>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies world, digital experience, brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE coverage of Dell Technologies world digital experience. Happy to welcome to the program. First we have a first time guest Akanksha Mehrotra, she's the Vice President of Marketing with Dell Technologies. Joining us one of our CUBE alumni, Caitlin Gordon, she's the Vice President of Product Marketing, also with Dell Technologies. Caitlin, welcome back, Akanksha welcome to the program. >> Thank you Stu, happy to be here. >> Alright, so one of the big models we've been talking about for the last few years is a change in how customers acquire things, big thing we've talked about, for many years, this shift from CAPEX to OPEX. How cloud is impacting everything Jeff Clarke in the keynote was talking about, it's the Dell Technologies on demand, DTOD, I guess is the, four letter acronym we use Akansha help us understand a little bit from your standpoint, what is it? Why is it important to your customers? >> Yeah, so Stu, as soon as you as you heard, as part of the keynote, from from Jeff and others earlier today, we've been working really hard to bring the benefits of on demand IT to our customers, in private cloud, public cloud and edge. And certainly this year, especially, we've seen a lot of interest in this, COVID have catalyzed customer interest in flexible consumption in as a service. As we talk with our customers and partners, we hear this almost daily, it's required a level of agility that candidly traditional CAPEX based models simply haven't been able to provide, I mean, imagine taking your workforce remote over the weekend, and the stress that puts on your infrastructure. And so I think that's kind of forced IT to consider some of these alternatives. Another factor has also been, companies have been wanting to preserve capital, right, and avoid large cash outlays and having this type of flexibility and being able to pay for infrastructure, as you're using it, it gives them a way to do that. So I mean, those are some of the customer drivers that we've seen. Last year at Dell Tech Summit, around the this time last year, actually, in November timeframe, we introduced Dell Technologies on demand as our umbrella program for a flexible consumption and as a service solutions. And really what it what it seeks to do is make it easier for customers to get the simplicity and flexibility of cloud, along with the performance and security of on-premises infrastructure. So it's giving them a range of consumption models that include both payment option as well as services that they can apply on any one of the products in our portfolio from end user devices to core data center infrastructure to hybrid cloud solutions. And we've announced that last year, one of the things that you heard about today, and that we're announcing over this event is that we're continually looking to make it easier and simpler for our customers with various turnkey offerings and simpler offerings for them, given the interest that we've seen. >> Yeah, I want to key off of, you mentioned the impact of COVID-19. And for your customers, it's something we've definitely seen that the promise of cloud always has been to be highly flexible, we can scale up, we can scale down. We know that some services out there aren't always as flexible as we might hope. There's certain SaaS solutions, where you're signing up for a multi year offering and even for the cloud, I might lock in some savings by buying something in bulk. So help us understand, what are the benefits that your customer sees, the savings that they get and is this truly cloud flexible, which means I can burst up and scale as I need. And I can it reached the point, oh, hey, I need half the capacity for the next six months. Can I do that? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, Stu we actually commissioned IBC to talk to a few of our customers. So let me maybe share some of the benefits that they saw in broad terms, and then I can maybe share a specific example of what a particular customer saw. So we had IDC talk to several of the customers using Dell Technologies on demand models, various GIOS, and various sort of sizes. And what they found was that on average, they saw about a 23%, lower cost of storage operations per year, which is great, right? Lower cost of operations is always great. IT is always looking for those efficiencies, especially, in the current environment, but that's not all. I think that's just sort of part of the story. What they also shared with us is that, these types of models were able to help them become much more agile in how they work and change how they work. And what they found was that they saw 54% fewer incidents of downtime and they were 92% faster in their ability to deploy storage capacity, because they had that capacity in their data center available ready for that spike when their business saw it. ` So those are just some of the broad examples of what our customers have seen. Another specific example that I would would share with you is a large multinational institution, financial services company, we've been working with them for years to service their, enterprise scale, private cloud. And then more recently, they had us also, manage their storage as a service managed utility. And they've seen phenomenal results, they've been able to get 50% more compute power at 8%, lower cost, and 90% faster or reduce time and provisioning data. It's all about the yes, it's about the cost savings but really, it's about the agility that the business gets, right. And as you started out, right, with COVID, they really needed that agility and that flexibility and having these models available, ready to spike, ready to go down, right, have been able to provide that. >> Yeah, I think another thing we've seen is, people rush to cloud because it promised that agility, and we've had those conversations before is, there's a reality of what that means, which it might not be the resiliency you're looking for, it also might not actually be as simple as he thought it might be. And we're seeing some of that come back on-prem, whether you need resiliency or performance or security, or you don't want to be really locked into a specific public cloud but you still want to have that agility in the benefits of really running your data center in a service oriented model. And that trend has been picking up over the past couple years. And as we've already said a couple times today, we've seen that accelerate, but also, we starting to see more customers ask for it. It's not just the big and more strategic and the aggressive customers that are looking for this more and more customers are kind of seeing that this is the end game and that's kind of leads into where we're going, which is, how do we make this more accessible to others? >> Well, Caitlin, you're using one of one of my punch lines that I've used for a number of years now if remember, when we thought that cloud was inexpensive and easy to use, it's not. And if we look at what customers are doing, it's a hybrid model. They're deploying in multiple environments, we're seeing the public cloud look more like the enterprise, the enterprise look more like, the public cloud. So these offerings have, OPEX flexibility and the like, make a whole lot of sense. So you've said that, you've seen a lot of growth, especially this year, any metrics you can give us on, adoption, love the one customer example, in the financial space, anything else to kind of paint the picture as to, how prevalent this is becoming. >> Yeah, maybe I'll get started. So, we've seen nearly 50%, year over year growth in the customer base or our most recent quarter, and it's growing, we've seen over 500% increase, year on year in signed contracts, customer demand in these types of models has caused us to expand our offerings to into countries like Brazil, Chile, Colombia, India, and China. I mean, we already offered about 50 plus countries and along with our partner, network and even more, so, I mean, those are just some of the data points around business traction. In the models that we have another proof point that I could point you to is that, in April, we include, we announced a payment flexibility program, which gave our customers a number of promotions and options to extend this flexibility into, across our portfolio and into other parts of our businesses. And just recently, about a month ago, we extended that, and we've seen really good traction in that as well. So I think overall, like you said there's aspects about public cloud that customers really like, and they tell us, hey, I want to be able to pay as I go, I want to be able to extend and contract the infrastructure as I'm using it. I want a simple management experience. But then as Caitlin said, they realize that Oh, but I don't want to, pay for the refactoring and then the egress and the ingress charges and some of my workloads are better off on premises for performance, locality, security, compliance reasons, right. And therein lies the promise of as a service for on-prem infrastructure, 'cause really, I keep looking for the best of both worlds. And this gives you that right you can use the consumption models to grow and shrink as you needed, you can us the payment models to only pay for what you're using and along with our partner network, you can have in the location that you want so you can sort of have your cake and eat it too. >> Yeah, and I would just add on to that is that more and more of the conversation is both about how can I consume that more as a service and pay for just what I'm using? But also, how can I spend less time maybe zero time and energy actually managing that infrastructure? And how can I then allocate the time energy resources into running my business and investing in more strategic things? So becomes both an important financial conversation but even more so a conversation about how IT can empower the business, which really just changes what we're able to do for customers. So it's an exciting kind of transition to see this really evolve into really not talking about products anymore, and helping our customers have all their business. >> Well, Caitlin, that's a really interesting point, I want you to talk to us a little bit about the Dell Tech storage as a service, how does that fit, we were just talking about don't want to talk about products, we want to talk about really moving to that full OPEX model so help connect the dots for us. >> Yeah, so we're really excited about this, this will be coming in the first half of next year, as you probably heard earlier today. And what we're doing here is we've really taken what we already have had in market. And we've really upped that to the next level, we've accelerated the simplicity of what we offer here. And think of the experience is all starting in a single console, where you just pick up four things, what's the type of storage you want, what's the performance you want, how much and for how long, that's it. And then now we're counting the time from then to when it's in your data center in days, not months, not weeks, but in days and we're able to get you up and going. And it's your data center of your choice, whether that's on-prem in your own data center, or at a colo facility, we bring that equipment in, we get that deployed, we manage it for you, you operate it, and you simply pay for what you use. So you're really in a quick time to value you're in a very simple model and you're not really responsible for managing infrastructure that's really on us. And that moves you into being in a true OPEX model and it also enables you to accelerate what you're able to leverage that whether it's Blob Storage, file storage, you can get up and running quickly and let us worry about how to manage the infrastructure and we give you the ability to operate what you need to. >> Caitlin, maybe if you could give us a little bit of color as to what happens behind the scenes to make that work. As it sounds wonderful, you've had the program around for a year, these aren't trivial things that you're talking about all the logistics, the management the the gear, and making sure that the physical and the power and everything is all set. So help us understand the engineering, the development, and what this means from kind of a services and go to market that make a solution like this work. >> Yeah, and a lot of ways we're having to change our entire business to help our customers change there's, it goes from top to bottom, and you'll get to hear a lot more about it when we're actually available next year. But when you think about it, we have a lot of the DNA, we have a lot of the experience, we have the technology, but we almost have to completely flip the script on ourselves of how we deliver it, who our customer is, what our then end user customer needs from us, and what the role of things like our global services organization is what the role of our global sales organization is and how do we accelerate providing outcomes to our customers and get the rest out of their way. And the fact that I haven't mentioned a product name, but by the way, we actually have industry leading products and pretty much every category. So of course, on the back end, all of this is going to be powered by our industry leading storage solutions, like power store will be in your data center but at the same time, we will actually have worked to really masked that you don't even need to know that nor do you need to really operate much beyond what you need to really run your business. And that's really it's been an interesting work for us to just flip how we think about everything and you'll hear a whole lot more about it next year as we really bring this out into market but it's been really fun and a big learning for everyone. >> Excellent well yeah, something something power is underneath there well Caitlin. All right why don't you both give us the final takeaway for the Dell Tech on demand account. Start with you in just give us the final takeaway. >> Yeah, so I think look, I back to kind of what we were talking about, we've actually been offering these types of solutions to our customers for a really long time. Through Dell financial services, we've been offering payment flexibility for over 23 years, over 15 years and manage utility. So the customer example that I gave you is a customer who's running storage as a service and has been for many years, I think, building on that experience, listening to our customers feedback over that time period and over, of course, this past year, we're looking to apply all of that, to make it even more simpler for them to consume our infrastructure in the near future. And so, storage as a service is going to be a really exciting proof point of that, the momentum stats and some of the other things that I shared with you today and that you're going to hear about over the next couple of days or another proof point of it. But we're excited about this, and looking forward to continuing the dialogue with our customers with our partners and (mumbles) >> Then I would I'll kind of play off of one of your words there which is is all about simplicity for us is how do we take what we've been able to do for a lot of our customers accelerate that and simplify it to a point where we can offer that for all of our customers. And we're really looking to accelerate this first with storage and then get all of our offerings really into this model, because it's really about getting our customers out of managing infrastructure and give them the time, energy, resources to manage their business and simplicity is paramount to making sure that happens. >> Caitlin and Akanksha, thank you so much for giving us the updates. Congratulations to all the progress and definitely looking forward to hearing more beginning of next year. Thanks for joining. >> Thank you Stu. >> Thank you Stu >> All right, I'm Stu Miniman this is Dell Technology world digital experience. I'm Stu Miniman. And thank you as always for watching theCUBE (upbeat music)

(motivating electronic music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, the co-host and co-founder of Silicon Angle Media. We're here for a CUBE Conversation in our studios in Palo Alto, California. Here with two great guests inside the industry, to help illuminate the cloud computing conversation, really around what's coming up with Amazon re:Invent. But more importantly, the major advances happening in the digital transformation around IT and around developers and around cloud, and how that's impacting business. Our guests are Chris Comings, who's with the Chasm Group, consult and they help people, and former industry executive at NetApp, and (mumbles) the storage company. Peter Smails, the CMO of Datos.io data, and then he's the CMO there. Now, new progressive solutions. So guys, great solution. And Peter, I know you got news. We're gonna do another segment on your big news coming out, so we're gonna hold that off. >> Cool. >> The game has changed, right? >> Mm-hmm (affirmative). >> And we talked, with Chris and I had a one on one about this. But the industry conversation, there's people that are in the know, and people who are trying to figure out what's happening and how it impacts their business. CIO, CEOs, CDOs, chief data officers, chief security officers. There's a lot of things on the plate of businesses. >> Right. >> Big time. >> Right. >> So let's unpack this, and let's illuminate what it means. So cloud computing, Peter, what's your take on this, because Datos just takes a unique approach? I love your solution. A lot of people are liking this solution, but it's nuanced, because it's cloud-- >> Yeah. >> That's driving you. >> Yeah. >> What's the big driver? >> So the big driver, you said at the top of the discussion, the big driver is digital transformation. Digital transformation. Organizations are trying to be more data-driven. Okay, this is completely throwing, throwing traditional IT amok, because we're not living in the traditional world anymore of all my data sits within a single data center, I run my traditional monolithic applications. That's changed. The world is no longer running in a traditional four wall data center, and the world's moved away from the traditional view of scale-up architectures to elastic compute, shared nothing, elastic storage environment. So what's happening is, you've got the challenge of trying to essentially support traditional transformation initiatives, and it's just throwing all the underlying infrastructure foundations that an entire generation of IT professionals has known (laughs) into disarray. So everything's a little bit caddywhompus right now. >> Mm-hmm (affirmative), Chris? >> Well, and like you said, those people all have gone from being implementers to, they're moving to being developers. >> Right. >> And it completely changes their, it has to be a big change in their mindset. And it changes the management folks, the CIOs, the CDOs, the people that you interact with on a daily basis, right? >> Absolutely. >> Because these people are all trying to kind of come up to the next generation and get there. >> So you talked about, we got re:Invent coming up in a couple of weeks and, I think reinvent's a perfect term for this entire conversation, because everybody is reinventing themselves. The customer's reinventing themselves, the IT organizations are reinventing themselves, the individual roles within organizations are changing, and the whole evolution of dev ops versus traditional roles, so it is really-- >> And the vendors are all trying to reinvent themselves, too. >> Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. >> Well there's a lot of noise, so the customer's being bombarded with pitches. And if I here one more digital transformation pitch, without substance, I still don't understand. So in the spirit of trying to understand, first of all, I believe in digital transformation, but you can't just say the word, you gotta to prove it. But there's hard to prove a new approach or they've never seen it before. It's kind of like Steve Jobs would say, "If you want a Blackberry, that's a phone, "but the iPhone's not what you've seen before." But everyone loved it, changed the industry. That dynamic's happening in the cloud where for instance, your solution, some might not have seen before, but it's highly relevant to the user behavior expectations of the new environment. Okay, so this is the issue. What is the new environment specifically around digital transformation? Because I have an investment in storage. If I'm a customer, I bought a zillion drives from NetApp and EMC. I got data domain backup and, I got a perimeter, I have all this stuff, and now I've got this cloud thing bursting, and I got some analytics running there, and then I got the hot shot young developers banging out apps, and they want to put it in the cloud and... and security, I mean, what's going on? >> You wanna take that one first? And then I'll jump in. >> Can't I just buy more storage? >> Yeah. (Men laugh) Hey, just, no John, you don't just buy more storage, you upgrade from spinning to flash. I mean, that's really, >> There you go. >> That's really, really cutting edge right there. No I think what a lot of you see what they're doing is basically saying listen, for all this secondary, tertiary, quaternary, I mean, I didn't even know what that word was. But your second, your third, your fourth cuts of that data, move that all to the cloud, get that out of my environment. I'm not gonna be submersed in dealing with all of that anymore. Then maybe I can clear out some of my headaches, so I can actually focus on that primary cut, and what do I do about that primary cut? And that's where these completely new approaches come into play, and I, Peter I don't know if you call that hybrid, or multi-aire or what? But it is basically just trying to get some of that noise out of their system, so they can focus on the thing that's most valuable. >> So the way I would make that tangible John, is sort of, to us it all rolls down to the notion of the modern IT stack, okay? So essentially, the way you respond to digital transformation which, is all about being more agile, and some of the buzzwords you hear, but they're trying to be more, customers are trying to be, vendors are trying to be, or excuse me, customers or organizations are trying to be more customer-centric. They're trying to be more business driven, more data driven, okay great. If that's their initiative-- >> That's a mission. That's a mission. >> That's a mission. >> Yep. >> What that means for IT specifically is a fundamental rearchitecture of the underlying stack, okay, along a couple vectors, which is, organizations are building these new applications. They're fundamentally rearchitecting applications. What used to be a monolithic-oriented, traditional, relational, on-prem database is now running in a microservices, highly distributed configuration. That's vector number one, implication. Implication number two is we're absolutely in the mainstream of hybrid cloud, okay? You may be running all your apps on-prem, but you're still connected in some way to the cloud, for archiving, for BI, for TASDAV, whatever the case may be. And number three is the world just moved completely to an elastic, compute, shared nothing world. So we call that the modern IT stack. So the modern IT stack, modern infrastructure today-- >> Share nothing, you said? >> Shared nothing, the cloud is-- >> Oh, shared nothing. >> Yeah, shared nothing, shared nothing storage, shared nothing compute, that's that's, those are the foundations of a cloud based architecture. >> Is that called serverless? >> You could call it serverless as well. >> Okay. >> But, if you look at the modern IT stack, so to your point, the modern IT stack, modern infrastructure today is EC2. >> Mm-hmm (affirmative). >> Modern storage is S3. It could be object prem, object storage sitting on-prem. You know, modern applications are IOT. Modern, or our customer 360, IOT. Modern databases are dynamo DB. It's MongoDB, it's the number two-- >> Right. >> database in the cloud. So to answer your question very specifically, to make it tangible, that's to us the fundamental indication is, that new modern IT stack, throws storage into disarray, it throws data management into disarray-- >> It's an operational disruption. >> It's an operational disruption. >> All right, so let's backup for a second, because I think you nailed the thread I was trying to connect on. So let's take MongoDB, your reference to that being, where'd that come from? We all know why, the LAMP stack, it was one of the drivers. But developers drove that. >> That's right. >> So it wasn't the IT department recommending Mango. >> Right (laughs). >> so the developers were driving that because of ease of use. Now there's some scalability with Mango, we all know about, but what that means is, no one gives a crap if it can scale, because you already hit your product market fit. Then you could rearchitect, so you're seeing this use case of developers driving some of the behavior. >> Yes. >> Yes. >> Mm-hmm (affirmative). >> Hence containers, docker containers, and the role of Kubernetes. >> Kubernetes, yep. >> So if that's the case, how does an enterprise customer deal with that vector? Because now the developers are dictating the stacks. >> Mm-hmm (affirmative). >> Well, I-- >> Is it a free-for-all right now? I mean, this is... >> I think both of those guys are, think of it as they used to be warring factions, dev and ops, and the fact that we say the word dev ops right now is kind of a, it's kind of an oxymoron, right? Because they don't actually know each other and actually don't naturally talk to one another, and they go, "That's the other guy who's holding me back." >> Yeah, it's the old-- >> They look at, yeah, yeah. >> Goes over the fence. >> And so now, you've got folks that are really trying to, trying to bring it together a little bit more on that front and I think that, we're starting to see some technologies where people can say, "Not only can I use that "to accelerate my developments," so meets the dev criteria, but also the ops people say, "You know what, that stuff's not so bad. "I could actually work with that." >> Right, and then there's IT going, "Uh-oh," because they're basically sitting there on the catcher's side, so to your point it's, the dev ops, it is very much of an application-led environment. The tip of the spear for the new IT stack is absolutely application-led. And IT is challenged with essentially aligning to that, collaborating with that, and keeping up with that pace of change. >> And John, on this point, I think this is where, back to re:Invent, and really the role of AWS. This all started because of that. When a developer can just say, "I don't even know who those IT people are over there, "But I can spin up my S3 instance, "and I can start working against it." They start moving down the path, they show it to somebody, someone says, "Wow, that's great stuff, I want that." >> John: Yeah, right. >> Guess what? We need to make sure that that's enterprise class and scalable and then that's where that whole thing starts, and then it becomes that pull-ya-apart, "Oh God, what did these developer people do? "I'm gonna inherit this? "What the heck am I gonna do with it?" Now it's, we've gotta move that to be more symbiotic up front. >> I remember talking to both Pat Gelsinger and Andy Jassy years ago, I think maybe five years ago, and I asked the question, "What enables developers?" What is enabling point? Does infrastructure dictate developer behavior? Or do developers dictate infrastructure behavior? This was years ago, when the dev ops was an early-on movement. Clearly the vote is there. Developers are driving infrastructure. Hence the dev ops infrastructure, >> Absolutely. >> Yeah. >> as code model, that's proven. Jassy was interesting because he looked at it that way and said, "Yeah, we saw the same thing," and they've never wavered, Amazon's stayed on the course, and they've just been running like a machine, like a, just pounding it out. I asked Pat Gelsinger, he once positioned the AWS as the developer cloud. Kinda in, I wouldn't say depositioning them, but he was basically pointing out, they have a developer cloud. Now Amazon's the enterprise cloud. >> Mm-hmm (affirmative). >> Because they've developers are now a big driver of that, and the scale with data is actually turning out to be a better security environment. >> Right. >> For cyber. >> Right, it might just-- >> So it's cloud's winning. >> Cloud is winning and just sort of just take that one step further. It's always ultimately, the winner's going to, it's Darwinism, it's like the winner's gonna be the one with the richest ecosystem. And AWS is becoming that enterprise eco. And you could argue, I mean, GCP's fighting to be in there, Oracle's not going to go quietly into that dark night. You've got multiple public cloud vendors. >> That's right. >> Yeah. >> But the reality is that he who has the biggest, he or she who has the biggest ecosystem is gonna win, and that's right now is AWS driving that bus. >> All right, so I need to see those glasses for a second, and then want to go into another line of question here. (men laugh) >> You may use those. >> Oh who's, oh you put them on, all right good, as long as he's wearing them. >> He that wear-- >> You know, on that front too, on that front too, I would think we started back where VM was the big new thing, and here we go with VM's, and then all of a sudden we're coming up and we're saying, "Yeah, now there's containers." And so now we're gonna see this move to, we want to micro-package these services, and be able to aggregate them. Well you know the average IT shop that I would be talking to out there is just still trying to figure out, how do they put together their on-prem and their AWS instance? So this notion of hybrid is where most of these large enterprises are. We see a lot of terminology out there and a lot of vendors talking about multi-cloud. But multi-cloud is really just taking an option on the future and saying, "I'm not locked into you, AWS, "even though I am locked into you 100% right now. "I don't want to be forever in the future." >> It's a value statement that they're gesturing. >> That's right. >> Good segue. >> Chris: But it's not a practical implementation piece. >> I got my nerd glasses on so-- >> Peter: Strap in for something, here we go. I got my nerd glasses, so next question, we'll go a little nerdy, because this is important one. I put out at my crowd chat for Amazon, so to crowdchat.net/awsreinvent it's open, I have a lot of questions on there. Feel free to weigh in, it's an influencer-only chat, so no consumers, so I asked the question, and this is to the value statement, because multi-cloud is basically telegraphing lock-in. We don't want lock-in. >> Right. >> But we want love choice. If you have good choice and good value, we'll go there so it's a value equation. So the question I said is, where do you, this is a question I put on crowd-chat, I'll ask you guys. Where do you see the value that cloud creates for customers in the next 24 months? #cloud So the first response was from Subbu Allamaraju, who's the CIO at Expedia. He writes, "Agility from the service "ecosystem and rapid second-order architecture "architectural changes thereby clearing technical debt." And the second one from Grant Chase, "Born on the cloud apps already here. "Next wave migrating of existing apps." And then Maddoux Tsukahara said, "Legacy SASS applications will be disrupted "by cloud microservices, serverless, "and AI and machine learning." So we start to see the pattern. Your thoughts? Value creation, in the cloud, is gonna be what? >> So I think they're hitting on the right trends. I would go back to the first one which is "How do I get this on-prem stuff "that's driving me crazy, consuming all of my resources "in terms of maintenance and upgrades? "And then optimizing my environment for that." Which ones of those are core? And which ones of those are really kind of ancillary? I've gotta have them, but I really don't want them. If I didn't have to use them, I'd get rid of them. Take all, just do that homework. Separate the two cleanly. Move ancillary to the cloud, and move on. >> Peter: Yeah, yeah. >> So service ecosystem he nailed, I love, by the way, I agree with you, that was my favorite answer. And rapid second-order architecture changes. This speaks to what datos.io is doing. Because you guys, what you're in, the tornado that you're in, kind of just a play on the Chasm group here. You guys have a solution that has got visibility into some of the real dynamics of the environmental environment. >> Check. >> People, tech, stack, et cetera. >> Yeah, yeah. >> So what are some of the things that you're seeing that point to these second or level architectural changes? >> Well you mentioned, a couple different things, which is, you mentioned the notion of technical debt, which is indirectly what you were just talking about, the ability to get rid of my technical debt. It's an easy way, it eliminates my barrier to answering to creating net new applications. So without having to sort of, I avoid the innovator's dilemma if you will, because I can build these net new applications, which are the things I have to to drive my digital transformation, et cetera. I can do that in a very cost-effective and agile way. Meanwhile, sort of ignoring the old world. Then what I'll do is I'll go back, and I'll worry about the old stuff, and I'll start migrating some of that old stuff to the cloud. So in the context of, yeah, so what we see from a Datos IO perspective, in the context of data management, is that one, applications drive the stack, like you said earlier, it's absolutely, the application's at the tip of the spear, driving the stack. Organizations are building net new applications that are cloud native, okay? And they're built on the new modern IT stack, and at the same time, they're also taking their legacy application, so I like that second answer as well which is, modern cloud applications are here. The interesting thing is, you say modern cloud apps, modern cloud apps don't have to run in the cloud. >> That's right. >> We've got customers that are running their next gen app-- >> It's an operating model. >> It's an operating model. We've got customers running 100% on-prem. Their econ number stuff runs on-prem, then you have people that run in the cloud. So it's a mindset, it's an operating model. So you've got folks absolutely deploying these cloud-native apps. >> Well, it's an architectural model too, it's how they are deploying and servicing apps. >> And ultimately, it comes down to the architectural model. That's what shifted, and that world is very infrastructure. The other thing I would add to the cloud thing is if you do it right, the cloud actually can give you architectural independence and cloud independence, but you can't be focused on the infrastructure level. You've gotta focus at the application level, because then you can be agnostic, until they're online. >> So Peter you, you guys are disrupting a very large space, backup and recovery in the cloud which you guys are doing. >> Check. >> And the application database layer is a very progressive solution. So I love your approach, but you're talking about disrupting the data domains of the world. We're talking about big whales. >> Yeah. >> Big incumbents that are built around four walls in the data center. >> Check. >> Mm-hmm (affirmative), yep. >> What are you seeing? What's the makeup? What's the personnel of the customers look like? If dev ops is happening, which we agree it is, and the the evidence is there clearly, they're not 50 year old backup and recovery guys. They're young guns, they're probably not thinking about waking up every day with their coffee, say, "Hmm, what am I gonna do with backup today?" >> Yeah. >> Mm-hmm (affirmative). >> They're waking up saying, "Hey, I'm gonna drive some more machine learning "and AI in my apps." >> Yep. >> "And I'm gonna provide workflow movement to--" >> And you said breakfast was some, you said that. >> Adopt this microservice. >> I had the craziest dream last night. It was microservices, what? >> Yeah. >> Yeah, so I can answer that two ways. There's the technology side of it. Fun little tidbit, average age of the traditional backup and recovery software architecture, about 20 years. >> Hmm. >> Architected well before the mainstream advent of the cloud or certainly modern applications. >> Hold on, the person's 20 years old? Or it's 20 years of architecture? >> No, the architecture of the software. >> Okay. >> The solutions, or come up, the point is they've been around for awhile. >> It's old. It's old. >> It's old, fair enough. >> Yeah, and 20 years-- >> So on the technology side, that's a dilemma. On the persona side, you're absolutely right as well. These are, it's the application folks that are driving the conversation, that our applications dictate the IT stack. They're building these new architectures, which have all these implications on the infrastructure. >> All right, so I'm gonna play devil's advocate, just because I want to connect the dots. And again, illuminate what I think the problem is that you have. One is, okay I'm a CIO. Hey, he's my storage guy. Who the hell are you, young gun? Complaining about your backup and recovery. He recommends all flash arrays in the data center provisioned in a VSAN environment, whatever that's going on. Who are you? You're just nothing to me. You don't make that decision. >> I'm the guy that can give you all the visibility to your data to make you smarter and more agile as a company. I can save you money. I can make this company more market-- >> So what do I need to do differently? If I'm the CIO, I don't want to make these, or these architectural calls based upon old dogma or old reporting lines. This is an example. I go to him, he's my storage guy. Who are you? I already built you the dev ops environment. He runs storage and so, you're impacted as a developer. So how do you guys talk to that guy? What does the CXO have to do differently to adapt to the new environment? >> I'll take that and then you can-- >> Please. >> You know, jump in. So I think what you see is, you see the proliferation of new personas. Like you see chief transformation officers, you see chief digital officers. You see system architects and DBAs getting a more prominent role in the conversation. So the successful CIOs and technology officers are the ones that are essentially gonna get the cowboys and the Indians to collaborate more closely, because they have to, because the folks that were over in the corner that used to get laughed at, building these, oh mangos and these new applications and such, they're the ones holding the keys to the future. So the successful technologists are gonna be the ones that marry those personas from the application side of the house with the traditional storage, infrastructure folks as well. You successfully do that, then you can be more, then you can move more quickly forward. >> Yeah, that's right. >> What do you think? >> Well I think some of it's gonna come back down to economics, too. And I agree with that move which is, I talked to over a hundred CIOs and their staff in the last year. I had one conversation where the person said, "You know what? "The chief complaint about me as CIO "is I'm not spending enough money." And I thought to myself, "Sounds like a company that I should put some bucks into, "because they must be doing really, really well." Everybody else is looking at it saying, "You know what? "I'm under pressure to adopt the cloud, "because there's a belief out there "that the cloud is gonna be so much less expensive "than what they've done in the past." And then I think they find that it's not, that it's not just the one size fits all answer to that. >> Right. >> And so as a consequence, you're gonna have people say, Listen, this money printing operation, or this funnel out the door to, whether it's EMC or NetApp 4, or whatever it may be, whatever storage vendor for backup architecture, they've got to stop that funnel. Because they've got to take what they were spending there and move it to the things that are going to make money for them, not just gonna hold on to it, and de-risk their enterprise. >> I'm here with two industry leaders, Chris Comings and Peter Smails, talking about the impact of infrastructure technologies, and app development in the cloud for businesses. It's a great conversation, and our final point, I wanna just get to, I know we're running on some time here but we wanna go a little further. I think this is awesome. That's for taking the time to share it out. >> It's great. >> One of my other questions I put on my crowd chat was, a true or false and comment question. Here's the statement: Serverless computing will become mainstream, will come to mainstream private cloud, true or false, comment. Subbu said, "False, adoption and success "of serverless patterns depend almost entirely "on the strength of the ecosystem "that the data center lacks." Interesting comment. I was kinda leaning, I go, "I was leaning towards true." But I don't have enough insight on this, because I'm waffling between true or false. I love serverless, I love the idea of, notion of resources that are just programmable. But what is the state of serverless? I mean, is he right? Is that that there's not enough ecosystem in the data center areas or... >> You wanna go first? >> Well, I'd just say that I would, I would just call out two things on that front. One is, I think you need a lot more germination of microservices that are out there in order to be able to put that all together. That's one aspect. We're seeing that growth come rapidly. The other thing is, now your security is beholden to the lowest common denominator. The security of that individual microservice. So I think you're gonna have some fits and starts here as we move down that path because, boy oh boy, the last thing I wanna do is get all modern but at the same time, put myself at a greater amount of risk. >> I thought the comment at the end was, I think it's true. I thought it was interesting what he said at the end. He said, "The ecosystem that the data center lacks." I would contend that potentially, the ecosystem that the cloud has would support that. >> Yeah. >> Because the cloud, by definition is, it's a shared-nothing world. >> Right. >> You know? >> So, he also comments, someone said, Lambda, "My Expedia is that Lambda's growth "is almost entirely due to the power "of the ecosystem of services, "which is one of the key points," and he points to his blog post. Stu Miniman, our Wikibon analyst weighed in, because Stu's on this big time. "Service will definitely be used for edge applications. "Currently don't see use case for general data center usage." >> Mm-hmm (affirmative). >> So edge of the network. Again, good point? This edge of the network thing helps you, because most people are using cloud for edge. >> Peter: Right. >> So this IOT, which is, an iterative things, is an edge of the network. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Whether it's devices, sensors, industrial equipment, or people's devices on their bodies. >> Yeah. >> It's a huge data source. >> Absolutely. >> Cloud's rolling that up. Or a cloud-like infrastructure. >> Well but it's not necessarily rolling it up. It's just connecting all the dots as to where you can put storage and you can put compute where the data is. Or you can move the data to where the storage and the compute is. So it's not, I mean, yes there's core and edge, that's absolutely true, but the notion of rollup isn't necessarily true. It's not necessarily the cloud enables me to do all this colossal aggregation. It's I basically distribute my compute, I distribute my storage. >> Well, when I say rollup, I'm assuming there's some sort of architectural thing. >> Okay, fair. >> But this fits into your wheelhouse, I think. But I just connecting the dots. That's why it's a question for you is, it would make sense for a solution like DATOS to be there because, That's a application so you-- >> Absolutely. >> You back up IOT? >> Oh absolutely. We backup IOT, but we basically backup any modern cloud application. And by definition, what does that mean? >> So IOT's and app for you. >> IOT, absolutely IOT's-- >> Not necessarily a-- >> So the technically where we plug in is, we plugin at the database level. And the databases basically, are the underlying infrastructure that support the applications. So in the case of IOT, those are typically very highly distributed across GIOS, absolutely we protect them. >> So we were just talking earlier about the words flexibility, manageability, agility. That's kind of vanilla words that everyone uses these days. But in essence, you're actually really doing it. Right, so. >> Thanks for that setup. Yes, we actually do all those buzz words. >> So Chris recommends, I recommend that you call it, hyper flexibility. >> Yeah. >> Or microflexibility. >> Or ultra. >> Or ultra flexibility. >> Or go mega. Just go mega right now. Or uber and steal a little of that, although that's kind of out of favor right now. >> Not, uber is-- >> Uber we wanna let that one kind of fly by. >> But remember we also talked before, we thought we were spot on with our product being branded RecoverX. We thought we were really in the spot with the whole, you know. >> Your name is awesome. RecoverX is a great brand. >> So we're gonna stick with that for now before we-- >> Good branding, RecoverX, Data IOS. Chris, thanks for coming on. Final comment, any words on the storage industry as it evolved? You mentioned earlier, just call it flash. Certainly, all flash arrays are doing well. Pure Storage went public. Flash is a standard. >> Yeah. >> It has benefits. Where does the flash storage go with all this cloud value coming over the top? >> Well I think, you know, there's gonna be a couple. I have one comment on that which is, we see what flash is doing at the array level, and now we're gonna see what NVME does at the cash layer, for allowing this access to information. You think about, I want to run a singular query, but some of that data is here, there, everywhere, but I've gotta have a level of performance that allows me to actually run it, and get an answer from it. And so that's where that comes into play. I think we're gonna see a whole host of folks flooding into that space, to try and improve performance, but not only improve performance, but enable that whole distribution model. >> Yeah, and I would just pick up on more persona-centric thing which is, the message to the traditional IT shops is it is all about collaboration. The folks over in the corner, the application folks, it is absolutely all about getting more closely aligned, because cloud is here. >> Yeah. >> Multicloud, hybrid cloud, call it whatever you want, is here. The traditional IT stack is absolutely being disrupted, and it's all about embracing this application-centric, data-driven view of the world. That's the future, traditional IT's got to align with that, and collaborate and drive that whole thing forward. >> That's a great, I agree 100% what you guys just said, great comment. I would just say Wikibon calls it unigrid, which is, I'll rename it hypergrid, meaning it's just one system, to your point. Private, public, it's all cloud-like. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah, it doesn't matter where it goes. Okay guys, thanks for the thought leadership. Peter Smails and Chris Cummings here, breaking down the industry landscape on storage infrastructure, application developers, in context the cloud. This is theCUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (motivating electronic music)