use an app that suits our own style of working, right? My inbox is zero inbox. I'm a zero inbox kind of guy, right? If I can work like that and interact with people who want to work on a different client, I'm happy. >> Not to go on the Yammer piece, but you made me think a little bit about acquisitions. Big acquisitions, like LinkedIn and Github, messaging ties into both of those quite a bit. Any visibility you can give? I know there's some integrations there, but how does that look? >> So we're launching LinkedIn integration with Outlook for iOS and Android as we speak. That's something we'll be rolling out shortly, and it enables, within the people or contact card, you can quickly see information from their LinkedIn data set, as well as the ability for us to push data from Office 365 into LinkedIn, so that LinkedIn users can also see relevant information about who that person's interacting with from a calendar type of perspective. So we're definitely taking that availability and providing that through our mutual customers. >> Great. Well, Ross and Greg, thank you so much for coming on the show, it was >> Thanks for having us. really a pleasure having you. >> Yeah, it was great. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, we will have more of theCube's live coverage from the Orange County Civic Center Microsoft Ignite in just a little bit. (electronic music)