>>Live from Barcelona, Spain, execute covering CubeCon cloud native con Europe, 2019 onto you by red hat, the cloud native computing foundation and ecosystem partners. >>Welcome back. We're here in Barcelona, Spain where 7,700 attendees are here for Q con cloud native con. I'm Stu Miniman and this is the cubes live two day coverage having to have on the program to returning guests to talk about five years of Kubernetes. To my right is Tim Hawkin wearing the Barna contributors shirt. Uh, and uh, sitting to his right is gay Bon Roy. So, uh, I didn't introduce their titles and companies, but you know, so Tim's and Google gives it Microsoft, uh, but you know, heavily involvement in uh, you know, Coobernetti's since the very early days. I mean, you know, Tim, you're, you're on the Wikipedia page game, you know, I think we have to do some re editing to make sure we get the community expanded in some of the major contributors and get you on there. But gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having us. >>Alright. Uh, so, you know, Tim just spoke to Joe Beda and we talked about, you know, the, the, the idea of, you know, Craig and Brendan and him sitting in the room and, you know, open source and, you know, really bringing this out there to community. But let's start with you. Cause he, you know, uh, I remember back many times in my career like, Oh, I read this phenomenal paper about Google. You know, we're going to spend the next decade, you know, figuring out the ripple effect of this technology. Um, you know, Coobernetti's has in five years had a major impact on, on what we're doing. Uh, it gives a little bit of your insight is to, you know, what you've seen from those early days, you know. >>Yeah. You know, um, in the early days we had the same conversations we produced. These papers are, you know, seminal in the industry. Um, and then we sort of don't follow up on them sometimes as Google. Um, we didn't want this to be that, right. We wanted this to be alive living thing with a real community. Uh, that took root in a different way than MapReduce, Hadoop sort of situation. Um, so that was very much front of mind as we work through what are we going to build, how are we going to build and how are we going to manage it? How are we going to build a community? How, how do you get people involved? How do you find folks like Gaiman and Deus and get them to say we're in, we want to be a part of this. >>All right, so Gabe, it was actually Joe corrected me when I said, well, Google started it and they pulled in some other like-minded vendors. Like he said, no, no stew. We didn't pull vendors in. We pulled in people and people that believed in the project and the vision, you were one of those people that got pulled in early. He were, you know, so help give us a little context in your, your viewpoint. I did. And, and, and you know, at the time I was working for a company, uh, called, uh, that I had started and we were out there trying to make developers more productive in industry using modern technology like containers. And you know, it was through the process of trying to solve problems for customers, sort of the lens that I was bringing, uh, to this where, um, I was introduced to some really novel technology approaches first through Docker. >>Uh, and you know, I was close with Solomon hikes, the, the founder over there. Uh, and then, you know, started to work closely with folks at Google, uh, namely Brendon burns, who I now work with at Microsoft. Um, you know, part of the, the founding Kubernetes team. Uh, and I, I agree with that statement that it is really about people. It's really about individual connections at the end of the day. Um, I think we do these things that at these coupons, uh, events called the contributor summits. And it's very interesting because when folks land at one of these summits, it's not about who you work for, what Jersey you're wearing, that sort of thing. It's people talking to people, trying to solve technical problems, trying to solve organizational challenges. Uh, and I think, you know, the, the phenomenon that's happened there and the scale with which that's happened is part of the reason why there's 8,000 people here in Barcelona today. >>Yeah. It's interesting to him cause you know, I used to be involved in some standards work and I've been, you know, working with the open source community for about 20 years. It used to be ah, you know, it was the side project that people did at nights and everything like that. Today a lot of the people that are contributing, well they do have a full time job and their job will either let them or asking them to do that. So I do talk to people here that when they're involved in the working groups, when they're doing these things, yes. You think about who their paycheck comes for, but that's secondary to what they're doing as part of the community. And it is, you know, some of the people what, what >>absolutely. It's part of the ethos of the project that the project comes first and if company comes second or maybe even third. Uh, and for the most part, this has been wildly successful. Uh, there's this huge base of trust among, uh, among the leadership and among the contributors. Um, and you know, it's, it's a big enough project now that I don't know every one of the contributors, but we have this web of trust. And, you know, I, I have this, this army of people that I know and I trust very well and they know people and they know people and it works out that the project has been wildly successful and we've never yet had a major conflict or strife that centered on company this or company that. >>Yeah. And I don't, I'd also add that it's an important development has happened in the wake of Kubernetes where, you know, for example, in my teams at Microsoft, I actually have dedicated PM and engineering staff where their only job is to focus on community engagements, right? Running the release team for communities one 15 or working on IPV six support or windows container support. Uh, and, and that work, that upstream work, uh, puts folks in contact with people from all different companies, Google, uh, uh, you know, Microsoft working closely together on countless initiatives. Uh, and the same is true really for the entire community. So I think it's really great to see that you can get not just sort of the interpersonal interactions. We can also get sort of corporate sponsorship of that model. Cause I do think at the end of the day people need to get their paychecks. Uh, and oftentimes that's going to come from a big company. Uh, and, and seeing that level of investment is, I think, uh, pretty encouraging. Okay. Well, you know, luckily five years in we've solved all the problems and everything works perfectly. Um, if that's not maybe the case, where do we need people involved? What things should we be looking at? Kind of the, the, the next year or two in this space, you know, a project >>of this size, a community of this size, a system of this scope has infinite work to do, right? The, the, the barrel is never going to be empty. Um, and in some cases it's filling faster than it's draining. Um, every special interest group, every SIG, it has a backlog of issues of things that they would like to see fixed of features that they have some user pounding the table saying, I need this thing to work. Uh, IPV six is a great example, right? And, and we have people now stepping up to take on these big issues because they have customers who need it or they see it as important foundational work for building future stuff. Um, so, you know, there's, there's no shortage of work to do. That's not just engineering work though, right? It's not just product definition or API. We have a, what we call a contributor experience. People who work with our community to entre online, uh, new contributors and um, and, and streamline how to get them in and involved in documentation and testing and release engineering. And there's so much sort of non-core work. Uh, I could go on on this for. >>Yeah, you're just reminding me of the session this morning is I don't manage clusters. I manage fleets. And you have the same challenge with the people. Yeah. And I also had another dimension to this about just the breadth of contribution. We were just talking before the show that, um, you know, outside at the logo there is this, uh, you know, characters, book characters, and such. And really that came from a children's book that was created to demonstrate core concepts, uh, to developers who were new to Kubernetes. And it ended up taking off and it was eventually donated to the CNCF. Um, but things like that, you can't underestimate the importance and impact that that can have on making sure that Kubernetes is accessible to a really broad audience. Okay. Uh, yeah, look, I want to give you both a, just the, the, the final word as to w what you shout out, you one for the community and uh, yeah. And any special things that have surprised you or exciting you? Uh, you know, here in 2019, >>uh, you know, exciting is being here. If you rewind five years and tell me I'm going to in Barcelona with with 7,500 of my best friends, uh, I would think you are crazy or are from Mars. Um, this is amazing. And uh, I thank everybody who's here, who's made this thing possible. We have a ton of work to do. Uh, and if you feel like you can't figure out what you need to work on, come talk to me and we'll, we'll figure it out. >>Yeah. And for me, I just want to give a big thank you to all the maintainers folks like Tim, but also, you know, some other folks who, you know, may, you may not know their name but they're the ones slogging it out and to get hub PRQ you know, trying to just make the project work and function day to day and were it not for their ongoing efforts, we wouldn't have any of this. So thank you to that. Well and look, thank you. Of course, to the community and thank you both for sharing with our community. We're always happy to be a small piece of a, you know, helping to spread the word and uh, give some voice to everything that's going on here. Thank you so much. All right, so we will be back with more coverage here from coupon cloud native con 2019 on Stu Miniman and thank you for watching the cube.

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Justin Warren on day one of VMworld 2018. This is the twentieth anniversary of VMware. Lots of momentum this morning kicking things off. Justin and I are happy to be joined by some folks from NetApp. We have Nancy Hart, the Head of Marketing for Cloud Infrastructure. >> Good afternoon. >> Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you Julie, it's so great to be here. And an alumni, Gabe Chapman. I love your Twitter handle @bacon_is_king. Senior Manager of NetApp HCI. Hey, Gabe. >> Hi, how are you doing? >> Good. Guys, lots of momentum. Pat Gelsinger was probably one of my favorite keynotes cause he's really energetic. He even went full-in with his faux tap this morning. I was impressed. >> Impressive. >> You guys have some news. >> Yes. >> Tell us about what's new with NetApp and VMware today. >> Fantastic, exciting times at NetApp these days. NetApp is really focused on becoming the data authority for hybrid cloud. Part of that is what we're excited to announce today here at VMworld, is a NetApp-verified architecture for VMware private cloud for HCI. What you heard today in Pat's keynote was a lot about connection on-premises private clouds with hyperscalers public clouds. That's what we're doing in our partnership with VMware here and this validated architecture for private clouds. Exciting news for us. In addition, we're also really be thrilled to be announcing new storage nodes for our NetApp HCI product and SolidFire product, as well. Lots going on today. >> Wow, that's really cool. >> Gabe, you've been in the field a lot. What are some of the things that you're hearing? Some of the signage around here is about VMware's making things possible, making momentum possible. What are some of the things that you're seeing in the field in terms of customer's momentum? Leveraging HCI from NetApp to drive new business models, new revenue streams. >> I think one of the things I see commonly is that the hyperconverge as a platform has been around for about six, seven years now. Customers are seeing that some of the first generational approaches have got them to a certain level in terms of addressing simplicity and kind of that turnkey infrastructure stack, but where they would like to go next is more cloud integrated, more scalability, more enterprise class or enterprise scale technology. Therefore, they're kind of looking at the NetApp HCI product and the architecture that we've brought to market, and seeing the potential to not only do things on-premise that they'd normally do in terms of a infrastructure platform but also move in to new services. How do we integrate with existing investments that they've had? How do we become connected into the hybrid cloud model with the hyperscalers themselves and really push towards a all-encompassing cloud infrastructure platform other than just a box. >> Yeah, one of the things I noticed in the keynote today that, I think, relates to that, and I'm interested to hear, Nancy and Gabe, a little bit more about what customers are doing here, because it seems that the idea of it must be all cloud or all on-site, that's gone away now. It's very much hybrid cloud world, multi cloud world, where customers have choice. Are you hearing that from customers? Clearly, there seems to be some demand here because we've seen the change in messaging. >> Absolutely, and I think what you're seeing is customers want the option to take advantage of all the resources. Regardless if those resources are on-premises or in public clouds, and that's what we're doing here at NetApp with our own HCI solution. As the market evolves under our feet, Gabe talked about those first generation vendors weren't quite enough, that our customers are choosing NetApp cause they want more then what they can get from those first generation vendors. What you really want to see is that convergence continues to march on and that there is more to collapse into this stack, particularly that connection up into the public cloud. Customers are definitely looking today, they're making buying decisions today based on that option. >> Right, and clearly, there's lots of customers who have substantial investment already in NetApp so being able to use what've you already got and extend it with a vendor that you're already familiar with and you know how it works. There's a lot of value there. >> We're a trusted vendor. NetApp is a trusted enterprise vendor with the reliability and customers can come to us with confidence and choose NetApp with confidence. >> We were with you guys at SAP just a couple months ago at the beginning of the summer and #datadriven was everywhere, I'm seeing it in Twitter. We often hear many things about data is power, data is currency, data is fuel. Data is all of those things if it can be harnessed and acted upon in real time. How does NetApp HCI, what are some of the differentiators? Obviously, we talked about the trusted partnership, but how does NetApp help customers actually live a data-driven life within their organization? >> I think a lot of times it starts with understanding where your data lives. How you manage it, manipulate it, and secure it. We have things like GPDR that comes (mumbles). All the sudden, everybody's scrambling to come up with a solution or a reference architecture or some way that integrates with it. I think, naturally, NetApp being the product technology company that it's been and it's lived and breathed data all its life. We understand our customer's unique requirements around governance, around security, around mobility, and we've built technologies that don't lock you into any one mode of consumption. If you bought a filer, if you bought an HCI system, if you bought an object store platform, the data fabric piece is the glue that binds and allows data mobility and portability across multiple platforms. Not only from the edge to the core, but also to the cloud and kind of gives you that larger, bigger picture. We believe that as we start to see this transition, especially edge computing, especially as we look at things like NVMe over fabrics and getting in to new levels and also services that we are delivering across the hyperscalers. A cohesive picture and story around where your data lives, how you manage it, and who can access it is empowering customers to make their transition into the multi cloud space. >> Right, clearly that transition, I think, is what people weren't really understanding three or four years ago. It was like enterprises aren't going to be there in one spot. You can't just turn it on in five seconds, these things take time. >> (mumbles) flipped, yeah. >> With our data fabric we're able to cover the entire NetApp portfolio from edge to core to cloud. As you say, enterprises and different departments in those enterprises will make their own transition and go down their own journey of digital transformation in their own time. NetApp can really be that trusted partner for all these enterprises. >> With so much choice comes, I think, inherently a lot of complexity. I thought they did a great job this morning in the keynote, Pat Gelsinger and team, of really talking about their announcements, what VMware has done in their history pretty clearly. I can imagine from a customer's perspective, if it's an enterprise organization who doesn't want to get Uber-ized, they probably don't know where to start. Talk to us about sort of the business-level conversations that NetApp has with not just your existing customers who know they can come to NetApp to trust you but also some of those maybe newer businesses or newer enterprise businesses to NetApp. How can they come to you and say help us understand? We probably have, what did they say this morning? The average customer's eight clouds. How do you help them to sort of digest that, embrace it, and be able to maximize it so that their data can be available as soon as they need it? >> What it is is data's at the heart of the enterprise and how people help customers change their world with data, but there has to be a direct business outcome for that. When enterprise customers learn to mine the value of their data they can really build new revenue streams, they can create new touchpoints with their own customers to drive their businesses. For example, one of our early NetApp HCI customers was down in Australia. A company called Consatel, a service provider down in Australia. They were really struggling to set up new businesses and new services to their own customer base. When the conversation, when they worked with NetApp what they were able to do was deploy new services three times faster over their last vendor. Think about what that did for their top line. If this company Consatel could deploy new services, new revenue opportunities three times faster. >> Blowing their competitors out of the water. >> Blowing their competitors out of the water. That's a business-level conversation. This is not a conversation about technology. Yes, under the covers, there's some amazing, fantastic technology, but it has to serve the business. Consatel has now been so successful with NetApp HCI that they now are expanding into brand new geo and geo regions and bringing new services to a whole new set of customers and a whole new customer base working with us. >> That's what I'm hearing in the conversations that I have with customers. I'm interested to hear from yourself and Gabe as to whether you're hearing this across the board. You've got one example here of customers who are concerned more with additional revenues. New revenue streams, new ways of making money top line and not so much about cost savings. That was something that was being, we were concentrating on that maybe three or four years ago. That seems to have been de-emphasized now and people are much more interested in seeking out new ways to use things. New sources of revenue and focusing on top line. Is that something that you're seeing across the board or is that only leading edge companies that are looking at that? >> We see it across the board, I think, with a lot of customers across many different verticals. For instance, Children's Mercy Hospital bought our NetApp HCI product for a virtual desktop implementation and they did so for a lot of reasons. One of them being the traditional TCO/ROI discussion. But also allows them to provide a platform that isn't just a silo of resources because of the unique aspects and differentiation that we have on our platform. We're able to go and do mixed workloads and do consolidation so they're realizing savings and gains across collapsing silos, bringing multiple applications on the same, common infrastructure. The same way they would've gone and swiped their credit card at Amazon. When you do that, you don't care if you're putting a SQL database, an Oracle or what not. They're going to give you the resource that you need. We want to mimic that locally on-prem for customers. Then, also have that integration with cloud services. If we're building a cloud service that runs on Amazon or Google, or if we're integrating with VMware as it runs on AWS or whatever, we want to be able to extend those services from local on-premises environments into the cloud and back based on that. I think that's really where the value is. There's no turnkey public cloud in a hybrid cloud integration piece. It's a journey and you have to analyze all the applications and the way you've done business. NetApp, having been working in the enterprise space as a trusted advisor for such a long time, we understand the customer's needs. We've been in the cloud space for a number of years already and we kind of understand that space. We're bridging the gap at the data level and helping to expand that more at the infrastructure level as well and as we branch into new services as time goes on. >> You've got that challenge of every customer being different but there's also trends that are common across the industry and NetApp being the size and having the history that it does, you've seen all of these things before and you know that yes, this is unique to you as a customer, but also we've seen this in other customers. This would be of value to you and you can bring that to those customers. >> Not only that, we have this product called Active IQ and it tends to be a service and support and monitoring application but, like you said, we have a very large customer base and using features and functionalities in AI we're able to use the data that we get from Active IQ as a community wisdom in effect and then make suggestions to those users as well. NetApp does have a very large install base. What can we learn from that install base, how can we help existing customers run their operations better with that community wisdom? >> We've always referred to it as actionable intelligence for your data. We've all played Tetris as a kid, it's playing Tetris with your data, Tetris with your workloads, and making sure that they all line up so that you get all four blocks break at the same time and get the high score. It's really taking and really, truly mining your infrastructure, mining your workloads and your information, and making sure that you're getting the most effective resource utilization that you possibly can. Across not just virtual machine workloads but also data workloads and understanding what you have on the floor versus what you need six months from now to one year from now. That Active IQ platform is really an integral part to really understanding customer's data resource utilization, etc. >> As someone who has played storage Tetris, any help that you can do is very, very welcome. >> I got to bring that back. That's the second reference I've heard to that in the last couple days. One of the things that Pat Gelsinger and team talked about this morning during the general session was superpowers and the need to enable enterprises to be able to harness their superpowers and maximize AI, machine learning, IoT, the edge. How was NetApp and VMware uniquely positioned to help your customers be able to take that actionable intelligence, Gabe, that you mentioned on that data to drive the new business models and revenue streams? >> I think our superpower would be, information is power, so that's our superpower is being data-driven and understanding how we take the customer's data, leverage it to its most effective use, and allocate it and protect it properly. There's a whole bunch of different areas around what we're doing there. Ours would be understanding data, understanding how customers want to use it, and what kind of information they want to extract from it. I'll have to come up with a fancy term for, maybe data thrivers is my superpower. That could be definitely one part of it. >> You could make a logo out of that. >> That sounds pretty good. >> The Thriver. >> The Thriver, I like it. >> We're data thrivers. >> I like it. >> I think so. >> NetApp has been a partner of VMware's for a very long time. You have a large ecosystem of partners, as well. What you guys announced today, talk to us about some of the benefits or really the opportunities that's going to give to NetApp's channel partners. >> There's a lot of opportunity here for our channel partners. As our customers take this journey, they're going to turn to their trusted advisors, their partners, to help them take that journey as well. What we've done here with what we announced with the VMware private cloud for HCI, this is a significant opportunity for our channel partners to work with their customers and take them down that path to be that data thriver. To harness that superpower. New opportunities for all. Customers need someone to help them show the way and channel partners are really the community to do that. >> For those channel partners who are keen to go and do this, how should they engage with you? How should they start talking to NetApp about helping their customers to go down this journey? >> Honestly, we're making the announcement this week. That's the first step is come by our booths. >> It's a thing, yeah. >> If they're here, obviously. We have a very large channel organization. We have outreach, we'll have training, we'll have, the path to hybrid clouds starts with turnKey private cloud and that's kind of what we've done here. We're working on that turnkey private cloud with our partner VMware and NetApp together to kind of facilitate that first step. Then we go out and work with our channel partner organizations to find the customers that want to go down that path. Then they can bring their additional add-on to it. There's a lot of opportunity to go out and really push and help customers make this transition between the two different worlds and obviously we can go to netapp.com and come and take a look. We have plenty of information there, too. >> Just as we wrap up here, I'm curious, Nancy, to get your perspective, from a cloud infrastructure perspective or vision, the announcements that VMware made today. Big news with AWS. Launched that last year. Talked about a lot of expansion going to apache. A lot of work in Australia. >> Yep. >> What does that as well as some other product enhancements they announced today, what does that mean to NetApp? >> I think for NetApp and for our customers, cause really let's stay focused on NetApp's customers, some of the announcements you saw Pat make today provides new options, new opportunities for NetApp's customers globally. As there's these new features, new functionalities to that turnkey solution for private cloud, what you saw is VMware expanding that relationship with AWS just gives new options and new opportunities. >> Hopefully, people can go and maybe by tomorrow get a data thriver pin or sticker. >> Going to have to run out to Kinko's real quick and make some stickers. >> Maybe print it on some bacon. >> Actually, I think we have pretzel necklaces in our booth to go for the beer crawl. >> Oh wow. What time is that? >> Soon, not soon enough. >> Nancy and Gabe, thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE and chatting with Justin and me. Very exciting to hear NetApp's continued transformation and what you're helping customers achieve. >> Thank you for your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. For Justin Warren, I'm Lisa Martin. We're at VMworld, day one, stick around we'll be right back. (electronic tones)

>> Commentator: Live from Austin, Texas, it's the Cube. Covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2017. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Linux foundation, and the Cube's ecosystem partners. >> Hey welcome back everyone. Live here in Austin, Texas the Cube's exclusive coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, its third year, not even third year I think it's second year and not even three years old as a community, growing like crazy. Over 4500 people here. Combined the bulk of the shows it's double than it was before. I'm John Ferrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE. Stu Miniman, analysts here. Next is Gabe Monroy who was lead p.m. product manager for containers for Microsoft Azure, Gabe welcome to the Cube. >> Thanks, glad to be here. Big fan of the show. >> Great to have you on. I mean obviously container madness we've gotten past that now it's Kubernetes madness which really means that the evolution of the industry is really starting to get some clear lines of sight as a straight and narrow if you will people starting to see a path towards scale, developer acceleration, more developers coming in than ever before, this cloud native world. Microsoft's doing pretty well with the cloud right now. Numbers are great, hiring a bunch of people, give us a quick update big news what's going on? >> Yeah so you know a lot of things going on. I'm just excited to be here, I think for me, I'm new to Microsoft right. I came here about seven months ago by way of a Dais acquisition and I like to think of myself as kind of representing part of this new Microsoft trend. My career was built on open source. I started a company called Dais and we were focused on really Kubernetes based solutions and here at Microsoft I'm really doing a lot of the same thing but with Microsoft's Cloud as sort of the vehicle that we're trying to attract developers to. >> What news do you guys have here, some services? >> Yeah so we got a bunch of things, we're talking about so the first is something I'm especially excited about. So this is the virtual kubelet. Now, tell a little bit of story here, I think it's actually kind of fascinating, so back in July we launched this thing called Azure Container Instances and what ACI was first of its kind service containers in the cloud. Just run a container, runs in the cloud. It's micro build and it is invisible infrastructure, so part of the definition of serverless there. As part of that we want to make it clear that if you were going to do complex things with these containers you really need an orchestrator so we released this thing called the ACI Connector for Kubernetes along with it. And we were excited to see people just were so drawn its idea of serverless Kubernetes, Kubernetes that you know didn't have any VMs associated with it and folks at hyper.sh, who have a similar service container offering, they took our code base and forked it and did a version of theirs and you know Brent and I were thinking together when we were like "oh man there's something here, we should explore this" and so we got some engineers together, we put a lot of work together and we announced now, this in conjunction with hyper and others, this virtual kubelet that bridges the world of Kubernetes with the world of these new serverless container runtimes like ACI. >> Okay, can you explain that a little bit. >> Sure. >> People have been coming in saying wait does serverless replace, how does it work, is Kubernetes underneath still? >> Yeah so I think the best place to start is the definition of serverless and I think serverless is really the conflation of three things: it's invisible infrastructure, it is micro billing, and it is an event based programming model. It's sort of the classical definition right. Now what we did with ACI and serverless containers is we took that last one, the event based programming model, and we said look you don't need to do that. If you want to write a container, anything that runs in that container can work, not just functions and so that is I think a really important distinction that I believe it's really the best of serverless is you know that micro billing and invisible infrastructure. >> Well that's built in isn't it? >> Correct yeah. >> What are the biggest challenges of serverless because first of all its [Inaudible 00:03:58] in the mind of a developer who doesn't want to deal with plumbing. >> Yes. >> Meaning networking plumbing, storage, and a lot of the details around configurating, just program away, be creative, spend their time building. >> Yes. >> What is the big differences between that? What are the issues and challenges that service has for people adopting it or is it frictionless at this point? >> Well you know as far I mean it depends on what you're talking about right. So I think you know for functions you know it's very simple to you know get a function service and add your functions and deploy functions and start chaining those together and people are seeing rapid adoption and that's progressing nicely but there's also a contingent of folks who are represented here at the show who are really interested in containers as the primitive and not functions right. Containers are inclusive of lots of things, functions being one of them, betting on containers as like the compute artifact is actually a lot more flexible and solves a lot more use cases. So we're making sure that we can streamline ease of use for that while also bringing the benefits of serverless, really the way I think of this is marrying our AKS, our Managed Kubernetes Service with ACI, our you know serverless containers so you can get to a place where you can have a Kubernetes environment that has no VMs associated with it like literally zero VMs, you'd scale the thing down to zero and when you want to run a pod or container you just pay for a few seconds of time and then you kill it and you stop paying for it right. >> Alright so talk about customers. >> Yep. >> What's the customer experience you guys are going after, did you have any beta customers, who's adopting your approach, and can highlight some examples of some really cool and you don't have to name names or you can, anecdotal data will be good. >> Yeah well you know I think on the blog post announcement blog post page we have a really great video of Siemens Health and Years, I believe is the name, but basically a health care company that is looking, that is using Kubernetes on Azure, AKS specifically, to disrupt the health care market and to benefit real people and you know to me I think it's important that we remember that we're deep in this technology right but at the end of the day this is about helping developers who are in turn helping real world people and I think that video is a good example of that. >> An what was there impact, speed? Speed of developers? >> Yeah, I mean I think it's really the main thing is agility right, people want to move faster right and so that's the main benefit that we hear. I think cost is obviously a concern for folks but I think in practice the people cost of operating some of these systems is tends to be a lot higher than the infrastructure costs when you stack them up, so people are willing to pay a little bit of a premium to make it easier on people and we see that over and over again. >> Yeah Gabe, want you to speak to kind of the speed of company the size of Microsoft. So you know the Dais acquisition of course was already focused on Kubernetes before inside of Microsoft, see I mean big cloud companies moving really fast on Kubernetes. I've heard complaints from customers like "I can't get a good roadmap because it's moving so fast". >> You know I would say that was one of the biggest surprises for me joining Microsoft, is just how fast things move inside of Azure in particular. And I think it's terrific you know. I think that there's a really good focus of making sure that we're meeting customers where they are and building solutions that meet the market but also just executing and delivering and doing that with speed. One of the things that is most interesting to me is like the geographic spread. Microsoft is in so many different regions more than any other cloud. Compliance certification, we take to all that stuff really seriously and being able to do all those things, be the enterprise friendly cloud while also moving at this breakneck pace in terms of innovation, it's really spectacular to watch from the inside. >> A lot of people don't know that. When they think about Azure they think "oh they're copying Amazon" but Microsoft has tons of data centers. They've had browsers, they're all over the world, so it's not like they're foreign to region areas I mean they're everywhere. >> Microsoft is ever and not only is it not foreign but I mean you got to remember Microsoft is an enterprise software company at its core. We know developers, that is what we do and going into cloud in this way is just it's extremely natural for us. And I think that the same can't really be said for everyone who's trying to move into cloud. Like we've got history of working with developers, building platforms, we've entire division devoted to developer tooling right. >> I want to ask you about two things that comes up a lot, one is very trendy, one is kind of not so trendy but super important, one is AI. >> Yes. >> AI with software units impact disrupt storage and with virtual kubelets this is going to be changing storage game buts going to enhance the machine learning and AI capability. The other one is data warehousing or data analytics. Two very important trends, one is certainly a driver for growth and has a lot of sex appeal as the AI machine learning but all the analytics being done on cloud whether it's an IOT device, this is like a nice use case for containers and orchestration. Your comment and reaction for those two trends. >> Yeah and you know I think that AI and deep learning generally is something that we see driving a ton of demand for container orchestration. I've worked lots of customers including folks like OpenAI on there Kubernetes infrastructure running on a Azure today. Something that Elon Musk actually proudly mention, that was a good moment for the containers (chuckling) >> Get a free Tesla. Brokerage some Teslas and get that new one, goes from 0 to 100 and 4.5 seconds. >> Right yeah. >> So you got a good customer, OpenAI, what was the impact of them? What was the big? >> Well you know this is ultimately about empowering people, in this case they happen to be data scientists, to get their job done in a way where I mean I look at it has we're doing our jobs in the infrastructure space if the infrastructure disappears. The more conceptual overhead we're bringing to developers that means we're not doing our job. >> So question then specifically is deep learning in AI, is it enhanced by containers and Kubernetes? >> Absolutely. >> What order of magnitude? >> I don't know but in order of magnitude in enhancement I would argue. >> Just underlying that the really important piece is we're talking about data here >> Yes. >> and one of the things we've been kind of trying to tackle the last couple years of containers is you know storage and that's carried over to Kubernetes, how's Microsoft involved? What's you're you know prognosis as to where we go with cloud native storage? >> Yeah that's a fascinating question and I actually, so back in the early days when I was still contributing to Docker, I was one of the largest external contributors to the Docker Project earlier in my career. I actually wrote some of the storage stuff and so I've been going around Dockers inception 2013 saying don't run databases in containers. It's not cause you can't, right, you can, but just because you can doesn't mean you should (chuckling) >> Exactly. >> and I think that you know as somebody who has worked in my career as on the operation side things like an SLA mean a lot and so this leads me to another one of our announcements at the show which is the Open Service Broker for Azure. Now what we've done, thanks to the Cloud Foundry Foundation who basically took the service broker concept and spun it out, we now are able to take the world of Kubernetes and bridge it to the world of Azure services, data services being sort of some of the most interesting. Now the demo that I like to show this is WordPress which by the way sounds silly but WordPress powers tons of the web today still. WordPress is a PHP application and a MySQL database. Well if you're going to run WordPress at scale you're going to want to run that MySQL in a container? Probably not, you're probably going to want to use something like Azure database for MySQL which comes with an SLA, backup/restore, DR, ops team by Microsoft to manage the whole thing right. So but then the question is well I want to use Kubernetes right so how do I do that right, well with the Open Service Broker for Azure we actually shipped a helm chart. We can helm install Azure WordPress and it will install in Kubernetes the same way you would a container based system and behind the scenes it uses the broker to go spin up a Postgres, sorry a MySQL and dynamically attach it. Now the coolest thing to me about this yeah is the agility but I think that one of the underrated features is the security. The developer who does that doesn't ever touch credentials, the passwords are automatically generated and automatically injected into the application so you get to do things with rotations without ever touching the app. >> So we're at publisher we use WordPress, we'd love, will this help us with scale if we did Azure? >> Absolutely. After this is over we'll go set it up. (laughing) >> I love WordPress but when it breaks down well this is the whole point of where auto scaling shows a little bit of its capabilities in the world is that, PHP does you'd like to have more instances >> Yeah. >> that would be a use case. Okay Redshift in Amazon wasn't talking about much at re:Invent last week. We don't hear a lot of talk around the data warehouse which is a super important way to think about collecting data in cloud and is that going to be an enhanced feature because people want to do analytics. There's a huge analytics audience out there, they're moving off of tera-data. They're doing you guys have a lot of analytics at Microsoft. They might have moved from Hadoop or Hive or somewhere else so there's a lot of analytics workloads that would be prime or at least potentially prime for Kubernetes. >> Yeah I think >> Or is that not fully integrated. >> No I think it's interesting, I mean for us we look at, I personally think using something like the service broker, Open Service Broker API to bridge to something like a data lake or some of these other Azure hosted services is probably the better way of doing that because if you're going to run it on containers, these massive data warehouses, yes you can do it, but the operational burden is high, >> So your point about the >> its really high. >> database earlier. >> Yeah. Same general point there. Now can you do it? Do we see people doing it? Absolutely right. >> Yeah, they do you things sometimes that they shouldn't be doing. >> Yeah and of course back to the deep learning example those are typically big large training models that have similar characteristics. >> Alright as a newbie inside Azure, not new to the industry and the community, >> Yep. >> share some color. What's it like in there? Obviously a number two to Amazon, you guys have great geography presence, you're adding more and more services every day at Azure, what's the vibe, what's the mojo like over there, and share some inside baseball. >> Yeah I got to say so really I'm just saying it's a really exciting place to work. Things are moving so fast, we're growing so fast, customers really want what we're building. Honestly day to day I'm not spending a lot of time looking out I'm spending a lot of time dealing with enterprises who want to use our cloud products. >> And one of the top things that you have on your p.m. list that are the top stack ranked features people want? >> I think a lot of this comes down, in general I think this whole space is approaching a level of enterprise friendliness and enterprise hardening where we want to start adding governance, and adding security, and adding role based access controls across the board and really making this palatable to high trust environment. So I think a lot that's a lot of our focus. >> Stability, ease of use. >> Stability, ease of use are always there. I think the enterprise hardening and things like v-net support for all of our services, v-net service endpoints, those are some things that are high on the list. >> Gabe Monroy, lead product manager for containers at Microsoft Azure Cloud. Great to have you on and love to talk more about geographies and moving apps around the network and multi-cloud but another time, thanks for the time. >> Another time. >> It's the Cube live coverage I'm John Ferrier co-founder of [Inaudible 00:15:21]. Stu Miniman with Wikibon, back with more live coverage after this short break.

>> Narrator: Live, from Las Vegas its theCUBE. Covering NetApp Insight 2017. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to our live coverage, exclusive coverage at NetApp Insight 2017, it's theCUBE's coverage. I'm John Furrier, co-host, theCUBE co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media, with my co-host, Keith Townsend at CTO Advisor. Our next two guests is Gabe Chapman, Senior Manager, NetApp HCI, and Sidney Sonnier, who's the IT consultant at 4th and Bailey, also a member of the A-Team, a highly regarded, top-credentialed expert. Welcome to theCUBE, guys. Good to see you. >> Hey >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you, good to be here. >> So love the shirt, by the way, great logo, good font, good, comes up great on the camera. >> Thank you. >> We're talking about the rise of the cloud and everything in between, kind of the segment. As a NetApp, A-Team member, and customer. It's here, cloud's here. >> Sidney: Yes >> But it's not yet big in the minds of the Enterprise because they got, it's a path to get there. So, there's public cloud going on, >> Sidney: Right. >> Hybrid clouds, everyone gets that. >> Sidney: Right. >> There's a lot of work to do at home inside a data center. >> Yes, there is, there's an extreme amount of work. And, like you said, these are very exciting times, because we have a blend of all of the technologies and being at an event like this allows us to look at those technologies, look at that fabric, look at that platform, and how we can merge all of those things into an arena that can allow any customer to dynamically move on-prem, off-prem, public cloud, private cloud, but still be able to manage and securely keep all their data in one specific place. >> Gabe, I want to get your thoughts, as he brings up a good point. Architecture's king, it's the cloud architect. Devop has gone mainstream. Pretty much, we all kind of can look at that and say, okay QED, Don, and everyone else put their plans together, but the Enterprises and the folks doing cloud, cloud service providers and everyone else, they have issues, and their plates are full. They have an application development mandate. Get more developers, new kinds of developers, retrain, re-platforming, new onboarding, open source is booming. They have security departments that are unbundling from IT in a way and fully staffed, reporting to the board of directors, top security challenges, data coverage, and then over the top is IoT, industrial IoT. Man, their plate's full. >> Sidney: Right. >> So architecture's huge, and there's a lot of unknown things going on that need to be automated. So it's a real challenge for architects. What's your thoughts. >> So you know, my thoughts about that is, I like to make this joke that there's no book called, The Joy of Menial Tasks. And there are so many of those menial tasks that we do on a day-in and day-out basis, in terms of the Enterprise, whether it's storage, whether it's virtualization, whether it's, whatever it is, right? And I think we've seen this massive shift towards automation and orchestration, and fundamentally the technologies that we're provisioning in today. APIs are king, and they're going to be kind of the focal point, as we move forward. Everything has to have some form of API in it. We have to be making a shift in a transition towards infrastructure as code. At the end of the day the hardware has relevance. It still does, it always will. But the reality is to abstract away the need for that relevance and make it as simple as possible. That's where we have things like hyper converged infrastructure being so at the forefront for so many organizations, NetApp making a foray into this space, as well, is to push, to simplify as much as possible, the day-to-day minutiae, and the infrastructure provisioning. And then, transition those resources over towards getting those next-generation data center applications up, running, and functional. >> Old adage that's been in the industry around making things simple, as our cubbies like an aircraft carrier. But when you go below the water lines, everyone in little canoes paddling, bumping into each other. These silos, if you will. >> Gabe: Right. >> And this is really the dynamic around cloud architecture, is where the operating model's changing. So, you got to be prepared to handle things differently. And in storage, the old days, is, I won't say, easy, but you guys made it easy. A lot of great customers. NetApp has a long history of, but it's not the storage anymore. It's the data fabric as you guys are talking about. It's the developer enablement. It's getting these customers to drive for themselves. It's not about the engine anymore, although, you've got to have a good engine, call it tech, hardware, software together. But the ultimate outcome is the people driving the solutions are app guys. They're just the lines of businesses are under huge pressure and huge need. >> I think you can look at it this way. It's like we're kind of data-driven. You'll see Gene talk about that as part of our messaging. We can no longer be just a storage company. We need to be a data company and a data management organization as we start to have those conversations. Yes, you're going to go in there and talk to the storage administrations and storage teams, but there are 95% of the other people inside of the Enterprise, inside information technology, within different lines of business. They're the ones that we have the most relevant discussions with. That's where our message probably resonates more strongly in the data-driven aspect, or the management, or analytics, and all those other spaces. And I think that's the white space and growth area potential for NetApp, is the fact that we can go in there and have very authoritative discussions with customers around their data needs, and understanding governance. You have things like GPRD, and AMIA. That's a giant open ecosystem for, it has so many requirements and restrictions around it, and everybody's just now starting to wrap their head around it. So building a program around something like that, as well. So there's challenges for everybody. And there's even challenges for vendors like ourselves, because we had, we were mode one. Now we're mode two. So it's kind of like making that transition. And the old speeds, the speeds were always, hey, how fast can you go, what's the files look like, with replication, blah, blah, blah. Now you've got solid, solid state storage. You got SolidFire. Now people want outcomes as a service. Not outcomes anymore, like a cliché, things are happening very dynamically. And last week at Big Data NYC, our event, around the big data world, you couldn't get anymore clear that there's no more room for hype. They want real solutions now. Realtime is critical. And, now watching the keynotes here at NetApp, it's not speed that's featured, although there's a lot of work going on under the hood, it's really about competitive advantage. You're hearing words like data as a competitive advantage. >> Sidney: Yes. >> Sidney, you're in the field, you're in the front lines. Make sense of this. >> The sense that we have to make is, we made up some great points. >> Gabe: Yes. >> Getting the business engaged is one thing, because you still, with the cloud and the cloud architecture, you still have a lot of individuals who are not necessarily sold on it, all the way. So even from a technical perspective. So those guys that are down in the bottom of the boat, so to speak, you still have to kind of convince them because they feel somewhat uncomfortable about it. They have not all the way accepted it. The business is kind of accepted it in pockets. So being, having been on a customer's side and then going to more of a consulting side of things, you understand those pain points. So by getting those businesses engaged and then also engaging those guys to say, listen, it's freeing, the relevance of cloud architecture is not to eliminate a position, it's more to move the mundane tasks that you were more accustomed to using and move you closer to the business so that you can be more effective, and feel more of a participant, and have more value in that business. So that's-- >> So it's creating a value role for the-- >> Right, Right. >> The nondifferentiated tasks >> Absolutely. >> That were being mundane tasks, as you called them. >> Yes. >> You can then put that person now on, whether analytics or ... >> All those IoT things like you were mentioning on those advance projects, and use and leverage the dynamic capability of the cloud being able to go off-prem or on-prem. >> Alright, so what's the guiding principle for a cloud architecture? We'll have to get your thoughts on this because we talked about, in a segment earlier, with Josh, around a good devops person sees automation opportunities and they jump on it like a grenade. There it is, take care of that business and automate it. How do you know what to automate? How do you architect around the notion of we might be continually automating things to shift the people and the process to the value? >> I think what it boils down to is the good cloud architect looks and sees where there are redundancies, things that can be eliminated, things that can be minimized, and sees where complexity is, and focuses to simplify as much of it as possible, right? So my goal has always been to abstract away the complexity, understand that it's there and have the requirements and the teams that can functionally build those things, but then make it look to you as if it were your iPhone, right? I don't know how the app store works. I just download the apps and use it. A good cloud architect does the same thing for their customers. Internally and externally, as well. >> So where does NetApp fit in there, from a product perspective? As a cloud architect, you're always wondering what should I build versus what should I buy? When I look at the open source projects out there, I see a ton of them. Should I go out and dive head deep into one of these projects? Should I look towards a vendor like NetApp to bring to bear that simplified version? Where is the delineation for those? >> So the way we see it is traditionally, there's kind of four consumption models that exists. There's an as-a-service model, or just-in-time model. There are, we see converged, hyper converged as a consumption continuum that people leverage and utilize. There are best-of-breach solutions. Because if I want an object store, I want an object store, and I want it to do exactly what it does. That's an engineering solution. But then there's the as-a-service, I mean, I'm sorry, there's a software-defying component, as well. And those are the, kind of the four areas. If you look at the NetApp product lines, we have an ONTAP set of products, and we have an Element OS set of products, and we have solutions that fit into each one of those consumption continuums, based on what the customer's characteristics are like. You may have a customer that likes configurability. So they would look at a traditional FlexPod with a FAS and say that that's a great idea for me for, in terms of provisioning infrastructure. You may get other customers that are looking at, I want the next-generation data center. I want to provide block storage as a service. So they would look at something like SolidFire. Or, you have the generalist team that looks at simplicity as the key running factor, and time-to-value. And they look at hyper converged infrastructure. So there's a whole set. For me, when I have a conversation with a customer around build versus buy, I want to understand why they would like to build it versus buy it. Because I think that a lot of times, people think, oh, I just download the software and I put it on a box. I'm like, well, right, that's awesome. Now you're in the supply-chain management business. Is that your core competency? Because I don't think it is, right? And so there's a whole bunch of things. It's like firmware management and all these things. We abstract away all of that complexity. That's the reason we charge up for a product, Is the fact that we do all that heavy lifting for the customer. We provide them with an engineered solution. I saw a lot of that when we really focused significantly on the OpenStack space, where we would come up and compete against SEP. And I'm like, well how many engineers do you want to dedicate to keeping SEP up and running? I could give you a turnkey solution for a price premium, but you will never have to dedicate any engineers to it. So that's the trade-off. >> So on that point, I just want to followup. A followup to that is you vision OpenStack, which, big fans of, as you know, we love OpenStack. In the beginning, the challenge with the dupe in OpenStack early on, although that kind of solved, the industry's evolved, is that the early stage was the cost of ownership problem. Which means you had the early tire kickers. Early pioneers doing to work. And they iterated through it. So the question around modernization, which came up as a theme here, what are some modernization practices that I could take as a potential customer, or customer of NetApp, whether I'm an existing customer or a future customer, I want to modernize but I don't want to, I want to manage cost of ownership. And I want to have an architect that's going to allow me to manage my data for that competitive advantage. So I want the headroom of know that it's not just about putting a data link out there, I got to make data realtime, and I don't know when and where it's going to be available. So I need kind of like a fabric or a layer, but I got to have a modern infrastructure. What do I do, what's the playbook? >> So that's where that data fabric, again, comes in. It's like one of the keynotes we heard earlier in the General Session yesterday. We have customers now who are interested in buying infrastructure like we buy electricity. Or like we buy Internet service at home. So by us having this fabric, and it being associated with a brand like NetApp, we're, it's opening up to the point where, what do you really want to do? That's the question we come to you and ask. And if you're into the modernization, we can provide you all the modernization tools right within this fabric, and seamlessly transition from one provider to the next, or plug into another platform or the next, or even put it on-prem. Whatever you want to do. But this will allow the effective management of the entire platform in one location, where you don't have to worry about a big team. You can take your existing team, and that's where that internal support will come in and allow people to kind of concentrate and say, oh, this is some really interesting stuff. Coming from the engineering side of things, being on that customer side, and when you go into customers, you can connect with those guys and help them to leverage this knowledge that they already have because they're familiar with the products. They know the brand. So that makes it more palatable for them to accept. >> So from the cloud architect's perspective, as you look at it, you look at the data-driven fabric or data fabric, and you're like, wow, this is a great idea. Practically, where's the starting point? Is this a set of products? Is it an architecture? Where do I start to bite into this apple? >> So ultimately, I think, you look at it, and I approach it the same way, I would say, like, I can't just go and buy devops. >> Right. >> Right, but data fabric is still, it's a concept, but it's enabled by a suite of technology products. And we look at NetApp across our portfolio and see all the different products that we have. They all have a data fabric element to them, right? Whether it's a FAS, and Snapmirror and snapping to, and ONTAP cloud, it's running in AWS. Whether it's how we're going to integrate with Azure, now with our NFS service that we're providing in there, whether it's hyper converged infrastructure and the ability to move data off there. Our friend Dave McCrory talked about data having gravity, right, he coined that term. And it does, it does have gravity, and you need to be able to understand where it sits. We have analytics in place that help us craft that. We have a product called OCI that customers use. And what it does, it gives them actionable intelligence about where their data sits, where things may be inefficient. We have to start making that transition to, not just providing storage, but understanding what's in the storage, the value that it has, and using it more like currency. We heard George talk about data as currency, it really is kind of the currency, and information is power, right? >> Yeah, Gabe, I mean Gabe, this is right on the money. I mean cryptocurrency and blockchain is a tell sign of what's coming around the corner. A decentralized and distributed environment that's coming. That wave is way out there, but it's coming fast. So you, I want you to take a minute to talk about the cloud component. >> Sidney: Sure. >> Because you mentioned cloud. Talk about your relationship to the clouds, because multi cloud is coming, too. It's not yet there yet, but just because you have a cloud, something in every cloud means multi cloud in the sense of moving stuff around. And then talk about the customer perspective. Because if I'm a customer, I'm saying to myself, okay, I have NetApp, I got files everywhere, I've got ONTAP, they understand the management game, they know how to manage data on-prem, but now I got this cloud thing going on, and I got this shiny new toy start-up over there that's promised me the moon. But I got to make a decision. You're laughing, I know you're thinking about it. This is the dilemma. Do I stay with what I know? >> Right. >> And what I know, is that relevant for where I'm going? A lot of times start-ups will have that pitch. >> Oh, yeah. >> Right >> So address the cloud and then talk about the impact of the customer around the choice. >> Ultimately, it boils down to me in many respects. When I have a conversation with a customer, if I'm going to go for the bright and shiny, right, there has to be a very compelling business interest to do so. If I've built a set of tools and processes around data governance, management, implementation, movement, et cetera, around a bunch of on-premises technologies and I want that same effect or that same look and feel in the public cloud, then that's how we transition there. I want to make it look like I'm using it here locally but it's not on my site, it's somewhere else. It's being managed by somebody else, from a physical standpoint. I'm just consuming that information. But I also know I have to go back and retool everything I've spent in the last 15 and 20 years building because something new and neat comes along. If that new and neat thing comes along, it abstracts away, or it makes a significant cost reduction or something like that, then obviously, you're going to validate that or look at and vet that technology out. But reality is, is that we kind of have these-- >> Well, they don't want to recode, they don't want to retool, they'll rewrite code, but if you look at the clouds, AWS, Azure, and Google, top three in my mind, >> Sidney: Right. >> They all implement everything differently. They got S3 over there, they got it over here, so like, I got it resting on-prem but then I got to hire a devops team that's trained for Azure, Sidney, this is the reality. I mean, evolution might take care of this, but right now, customers have to know that. >> We're at a point right now where customers, businesses we go to, realtime is very important. Software as a service is the thing now. So if you have a customer who is just clicking on a button, and if they can't see that website or whatever your business is, that's a problem. You're going to lose money. You're going to lose customers, you're going to lose revenue. So what you have to do is, as a business, discover what you have internally. And once you discover that and really understand it as a business, not just the tech team, but the business actually understands that. Move that forward and then blend some cloud technology in that with a data fabric, because you're leveraging what you already have. Most of the time, they usually have some sort of NetApp appliance of some sort. And then some of the new appliances that we do have, you can either say, have a small spin, put it next to an old appliance, or use some of the OCI, or something of that nature, to help you migrate to a more dynamic, and the thing about it is, is to just make it more a fluid transition. That's what you're looking to do. Uptime is everything. >> Yeah. >> Totally. >> This fabric will allow you to have that uptime so that you can propel your business and sustain your business. Because you want to be able to still use what you have, and still get that ROI out of that technology, but at the same token, you want to be more dynamic than the competition, so that you can increase that business and still grow the business, but now lose any business. >> Sidney, you bring up a good point. In fact, we should do a followup segment on this, because, what I'm hearing you say, and I've heard this many times in theCUBE, but it's happening, and certainly, we're doing our part on theCUBE to help, but the tech guys, whether they're ops or devs, they're becoming more business savvy. They've got to get closer to the business. >> Sidney: You have to. >> But they don't want to get an MBA, per se, but they have to become street MBA. >> Sidney: Right. >> They got to get that business degree through scar tissue. >> Yes. You can't just be the tech anymore, you have to understand why your business is making this effort, why it's investing this technology, why they would look to go to the public cloud, if you can't deliver a service, and try to emulate that. We've seen that time and time again, the concept of shadow IT, and a shift away from resources. And if you want to be relevant longterm, and not just the guy that sits in the closet, and then plugs in the wires, start learning about your business. Learn about how the business is run and how it generates revenue and see what you can do to affect that. >> Yeah, and the jobs aren't going away. This nonsense about automation killing jobs. >> No, it's not. >> And they use the mainframe as an example, not really relevant, but kind of, but there are other jobs. I mean, look at cyber security, huge data aspect, impact story. >> Sure, it's huge. >> That paradigm is changing realtime. So good stuff, a lot of good business conferences we should do a followup on. I'll give you guys a final word in this segment. If you could each weigh in on what cloud architects should be doing right now. I mean, besides watching theCUBE, and watching you guys here. They got to have the 20-mile stare. They got to understand the systems that are in place. It's almost like an operating system model. They got to see the big picture. Architecting on paper seems easy, but right now it's hard. What's your advice for cloud architects? >> I mean, I say continue to follow the trends. Continue to expose yourself to new technologies. I mean, I'm really interested in things like serverless and those type technologies, and how we integrate our platforms into those types of solutions. Because, that's kind of the next wave of things that are coming along, as we become more of an API-driven ecosystem, right? So if it's infrastructure, if it's code, if it's everything is just in time instance of spin up, how do I have the communications between those technologies? You've just got to stay well ahead of the curve and, you know ... >> John: Sidney, your thoughts? >> My thoughts are along those lines. Not only from a technical perspective but also like you were talking about, that business perspective. Understand your business needs. Because even though, and be able to provide a portfolio, or a suite of tools that will help that business take that next step. And that's where that value. So it's kind of like a blend. You're more of a hybrid. Where you're coming in, not only as a technical person, but you're coming in to assist the business and develop it and help it take it's next step. >> John: And IT is not a department, anymore, it's everywhere. >> No it's not, not. >> It's integrated. >> It is the business. >> Yes. >> Guys, great conversation here on the future of the cloud architect, here inside theCUBE at NetApp Insight 2017 here at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, theCUBE's coverage. We'll be right back with more after this short break. (techno music) (fast and furious music)

>>The Cube presents UI Path Forward. Five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of UI Path Forward. Five from Las Vegas. We're inside. The formerly was The Sands, now it's the Venetian Convention Center. Dave Nicholson. David, Deb. I've never seen it set up like this before. UI Path's. Very cool company. So of course the setup has to be cool, not like tons of concrete. James Furlong is here, the Vice President of Supply Chain Management and projects at Puma. And Derek Weimer is the CEO of Robo, who's an implementation partner, expert at Intelligent Automation. Folks, welcome to the Cube. Good to see you. Great to have you on. >>Thank you. It's a pleasure. >>So what's happening at Puma these days? I love your sneakers, but you guys probably do more than that, but let's tell us about, give us the update on Puma. >>Yeah, absolutely. Puma's one of the world's leading sports, sports brands. So we encompass all things sports. We do footwear, we do apparel, we do accessories. Cobra, Puma golf is underneath our umbrella as well. So we get the added benefit of having that category as well. And yeah, trade, trade all over the world and it's an exciting, exciting brand to be with. >>And di Robo Atlanta based really specialists in intelligent automation. That's pretty much all you do, is that right? >>Yeah, we are a pure play intelligence automation professional services firm. That's all we do. We're the world's largest firm that focuses only on automation headquarter in Germany, but with a large presence here in Americas. >>So we hear from a lot of customers. We've heard from like with the journey it started, you know, mid last decade, Puma James is just getting started. We April you mentioned. So take us through that. What was the catalyst as you're exiting the, the pandemic, the isolation economy we call it? Yeah. What was the catalyst tell, take us through the sort of business case for automation. >>Sure, absolutely. So Puma, our mission is forever faster. It's, it's our mantra and something we live and breathe. So naturally we have an intense focus on innovation and, and automation. So with that mindset, the way this all kicked off is that I had the opportunity to go into some of our distribution facility and I was unbelievably impressed with the automation that I saw there. So how automation augmented the employee workforce. And it was just very impressive to see that some of our state of the art technology and automation at the same time. Then I went back to the office with that excitement and that passion and I saw that we had the opportunity to take that to our employee base as well. We sort of lacked that same intense focus on how do we take automation and technology like I saw at the distribution facilities and bring it to our employees because picture a large workforce of talented, dedicated employees and they just couldn't keep up with the explosive growth who's seen explosive growth over the last couple of years and they just couldn't keep up with it. So I said that that's it. We need to, to take that same passion and innovation and enter in hyper hyper automation. So we went to the leadership team and no surprise they were all in. We went with them with the idea of bringing hyper automation, starting with RPA to, to our office employees. And they were in, they support innovation and they said, Great, what do you need? Really? Go for it. >>The first question wasn't how much, >>Actually the first question I will say that the funny part is, is they said, Well I like this, it sounds too good to be true. And because it, it really does. If you're new to it like we were and I'm pitching all the benefits that RPA could bring, it does sound too good to me. True. So they said, All right, you know, we trust you and, and go for it. What do you need? Resources, just let us know. So sure enough, I had a proof of concept, I had an idea, but now what? I didn't know where to go from there. So that's where we did some intensive research into software suppliers, but also implementation partners because now we knew what we wanted to do. We had excitement, we had leadership buy-in now, now what do I do? So this is when we entered our partnership to figure out, okay, help Puma on this journey. >>How'd you guys find each other? You know, >>Just intensive research and spoke with a lot of people here. Is there a lot of great organizations? But at the end of the day, they really supported everything that Houma stood for, what we're looking to do and had a lot of trust in the beginning and Dirk and his team and how he could help us on this journey. Yeah. >>Now James, your, your job title system for supply chain management. It is, but I understand that you have had a variety of roles within the organization. Now if we're talking about another domain, artificial intelligence, machine learning. Yeah. There's always this concept of domain expertise. Yeah. And how when you're trying to automate things in that realm, domain expertise is critical. Yeah. You have domain expertise outside of your job title. Yeah. So has that helped you with this journey looking at automation, being able to, being able to have insight into those other organizations? >>Yeah, absolutely. And I think when we were pitching it to the leadership team in the beginning, that enabled me to look at each one sitting at the table and saying, alright, and on the sales, on a commercial side, I was a head of sales for one of the trade channels. I could speak directly to him in the benefits it could have with not with tribal knowledge and with an expertise. So it wasn't something that, it was just, oh, that's supply chain. I could sit, you know, with the, our CFO and talk to him about the, the benefits for his group merchandising and legal so on. I was really able to kind of speak to each one of them and how it would support, because I had that knowledge from being blessed of 15 years experience at, at Puma. So yeah, I was able to take all of that and figure out how do I make sure not just supply chain benefits from rpa, but how does the whole organization benefit from not only RPA but the hyper automation strategy. >>So what's an engagement look like? You start, I presume you, you gotta do some type of assessment and, and you know, of some upfront planning work. Yeah. What does that look like? How, what's the starting point? Take us through that >>Journey. Yeah, so exactly. So the, the key when you're trying to get value from Intel automation is finding the right opportunities, right? And you can automate a lot of things, but which are the things that are gonna drive the most value and, and the value that actually matters to the company, right? So where are you trying to get to from a strategic level, your objectives and how do you actually use automation to help you get to there? So the first thing is, what are the opportunities gonna help you do that? And then once you identify, what we recommend is start with something that's gonna be, you know, accessible, small, You're gonna get a quick win. Cuz then the important thing is once you get that out there, you build the momentum and excitement in the organization that then leads to more and more. And then you build a proper pipeline and you and you get that the, the engagement. >>So what was that discovery like? Was it you fly up there and do a, a chalk talk? Or did you already know James, like where you wanted to focus? >>Yeah, I knew I had a solid proof of concept with the disruptions in supply chain we couldn't keep up with, with all the changes and supply. So right away I knew that I have a very substantial impact on the organization and it would be a solid proof of concept. It was something that not only would supply chain steal, but our customers would feel that we would be servicing them better. Our sales team, the commercial team, marketing impacted everybody. But at the same time it was tangible. I saw two people that just physically couldn't get their, their work done despite how talented and hardworking they were. So I, I was in on that proof of concept and then I just took that idea with some strong advice from Dirk and and his team on, okay, well how do I take that? But then also use that to evangelize through the organization. What are some pitfalls to avoid? Because as a proof of concept, they just told me it's too good to be true. I believe in it. So it was so important to me that it >>Was successful. >>It get your neck out. Oh, I sure was. Which is a little scary, but I had confidence that we would >>Do it. But your poc you had to have a systems view. Yes. Right? Cuz you were trying to, I think you, I'm inferring that you had two people working really hard, but they couldn't get their job done. Yeah, for sure. They were just sitting on their hands. Right. Waiting. Okay. So you kind of knew where the bottlenecks were. Yes. And that's what you attacked and or you helped James and her the team think through that or, >>Yeah, exactly. So, so a couple points you were asking about her domain model of knowledge earlier, and I think that's really key to the puma's success with it, is that they've come at it from a business point of view, what matters to the business. And at the point, you know, supply chain challenges, how do we use automation to address that? And then, you know, and then it's gonna, it's actually gonna, you know, pick opportunities that are gonna matter to the business. Yeah, >>Yeah. At the same time, we, we knew this could be a scary thing, right? If it's not done right, you know, automation definitely can, can take a, a wrong path. So what we relied on them for is tell us how to make this successful. We wanted structure, we wanted oversight, we wanted to balance that with speed and really, you know, developing our pipeline, but at the same time, tell us how to do this right? How do we set up a center, our first ever center of excellence? They help us set that up. Our steerco, our process definition documents are like, they really helped us add that structure to how to make this successful, sustainable and make sure that we were standing things up the right way versus launching into a strong proof, proof of concept. But then it's not gonna be scalable if we didn't really take their strong advice on how to make this something, you know, that had the right oversight, the right investment. So that was, that was key as >>Well for us. So when you looked at the POC and James was saying there were potential pitfalls, what were those pitfalls? Like what did you tell Puma, Hey, watch out for this, watch out for that. What was sort of the best advice there? >>Yeah, so I think one is understanding complexity, right? So a lot of opportunities sound good, but you want to make sure that it's, it's feasible with the right tool set. And also that you're not bit off too much in the beginning is really important. And so some of that is that bringing that expertise to say, Okay, yeah, look, that does something, a good process. You're gonna get value out. It's not gonna be overly complicated. It's a good place to start. And then also, I guess the thing too to mention is it's more than just a technology project. And that's the thing that we also really focus on is it's actually as much about the change management, it's much about, you know, what is the right story, the business case around it, the technology actually in a way is the easy part and it's all the stuff around it that really makes the POC effective, >>Obviously the process. Yeah. Been the people I presume getting to adopt, >>Right? And I think, again, with our, our brand mantra forever faster, we, we get that support that the buy-in from the top is is there from, from the beginning. So that's a benefit that some companies don't, they don't have, right? They have a little resistance maybe from the top. We're trying to get everyone's buy in it. And we had that. So we had, you know, the buy-in the engagement, we were ready to go. So now we just needed someone to kind of help us. >>One more if I may. Yeah, yeah. Gabe, six months in. Yes. That's the business impact that, can >>You tell you? That was tremendous. Yeah. >>Really already six months. Wow. >>Yeah, >>Absolutely. Cfo, CFO's dream. Yeah. >>And again, and, and we had a CFO change mid, mid project. So the new CFO comes in, not new to Puma, the same thing. Super, super smart guy. And I had to sit and again pitch, you know, pitch what it is and the support that I needed by way of investment. And he saw the results and he was all in, you know, what do you need, what's next? And instantly was challenging his departments, Why don't he got competitive, right? We're a competitive bunch, so why don't you know, you should have more in the pipeline. And he was, he was bought in. So there was that fear of a new CFO coming in and how do you show value? Because some of it is, it's very easy to show right away, You know, we were able to refocus those two full-time employees on, on higher value chain activity and you know, they're doing a tremendous job and they're, you know, they have the, the bot and the automation supporting them. So he saw that right away. And we can show him that. But he also understands, as does the whole leadership team, the concept of downstream impacts that you can't necessarily, you know, touch and, and put on paper. So he sees some, but then he also recognizes all the other upstream and downstream impacts that it's had and he's all in and supports whatever, whatever we need. >>Yeah. New CFOs like George Seaford taking over for bill walls. >>Yeah, exactly. Exactly. We >>Have, we have to keep showing results and it has to be sustainable. So that's, again, we'll rely on our partnership to say, okay, this is the beginning, you know, what's next? Keep us, you know, honest on oversight and, and any pitfalls that we should avoid because he's excited. But at the same time, we need to make sure that we sustain those results and, and show what's next. Now they all gotta taste to the apple and they're very eager to see what's next in, in, in this hyper automation journey. >>Well, Dirk, you've partnered on this journey, this specific journey with, with, with Puma. But from your perspective in the broader marketplace, what would be the perfect low hanging fruit opportunity that you would like to have somebody call you and say, Hey, we've got, we've got this perspective engagement with a client. What would be the, what would be the like, Oh yeah, that's easy, that's huge roi really quickly, What does that look like? >>Yeah, I think there's, there's a few areas, right? You know, one task automation RPA is a, is a really good entry point, right? Because it's, it's, it's not overly complex. It doesn't involve a lot of complicated technologies. And I'd say the, the usual starting areas, you know, you, you finance back office, you know, shared service, invoice processing, you know, payables is a very good opportunity area. HR is also an area I would look at, you know, in new, new employee onboarding process or you know, payroll, et cetera. And then supply chain is actually becoming more and more, more common, right? So those would be I guess, top three areas I would mention. And >>Then, and then kind of follow onto that, what's the tip of this sphere? What's the sort of emerging market Yeah. >>For >>This kind of technology? >>I think there's two things. One, it's taking a holistic into end view and leveraging multiple, you know, technology, you know, beyond just rpa, right? You know, intelligent document processing, iml, you know, bringing all this to bear to actually do a true digital transformation. That's, that's number one. And then I'd say the second is going from focusing on cost and efficiency to actually getting into the front office and how do you, how do you actually increase revenue? How do you increase margin? How do you actually, you know, help with that, that top line growth. I think that's really, and that's where you're leveraging technologies, you know, like the, the AI as an example to really help you understand how do you optimize. >>So James, that's, that becomes then an enterprise wide initiative. Yeah. That's, that's, is that your vision? Maybe maybe lay that out for >>Us a bit. Yeah, ab absolutely. The, the vision is now that we've seen what, what it can do, how do we take it from being managed by just, you know, supply chain and this proof of concept cuz I manage projects, but now it's bigger than just a supply chain project. And how do we sort of evangelize that through the whole organization And you know, they mentioned on main stage this, the creation of new jobs and, and roles and how a, a company might set out their strategic directive now is, is changing and evolving. So you know that that's our idea now and that what we'll need support next is how should we structure now for success. And so that it's across the whole enterprise. But that's, that's the vision for >>Sure. What worries you do, you worried about it like taking off and getting outta control and not being governed and so you have to be a little bit careful there. >>Yeah, for sure. That was really important to us. And we actually got to leverage a lot of heavy lifting that Puma Global had done at the same time that we were coming up and, and thinking of the idea of rpa. They were having the same thoughts and they did a lot of heavy lifting again, about not only the software providers but also what does the structure look like, the oversight, a center of excellence globally. So we were able to really leverage a lot of best practices and SOPs that they had set out and we were able to kind of leverage those, bring those to Puma North America so that we didn't face that fear cuz that would be a limiting factor for us. So because we were so disciplined and we could leverage the work that they had done, that fear wasn't, wasn't there. Now we have to stay, you know, on top of it. And as people get excited, how do you kind of mirror the excitement and with it at the same time that the oversight and not getting, you know, too, too big, too fast. So that's the balance that we'll, we'll work through now. It's a good problem to have. >>Well, exactly. It is super exciting. Great story. Congratulations on, on the success and good luck. Thank you. Yeah, you very much for coming to the, Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. All right. And thank you for watching. Keep it right there. Dave Nicholson Andante right back, the cube live from Las Vegas UI path forward. Five.

hi everybody and welcome to this cube special presentation of the verdict of virtual Big Data conference the cube is running in parallel with day 1 and day 2 of the verdict big data event by the way the cube has been at every single big data event and it's our pleasure to be here in the virtual / digital event as well Gabriel Chapman is here is the director of flash blade product solutions marketing at pure storage gave great to see you thanks for coming on great to see you - how's it going it's going very well I mean I wish we were meeting in Boston at the Encore Hotel but you know and and hopefully we'll be able to meet it accelerate at some point you cheer or one of the the sub shows that you guys are doing the regional shows but because we've been covering that show as well but I really want to get into it and the last accelerate September 2019 pure and Vertica announced a partnership I remember a joint being ran up to me and said hey you got to check this out the separation of Butte and storage by a Eon mode now available on flash played so and and I believe still the only company that can support that separation and independent scaling both on permit in the cloud so Gabe I want to ask you what were the trends in analytical database and cloud that led to this partnership you know realistically I think what we're seeing is that there's been in kind of a larger shift when it comes to modern analytics platforms towards moving away from the the traditional you know Hadoop type architecture where we were doing on and leveraging a lot of direct attached storage primarily because of the limitations of how that solution was architected when we start to look at the larger trends towards you know how organizations want to do this type of work on premises they're looking at solutions that allow them to scale the compute storage pieces independently and therefore you know the flash play platform ended up being a great solution to support Vertica in their transition to Eon mode leveraging is essentially as an s3 object store okay so let's let's circle back on that you guys in your in your announcement of a flash blade you make the claim that flash blade is the industry's most advanced file and object storage platform ever that's a bold statement so defend that it's supposed to yeah III like to go beyond that and just say you know so we've really kind of looked at this from a standpoint of you know as as we've developed flash blade as a platform and keep in mind it's been a product that's been around for over three years now and has you know it's been very successful for pure storage the reality is is that fast file and fast object as a combined storage platform is a direction that many organizations are looking to go and we believe that we're a leader in that fast object of best file storage place in realistically would we start to see more organizations start to look at building solutions that leverage cloud storage characteristics but doing so on prem or multitude different reasons we've built a platform that really addresses a lot of those needs around simplicity around you know making things assure that you know vast matters for us simple is smart we can provide you know cloud integrations across the spectrum and you know there's a subscription model that fits into that as well we fall that that falls into our umbrella of what we consider the modern data experience and it's something that we've built into the entire pure portfolio okay so I want to get into the architecture a little bit of Flash blade and then better understand the fit for analytic databases generally but specifically Vertica so it is a blade so you got compute and a network included it's a key value store based system so you're talking about scale out unlike unlike viewers sort of you know initial products which were scale up and so I want to under in as a fabric base system I want to understand what that all mean so take us through the architecture you know some of the quote-unquote firsts that you guys talk about so let's start with sort of the blade aspect yeah the blade aspect meaning we call it a flash blade because if you look at the actual platform you have a primarily a chassis with built in networking components right so there's a fabric interconnect with inside the platform that connects to each one of the individual blades the individual blades have their own compute that drives basically a pure storage flash components inside it's not like we're just taking SSDs and plugging them into a system and like you would with the traditional commodity off-the-shelf hardware design this is a very much an engineered solution that is built towards the characteristics that we believe were important with fast file and fast object scalability you know massive parallelization when it comes to performance and the ability to really kind of grow and scale from essentially seven blades right now to a hundred and fifty that's that's the kind of scale that customers are looking for especially as we start to address these larger analytic spools they have multi petabyte datasets you know that single addressable object space and you know file performance that is beyond what most of your traditional scale-up storage platforms are able to deliver yes I interviewed cause last September and accelerate and and Christopher's been you know attacked by some of the competitors is not having a scale out I asked him his thoughts on that he said well first of all our Flash blade is scale-out and he said look anything that that that adds the complexity you know we avoid but for the workloads that are associated with Flash blade scale-out is the right sort of approach maybe you could talk about why that is well you know realistically I think you know that that approach is better when we're starting to learn to work with large unstructured data sets I mean flash plays uniquely architected to allow customers to achieve you know a superior resource utilization for compute and storage well at the same time you know reducing significantly the complexity that is arisen around these kind of bespoke or siloed nature of big data and analytic solutions I mean we really kind of look at this from a standpoint of you have built and delivered or created applications in the public cloud space that address you know object storage and and unstructured data and and for some organizations the importance is bringing that on Prem I mean we do seek repatriation that coming on on for a lot of organizations as these data egress charges continue to expand and grow and then organizations that want even higher performance in the what we're able to get into the public cloud space they are bringing that data back on Prem they are looking at from a standpoint we still want to be able to scale the way we scale on the cloud we still want to operate the same way we operate in the cloud but we want to do it within control of our own you know our own borders and so that's you know that's one of the bigger pieces to that is we start to look at how do we address cloud characteristics and dynamics and consumption metrics or models as well as the benefits and efficiencies of scale that they're able to afford but allowing customers that do that with inside their own data center yes are you talking about the trends earlier you had these cloud native databases that allowed the scaling of compute and storage independently of Vertica comes in with eon of a lot of times we talk about these these partnerships as Barney deals of you know I love you you love me here's a press release and then we go on or they're just straight you know go to market are there other aspects of this partnership that are that are non Barney deal like in other words any specific you know engineering you know other go to market programs can you talk about that a little bit yeah it's it's it's more than just you know I then what we consider a channel meet in the middle or you know that Barney type of deal it's the realistically you know we've done some first with Vertica that I think are really important if they think you look at the architecture and how we do have we've brought this to market together we have solutions teams in the back end who are you know subject matter experts in this space if you talk to joy and the people from vertigo they're very high on or very excited about the partnership because it often it opens up a new set of opportunities for their customers to to leverage Eon mode and you know get into some of the the nuanced aspects of how they leverage the depot for Depot with inside each individual compute node and adjustments with inside there I reach additional performance gains for customers on Prem and at the same time for them there's still the ability to go into that cloud model if they wish to and so I think a lot of it is around how do we partner as two companies how do we do a joint selling motions you know how do we show up and and you know do white papers and all of the the traditional marketing aspects that we bring devote to the market and then you know joint selling opportunities as exists where they are and so that's realistically I think like any other organization that's going to market with a partner or an ISP that they have a strong partnership with you'll continue to see us you know talking about our chose mutually beneficial relationships and the solutions that we're bringing to the market okay you know of course he used to be a Gartner analyst and you go over to the vendor side now but as but as it but as a gardener analyst you're obviously objective you see it all you know well there's a lot of ways to skin a cat there are there are there are strengths weaknesses opportunities threats etc for every vendor so you have you have Vertica who's got a very mature stack and and talking to a number of the customers out there we're using Eon mode you know there's certain workloads where these cloud native databases make sense it's not just the economics of scaling compute and storage independently I want to talk more about that there's flexibility aspects as well but Vertica really you know has to play its trump card which is look we've got a big on-premise state and we're gonna bring that you know Eon capability both on Prem and we're embracing the cloud now they're obviously you have to they had to play catch-up in the cloud but at the same time they've got a much more mature stack than a lot of these other you know cloud native databases that might have just started a couple of years ago so you know so there's trade-offs that customers have to make how do you sort through that where do you see the interest in this and and and what's the sweet spot for this partnership you know we've been really excited to build the partnership with Vertica and we're providing you know we're really proud to provide pretty much the only on Prem storage platform that's validated with the vertical yawn mode to deliver a modern data experience for our customers together you know it's it's that partnership that allows us to go into customers that on Prem space where I think that they're still you know not to say that not everybody wants to go the cloud I think there's aspects and solutions that work very well there but for the vast majority I still think that there's you know the your data center is not going away and you do want to have control over some of the many of the different facets with inside the operational confines so therefore we start to look at how do we can do the best of what cloud offers but on Prem and that's realistically where we start to see the stronger push for those customers who still want to manage their data locally as well as maybe even work around some of the restrictions that they might have around cost and complexity hiring you know the different types of skills skill sets that are required to bring you know applications purely cloud native it's still that larger part of that digital transformation that many organizations are going for going forward with and realistically I think they're taking a look at the pros and cons and we've been doing cloud long enough for people recognize that you know it's not perfect for everything and that there's certain things that we still want to keep inside our own data center so I mean realistically as we move forward that's that that better option when it comes to a modern architecture they can do it you know we can deliver and address a diverse set of performance requirements and allow the organization to continue to grow the model to the data you know based on the data that they're actually trying to leverage and that's really what flash Wood was built or it was built for a platform that can address small files or large files or high throughput high throughput low latency scale to petabytes in a single namespace in a single rack as we like to put it in there I mean we see customers that have put you know 150 flash blades into production as a single namespace it's significant for organizations that are making that drive towards modern data experience with modern analytics platforms pure and Vertica have delivered an experience that can address that to a wide range of customers that are implementing you know the verdict technology I'm interested in exploring the use case a little bit further you just sort of gave some parameters and some examples and some of the flexibility that you have in but take us through kind of what the discuss the customer discussions are like obviously you've got a big customer base you and Vertica that that's on prem that's the the the unique advantage of this but there are others it's not just the economics of the the granular scaling of compute and storage independently there are other aspects so to take us through that sort of a primary use case or use cases yeah you know I mean I can give you a couple customer examples and we have a large SAS analyst company which uses verdict on flash play to authenticate the quality of digital media in real time and you know then for them it makes a big difference is they're doing they're streaming and whatnot that they can they can fine tune and grandly control that so that's one aspect that that we get address we have a multi national car con company which uses verdict on flash blade to make thousands of decisions per second for autonomous vehicle decision-making trees that you know that's what really these new modern analytics platforms were built or there's another healthcare organization that uses Vertica on flash blade to enable healthcare providers to make decisions in real time the impact Ives especially when we start to look at and you know the current state of affairs with Kovac in the coronavirus you know those types of technologies are really going to help us kind of get love and and help lower and been you know bend that curve downward so you know there's all these different areas where we can address the goals and the achievements that we're trying to look bored with with real-time analytic decision making tools like Berta and you know realistically as we have these conversations with customers they're looking to get beyond the ability of just you know you know a data scientist or a data architect looking to just kind of drive in information we were talking about Hadoop earlier we're kind of going well beyond that now and I guess what I'm saying is that in the first phase of cloud it was all about infrastructure it was about you know spinning up you know compute and storage a little bit of networking in there seems like the the a next a new workload that's clearly emerging is you've got and it started with the cloud databases but then bringing in you know AI and machine learning tooling on top of that and then being able to really drive these new types of insights and it's really about taking data these bogs this bog of data that we've collected over the last 10 years a lot of that you know driven by Hadoop bringing machine intelligence into the equation scaling it with either cloud public cloud or bringing that cloud experience on prams scale you know across your organizations and across your partner network that really is a new emerging work load do you see that and maybe talk a little bit about you know what you're seeing with customers yeah I mean it really is we see several trends you know one of those is the ability to take a take this approach to move it out of the lab but into production you know especially when it comes to you know data science projects machine learning projects that traditionally start out as kind of small proofs of concept easy to spin up in the cloud but when a customer wants to scale and move towards a real you know it derived a significant value from that they do want to be able to control more characteristics right and we know machine learning you know needs to needs to learn from a massive amounts of data to provide accuracy there's just too much data to retrieve in the cloud for every training job at the same time predictive analytics without accuracy is not going to deliver the business advantage of what everyone is seeking you know we see this the visualization of data analytics is traditionally deployed as being on a continuum with you know the things that we've been doing in the long you know in the past you know with data warehousing data lakes AI on the other end but but this way we're starting to manifest it in organizations that are looking towards you know getting more utility and better you know elasticity out of the data that they are working for so they're not looking to just build ups you know silos of bespoke AI environments they're looking to leverage you know a platform that can allow them to you know do a I for one thing machine learning for another leverage multiple protocols to access that data because the tools are so much different you know it is a growing diversity of of use cases that you can put on a single platform I think organizations are looking for as they try to scale these environments I think there's gonna be a big growth area in the coming years gay ball I wish we were in Boston together you would have painted your little corner of Boston Orange I know that you guys are sharing but I really appreciate you coming on the cube wall-to-wall coverage two days at the vertical Vertica virtual big data conference keep you right there but right back right after this short break [Music]

hi everybody and welcome to this cube special presentation of the verdict of virtual Big Data conference the cube is running in parallel with day 1 and day 2 of the verdict big data event by the way the cube has been at every single big data event and it's our pleasure to be here in the virtual / digital event as well Gabriel Chapman is here is the director of flash blade product solutions marketing at pure storage gave great to see you thanks for coming on great to see you - how's it going it's going very well I mean I wish we were meeting in Boston at the Encore Hotel but you know and and hopefully we'll be able to meet it accelerate at some point you cheer or one of the the sub shows that you guys are doing the regional shows but because we've been covering that show as well but I really want to get into it and the last accelerate September 2019 pure and Vertica announced a partnership I remember a joint being ran up to me and said hey you got to check this out the separation of Butte and storage by a Eon mode now available on flash played so and and I believe still the only company that can support that separation and independent scaling both on permit in the cloud so Gabe I want to ask you what were the trends in analytical database and cloud that led to this partnership you know realistically I think what we're seeing is that there's been in kind of a larger shift when it comes to modern analytics platforms towards moving away from the the traditional you know Hadoop type architecture where we were doing on and leveraging a lot of direct attached storage primarily because of the limitations of how that solution was architected when we start to look at the larger trends towards you know how organizations want to do this type of work on premises they're looking at solutions that allow them to scale the compute storage pieces independently and therefore you know the flash play platform ended up being a great solution to support Vertica in their transition to Eon mode leveraging is essentially as an s3 object store okay so let's let's circle back on that you guys in your in your announcement of a flash blade you make the claim that flash blade is the industry's most advanced file and object storage platform ever that's a bold statement so defend that it's supposed to yeah III like to go beyond that and just say you know so we've really kind of looked at this from a standpoint of you know as as we've developed flash blade as a platform and keep in mind it's been a product that's been around for over three years now and has you know it's been very successful for pure storage the reality is is that fast file and fast object as a combined storage platform is a direction that many organizations are looking to go and we believe that we're a leader in that fast object of best file storage place in realistically would we start to see more organizations start to look at building solutions that leverage cloud storage characteristics but doing so on prem or multitude different reasons we've built a platform that really addresses a lot of those needs around simplicity around you know making things assure that you know vast matters for us simple is smart we can provide you know cloud integrations across the spectrum and you know there's a subscription model that fits into that as well we fall that that falls into our umbrella of what we consider the modern data experience and it's something that we've built into the entire pure portfolio okay so I want to get into the architecture a little bit of Flash blade and then better understand the fit for analytic databases generally but specifically Vertica so it is a blade so you got compute and a network included it's a key value store based system so you're talking about scale out unlike unlike viewers sort of you know initial products which were scale up and so I want to under in as a fabric base system I want to understand what that all mean so take us through the architecture you know some of the quote-unquote firsts that you guys talk about so let's start with sort of the blade aspect yeah the blade aspect meaning we call it a flash blade because if you look at the actual platform you have a primarily a chassis with built in networking components right so there's a fabric interconnect with inside the platform that connects to each one of the individual blades the individual blades have their own compute that drives basically a pure storage flash components inside it's not like we're just taking SSDs and plugging them into a system and like you would with the traditional commodity off-the-shelf hardware design this is a very much an engineered solution that is built towards the characteristics that we believe were important with fast file and fast object scalability you know massive parallelization when it comes to performance and the ability to really kind of grow and scale from essentially seven blades right now to a hundred and fifty that's that's the kind of scale that customers are looking for especially as we start to address these larger analytic spools they have multi petabyte datasets you know that single addressable object space and you know file performance that is beyond what most of your traditional scale-up storage platforms are able to deliver yes I interviewed cause last September and accelerate and and Christopher's been you know attacked by some of the competitors is not having a scale out I asked him his thoughts on that he said well first of all our Flash blade is scale-out and he said look anything that that that adds the complexity you know we avoid but for the workloads that are associated with Flash blade scale-out is the right sort of approach maybe you could talk about why that is well you know realistically I think you know that that approach is better when we're starting to learn to work with large unstructured data sets I mean flash plays uniquely architected to allow customers to achieve you know a superior resource utilization for compute and storage well at the same time you know reducing significantly the complexity that is arisen around these kind of bespoke or siloed nature of big data and analytic solutions I mean we really kind of look at this from a standpoint of you have built and delivered or created applications in the public cloud space that address you know object storage and and unstructured data and and for some organizations the importance is bringing that on Prem I mean we do seek repatriation that coming on on for a lot of organizations as these data egress charges continue to expand and grow and then organizations that want even higher performance in the what we're able to get into the public cloud space they are bringing that data back on Prem they are looking at from a standpoint we still want to be able to scale the way we scale on the cloud we still want to operate the same way we operate in the cloud but we want to do it within control of our own you know our own borders and so that's you know that's one of the bigger pieces to that is we start to look at how do we address cloud characteristics and dynamics and consumption metrics or models as well as the benefits and efficiencies of scale that they're able to afford but allowing customers that do that with inside their own data center yes are you talking about the trends earlier you had these cloud native databases that allowed the scaling of compute and storage independently of Vertica comes in with eon of a lot of times we talk about these these partnerships as Barney deals of you know I love you you love me here's a press release and then we go on or they're just straight you know go to market are there other aspects of this partnership that are that are non Barney deal like in other words any specific you know engineering you know other go to market programs can you talk about that a little bit yeah it's it's it's more than just you know I then what we consider a channel meet in the middle or you know that Barney type of deal it's the realistically you know we've done some first with Vertica that I think are really important if they think you look at the architecture and how we do have we've brought this to market together we have solutions teams in the back end who are you know subject matter experts in this space if you talk to joy and the people from vertigo they're very high on or very excited about the partnership because it often it opens up a new set of opportunities for their customers to to leverage Eon mode and you know get into some of the the nuanced aspects of how they leverage the depot for Depot with inside each individual compute node and adjustments with inside there I reach additional performance gains for customers on Prem and at the same time for them there's still the ability to go into that cloud model if they wish to and so I think a lot of it is around how do we partner as two companies how do we do a joint selling motions you know how do we show up and and you know do white papers and all of the the traditional marketing aspects that we bring devote to the market and then you know joint selling opportunities as exists where they are and so that's realistically I think like any other organization that's going to market with a partner or an ISP that they have a strong partnership with you'll continue to see us you know talking about our chose mutually beneficial relationships and the solutions that we're bringing to the market okay you know of course he used to be a Gartner analyst and you go over to the vendor side now but as but as it but as a gardener analyst you're obviously objective you see it all you know well there's a lot of ways to skin a cat there are there are there are strengths weaknesses opportunities threats etc for every vendor so you have you have Vertica who's got a very mature stack and and talking to a number of the customers out there we're using Eon mode you know there's certain workloads where these cloud native databases make sense it's not just the economics of scaling compute and storage independently I want to talk more about that there's flexibility aspects as well but Vertica really you know has to play its trump card which is look we've got a big on-premise state and we're gonna bring that you know Eon capability both on Prem and we're embracing the cloud now they're obviously you have to they had to play catch-up in the cloud but at the same time they've got a much more mature stack than a lot of these other you know cloud native databases that might have just started a couple of years ago so you know so there's trade-offs that customers have to make how do you sort through that where do you see the interest in this and and and what's the sweet spot for this partnership you know we've been really excited to build the partnership with Vertica and we're providing you know we're really proud to provide pretty much the only on Prem storage platform that's validated with the vertical yawn mode to deliver a modern data experience for our customers together you know it's it's that partnership that allows us to go into customers that on Prem space where I think that they're still you know not to say that not everybody wants to go the cloud I think there's aspects and solutions that work very well there but for the vast majority I still think that there's you know the your data center is not going away and you do want to have control over some of the many of the different facets with inside the operational confines so therefore we start to look at how do we can do the best of what cloud offers but on Prem and that's realistically where we start to see the stronger push for those customers who still want to manage their data locally as well as maybe even work around some of the restrictions that they might have around cost and complexity hiring you know the different types of skills skill sets that are required to bring you know applications purely cloud native it's still that larger part of that digital transformation that many organizations are going for going forward with and realistically I think they're taking a look at the pros and cons and we've been doing cloud long enough for people recognize that you know it's not perfect for everything and that there's certain things that we still want to keep inside our own data center so I mean realistically as we move forward that's that that better option when it comes to a modern architecture they can do it you know we can deliver and address a diverse set of performance requirements and allow the organization to continue to grow the model to the data you know based on the data that they're actually trying to leverage and that's really what flash Wood was built or it was built for a platform that can address small files or large files or high throughput high throughput low latency scale to petabytes in a single namespace in a single rack as we like to put it in there I mean we see customers that have put you know 150 flash blades into production as a single namespace it's significant for organizations that are making that drive towards modern data experience with modern analytics platforms pure and Vertica have delivered an experience that can address that to a wide range of customers that are implementing you know the verdict technology I'm interested in exploring the use case a little bit further you just sort of gave some parameters and some examples and some of the flexibility that you have in but take us through kind of what the discuss the customer discussions are like obviously you've got a big customer base you and Vertica that that's on prem that's the the the unique advantage of this but there are others it's not just the economics of the the granular scaling of compute and storage independently there are other aspects so to take us through that sort of a primary use case or use cases yeah you know I mean I can give you a cup of customer examples and we have a large SAS analyst company which uses verdict on flash play to authenticate the quality of digital media in real time and you know then for them it makes a big difference is they're doing they're streaming and whatnot that they can they can fine tune and grandly control that so that's one aspect that we get address we have a multi national car con company which uses verdict on flash blade to make thousands of decisions per second for autonomous vehicle decision-making trees that you know that's what really these new modern analytics platforms were built or there's another healthcare organization that uses Vertica on flash blade to enable healthcare providers to make decisions in real time the impact Ives especially when we start to look at and you know the current state of affairs with Kovac in the coronavirus you know those types of technologies are really going to help us kind of get love and and help lower and been you know bend that curve downward so you know there's all these different areas where we can address the goals and the achievements that we're trying to look bored with with real-time analytic decision making tools like Berta and you know realistically as we have these conversations with customers they're looking to get beyond the ability of just you know you know a data scientist or a data architect looking to just kind of drive in information we were talking about Hadoop earlier we're kind of going well beyond that now and I guess what I'm saying is that in the first phase of cloud it was all about infrastructure it was about you know spinning up you know compute and storage a little bit of networking in there seems like the the a next a new workload that's clearly emerging is you've got and it started with the cloud databases but then bringing in you know AI and machine learning tooling on top of that and then being able to really drive these new types of insights and it's really about taking data these bogs this bog of data that we've collected over the last 10 years a lot of that you know driven by Hadoop bringing machine intelligence into the equation scaling it with either cloud public cloud or bringing that cloud experience on prams scale you know across your organizations and across your partner network that really is a new emerging work load do you see that and maybe talk a little bit about you know what you're seeing with customers yeah I mean it really is we see several trends you know one of those is the ability to take a take this approach to move it out of the lab but into production you know especially when it comes to you know data science projects machine learning projects that traditionally start out as kind of small proofs of concept easy to spin up in the cloud but when a customer wants to scale and move towards a real you know it derived a significant value from that they do want to be able to control more characteristics right and we know machine learning you know needs to needs to learn from a massive amounts of data to provide accuracy there's just too much data to retrieve in the cloud for every training job at the same time predictive analytics without accuracy is not going to deliver the business advantage of what everyone is seeking you know we see this the visualization of data analytics is traditionally deployed as being on a continuum with you know the things that we've been doing in the long you know in the past you know with data warehousing data lakes AI on the other end but but this way we're starting to manifest it in organizations that are looking towards you know getting more utility and better you know elasticity out of the data that they are working for so they're not looking to just build ups you know silos of bespoke AI environments they're looking to leverage you know a platform that can allow them to you know do a I for one thing machine learning for another leverage multiple protocols to access that data because the tools are so much different you know it is a growing diversity of of use cases that you can put on a single platform I think organizations are looking for as they try to scale these environments I think there's gonna be a big growth area in the coming years gay ball I wish we were in Boston together you would have painted your little corner of Boston Orange I know that you guys are sharing but I really appreciate you coming on the cube wall-to-wall coverage two days at the vertical Vertica virtual big data conference keep you right there but right back right after this short break [Music]

six five four three two one hi everybody and welcome to this cube special presentation of the verdict of virtual big data conference the cube is running in parallel with day 1 and day 2 of the verdict the big data event by the way the cube has been at every single big data event and it's our pleasure to be here in the virtual / digital event as well Gabriel Chapman is here is the director of flash blade product solutions marketing at pure storage Gabe great to see you thanks for coming on great to see you - how's it going it's going very well I mean I wish we were meeting in Boston at the Encore hotel but you know and and hopefully we'll be able to meet it accelerate at some point you cheer or one of the the sub shows that you guys are doing the regional shows but because we've been covering that show as well but I really want to get into it and the last accelerate September 2019 pure and Vertica announced a partnership I remember a joint being ran up to me and said hey you got to check this out the separation of Butte and storage by a Eon mode now available on flash played so and and I believe still the only company that can support that separation and independent scaling both on prime and in the cloud so gave I want to ask you what were the trends in analytical database and plowed that led to this partnership you know realistically I think what we're seeing is that there's been kind of a larger shift when it comes to modern analytics platforms towards moving away from the the traditional you know Hadoop type architecture where we were doing on and leveraging a lot of direct mass storage primarily because of the limitations of how that solution was architected when we start to look at the larger trends towards you know how organizations want to do this type of work on premises they're looking at solutions that allow them to scale the compute storage pieces independently and therefore you know the flash blade platform ended up being a great solution to support Vertica in their transition to Eon mode leveraging >> essentially as an s3 object store okay so let's let's circle back on that you guys in your in your announcement of a flash blade you make the claim that flash blade is the industry's most advanced file and object storage platform ever that's a bold statement I defend that it's supposed to yeah I I like to go beyond that and just say you know so we've really kind of looked at this from a standpoint of you know as as we've developed flash Wade as a platform and keep in mind it's been a product that's been around for over three years now and has you know it's been very successful for pure storage the reality is is that fast file and fast object as a combined storage platform is a direction that many organizations are looking to go and we believe that we're a leader in that fast object of best file storage place in realistically which we start to see more organizations start to look at building solutions that leverage cloud storage characteristics but doing so on prem for a multitude of different reasons we've built a platform that really addresses a lot of those needs around simplicity around you know making things assure that you know vast matters for us simple is smart we can provide you know cloud integrations across the spectrum and you know there's a subscription model that fits into that as well we fall that falls into our umbrella of what we consider the modern day day experience and it's something that we've built into the entire pure portfolio okay so I want to get into the architecture a little bit of Flash blade and then better understand the fit for analytic databases generally but specifically for Vertica so it is a blade so you got compute and a network included it's a key value store based system so you're talking about scale out unlike unlike viewers sort of you know initial products which were scale up and so I want to as a fabric base system I want to understand what that all mean so take us through the architecture you know some of the quote-unquote firsts that you guys talk about so let's start with sort of the blade aspect yeah the blade aspect mean we call it a flash blade because if you look at the actual platform you have a primarily a chassis with built in networking components right so there's a fabric interconnect with inside the platform that connects to each one of the individual blades the individual blades have their own compute that drives basically a pure storage flash components inside it's not like we're just taking SSDs and plugging them into a system and like you would with the traditional commodity off-the-shelf hardware design this is a very much an engineered solution that is built towards the characteristics that we believe were important with fast file and fast object scalability you know massive parallelization when it comes to performance and the ability to really kind of grow and scale from essentially seven blades right now to a hundred and fifty that's that's the kind of scale that customers are looking for especially as we start to address these larger analytics pools mayo multi petabyte datasets you know that single addressable object space and you know file performance that is beyond what most of your traditional scale-up storage platforms are able to deliver yeah I saw you interviewed cause last September and accelerate and and Christopher's been you know attacked by some of the competitors is not having a scale out I asked them his thoughts on that he said well first of all our flash plate is scale out he said look anything that that that adds the complexity you know we avoid but for the workloads that are associated with Flash blade scale out is the right sort of approach maybe you could talk about why that is well you know realistically I think you know that that approach is better when we're starting to learn to work with large unstructured data sets I mean flash plays uniquely architected to allow customers to achieve you know a superior resource utilization for compute and storage well at the same time you know reducing significantly the complexity that is arisen around these kind of bespoke or siloed nature of big data and analytic solutions I mean we really kind of look at this from a standpoint of you have built and delivered or created applications in the public cloud space that address you know object storage and and unstructured data and and for some organizations the importance is bringing that on Prem I mean we do seek repatriation that coming on for a lot of organizations as these data egress charges continue to expand and grow and then organizations that want even higher performance in the what we're able to get into the public cloud space they are bringing that data back on Prem they are looking at from a standpoint we still want to be able to scale the way we scale on the cloud we still want to operate the same way we operate in the cloud but we want to do it within control of our own you know our own borders and so that's you know that's one of the bigger pieces to that is we start to look at how do we address cloud characteristics and dynamics and consumption metrics or models as well as the benefits and efficiencies of scale that they're able to afford but allowing customers that do that with inside their own data center so you're talking about the trends earlier you had these cloud native databases that allowed the scaling of compute and storage independently Vertica comes in with Eon a lot of times we talk about these these partnerships as Barney deals of you know I love you you love me here's a press release and then we go on or they're just straight you know go to market are there other aspects of this partnership that are that are non Barney deal like in other words any specific you know engineering you know other go to market programs could you talk about that a little bit yeah it's it's it's more than just you know I then what we consider a channel meet in the middle or you know that Barney type of deal it's realistically you know we've done some first with Vertica that I think are really important if they think you look at the architecture and how we do how we've brought this to market together we have solutions teams in the back end who are you know subject matter experts in this space if you talk to joy and the people from vertigo they're very high on they're very excited about the partnership because it often it opens up a new set of opportunities for their customers to to leverage Eon mode and you know get into some of the the nuanced aspects of how they leverage the Depot or Depot with inside each individual compute node and adjustments with inside there I reach additional performance gains for customers on Prem and it's the same time for them there's still the ability to go into that cloud model if they wish to and so I think a lot of it is around how do we partner as two companies how do we do a joint selling motions you know how do we show up and and you know do white papers and all of the the traditional marketing aspects that we bring into the market and then you know joint selling opportunities exist where they are and so that's realistically I think like any other organization that's going to market with a partner or an ISP that they have a strong partnership with you'll continue to see us you know talking about our shows mutually beneficial relationships and the solutions that we're bringing it to the market okay you know of course he used to be a Gartner analyst and you go over to the vendor side now but as but as it but as a gardener analyst you're obviously objective you see it all and you know well there's a lot of ways to skin a cat there are there are there are strengths weaknesses opportunities threats etc for every vendor so you have you have Vertica who's got a very mature stack and and talking to a number of the customers out there who are using Eon mode you know there's certain workloads where these cloud native databases make sense it's not just the economics of scaling compute and storage independently I want to talk more about that there's flexibility aspects as well but Vertica really you know has to play its trump card which is look we've got a big on-premise state and we're gonna bring that you know Eon capability both on Prem and we're embracing the cloud now they're obviously having they had to play catch-up in the cloud but at the same time they've got a much more mature stack than a lot of these other you know cloud native databases that might have just started a couple years ago so you know so there's trade-offs that customers have to make how do you sort through that where do you see the interest in this and and and what's the sweet spot for this partnership you know we've been really excited to build the partnership with Vertica and we're providing you know we're really proud to provide pretty much the only on Prem storage platform that's validated with the vertical Aeon mode to deliver a modern data experience for our customers together you know it's it's that partnership that allows us to go into customers that on Prem space where I think that they're still you know not to say that not everybody wants to go the cloud I think there's aspects and then solutions that work very well there but for the vast majority I still think that there's you know the your data center is not going away and you do want to have control over some of the many of the different facets with inside the operational confines so therefore we start to look at how do we can do the best of what cloud offers but on Prem and that's realistically where we start to see the stronger push for those customers you still want to manage their data locally as well as maybe even work around some of the restrictions that they might have around cost and complexity hiring you know the different types of skills skill sets that are required to bring you know applications purely cloud native it's still that larger part of that digital transformation that many organizations are going for going forward with and realistically I think they're taking a look at the pros and cons and we've been doing cloud long enough where people recognize that you know it's not perfect for everything and that there's certain things that we still want to keep inside our own data center so I mean realistically as we move forward that's that that better option when it comes to a modern architecture they can do it you know we can deliver and address a diverse set of performance requirements and allowed the organization to continue to grow the model to the data you know based on the data that they're actually trying to leverage and that's really what flash Wood was built for it was built for a platform that can address small files or large files or high throughput high throughput low latency scale to petabytes in a single namespace in a single rack as we like to put it in there I mean we see customers that have put you know 150 flash blades into production as a single namespace it's significant for organizations that are making that drive towards modern data experience with modern analytics platforms pure and Vertica have delivered an experience that can address that to a wide range of customers that are implementing you know the verdict technology I'm interested in exploring the the use case a little bit further you just sort of gave some parameters and some examples and some of the flexibility that you have in but take us through kind of what to discuss the customer discussions are like obviously you've got a big customer base you and Vertica that that's on prem that's the the unique advantage of this but there are others it's not just the economics of the granular scaling of compute and storage independently there are other aspects so to take us through that sort of a primary use case or use cases yeah you know I mean I can give you a couple customer examples and we have a large SAS analyst company which uses verdict on flash play to authenticate the quality of digital media in real time and you know then for them it makes a big difference is they're doing they're streaming and whatnot that they can they can fine tune and grandly control that so that's one aspect that we need to address we have a multi national car company which uses verdict on flash blade to make thousands of decisions per second for autonomous vehicle decision making trees you know that's what really these new modern analytics platforms were built for there's another healthcare organization that uses Vertica on flash blade to enable healthcare providers to make decisions in real time the impact vibes especially when we start to look at and you know the current state of affairs little Co vid and the coronavirus you know those types of technologies are really going to help us kind of get love and and help lower and been you know bend that curve downward so you know there's all these different areas where we can address the goals and the achievements that we're trying to look bored with with real-time analytic decision making tools like birth and you know realistically as we have these conversations with customers they're looking to get beyond the ability of just you know you know a data scientist or a data architect looking to just kind of drive in information you know you know I'm gonna set this model up and we'll come back in a day now we need to make these and the performs characteristics the Aeon mode and vertical allows for can get us towards this almost near real-time analytics decision-making process and that the customers and that's the kind of conversations that we're having with customers who really need to be able to turn this around very quickly instead of waiting well I think you're hitting on something that is actually pretty relevant and that is that near real-time analytic you know database we were talking about Hadoop earlier we're kind of going well beyond that now and I guess what I'm saying is that in the first phase of cloud it was all about infrastructure it was about you know spinning up you know compute and storage a little bit of networking in there seems like the the a next a new workload that's clearly emerging is you've got and it started with the cloud native databases but then bringing in you know AI and machine learning tooling on top of that and then being able to really drive these new types of insights and it's really about taking data these bogs this bog of data that we've collected over the last 10 years a lot of that you know driven by Hadoop bringing machine intelligence into the equation scaling it with either cloud public cloud or bringing that cloud experience on-premise scale you know across your organizations and across your partner network that really is a new emerging work load do you see that and maybe talk a little bit about you know what you're seeing with customers yeah I mean it really is we see several trends you know one of those is the ability to take a take this approach to move it out of the lab but into production you know especially when it comes to you know data science projects machine learning projects that traditionally start out as kind of small proofs of concept easy to spin up in the cloud but when a customer wants to scale and move towards a real you know that derived a significant value from that they do want to be able to control more characteristics right and we know machine learning you know needs to needs to learn from a massive amounts of data to provide accuracy there's just too much data to retrieve in the cloud for every training job at the same time predictive analytics without accuracy is not going to deliver the business advantage of what everyone is seeking you know we see this the visualization of data analytics is traditionally deployed as being on a continuum with you know the things that we've been doing in the long you know in the past you know with data warehousing data lakes AI on the other end but but this way we're starting to manifest it in organizations that are looking towards you know getting more utility and better you know elasticity out of the data that they are working for so they're not looking to just build ups you know silos of bespoke AI environments they're looking to leverage you know a platform that can allow them to you know do a I for one thing machine learning for another leverage multiple protocols to access that data because the tools are so much different you know it is a growing diversity of of use cases that you can put on a single platform I think organizations are looking for as they try to scale these environments I think there's gonna be a big growth area in the coming years Gabe well I wish we were in Boston together you would have painted your little corner of Boston Orange I know that you guys are sure but I really appreciate you coming on the cube and thank you very much have a great day you too okay thank you everybody for watching this is the cubes coverage wall-to-wall coverage two days of the vertical Vertica virtual Big Data conference keep her at their very back right after this short break

(upbeat techno music) >> Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high-tech coverage, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2019. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> And we are back at VMworld 2019, here in San Francisco, along with Stu Miniman. I'm John Walls. Welcome to theCUBE here, continuing our coverage here at Moscone. And we're now joined by Don Murawski, who is the manager of Servers and Storage at Wendy's. Don, glad to have you on theCUBE. >> Glad to be here. >> Before we leave, you're going to have to settle this with Stu. He's very upset about the change in menu. That number eight is no longer number eight. >> I can't do anything about that-- >> Well, perhaps we're going to look into that a little bit later on. And what you can do something about is is tell us about your portfolio of services. What you do in terms of, what you are managing in terms of storage, in terms of servers at Wendy's. >> Right, right, yeah. As you know, IT has, especially in the food industry, has become huge, especially mobile app, mobile ordering. You know, DoorDash. Order your food and have it delivered to you. You know, massive business. Massive financial for the company too. How that plays for me is, managing the infrastructure that it runs on. Whether it's an AWS or Azure. A lot of that stuff is on-prem still. So we have to manage a huge amount of volume with a very dense environment. For a hyper-converged shop, Nutanix is part of that. Cohesity is a huge part of our system now. Two data centers. One in Atlanta, one in Dublin, Ohio. So, it's quite quite a big effort. >> You mentioned on-prem, off-prem. About what's your split right now, and are you-- >> I'd say 30:70. >> Okay. >> Yeah, 30 off, 70 on. >> And how is that going to change, you think, over the next three, four, or five years? >> Oh it's changing, drastically. Cost. You know, CapEx, OpEx. It depends where our model's going to be at. Right now, we're more CapEx. So when that goes to OpEx, you'll see a lot more cloud. So right now, 70:30. 70 on-prems, 30 off. >> All right, Don, we talked to so many companies today, and what is that digital transformation they're going through? You talk about app and mobile. It's like boy, I'm reading articles about, how do we make sure that your food delivery person, doesn't eat a lot of french fries, before it gets to you? Maybe speak a little about the ripple effect that has to, your group and IT, as to, you know, we always say fast food. What's faster than walking up to the counter and you know... You guys don't have it sitting under the warmers, of course. They put that together and make it. But it's now transforming that fast food business. >> Yeah, it was touching the back-end servers So it's important that those are properly tuned, properly functioning, on legacy, sometimes legacy hardware. So between cloud and on-prem, it's been a challenge. And we're still working through that challenge. A lot of our developers are in-house. We actually have a big presence for developing right now for our own app. We actually develop our own app and websites. So a lot of that is tied into the movement of, more into cloud technology, than on-prem technology. So right now, like I said, it's 70:30. But it's still a challenge. >> And what is it about that when you say it's a challenge, I mean. So we've drilled down on that a little bit. >> It's just dealing with, not (mumbles) With on-prem you can't scale like you can with AWS or Azure. You can scale 100 times down an Azure bot, auto-scaling. On-prem we can't do that quite yet. We're getting there. So that's still a challenge, because a lot of the information still hasn't touched, on-prem. On-prem databases, which are getting older too, so to speak. So it's still a challenge. >> Don, when you talk to companies, you talk about that whole modernization. And the keynote this morning. We're talking about hybrid-cloud. We talked about multi-cloud. HCI is often a piece of that modernization, but how do you look at how you scale and change things in your data center, versus the public cloud. Is it making progress? Is it limiting at all? >> It's slow progress, slower than we want. More like into, getting rid of the VMs, go containerization. That's a lot of containerization that's happening now with Kubernetes. We have a DevOps apartment we actually just created internally to do that type of work. It's just taking a little bit longer than we anticipated. >> Yeah, and (mumbles) obviously Kubernetes is big discussion here. >> Right. >> How long has your group been using it? >> Not a year. >> Why do you use it? What is it? What's the value to your organization? >> Click a button and you've got a server. It's auto-scaling. So instead of taking two hours to build a server, or three, it's taking two minutes. I think we actually timed a Linux server build in two and a half minutes. The fact that you've got a small workforce too. I mean, we're advertising jobs. Things are what they are. They're pretty stagnant. So we have to make do with the technology that's out there. And Kubernetes is a big part of our future, infrastructure. >> But oftentimes Kubernetes is something that will help me if I want to move something from my data center to the cloud or between clouds or like, do you use that use case yet? Or -- >> Not yet, not yet, we're getting there. >> Okay. >> Yes. Slower progress than we'd want, but yeah, we're getting there. >> All right, when you're living in this multifaceted environment, bring us inside your data management. What's that like today, what's working, what challenges do you have? >> I'll tell you what it was like. It was a nightmare.(laughs) >> Yeah. That'd be awful. (laughing) >> It was a complete nightmare. Multiple vendors. Very complex. Now we're trying to simplify things, make it more dense with (mumbles) Cohesity. It's been a big part for the past year. We moved all our backups at Cohesity. So Cohesity is basically backup and DR now. I don't use it like secondary storage. I have other storage for that, smaller storage units. So it's... Two years ago, we had lost our primary storage and basically took down the company. And living through trying to get your data back for hours and hours and hours, and working. I had guys working 100 hours a week for two, three weeks. And (mumbles) didn't see their families. So making something that is easy to use, manageable, and recoverable, was huge. So take the complexity out and add the ease administration. And that's what we did with Cohesity. >> Yeah, and you're painting really maybe not a worst-case scenario but an awful-case scenario. >> It was an awful case scenario. >> Yeah. So I mean, disaster recovery was a disaster for you. It sounds like that. >> It was. >> So is that what drove you to the Cohesity decision? >> It was, that was a big factor. The fact that I need to be able replicate this stuff to another location, that's one thing. That's what everybody says. But can you actually recover it if it's in the other location. No, we couldn't. Now we can, and I actually prove that through a POC. So yeah, it was a big factor. The fact that people had to sacrifice weekends and I mean literally, work all night, multiple nights, to get things back up, to get the business back up. >> So what do you say to your colleagues or counterparts out there, maybe who haven't, maybe done this kind of spadework that you guys from -- >> I'd try to turn down your critical servers and see if you can recover 'em. You know, take them down and see if you can get 'em back up. Test your DR, because if you don't, it's going to come back to bite ya, and it did. We got most of our data back, but there's some things we didn't get back. We had to recover, I think we had to retire a couple systems that were homegrown systems that were written by a developer back in the day, that's no longer there, we couldn't get it back. We had to send whole departments home, because of this. So I would say, test it. Make sure it works. And make sure your vendor, whoever you pick, is standing by you too. That's a big thing, it's that relationship with the vendor. We don't pick it because it works, we do. But we also pick it because of the relationship with the vendor. Are they going to be there when all, you know what, breaks loose. >> Right. >> Some do, some don't. >> Who's your friend right? >> Who's your friend. >> So Don, you've gotten your title. It's Server and Storage. But you're talking about the Kubernetes, and modern multi-cloud environment-- >> Don: We're small shop. We're small IT shop. So out of my group, DevOps actually spun out. So now we're kind of a infrastructure DevOps team That DevOps is a whole separate thing now because of my team. >> Yeah but (mumbles) what I guess I wanted to get it right is that, was that mostly internally training and going through the model. >> Yeah, it was. >> Bring us through some of those, what worked well, what was a little bit of a pain point. >> Pain points, It took a year to get one application working. But now it's working, you see the value in it. Because I was like, this is a waste of time. We don't scale that much. But however when you do, it sure is nice to build a server like I said, two minutes, that's a huge factor. You know, it was coming, that seemed to be the trend. DevOps, I mean, we wouldn't have DevOps jobs three, four years ago. Well now there's DevOps admin jobs. So it was coming, it was just a matter of time. >> You've been using Cohesity for about a year now, you said. >> A year. >> You talked about where you're using it. Give us a little bit looking forward. Where do you go with Cohesity. What would you like to see them do. >> Yeah, I think a big point is going to be, especially from a (mumble) infrastructure platform, will be more of an Azure footprint. Shrinking the on-prem data center. So Cohesity is going to play a huge role. We still have a lot of 2008 servers. And 2008 goes out of, end of life, in a few months. There's no way I'm going to retire 200+ servers by January. It's not going to be humanly possible. So a lot of that stuff I had to get moved to Azure for support, and Cohesity's going to play a big role in moving that and protecting it. So yeah, I'd say a good path for Cohesity in the future for us. >> So when I brought you on and we talked about the menu, item number eight, that you said you can't help Stu with, is that right? What is menu item number eight? >> It was one of the chicken specialties (mumbles) they have. >> So however, if that, we are very supportive. >> Don: I like that. >> We have our $2 Frosty donation for the year. >> Don: It's good. >> So a Frosty a day right? A free Frosty a day. >> That's right. >> So, we are supportive. >> That's good. >> If you can work on that number eight, maybe-- >> Don: I'll work on it. >> Maybe we can be even more supportive. >> All right John. >> Thanks Don. >> I appreciate it. >> Absolutely, this belongs to Gabe Leon, by the way, on our crew. Just got to give Gabe a shout-out there, for helping us out. Back with more here on theCUBE. You're watching this live, VMworld San Francisco here, 2019.

(upbeat intro) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto California, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to the Palo Alto studios of theCUBE, I'm John Furrier host of theCUBE, we're here with a special power panel on industrial IOT, also known as IIOT, industrial IOT, and cybersecurity, with the theme being apocalypse now or later, when will the rug be pulled out from everyone, when will people have to make a move on making sure that the network and security are all teed up and all locked down, as IOT increases the surface area of networks, industrial IOT, where critical equipment or infrastructure is being run for businesses. Got a great panel here, we got Gabe Lowy who's the founder and CEO of Tectonic Advisors, and author of an upcoming research paper on this particular topic. Bryan Skene, vice president of product development at Tempered Networks, and Greg Ness, the CMO, who happened to be available to join us from Tempered Networks as well. Guys, thanks for spending the time to come on this power panel. >> Great to be here. >> So, convergence is a theme we've heard every wave of innovation, the convergence of this, the convergence of networks and apps. Now more than ever, there's a confluence of multiple waves of convergence happening, you're seeing it right now, infrastructure turned into cloud, big data turned into machine learning and AI, you've got future infrastructure like Blockchain around the corner, but in the middle of all this, the security, data, networking, this is kind of the beginning of a cloud 2.0 dynamic, where pure cloud is great for computing network, you native born in the cloud, you scale it up, it's great. Still got challenges but if you're a large company, and you want to actually operate cloud scale anything, and have instrumentation, internet of things, devices, sensors, in factory's, in plants, in cars, your game is changing, if it's connected to the network, it's got power and connectivity, a terrorist, a hacker, a digital terrorist can come in and do all kinds of damage. This is the topic. So Greg, we talked about this panel, what was the motivation for this, what's your thoughts? >> Well, it occurred to us that you know, as you look at all the connectivity that's you know, underway, billions of devices being connected, the level of scale, complexity, and the porosity of what's being connected, is just really incomprehensible, to the people that developed the internet, and it's raising a lot of issues. All around, basically, the number of devices the inability to protect and secure and update those devices, and the sheer amount of money and effort that would have to be applied to protect them is beyond the scope of current IT security stuff. IT's not ready. >> IT, certainly, you and I talk about this all the time, but you know, I love the hype and you know, digital transformation's going to save the world Gabe, talk about the dynamics because the title of this panel, really the subtitle is apocalypse now or later, and this seems to be the modus operandus is that you know, you know what has to hit the fan before any action is taken, you see Capital One, there isn't a day gone by where there's some major breach, major hack, it's a firewall for Capital One, going to an open S3 bucket from some girl whose bragging about it on Twitter, wasn't really a serious hacker, then you've got adversaries that are organized, whether it's state sponsored and or real money making underbelly activities happening, you know there are digital terrorists out there, there are digital thieves, the surface area with IOT is absolutely opened up, we kind of know that, but industrial IOT, just talking about industrial equipment, industrial activities, whether it's critical infrastructure or planting equipment for a company, this is a huge digital problem. What's your take, what's your thesis? >> Yes it is, and building on what Greg said, there's an interesting gap from both sides. The first is that this industrial equipment or critical infrastructure, some of it goes back 20, 25 years. It was not architected to be connected to the internet, but yet with this digital transformation that you eluded to, companies want to find ways of getting that data, putting it into various analytics engines to improve cost efficiencies or decision outcomes. But how do you do that with a lot of equipment out there that runs on different operating systems and really was not built for internet connections. The other side of the gap is that your traditional IT security technologies, firewalls, intrusion protection, VPN's, they in turn were not built or architected to secure this IIOT infrastructure. And that gap creates the vulnerability that opens the door for cyber criminals to come in, or state sponsored cyber attackers to come in and do some serious damage. >> Bryan, I want you to weight in here. You're a network guy, you've been around the block, you've seen the networks evolve, the primitives were clear, the building blocks internet were, the DNS ran, most of what the internet right now, whether you're talking about from the marketing to routing, it's all DNS based, it's IP addresses as well under that. So you've got the IP address, you've got DNS, what else is there? What can be done? Why aren't these problems being solved by traditional firewalls and traditional players out there, is it just the limitation of the infrastructure? Or is there just more cultural DNA, you've got to evolve, what's your take on this? >> Yeah, um the way I think about this is that the internet that we know and we use was mostly built for human beings, I mean, it's been built for humans to use it, humans have discriminating tastes, they decide what to click on, for the most part they are skeptical, they learn through trial and error what's happened with- when people try to fool other people, a machine or you know, you've got a webpage and it's got something misleading, you learn that, you don't click on that any more. And the infrastructure we have today is built to help people avoid these problems, as well as drop packets when they can detect that something is just absolutely wrong. But machines, they don't know any of that, they're not discriminating, they've been built to, well if it's going to be on a network, to trust everything that's talking to them, and to send data and assume that the other side is also trusting them and just acting on the data. So it's just a fundamentally different problem, you know what traditionally the machine networks have had air gaps, they've been air gapped away from any other kinds of data or potential threat. And those air gaps are gone. >> So air gaps were supposed to save us, weren't they? But they're not are they? >> Well, they kept us going as Gabe alluded, for 20 -25 years, machines have been operating, operating critical infrastructure, but you know, with digitalization, with the opportunity to look at that data in the cloud, and do machine learning, and by the way machine learning's being done in the cloud just for scale, so the problem with getting the data from machines, or other things back into the cloud is a huge issue, and if there's an air gap between say the cloud and the thing, we might be somewhere. >> So a lot of incompatible architectures relative to what everyone's doing with cloud, and say hybrid and multi cloud. Gabe, you know the two worlds of information technology or IT people, and operational technology people, that tend to run the IOT world, you know you do sensors to factory floors to whatever, called OT people, operational technologies. I've always said that's a train wreck between those two cultures, they kind of don't like each other. You got IT guys, they're stacking and racking equipment, OT guys, stay out of my world I run propietary stacks, it's lockdown. Pretty locked down from a security standpoint, IT are pretty promiscuous just in the nature of it. As those two worlds collide, is that the thesis of the catastrophe model, as you see that world coming together, what's your thoughts on this? >> Yes, good question. That world has to come together, and I'll give you an analogy to this. About 10, 12 years ago, a lot of people were doubtful that Devops would ever take off, 'cause development guys really didn't like operations guys, they didn't like dealing with them. Here we are 10 years or so later, and everyone's pretty much adopted it, and they're seeing the benefits of it. This OT IT convergence takes it to a much higher level, because the stakes are so much higher, because a cyber attack can cause catastrophic damage. And as a result, these two teams are not only going to have to work together in harmony, but they're going to have to learn each other's stacks in the case of the OT guys, it's their traditional OSI networking stack for IT networks. And for the IT guys, they're going to have to learn the Purdue model, which was the model that's principally used in architecting these OT systems. And unless these two teams do work together, the vulnerabilities and probabilities for a catastrophic event increases significantly. >> That's a great example, Devops was poo-pooed on earlier on, I mean Greg, we were back in 2008 riffing on this, now it's the mainstream. Agilities come from it, the Lean startup, all kinds of cool things, people are talking about, we love cloud, great. Now we bring the OT world together, and IT world together, Gabe, what is the benefit, what is the key ethos around operating technologies and IT guys coming together? Because you know, dev ops would simply abstract away the complexity so developers don't have to do configuration and management, all that provisioning stuff, and still have the reliability. They called it infrastructure as code, so Devops was infrastructure as code, what's the ethos of the two worlds coming together from IT and OT? >> I think the ethos is at a very high level, it's risk management. Because the stakes are so high that the types of losses that could be incurred, you know you mentioned Capital One at the top of the program, yes those are financial losses, but imagine if the losses resulted in thousands or tens of thousands of people getting infected, or perhaps dying. So the need for these two teams to work together is absolutely critical, and so I'd say the key strategic approach to this, both from the IT and the OT side, is to go into it- into strategy or cyber strategy with the premise that the company has already been compromised. And so that starts to get your thinking away from legacy types of technologies that were not architected to prevent these new threats, or defend against them, and now these teams have to start working together from a totally different standpoint, to try and prevent the risks of those catastrophic losses. >> Greg, I want to get your thoughts, you've been in the IT businesses for a long time, you've been a major player in it, historian as well as us in IT, what do you see as contrast between the two cultures of IT and OT, because you got to lock down these networks, you got to have the teamwork between the two, because the surface area with IOT and industrial IOT is so massive, it's so complicated yet it's an opportunity at the same time it's an exposure, I mean just people working at home in IT, I mean the home is a great place to target people because all you got to do is get that light bulb from nest and you're at a fully threaded processor, you could run malware and get all the passwords from the person working at home. So again, from home to industrial, does IT even have the chops to get there? >> Not the way they're architected today around the TCP- IP stack, and that's the challenge, right? So from the 90's to this era, whether it's the mainframes to the networks to the internet to the enterprise web et cetera, compared to this we've had relatively incremental change, as surprising as that sounds. You know, devices being added and every year, every other year, every three years, people are upgrading those endpoints, they're adding more sophisticated security. But this world that you referred to, the world's in collision. It's not evolving at all in parallel. So, you've got devices with no security in mind they're being connected, and you know, calling it the industrial internet of things almost underwhelms what the risk is, it should be the internet of places or spaces, because what these devices can control, control of a factory, a hospital, et cetera, and you think back you know, yes you've got historical perspective, you don't have to go back very far when the Russians were attacking Ukraine, you know, WannaCry, NotPetya, you know they spread all over the place in a matter of weeks, UK hospitals were running on carbon paper, postponing procedures, Maersk shipping had they're shipping- they lost control of their ships at sea, and now you've got VxWorks coming along, saying you know, you're going to have to update that, because there's some serious vulnerabilities here, VxWorks is deployed to cross billions of devices, so I don't think historically there's really a precedent, I mean, if you want to tap into a common interest with military history, you don't even have the semblance of a Maginot Line, and that was a pretty imperfect protection scheme. >> I mean, the opportunity to infect governments, take 'em down within misinformation to actually harming people say through hospital hacks for instance, you know, people could- lives were in danger. And there's also other threats, I mean, you mentioned, it takes one device to be penetrated, at home or at work, I saw an article, came across my desk I saw IBM did some research, this concept of war shipping, where hackers ship their exploits directly on WiFi devices, so people get these devices, hey, free you know, nest light bulb or whatever's going on, they install in their home, oh it's got, I got a free WiFi router, uh-uh, it's got built in malware. It's just got WiFi connectivity. So again, the exploits are getting more complicated, Bryan, the network has to be smart. At the end of the day, this cloud 2.0 theme is beyond compute and storage, networking and security are two underdeveloped areas that need to evolve very quickly to solve these problems, what's your take on this. >> Well, my take on that is that our approach is that if the network has to be so smart that it can watch everything and understand what's good and bad, then we're doomed, so we're going to need to also combine watching packets, the traditional method, deep packet inspection, with divide and conquer. Frankly, it's-as Tom and I said before, the air gaps are gone for OT. I think we need to figure out a way to divide up the networks of things, and give them clean networks if possible, and try to segment them away from the network that the rest of the things are on. So, you know, we don't have enough compute power, we don't have enough memory and resources, but that's not really the fit. We just don't understand what is good traffic versus bad traffic, and we talk about Day Zero attack, and we talk about, try to chase that down with signatures, and you know the- you can watch transactions, people say AI and machine learning, but machine learning means learning good and bad from people. >> How do companies fix this, what's the answer to all this, or is there one? Or it's just going to take catastrophic loss to wake people up? >> Well we can't react to the problem, that's one thing that we all can probably- we all know that if we wait for the catastrophe, and then we try to react to that and solve it, that it's already gone, it's too late. I mean, this is a geometric expansion in complexity of the problem, I don't think there's a silver bullet, I think that there's going to be several things that need to be done, one is to keep inspecting traffic, but another one is again segmenting things that should be talking to each other, away from things that they should not be talking to. And trying to control the peers in the network of things. And you know, Greg something you said reminded me, fundamentally with networking, the TCP-IP, we are using the IP address, to mean the location say if we're talking about places, we're talking about the location of something and the identity of that thing, and most of our security policies, are spelled out in terms of something, an IP address, that is not under our control, and the network has to be kind of so complex as it is growing, with mass proxies, you know, motion, mobility, things are moving. A lot of this wasn't foreseen. >> So, Gabe and Greg, do we have to build new software, a new naming system? Do we have to kind of level up and put an extraction layer on top of the existing systems? What's the answer? >> The answer is a layered approach. Because to try and do a complete rebuild or a retrofit particularly with different operating systems, different versions, incompatible systems, billions of devices, and various types of security solutions that were not built for this, that's not a practical solution. So you've really got to go with an overlay strategy, people are always going to be the vulnerability, they'll fall for fishing attacks, that's why the strategy is that we're already compromised. So if the attacker is already in our network, how do we contain them from doing serious damage? So one strategy for this is micro-segmentation, which is a much more granular approach, to prevent that lateral movement once the attacker is inside the network. And then when you go from there, you can pair that with host identity protocol which has been around for a while, but that was architected specifically to address the networking and security requirements for IIOT environment, because it addresses that gap that we were talking about between traditional security solutions that lack this functionality, and it only allows white-listed communications between hosts or devices that are already approved and only approved to communicate with one another. So you could effectively do a lockdown even if the attacker is already inside your network. >> I want to get back to some of the criteria on this, and I want to also put the plug in for the TechTonic advisors report that's coming out that you are the author of, called securing critical infrastructure against cyber attacks, I read it, great paper. The line that I read, I want to get your thoughts I'm going to read it out loud, I'd love to get your thoughts on this Gabe or anyone else who wants to chime in, it says industrial IOT cybersecurity is beyond the scope of traditional firewall and VPN solutions would struggle to keep up with the scale and variety of modern attacks. What do you mean by that? Give an example, tell me what you mean by that sentence, and what examples can you give? >> Well, I'd say the most important thing is that firewalls were initially built to protect what we call north-south traffic. In other words, traffic that's coming in from the internet into the organization and back out. But now with network expansion, cloud adoption and more and more devices, industrial devices being connected, these firewalls cannot defend against that. They simply were not architected for it, they cannot scale to those proportions, and even if you're using software only versions, those aren't effective either because they do not protect against east-west or in other words lateral traffic. So if you're an organization moving IIOT data from your OT systems across your network into IP analytics systems or software, that's lateral movement. Your firewall- traditional firewall, just not going to be able to handle that and protect against it, so in simple terms, we need a new overlay not to say that firewalls are going away any time soon, they can still protect north-south traffic, but we need a new type of overlay that can protect this type of traffic, micro-segmentation is the strategy to do that and using host identity protocol or HIP protocol is what fills that gap that your traditional security tools were not designed to protect against. >> Greg, I want you to weigh in on this, because you're in this business now, you know the IT world, the criticality of what you just said is super critical to the nature of business, you know the catastrophic example's there, but IT does not move that fast, you know IT, IT'S like molasses, I mean they're slow. What is going to light a fire under IT to get them to be sensitive, I mean it's pretty obvious, can they get there, do they have to re-structure what has to happen in the IT world, because you know, it is a catastrophic end game here if they don't nail down this traffic protection. >> Well a part of the- you know, part of it is education. Because we've been- we've seen wave and wave of incremental innovation in the network, and when it happened it seemed so big and and it produced huge market cap growth with a lot of companies, you know play this guessing game of who is really connecting to the network. And it's evolved kind of gradually, to this big leap we have ahead of us, and IT is going to have to become aware that IIOT is a fundamentally different problem and challenge to solve, and that's going to require new thinking, new purpose built, like Gabe said, approaches, anything like the traditional firewall segmentation is just not going to address what we talked about, the scale issues, the resilience right? So, some of these devices, you don't want them off for one or two percent of the time. And the implications are that it's much more serious. So I think that, you know, more types of attacks are inevitable, and they're going to be even more catastrophic, and we're all aware that NotPetya and WannaCry raised a lot of eyebrows just for how quick it spread and the damage it caused. And we've just seen VxWorks vulnerabilities being announced. We need to prepare now. >> Malware and worms are still popular, it's a problem. Well guys, thanks so much for spending the time on this panel, I'll give you the final word here, share what you think is going to happen over the next 24 months, 12 months, is it going to take catastrophic failure, what's going to happen in your mind, what's going to end up being the trajectory over the next, you know say year. >> Well, unfortunately, sometimes it might take a catastrophic event to get things moving, hopefully not, but I think there's growing recognition as IIOT is growing, that they need new ways to secure this movement of data between OT and IT, and in order to facilitate that securing of data, you're going to have to have that OT and IT convergence occur, because the risk, as you sort of eluded to earlier John, we hear in the headlines about massive data breaches and all this data that's stolen. But the risk in IIOT is not only the exfiltration of the data, the risk is that the attacker has the capacity to take over the infrastructure. And if that happens in a hospital, if it happens with a water treatment facility or government type of defense installation, the outcomes can be disastrous. So the first thing that has to happen is OT IT convergence. Second, they have to start thinking strategically from a standpoint that they have already been breached, and so that changes their viewpoint about the technologies that they have to deploy, and where they have to move to to efficiently get to what I call the iddies, and that's the- you still need the availability, you've got to have visibility into this traffic, you need reliability of this network, obviously it's got to be at scale, it's got to be manageable, and you need security. >> Well, we'd like to have you on again Gabe, because we've talked about this from a national security perspective, not only the hackers potentially risking the business risk there, there's a national security overlay because you know, if the government's attacking our businesses, that's like showing up on the shores of our country, its the government's job to protect the freedom's and safety of the citizens, that includes companies. So why are companies defending themselves with all this capability, what's the role of government in all of this, that's a very important, I think a longer conversation. So, let's pick that one up, a separate one, my favorite topic these days. Critical infrastructure even if it's just business it's the grid, it's the plants that run our country. >> And John, what I'd like to add to that is, I was talking to a friend of mine who's a CIO down here in California yesterday, and we were talking about the ransomware right, that was taking down all these cities. And you know, he goes well the difference between what you guys are talking about and that, is that you can back up your IT systems, right, into the cloud, and that's a growing business to kind of protect and then replicate game over, and he goes, can you back up a hospital? Can you back up a manufacturing plant? Can you back up a fleet of ships? You know, can you back up a control center? Not really, when you lose physical control, it's game over. And people, I think that really needs to sink in. And that was, I think in Gabe's paper when I first read it, that's what really struck me about it, this is a different ballgame. >> Well, I mean, there's many points, there's the technical point there, and there's also the societal point of- you imagine things being taken over by hackers that physically can harm people, and that's again the societal side, technically the incompatible architecture's coming home to roost now, because there's the problem right there, that's the collision that's happened I think, and a lot of education needs to happen fast, Gabe, thanks for writing that paper critical infrastructure against cyber and securing it, Bryan thanks for coming on appreciate it, you want to say, get the final word Bryan, go ahead. Your thoughts, next 12 months. >> I think that if our future, it depends on OT and IT coming together and a lot of education, a lot of change, I don't think we're going to get there, I think that what's going to happen in the next 24 months is that you know, there are lots of innovative schemes and companies and people, working on this and what we need to do is lay down infrastructure that allows OT and IT to keep operating, and not have to do a forklift upgrade and everything that they do, their processes or teach the things how to protect themselves, and again I'm going to go back to air gaps in network, make a logical air gap, if you imagine driverless cars driving around they're not going to, imagine them sharing the same network that we're using to use Snapchat and look at cities and you know, sitting on the internet and looking at Facebook. We're not going to want that. So we need to try and figure out a way to separate the location of the thing from the identity, create policies in terms of the identity, manage that a new layer, and do it in such a way that doesn't change IT. To me that's the key, 'cause I- we've said it here, IT's doesn't move that fast, they can't. It's not a matter of willpower, it's a matter of momentum and intertia. >> Well, I think the forcing function on this is going to be catastrophic event, the subtitle of this panel, apocalypse now or later. And in my opinion, Greg's been, you know, on this JetEye department of defense story. I believe this is one of the most important stories in the technology industry in a long long time, it really highlights the confluence and convergence of two differently designed infrastructure technologies, that have to in a very short time, be re-platformed at high speed, in a very fast short time frame, because the stakes are so high. So guys, thanks so much for spending the time here on this power panel, IIOT, industrial IOT and cyber security apocalypse now or later, something's going to have to happen, it has to happen fast. Gabe, Bryan, Greg thanks for taking the time. This is a cube conversation here in Palo Alto power panel, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering KubeCon CloudNativeCon, Europe, 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, we're at the end of two days, wall-to-wall coverage here at KubeCon CloudNativeCon here in Barcelona, Spain. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host for two days has been Corey Quinn. Corey, we've gone two days, it's five years of Kubernetes, and everybody's been wondering when are you going to sing happy birthday to Fippy and the Kubernetes team? >> Generally, no one wants to hear me sing more than once, because first, I don't have a great singing voice, but more importantly, I insist on calling it Corey-oki, and it just doesn't resonate with people. The puns don't land as well as you'd hope they would. >> Maybe not singing, but you are a master of limericks, I'm told. >> So they tell me, most are unprintable, but that's a separate argument for another time. >> Alright, so, Corey this is your first time at KubeCon. >> It is. >> In CloudNativeCon, we've done some analysis segments, I thought we've had some phenomenal guests, some great end-users, some thought leaders, >> We had some great times. >> You need to pick your favorite right now. >> Oh, everyone's going to pick their own favorite on this one, but I've got to say it was, it would have to be, hands down, Abby Fuller, from AWS. Not that I didn't enjoy all of our guests -- >> Is it because you have AWS on your Lapel pin, and that secretly you do work for Amazon? >> Hardly, just the opposite, in fact. It's that, given that my newsletter makes fun of AWS on a near constant basis, whenever someone says Oh, there's going to be a public thing with Corey and someone from AWS, half the people there are like, Oh, this is going to be good, and the other half turn ghost white and Oh, no, no, this is going to go awfully. And, I'll be honest, it's been a day now, I still don't know which it was, but we had fun. >> Yeah, so, Abby was phenomenal, loved having her on the program, I'm a sucker for the real transformational stories, I tell you Jeff Brewer from Intuit, there's been many times I do a show and I do like, the first interview, and I'm like, I can go home. Here we hear a company that we know, both of us have used this technology, and really walks us through how that transformation happens, some of the organizational things. They've brought some software in and they're contributing to it, so just many aspects of what I look at in a company that's modernizing and going through those pieces. And those kinds of stories always get me excited. >> That story was incredible, and in fact it's almost starting to turn into a truth and labeling issue, for lack of a better term, because this is the Cloudnative Foundation, the software is designed for things that were more or less born in the cloud, and now we're hearing this entire series of stories on transitioning in. And it almost feels like that's not native anymore, that's effectively something that is migrating in. And that's fantastic, it's a sign of maturity, it's great to see. And it's strange to think of that, that in the terms of the software itself is absolutely Cloudnative, it's not at all clear that the companies that are working with this are themselves. And that's okay, that's not a terrible thing. There was some snark from the keynote today about, here's a way to run web logic in Kubernetes, and half the audience was looking at this with a, Eeee, why would I ever want to do that? Because you're running web logic and you need to continue to run web logic, and you can either sit there and make fun of people, you can help them get to a different place than they are now that helps their business become more agile and improves velocity, but I don't think you can effectively do both. >> Yeah, Corey, anything that's over than 5 years old why would you ever want to do that? Because you must always do things the brand new way. Oh wait, let's consider this for a second, lift and shift is something that I cringe a little bit when I hear it because there's too many times that I would hear a customer say I did this, and I hadn't fully planned out how I was doing it, and then I clawed it back because it was neither cheap nor easy, I swiped that credit card and it wasn't what I expected. >> Yeah, I went ahead and decided to run on a cloud provider now my infrastructure runs on someone else's infrastructure, and then a few months go by, and the transition doesn't happen right, I was wrong, it's not running on someone else's infrastructure, it's running on money. What do I do? And that became something that was interesting for a lot of companies, and painful as well. You can do that, but you need to plan the second shift phase to take longer than you think it will, you will not recoup savings in the time frame you probably expect to, but that's okay because it's usually not about that. It's a capability story. >> I had hoped that we learned as an industry. You might remember the old phrase, my mess for less? By outsourcing, and then we'll, Oh wait, I put it in an environment, they don't really understand my business, I can't make changes in the way I want, I need to insource now my knowledge to be able to work close with the business, and therefore no matter where I put my valuable code, my valuable information and I run stuff, I'm responsible for it and even if I move it there as a first step, I need to make sure how do I actually optimize it for that environment from a cost savings, there's lots of things that I can to change those kind of things. >> The one cautionary tale I'm picking up from a lot of these stories has been that you need to make sure the people you're talking to, and the trusted advisors that you have are aligned with your incentives, not their own. No matter where you go, there's an entire sea of companies that are thrilled and lined up to sell you something. And that's not inherently a bad thing, but you need to understand that whenever you're having those conversations, there's a potential conflict of interest. Not necessarily an actual one, but pay attention. You can partner with someone, but at some point your interests do diverge. >> Okay, Corey, what other key learnings or sound bites did you get from some of our speakers this week? >> There were an awful lot of them. I think that's the first time I've ever seen, for example, a project having pieces removed from it, Tiller, in this case, and a bunch of people clapped and cheered. They've been ripped out of Helm, it's oh awesome, normally the only time you see something get ripped out and people cheer is when they finally fire that person you work with. Usually, that person is me, then everyone claps and cheers, which, frankly, if you've met me, that makes sense. For software, it's less common. But we saw that, we saw two open-source projects merging. >> Yeah. >> We had, it was-- >> Open telemetry is the new piece. >> With open senses and open tracing combining, you don't often see that done in anything approaching a responsible way, but we've seen it now. And there's been a lot of people a little miffed that there weren't a whole bunch of new features and services and what not launched today. That's a sign of maturity. It means that there's a stability story that is now being told. And I think that that's something that's very easy to overlook if you're interested in a pure development perspective. >> Just to give a little bit of a cautionary piece there, we had Mark Shuttleworth on the program, he said Look, there are certain emperors walking around the show floor that have no clothes on. Had Tim talking, Joe Beta, and Gabe Monroy on, some of the earliest people working on Kubernetes and they said Look, five years in, we've reached a certain level of maturity, but Tim Hoggin was like, we have so much to do, our sigs are overrunning with what I need to do now, so don't think we can declare success, cut the cake, eat the donuts, grab the t-shirt, and say great let's go on to the next great thing because there is so much more yet to do. >> There's absolutely a consulting opportunity for someone to set up shop and call it imperial tailoring. Where they're going around and helping these people realize that yes, you've come an incredibly long way, but there is so much more work to be done, there is such a bright future. Now I would not call myself a screaming advocate for virtually any technology, I hope. I think that Kubernetes absolutely has it's place. I don't think it's a Penesea, and I don't think that it is going to necessarily be the right fit for every work load. I think that most people, once you get them calmed down, and the adrenaline has worn off, would largely agree with that sentiment. But that nuance often gets lost in a world of tweets, it's a nuanced discussion that doesn't lend itself well to rapid fire, quick sound bites. >> Corey, another thing I know that is near and dear to your heart they brought in diversity scholarships. >> Yes. >> So 56 people got their pass and travel paid for to come here. There's really good, People in the community are very welcoming, yet in the same breath, when they talked about the numbers, and Cheryl was up on stage saying only three percent of the people contributing and making changes were women. And so, therefore, we still have work to do to make sure that, you've mentioned a couple of times on the program. >> Absolutely, and it is incredibly important, but one of the things that gives me some of the most hope for that is how many companies or organizations would run numbers like that and realize that three percent of their contributors are women, and then mention it during a keynote. That's almost unheard of for an awful lot of companies, instead they wind up going and holding that back. One company we don't need to name, wound up trying to keep that from coming out in a court case as a trade secret, of all things. And that's generally, depressingly, what you would often expect. The fact that they called it out, and the fact that they are having a diversity scholarship program, they are looking at actively at ways to solve this problem is I think the right answer. I certainly don't know what the fix is going to be for any of this, but something has to happen, and the fact that they are not sitting around waiting for the problem to fix itself, they're not casting blame around a bunch of different directions is inspirational. I'm probably not the best person to talk on this, but the issue is, you're right, it is very important to me and it is something that absolutely needs to be addressed. I'm very encouraged by the conversations we had with Cheryl Hung and several other people these last couple of days, and I'm very eager to see where it goes next. >> Okay, Corey, what about any things you've been hearing in the back channel, hallway conversations, any concerns out there? The one from my standpoint where I say, well, security is something that for most of my career was top of mine, and bottom of budget, and from day one, when you talk about containers and everything, security is there. There are a number of companies in this space that are starting to target it, but there's not a lot of VC money coming into this space, and there are concerns about how much real focus there will be to make sure security in this ecosystem is there. Every single platform that this is going to live in, whether you talk the public clouds, talk about companies like Red Hat, and everybody else here, security is a big piece of their message and their focus, but from a CNCF if there was one area that I didn't hear enough about at this show, I thought it might be storage, but feels like we are making progress there, so security's the one I come out with and say I want to know more, I want to see more. >> One thing that I thought was interesting is we spoke to Reduxio earlier, and they were talking about one of their advantages was that they are quote enterprise grade, and normally to me that means we have slides with war and peace written on every one. And instead what they talked about was they have not just security built into this, but they have audit ability, they have an entire, they have data lifecycle policies, they have a level of maturity that is necessary if we're going to start winning some of these serious enterprise and regulated workloads. So, there are companies active in this space. But I agree with you, I think that it is not been a primary area of focus. But if you look at how quickly this entire, I will call it a Kubernetes revolution, because anything else takes on religious overtones, it's been such a fast Twitch type of environment that security does get left behind, because it's never a concern or a priority until it's too late. And then it becomes a giant horses left, barn door's been closed story, and I hope we don't have to learn that. >> So, MultiCloud, Corey, have you changed your mind? >> I don't think so, I still maintain that MultiCloud within the absence of a business reason is not a best practice. I think that if you need to open that door for business reasons then Kubernetes is not a terrible way to go about achieving it. But I do question whether it's something everyone needs to put into their system design principles on day one. >> Okay, must companies be born CloudNative, or can they mature into a CloudNative, or we should be talking a different term maybe? >> I don't know if it's a terminology issue, we've certainly seen companies that were born in on-prem environments where the classic example of this is Capital One. They are absolutely going all in on public cloud, they have been very public about how they're doing it. Transformation is possible, it runs on money and it takes a lot more time and effort than anyone thinks it's going to, but as long as you have the right incentives and the right reason to do things it absolutely becomes possible. That said, it is potentially easier, if you're born in the cloud, to a point. If you get ossified into existing patterns and don't pay attention to what's happening, you look at these companies that are 20 years old, and oh they're so backwards they'll never catch up. If you live that long, that will be you someday. So it's very important to not stop paying attention to what the larger ecosystem is doing, because you don't want to be the only person responsible for levels of your stack that you don't want to have to be responsible for. >> Alright, want to give you the final word. Corey, any final things, any final questions for me? >> Fundamentally I think that this has been an incredible event. Where we've had great conversations with people who are focused on an awful lot of different things. There are still a bunch of open questions. I still, for example, think that Serverless is being viewed entirely too much through a lens of functions as a service, but I'm curious as far as what you took away from this. What did you learn this trip that you didn't expect to learn? >> So, it's interesting when we talk about the changing world of OpenSource. There's been some concern lately that what's happening in the public cloud, well, maybe OpenSource will be imploding. Well, it really doesn't feel that way to me when you talk at this show, we've actually used the line a couple of times, Kubernetes is people. It is not the vendors jested, >> Internet of flesh. >> There are people here. We've all seen people that we know that have passions for what they are doing, and that goes above and beyond where they live. And in this community it is project first, and the company you work for is second or third consideration in there. So, there's this groundswell of activity, we're big believers of the world can be changed if, I don't need everybody's full time commitment, if you could just take two percent of the US's watching of TV in a single year, you could build Wikipedia. Clay Sharky, one of my greats that I love from those environments, we believe that the network and communities really can make huge efforts and it's great to see tech for good and for progress and many of the outcomes of that we see here is refreshingly uplifting to kind of pull us out of some of the day-to-day things that we think about sometimes. >> Absolutely, I think that you're right, it has to come from people, it has to come from community, and so far I'm seeing a lot of encouraging signs. One thing that I do find slightly troubling that may or may not resolve itself is that we're still seeing CloudNative defined in terms of what it's not. That said, this is theCUBE, I am not Stu Miniman. >> Well, I am Stu Miniman, you are Corey Quinn. Corey, how's it been two days on theCUBE wall-to-wall through all these things, ready for a nap or fly home? >> I'm ready to call it a week, absolutely. I'm somewhat surprised that at no point have you hit me. And one of these days I am sure we will cross that border. >> Well, definitely, I try not to have any video or photo evidence of that, but thank you Corey, so much. We do have to make a big shout out, first and foremost to the CloudNative Computing Foundation without their partnership, we would not be able to come here. And we do have sponsorship if you look on the lower thirds of the videos you will see our headline sponsor for this show has been Red Hat. Obviously strong commitment in this community, and will be with us here and also in San Diego for KubeCon. Additional shout out to Cisco, Canonical, and Reduxio for their sponsorship here. And all the people that put on this show here, it's a big community, our team. So I want to make a big shout out to my boys here, coming in I've got Pat, Seth, flying in from the West Coast as well as the Tony Day crew Tony, Steve, and John. Thank you guys, beautiful set here, love the gimble with the logo. Branding here, lot's of spectacle, and we always say check out thecube.com to see all the replays as well, see where we will be, reach out with any questions, and thank you as always, for watching theCUBE. (upbeat jingle)

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's the Cube, covering KubeCon CloudNativeCon Europe 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and Ecosystem Partners. >> Welcome back, this is theCube getting towards the end of two days live wall-to-wall coverage here at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2019 in Barcelona. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host for this week has been Corey Quinn and happy to have on one of our hosts for this week from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Dee Kumar, the Vice President of Marketing, also helps with developer relations. Dee, welcome back to the program. >> Thanks for having me. >> And thank you for having us. We've been having a great time this week, a lot of buzz, a lot of people and obviously always a lot of enthusiasm at the show here. Thanks so much. Alright, so your team has been super busy. I've talked with a lot of them leading up to the show. >> That's right. >> Anybody that knows any show of this kind of magnitude know we're usually pretty exhausted before we get on planes and change all the time zones. So, you know, thank you for holding strong. Give us a little bit about, you know, when we talk marketing, you have a big annual report that came out recently from 2018. Give us some of the highlights of some of the things you've been seeing. >> Yeah, sure. Like you mentioned, you're seeing all the excitement and buzz here so this is our largest open-source developer conference, when compared to the last year we did in Copenhagen. So we have close to 8,000 attendees so we're really excited about that. And you're absolutely right, with that comes, we're so exhausted, but we really appreciate. I think the reason the conference has been so successful is primarily just because of the community engagement, which I highlight in the annual report. So it's a combination of our community, which is the developers, the contributors, also our end users, and the third significant portion of our ecosystem is our members. So we recently just announced that CNCF has crossed over 400 members, our end user community is growing, I think Sheryl mentioned this morning in the keynote, we have about 81 end users and this is phenomenal because end of the day, end users are companies who are not commercializing Cloud Native, but essentially they're using these products or technologies internally, so they are essentially the guinea pig of Cloud Native technologies and it's really important to learn from them. >> Well Dee, and actually it's interesting, you know, celebrating the five years of Kubernetes here, I happened to talk to a couple of the OG's of the community, Joe Beta, Tim Hawkin and Gabe Monroy. And I made a comment to Joe, and I'm like, "Well Google started it, but they brought in the Ecosync and pulled in a lot of other vendors too, it's people. And Gabe said, he's like "yeah, I started Deis and I was one of the people >> Absolutely. >> that joined in." So, we said this community is, it's people more than it's just the collection of the logos on the slides. >> Absolutely, I completely agree. And the other thing I also want to point out is a neutral home, like CNCF, it definitely increases contributions. And the reason I say that is, having a neutral home helps the community in terms of engaging and what is really interesting again, going back to the annual report is Google had a leadership role and most of the contributors were from Google, and now with having a neutral home, I think Google has done a phenomenal job to make sure that the contributors are not just limited to Google. And we're seeing all the other companies participating. We're also seeing a new little graph of independent contributors, who are essentially not associated with any companies and they've been again, very active with their comments or their engagement with overall, in terms of, not just limiting to Kubernetes, but all the other CNCF projects. >> So, this is sort of a situation of being a victim of your own success to some extent, but I've mentioned a couple of times today with various other guests, that this could almost be called a conference about Kubernetes and friends, where it feels like that single project casts an awfully long shadow, when you talk to someone who's vaguely familiar with the CNCF, it's "Oh you mean the Kubernetes people?" "Cool, we're on the same page." How do you, I guess from a marketing perspective begin to move out from under that shadow and become something that is more than a single project foundation? >> Yeah, that's a great question, and the way we are doing that is, I think, Kubernetes has become an economic powerhouse essentially, and what it has done is, it's allowed for other start-ups and other companies to come in and start creating new projects and technologies built around Kubernetes, so essentially, now, you're no longer talking about one single project. It's no longer limited to containers or orchestration, or just micro-services, which was the conversation 3 years ago at KubeCon, and today, what you will see is, it's about talking about the ecosystem. So, the way, from a marketing perspective, and it's actually the reality as well, is Kubernetes has now led to other growing projects, it's actually helped other developers come onboard, so now we are seeing a lot more co-ord, a lot more contributions, and now, CNCF has actually become a home to 35+ projects. So when it was founded, we had about 4 projects, and now it's just grown significantly and I think Kubernetes was the anchor tannin, but now we're just talking about the ecosystem as a whole. >> Dee, I'm wondering if it might be too early for this, but do you have a way of measuring success if I'm someone that has rolled out Kubernetes and some of the associated projects? When I talked to the early Kubernetes people, it's like, Kubernetes itself is just an enabler, and it's what we can do with it and all the pieces that go with it, so I don't know that there's spectrums of how are we doing on digital transformation, and it's a little early to say that there's a trillion dollars of benefit from this environm... but, do you have any measure today, or thoughts as to how we can measure the success of everything that comes out of the... >> Yeah, so I think there was Redmont, they published a report last year and it looks like they're in the process of updating, but it is just phenomenal to see, just based on their report, over 50% of fortune 100 companies have started to use Kubernetes in production, and then I would say, more than, I think, to be accurate, 71% of fortune 100 companies are using containers, so I think, right there is a big step forward. Also, if you look at it last year, Kubernetes was the first project to graduate, so one of the ways we also measure, in terms of the success of these projects, is the status that we have within CNCF, and that is completely community driven, so we have a project that's very early stage, it comes in as a sandbox, and then just based on the community growth, it moves onto the next stage, which is incubating, and then, it takes a big deal to graduate, and to actually go to graduation, so we often refer to those stages of the projects to Jeffery Moore, in terms of crossing the chasm. We've talked about that a lot. And again, to answer your question, in terms of how exactly you measure success is just not limited to Kubernetes. We had, this year, a few other projects graduates, we have 6 projects that have graduated within CNCF. >> How do you envision this unfolding in the next 5 years, where you continue to accept projects into the foundation? At some point, you wind up with what will only be described as a sarcastic number of logos on a slide for all of the included projects. How do you effectively get there without having the Cheesecake Factory menu problem of... the short answer is just 'yes', rather than being able to list them off coz no one can hold it all in their head anymore? >> Great question, we're still working on it. We do have a trail map that is a representation of 'where do I get started?', so it's definitely not prescriptive, but it kind of talks about the 10 steps, and it not only talks about it from a technology perspective, but it also talks about processes and people, so we do cover the DevOp, CICD cycle or pipeline. The other thing I would say is, again, we are trying to find other creative ways to move past the logos and landscape, and you're absolutely right, it's now becoming a challenge, but, you know, our members with 400+ members within CNCF. The other way to actually look at it is, back to my earlier point on ecosystems. So one of the areas that we are looking at is, 'okay, now, what next after orchestration?', which is all about Kubernetes is, now I think there's a lot of talks around security, so we're going to be looking at use cases, and also Cloud Native storage is becoming another big theme, so I would say we now have to start thinking more about solutions, solution, the terminology has always existed in the enterprise world for a long time, but it's really interesting to see that come alive on the Cloud Native site. So now we are talking about Kubernetes and then a bunch of other projects. And so now, it's like that whole journey from start to finish, what are the things that I need to be looking at and then, I think we are doing our best with CNCF, which is still a part of a playbook that we're looking to write in terms of how these projects work well together, what are some common use cases or challenges that these projects together can solve. >> So, Dee, we're here at the European show, you think back a few years ago it was a public cloud, there was very much adoption in North America, and starting to proliferate throughout the world. Alibaba is doing well in China and everything. CNCF now does 3 shows a year, you do North America, you do Europe and we've got the one coming up in China. We actually did a segment from our studio previewing the OpenStack Summit, and KubeCon show there, so maybe focus a little bit about Europe. Is there anything about this community and this environment that maybe might surprise people from your annual data? >> Yes, so if you look at... we have a tool called DevStart, it's open source, anyone can look at it, it's very simple to use, and based on that, we kind of monitor, what are the other countries that are active or, not just in terms of consuming, but who are actually contributing. So if you look at it, China is number 2, and therefore our strategy is to have a KubeCon in China. And then from a Euro perspective, I think the third leading country in terms of contributions would be Europe, and therefore, we have strategically figured out where do we want to host our KubeCon, and in terms of our overall strategy, we're pretty much anchoring to those 3 regions, which is North America, Europe as well as China. And, the other thing that we are also looking at is, we want to expand our growth in Europe as well, and now we have seen the excitement here at our KubeCon Barcelona, so we are looking to offer some new programs, or, I would say, new event types outside of KubeCon. Kind of you want to look at it as mini KubeCons, and so those would explore more in terms of different cities in Europe, different cities in other emerging markets as well. So that's still in the works. We're really excited to have, I would say 2 new event types that we're exploring, to really get the community to run and drive these events forward as well, outside of their participation in KubeCon because, oftentimes, I hear that a developer would love to be here, but due to other commitments, or, their not able to travel to Europe, so we really want to bring these events local to where they are, so that's essentially a plan for the next 5 years. >> It's fascinating hearing you describe this, because, everything you're saying aligns perfectly with what you'd expect from a typical company looking to wind up, building adoption, building footprints etc., Only, you're a foundation. Your fundamental goal at the end of it is user engagement, of people continuing to participate in the community, it doesn't turn into a 'and now, buy stuff', the only thing you have for sale here that I've noticed is a T-shirt, there's no... Okay, you also have other swag as well, not the important part of the story, I'm curious though, as far as, as you wind up putting all of this together, you have a corporate background yourself, was that a difficult transition to navigate, as far as, getting away from getting people to put money in towards something in the traditional sense, and more towards getting involved in a larger ecosystem and community. >> That was a big transition for me, just having worked on the classic B2B commercial software side, which is my background, and coming in here, I was just blown away with how people are volunteering their time and this is not where they're getting compensated for their time, it's purely based on passion, motivation and, when I've talked to some key community organizers or leaders who have done this for a while, one of the things that has had an impact on me is just the strong core values that the communities exhibit, and I think it's just based on that, the way they take a project and then they form a working group, and then there are special interest groups that get formed, and there is a whole process, actually, under the hood that takes a project from where Kubernetes was a few years ago, and where it is today, and I think it's just amazing to see that it's no longer corporate driven, but it's more how communities have come together, and it's also a great way to be here. Oftentimes... gone are the days where you try to set up a meeting, people look forward to being at KubeCon and this is where we actually get to meet face-to-face, so it's truly becoming a networking event as well, and to build these strong relationships. >> It goes even beyond just users, I mean, calling this a user conference would not... it would be doing it a bit of disservice. You have an expo hall full of companies that are more or less, in some cases, sworn enemies from one another, all coexisting peacefully, I have seen no fist-fights in the 2 days that we've been here, and it's fascinating watching a community effort get corporate decision makers and stakeholders involved in this, and it seems that everyone we've spoken to has been having a good time, everyone has been friendly, there's not that thousand yard stare where people are depressed that you see in so many other events, it's just something I've never experienced before. >> You know, that's a really amazing thing that I'm experiencing as well. And also, when we do these talks, we really make it a point to make sure that it's not a vendor pitch, and I'm not being the cop from CNCF policing everyone, and trying to tell them that, 'hey, you can't have a vendor pitch', but what I'm finding is, even vendors, just did a silverless talk with AWS, and he's a great speaker, and when he and I were working on the content, he in fact was, "you know, you're putting on that hat", and he's like, "I don't want to talk about AWS, I really want to make sure that we talk about the underlying technology, focusing on the projects, and then we can always build on top, the commercial aspect of it, and that's the job for the vendor. So, I think it's really great collaboration to see how even vendors put on the hat of saying, 'I'm not here to represent my products, or my thing', and of course they're here to source leads and stuff, but at the end of the day, the underlying common protocol that's already just established without having explicit guidelines saying, 'this is what you need to be following or doing', it's just like an implicit understanding. Everyone is here to promote the community, to work with the community, and again, I think I really want to emphasize on the point that people are very welcoming to this concept of a neutral home, and that really had helped with this implicit understanding of the communities knowing that it's not about a vendor pitch and you really want to think about a project or a technology and how to really use that project, and what are the use cases. >> It's very clear, that message has resonated well. >> Dee, thank you. We've covered a lot of ground, we want to give you the final word, anything else? We've covered the event, we've covered potential little things and the annual report. Any last words you have for us that you want people to take away? >> Not really, I think, like I said, it's the community that's doing the great work. CNCF has been the enabler to bring these communities together. We're also looking at creating a project journey it terms of how these projects come into CNCF, and how CNCF works with the communities, and how the project kind of goes through different stages. Yeah, so there are a lot of great things to come, and looking forward to it. >> Alright, well, Dee, thank you so much for all of the updates, and a big thank you, actually, to the whole CNCF team for all they've done to put this together. We really appreciate the partnership here. For Corey Quinn, I'm Stu Miniman. Back to wrap 2 days, live coverage, here at KubeCon, Cloud Native Con 2019, Thanks for watching the Cube. >> Thank you.

>> live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering del Technologies. World twenty nineteen, brought to you by Del Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back. Everyone's cubes. Live coverage. Day three wrap up of Del Technologies World twenty nineteen Java is Dave a lot. There's too many men on set one. We get set to over there blue set, White said. We got a lot of content. It's been a cube can, in guise of a canon of content firing into the digital sphere. Great gas. We had all the senior executive players Tech athletes. Adele Technology World. Michael Dell, Tom Sweet, Marius Haas, Howard Ally As we've had Pat Kelsey, rco v M were on the key partner in the family. They're of del technology world and we had the clients guys on who do alien where, as well as the laptops and the power machines. Um, we've had the power edge guys on. We talked about Hollywood. It's been a great run, but Dave, it's been ten years Stew. Remember, the first cube event we ever went to was DMC World in Boston. The chowder there he had and that was it wasn't slogan of of the show turning to the private cloud. Yeah, I think that was this Logan cheering to the private cloud that was twenty ten. >> Well, in twenty ten, it was Cloud Cloud Cloud Cloud Cloud twenty nineteen. It's all cloud now. That difference is back then it was like fake cloud and made up cloud and really was no substance to it. We really started to see stew, especially something that we've been talking about for years, which is substantially mimicking the public cloud on Prem. Now I know there are those who would say No, no, no, no, no. And Jessie. Probably in one of those that's not cloud. So there's still that dichotomy is a cloud. >> Well, Dave, if I could jump in on that one of the things that's really interesting is when Veum, where made that partnership with a ws It was the ripple through this ecosystem. Oh, what's that mean for Del you know Veum, wherein Del not working together Well, they set the model and they started rolling out bm where, and they took the learnings that they had. And they're bringing that data center as a service down to the Dell environment. So it's funny I always we always here, you know, eight of us, They're learning from their partners in there listening and everything like that. Well, you know, Dylan Veum where they've been listening, they've been learning to in this, and it brings into a little bit of equilibrium for me, that partnership and right, David, you said, you know that you could be that cloud washing discussion. And today it's, you know, we're talking about stacks that live in eight of us and Google and Microsoft. And now, in, you know, my hosted or service lighter or, you know, my own data center. If that makes sense, >> I mean, if you want to just simplify the high order bit, Dave Cloud. It's simply this Amazon's trying to be enterprised everyone, the enterprise, trying to claw Amazon, right? And so what? The what that basically means is it's all cloud. It's all a distributed computer system. OK, Scott McNealy had it right. The network is the computer. If you look at what's going on here, the traditional enterprise of vendors over decades of business model and technology, you know, had full stack solutions from mainframe many computers to PC the local area networking all cobble together wires it up creates applications, services. All that is completely being decimated by a new way to roll out storage, computing and networking is the same stuff. It's just being configured differently. Throw on massive computer power with Cloud and Moore's Law and Data and A. I U have a changing of the the architecture. But the end of the day the cloud is operating model of distributed computing. If you look at all the theories and pieces of computer science do and networking, all those paradigms are actually playing out in in the clouds. Everything from a IIE. In the eighties and nineties you got distributed networking and computing, but it's all one big computer. And Michael Dell, who was the master of the computer industry building PCs, looks at this. Probably leg. It's one big computer. You got a processor and subsystems. So you know this is what's interesting. Amazon has done that, and if they try to be like the enterprise, like the old way, they could fall into that trap. So if the enterprise stays in the enterprise, they know they're not going out. So I think it's interesting that I see the enterprise trying to like Amazon Amazon trying to get a price. So at the end of the day, whoever could build that system that's scalable the way I think Dell's doing, it's great. I was only scaleable using data for special. So it's a distributed computer. That's all that's going on in the world right now, and it's changing everything. Open source software is there. All that makes it completely different, and it's a huge opportunity. Whoever can crack the code on this, it's in the trillions and trillions of dollars. Total adjustable market >> well, in twenty ten we said that way, noted the gap. There's still a gap between what Amazon could do and what the on Prem guys Khun Dio, we'd argue, is a five years is seven years, maybe ten years, whatever it is. But at the time we said, if you recall, lookit, they got to close the gap. It's got to be good enough for I t to buy into it like we're starting to see that. But my view, it's still not cloud. It doesn't have to scale a cloud, doesn't have the economics cloud. When you peel the onion, it doesn't certainly doesn't have the SAS model and the consumption model of cloud nowhere close yet. Well, and you know, >> here's the drumbeat of innovation that we see from the public cloud. You know where we hit the shot to show this week, the public have allowed providers how many announcements that they probably had. Sure, there was a mega launch of announcements here, but the public lives just that regular cadence of their, you know, Public Cloud. See a CD. We're not quite there yet in this kind of environment, it's still what Amazon would say is. You put this in an environment and it's kind of frozen. Well, it's thought some, and it's now we can get data set. A service consumption model is something we can go. We're shifting in that model. It's easier to update things, but you know, how do I get access to the new features? But we're seeing that blurring of the line. I could start moving services that hybrid nature of the environment. We've talked a few times. We've been digging into that hybrid cloud taxonomy and some of the services to span because it's not public or private. It's now truly that hybrid and multi environment and customers are going to live in. And all of >> the questions Jonah's is good enough to hold serve >> well. I think the reality is is that you go back to twenty ten, the jury in the private cloud and it's enterprises almost ten years to figure out that it's real. And I think in that time frame Amazon is absolutely leveled. Everybody, we call that the tsunami. Microsoft quickly figures out that they got to get Cloud. They come in there, got a fast followers. Second, Google's trying to retool Oracle. I think Mr Bo completely get Ali Baba and IBM in there, so you got the whole cloud game happening. The problem of the enterprises is that there's no growth in terms of old school enterprise other than re consolidate in position for Cloud. My question to you guys is, Is there going to be true? True growth in the classic enterprise business or, well, all this SAS run on clouds. So, yes, if it's multi cloud or even hybrid for the reasons they talk about, that's not a lot of growth compared to what the cloud can offer. So again, I still haven't seen Dave the visibility in my mind that on premises growth is going to be massive compared to cloud. I mean, I think cloud is where Sassen lives. I think that's where the scale lives we have. How much scale can you do with consolidation? We >> are in a prolonged bull market that that started in twenty ten, and it's kind of hunger. In the tenth year of a of a decade of bull market, the enterprise market is cyclical, and it's, you know, at some point you're going to start to see a slowdown cloud. I mean, it's just a tiny little portion of the market is going to continue to gain share cloud can grow in a downturn. The no >> tell Motel pointed out on this, Michael Dell pointed out on the Cubans, as as those lieutenants, the is the consolidation of it is just that is a retooling to be cloud ready operationally. That's where hybrid comes in. So I think that realization has kicked in. But as enterprises aren't like, they're not like Google and Facebook. They're not really that fast, so So they've got to kind of get their act together on premises. That's why I think In the short term, this consolidation and new revitalisation is happening because they're retooling to be cloud ready. That is absolutely happen. But to say that's the massive growth studio >> now looked. It is. Dave pointed out that the way that there is more than the market growth is by gaining market share Share share are areas where Dell and Emcee didn't have large environment. You know, I spent ten years of DMC. I was a networking. I was mostly storage networking, some land connectivity for replication like srd Evan, like today at this show, I talked a lot of the telco people talk to the service of idle talk where the sd whan deny sirrah some of these pieces, they're really starting to do networking. That's the area where that software defined not s the end, but the only in partnership with cos like Big Switch. They're getting into that market, and they have such small market share their that there's huge up uplift to be able to dig into the giant. >> Okay, couple questions. What percent of Dell's ninety one billion today is multi cloud revenue. Great question. Okay, one percent. I mean, very small. Okay. Very small hero. Okay? And is that multi cloud revenue all incremental growth isat going to cannibalize the existing base? These? Well, these are the fundamentals weighs six local market that I'm talking to >> get into this. You led the defense of conversations. We had Tom Speed on the CFO and he nailed us. He said There's multiple levers to shareholder growth. Pay down the debt check. He's got to do that. You love that conversation. Margin expansion. Get the margins up. Use the client business to cover costs. As you said, increased go to market efficiency and leverage. The supply chain that's like their core >> fetrow of cash. And that all >> these. The one thing he said that was mind blowing to me is that no one gets the valuation of how valuable Del Technologies is. They're throwing off close to seven billion dollars in free cash flow free cash flow. Okay, so you can talk margin expansion all you want. That's great, but there got this huge cash flow coming in. You can't go out of business worth winning if you don't run out of cash >> in the market. When the market is good, these guys are it is good a position is anybody, and I would argue better position than anybody. The question on the table that I'm asking is, how long can it last? And if and when the market turns down and markets always cyclical we like again. We're in the tenth year of a bull market. I mean, it's someone >> unprecedented gel can use the war chest of the free cash flow check on these levers that they're talking about here, they're gonna have the leverage to go in during the downturn and then be the cost optimizer for great for customers. So right now, they're gonna be taking their medicine, creating this one common operating environment, which they have an advantage because they have all the puzzle pieces. You A Packer Enterprises doesn't have the gaping holes in the end to end. They can't address us, >> So that is a really good point that you're making now. So then the next question is okay. If and when the downturn turn comes, who's going to take advantage of it, who's going to come out stronger? >> I think Amazon is going to be continued to dominate, and as long as they don't fall into the enterprise trap of trying to be too enterprising, continue to operate their way for enterprises. I think jazz. He's got that covered. I think DEL Technologies is perfectly positioned toe leverage, the cash flow and the thing to do that. I think Cisco's got a great opportunity, and I think that's something that you know. You don't hear a lot of talk about the M where Cisco war happening. But Cisco has a network. They have a developer ecosystem just starting to get revitalized. That's an opportunity. So >> I got thoughts on Cisco, too. But one of things I want to say about Del being able to come out of that stronger. I keep saying I've said this a number of times and asked a lot of questions this week is the PC business is vital for Del. It's almost half the company's revenue. Maybe not quite, but it it's where the company started it. It sucks up a lot of corporate overhead. >> If Hewlett Packard did not spin out HP HP, they would be in the game. I think spinning that out was a huge mistake. I wrote about a publicly took a lot of heat for it, but you know I try to go along with the HPD focus. Del has proven bigger is better. HP has proven that smaller is not as leverage. And if it had the PC that bee have the mojo in gaming had the mojo in the edge, and Dale's got all the leverage to cross pollinate the front end and edge into the back and common cloud operate environment that is going to be an advantage. And that's going to something that will see Well, let me let me >> let me counter what you just said. I agree. You know this this minute. But the autonomy was the big mistake. Once hp autonomy, you know what Meg did was almost a fatal complete. They never should've bought autonomy >> makers. Levi Protector he was. So he was there. >> But she inherited that bag of rocks. And then what you gonna do with it? Okay, so that's why they had to spend out and did create shareholder value. If they had not purchased autonomy, then he would return much better shape, not to split it up. And they would be a much stronger competitor. >> And I share holder Pop. They had a pop on value. People made some cash with long game. I think that >> going toe peon base actually done pretty well for a first year holding a standalone PC company. So, but again, I think Del. With that leverage, assuming pieces, it's going to be really interesting. I don't know much about that market. You were loving that PC conversation, but the whole, you know, the new game or markets and and the new wayto work throwing an edge in there, I don't know is ej PC and edges that >> so the peanut butter. And so the big thing that Michael get the big thing, Michael Dell said on the Cube was We're not a conglomerate were an integrated company. And when you have an integrated company like this, with the tech the tech landscape shifting to their advantage, you have the ability to cross subsidize. So strategy game. Matt Baker was here we'd be talking about OK, I can cross subsidize margin. You've brought it up on the client side. Smaller margins, but it pays a lot of the corporate overhead. Absolutely. Then you got higher margin GMC business was, you know, those margins that's contributing. And so when you have this new configuration. You can cross, subsidize and move and shift, so I think that's a great advantage. I think that's undervalued in the market place. And I think, you know, I think Del stock price is, well, undervalue. Point out the numbers they got VM wear and their question is, What what point is? VM where blink and go All in on del technology stew. Orcas Remember that Gus was gonna partner. You don't think the phone was ringing off the hook in Palo Alto from their parties? What? What's this as your deal? So Vienna. There's gotta be the neutral party. Big problem. The opportunity. >> Well, look, if I'm a traditional historical partner of'Em are, it's not the Azure announcement that has me a little bit concerned because all of them partner with Microsoft to it is how tightly combined. Del and Veum, where are the emcee, always kept them in arms like now they're in the same. It's like Dave. They're blending it. It's like, you know Del, from a market cap standpoint, gets fifty cents on the dollar. VM wears a software company, and they get their multiples. Del is not a software company, but VM where well, people are. Well, if we can win that a little bit, maybe we could get that. >> Marty still Isn't it splendid? No, no, I think the strategy is absolutely right on. You have to go hard with VM wear and use it as a competitive weapon. But, Stuart, your point fifty cents and all, it's actually much worse than that. I mean the numbers. If you take out of'Em, wears the VM wear ownership, you take out the core debt and you look at the market value you're left with, like a billion dollars. Cordell is undervalued. Cordell is worth more than a billion or two billion dollars. Okay, so it's a really cheap way to buy Veum. Where Right that the Tom Sweet nailed this, he said. You know, basically, these company those the streets not used to tech companies having such big debt. But to your point, John, they're throwing off cash. So this company is undervalued, in my view. Now there's some risks associated with that, and that's why the investors of penalizing them for that debt there, penalizing him from Michael's ownership structure. You know, that's what this is, but >> a lack of understanding in my opinion. I think I think you're right. I just think they don't understand. Look at Dale and they think G You don't look a day Ellen Think distributed computing system with software, fill in those gaps and all that extra ten expansion. It's legit. I think they could go after new market opportunities as as a twos to us as the client business. I mean mere trade ins and just that's massive trillions of dollars. It's, I think I think that is huge. But I'm >> a bull. I'm a bull on the value of the company. I know >> guys most important developments. Del technology world. What's the big story that you think is coming out of the show here? >> Well, it's definitely, you know, the VM wear on del I mean, that is the big story, and it's to your point. It's Del basically saying we're going to integrate this. We're going to hard, we're going to go hard and you know Veum wear on Dell is a preferred solution. No doubt that is top for Dell and PacBell Singer said it. Veum wearing eight of us is the first and preferred solution. Those are the two primary vectors. They're going to drive hard and then Oh, yeah, we'Ll listen to customers Whatever else you want Google as you're fine, we're there. But those two vectors, they're going to Dr David >> build on that because we saw the, um we're building out of multi cloud strategy and what we have today is Del is now putting themselves in there as a first class citizen. Before it was like, Oh, we're doing VX rail and Anna sex and, you know, we'LL integrate all these pieces there, but infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure now it is. It is multi cloud. We want to see that the big table, >> right, Jeff, Jeff Clarke said, Why are you doing both? Let's just one strategy, one company. It's all one Cash registers that >> saying those heard that before. I think the biggest story to me is something that we've been seeing in the Cuban laud, you know, been Mom. This rant horizontally scaleable operating environment is the land grab and then vertically integrate with data into applications that allow each vertical industry leverage data for the kind of intimate, personalized experiences for user experiences in each industry. With oil and gas public sector, each one has got their own experiences that are unique. Data drives that, but the horizontal and tow an operating model when it's on premises hybrid or multi cloud is a huge land grab. And I think that is a major strategic win for Dell, and I think, as if no one challenges them on this. Dave, if HP doesn't go on, emanate change. If H h p e does not do it em in a complete changeover from strategy and pulling, filling their end to end, I think that going to be really hurting I think there's gonna be a tell sign and we'LL see, See who reacts and challenges Del on this in ten. And I think if they can pull it off without being contested, >> the only thing I would say that the only thing I would say that Jonah's you know, HP, you know very well I mean, they got a lot of loyal customers and is a huge market out there. So it's >> Steve. Look at economic. The economics are shifting in the new world. New use cases, new step function of user experiences. This is this is going to be new user experiences at new economic price points that's a business model. Innovation, loyal customers that's hard to sustain. They'Ll keep some clutching and grabbing, but everyone will move to the better mousetrap in the scenario. So the combination of that stability with software it's just this as a big market. >> So John twenty ten Little Table Back Corner, you know of'em See Dylan Blogger World double set. Beautiful says theatre of present lot of exchange and industry. But the partnership in support of this ecosystem. It's something that helped us along the way. >> You know, when we started doing this, Jeff came on board. The team has been amazing. We have been growing up and getting better every show. Small, incremental improvements here and there has been an amazing production, Amazing team all around us. But the support of the communities do this is has been a co creation project from day one. We love having this conversation's with smart people. Tech athletes make it unique. Make it organic, let the page stuff on on the other literature pieces go well. But here it's about conversations for four and with the community, and I think the community sponsorship has been part of funding mohr of it. You're seeing more cubes soon will be four sets of eight of US four sets of V M World four sets here. Global Partners sets I'm used to What have we missed? >> Yeah, it's phenomenal. You know, we're at a unique time in the industry and honored to be able to help documented with the two of you in the whole team. >> Dave, How it Elias sitting there giving him some kind of a victory lap because we've been doing this for ten years. He's been the one of the co captains of the integration. He says. There's a lot of credit. >> Yeah, Howard has had an amazing career. I I met him like literally decades ago, and he has always taken on the really hard jobs. I mean, that's I think, part of his secret success, because it's like he took on the integration he took on the services business at at AMC U members to when Joe did you say we're a product company? No services company. I was like, Give me services. Take it. >> It's been on the Cube ten years. Dave. He was. He was John away. He was on fire this week. I thought bad. Kelsey was phenomenal. >> Yeah, he's an amazing guest. Tom Tom Suite, You know, very strong moments. >> What's your favorite Cuban? I'LL never forget. Joe Tucci had my little camera out film and Joe Tucci, Anna. One of the sessions is some commentary in the hallway. >> Well, that was twenty ten, one of twenty eleven, I think one of my favorite twenty ten moments I go back to the first time we did. The cue was when you asked Joe Tucci, you know why a storage sexy. Remember that? >> A He never came on >> again. Ah, but that was a mean. If you're right, that was a cube mean all for the next couple of years. Remember, Tom Georges, we have because I'm not touching. That was >> so remember when we were critical of hybrid clouds like twenty, twelve, twenty, thirteen I go, Pat is a hybrid cloud, a halfway house to the final destination of public loud. He goes to a halfway house, three interviews. This was like the whole crowd was like, what just happened? Still favorite moment. >> Oh, gosh is a mean so money here, John. As you said, just such a community, love. You know, the people that we've had on for ten years and then, you know, took us, you know, three or four years to before we had Michael Dell on. Now he's a regular on our program with luminaries we've had on, you know, but yeah, I mean, twenty ten, you know, it's actually my last week working for him. See? So, Dave, thanks for popping me out. It's been a fun ride, and yeah, I mean, it's amazing to be able to talk to this whole community. >> Favorite moment was when we were at eighty bucks our first show. We're like, We still like hell on this. James Hamilton, Andy Jazzy Come on up, Very small show. Now it's a monster, David The Cube has had some good luck. Well, we've been on the right waves, and a lot of a lot of companies have sold their companies. Been part of Q comes when public Unicorns New Channel came on early on. No one understood that company. >> What I'm thrilled about to Jonah's were now a decade, and we're documenting a lot of the big waves. One of one of the most memorable moments for me was when you called me up. That said, Hey, we're doing a dupe world in New York. I got on a plane and went out. I landed in, like, two. Thirty in the morning. You met me. We did to dupe World. Nobody knew what to do was back then it became, like, the hottest thing going. Now nobody talks about her dupe. So we're seeing these waves and the Cube was able to document them. It's really >> a pleasure. The Cube can and we got the Cube studios sooner with cubes Stories with Cube Network too. Cue all the time, guys. Thanks. It's been a pleasure doing business with you here. Del Technologies shot out the letter. Chuck on the team. Sonia. Gabe. Everyone else, Guys. Great job. Excellent set. Good show. Closing down. Del Technologies rose two cubes coverage. Thanks for watching

[Music] when welcome to the special exclusive cube conversation here in Palo Alto in our studios I'm John for your host of the cube we have a very special guest speaking for the first time around some alleged alleged accusations and also innuendo around the Amazon Web Services Jedi contract and his firm c5 capital our guest as Andre Pienaar who's the founder of c5 capital Andre is here for the first time to talk about some of the hard conversations and questions surrounding his role his firm and the story from the BBC Andre thanks for a rat for meeting with me John great to have me thank you so you're at the center of a controversy and just for the folks who know the cube know we interviewed a lot of people I've interviewed you at Amazon web sources summit Teresa Carl's event and last year I met you and bought a rein the work you're doing there so I've met you a few times so I don't know your background but I want to drill into it because I was surprised to see the BBC story come out last week that was basically accusing you of many things including are you a spy are you infiltrating the US government through the Jedi contract through Amazon and knowing c-5 capital I saw no correlation when reading your article I was kind of disturbed but then I saw I said a follow-on stories it just didn't hang together so I wanted to press you on some questions and thanks for coming in and addressing them appreciate it John thanks for having me so first thing I want to ask you is you know it has you at the center this firm c5 capital that you the founder of at the center of what looks like to be the fight for the big ten billion dollar DoD contract which has been put out to multiple vendors so it's not a single source deal we've covered extensively on silicon angle calm and the cube and the government the government Accounting Office has ruled that there are six main benefits of going with a sole provider cloud this seems to be the war so Oracle IBM and others have been been involved we've been covering that so it kind of smells like something's going along with the story and I just didn't believe some of the things I read and I want to especially about you and see five capitals so I want to dig into what the first thing is it's c5 capital involved in the Jedi contract with AWS Sean not at all we have absolutely no involvement in the Jedi contract in any way we're not a bidder and we haven't done any lobbying as has been alleged by some of the people who've been making this allegation c5 has got no involvement in the general contract we're a venture capital firm with a British venture capital firm we have the privilege of investing here in the US as a foreign investor and our focus really is on the growth and the success of the startups that we are invested in so you have no business interest at all in the deal Department of Defense Jedi contract none whatsoever okay so to take a minute to explain c5 firm I read some of the stories there and some of the things were intricate structures of c5 cap made it sound like there was like a cloak-and-dagger situation I want to ask you some hard questions around that because there's a link to a Russian situation but before we get to there I want to ask you explain what is c5 capital your mission what are the things that you're doing c5 is a is a British venture capital firm and we are focused on investing into fast-growing technology companies in three areas cloud computing cyber security and artificial intelligence we have two parts our business c5 capital which invests into late stage companies so these are companies that typically already have revenue visibility and profitability but still very fast-growing and then we also have a very early stage startup platform that look at seed state investment and this we do through two accelerators to social impact accelerators one in Washington and one in Bahrain and it's just size of money involved just sort of order magnitude how many funds do you have how is it structure again just share some insight on that is it is there one firm is there multiple firms how is it knows it work well today the venture capital business has to be very transparent it's required by compliance we are a regulated regulated firm we are regulated in multiple markets we regulated here in the US the sec as a foreign investor in london by the financial conduct authority and in Luxembourg where Afonso based by the regulatory authorities there so in the venture capital industry today you can't afford to be an opaque business you have to be transparent at all levels and money in the Western world have become almost completely transparent so there's a very comprehensive and thorough due diligence when you onboard capital called know your client and the requirements standard requirement now is that whenever you're onboard capital from investor you're gonna take it right up to the level of the ultimate beneficial ownership so who actually owns this money and then every time you invest and you move your money around it gets diligence together different regulators and in terms of disclosure and the same applies often now with clients when our portfolio companies have important or significant clients they also want to know who's behind the products and the services they receive so often our boards our board directors and a shell team also get diligence by by important clients so explain this piece about the due diligence and the cross country vetting that goes on is I think it's important I want to get it out because how long has been operating how many deals have you done you mentioned foreign investor in the United States you're doing deals in the United States I know I've met one of your portfolio companies at an event iron iron on it iron net general Keith Alexander former head of the NSA you know get to just work with him without being vetted I guess so so how long a c5 capital been in business and where have you made your investments you mentioned cross jurisdiction across countries whatever it's called I don't know that so we've been and we've been in existence for about six years now our main focus is investing in Europe so we help European companies grow globally Europe historically has been underserved by venture capital we on an annual basis we invest about twenty seven billion dollars gets invested in venture capital in Europe as opposed to several multiples of that in the US so we have a very important part to play in Europe to how European enterprise software companies grow globally other important markets for us of course are Israel which is a major center of technology innovation and and the Middle East and then the u.s. the u.s. is still the world leader and venture capital both in terms of size but also in terms of the size of the market and of course the face and the excitement of the innovation here I want to get into me early career because again timing is key we're seeing this with you know whether it's a Supreme Court justice or anyone in their career their past comes back to haunt them it appears that has for you before we get there I want to ask you about you know when you look at the kind of scope of fraud and corruption that I've seen in just on the surface of government thing the government bit Beltway bandits in America is you got a nonprofit that feeds a for-profit and then what you know someone else runs a shell corporation so there's this intricate structures and that word was used which it kind of implies shell corporations a variety of backroom kind of smokey deals going on you mentioned transparency I do you have anything to hide John in in in our business we've got absolutely nothing to hide we have to be transparent we have to be open if you look at our social media profile you'll see we are communicating with the market almost on a daily basis every time we make an investment we press release that our website is very clear about who's involved enough who our partners are and the same applies to my own personal website and so in terms of the money movement around in terms of deploying investments we've seen Silicon Valley VCS move to China get their butts handed to them and then kind of adjust their scenes China money move around when you move money around you mentioned disclosure what do you mean there's filings to explain that piece it's just a little bit so every time we make an investment into a into a new portfolio company and we move the money to that market to make the investment we have to disclose who all the investors are who are involved in that investment so we have to disclose the ultimate beneficial ownership of all our limited partners to the law firms that are involved in the transactions and those law firms in turn have applications in terms of they own anti-money laundering laws in the local markets and this happens every time you move money around so I I think that the level of transparency in venture capital is just continue to rise exponentially and it's virtually impossible to conceal the identity of an investor this interesting this BBC article has a theme of national security risk kind of gloom and doom nuclear codes as mentioned it's like you want to scare someone you throw nuclear codes at it you want to get people's attention you play the Russian card I saw an article on the web that that said you know anything these days the me2 movement for governments just play the Russian card and you know instantly can discredit someone's kind of a desperation act so you got confident of interest in the government national security risk seems to be kind of a theme but before we get into the BBC news I noticed that there was a lot of conflated pieces kind of pulling together you know on one hand you know you're c5 you've done some things with your hat your past and then they just make basically associate that with running amazon's jedi project yes which i know is not to be true and you clarified that joan ends a problem joan so as a venture capital firm focused on investing in the space we have to work with all the Tier one cloud providers we are great believers in commercial cloud public cloud we believe that this is absolutely transformative not only for innovation but also for the way in which we do venture capital investment so we work with Amazon Web Services we work with Microsoft who work with Google and we believe that firstly that cloud has been made in America the first 15 companies in the world are all in cloud companies are all American and we believe that cloud like the internet and GPS are two great boons which the US economy the u.s. innovation economy have provided to the rest of the world cloud computing is reducing the cost of computing power with 50 percent every three years opening up innovation and opportunities for Entrepreneurship for health and well-being for the growth of economies on an unprecedented scale cloud computing is as important to the global economy today as the dollar ease as the world's reserve currency so we are great believers in cloud we great believers in American cloud computing companies as far as Amazon is concerned our relationship with Amazon Amazon is very Amazon Web Services is very clear and it's very defined we participate in a public Marcus program called AWS activate through which AWS supports hundreds of accelerators around the world with know-how with mentoring with teaching and with cloud credits to help entrepreneurs and startups grow their businesses and we have a very exciting focus for our two accelerators which is on in Washington we focus on peace technology we focus on taking entrepreneurs from conflict countries like Sudan Nigeria Pakistan to come to Washington to work on campus in the US government building the u.s. Institute for peace to scale these startups to learn all about cloud computing to learn how they can grow their businesses with cloud computing and to go back to their own countries to build peace and stability and prosperity their heaven so we're very proud of this mission in the Middle East and Bahrain our focus is on on female founders and female entrepreneurs we've got a program called nebula through which we empower female founders and female entrepreneurs interesting in the Middle East the statistics are the reverse from what we have in the West the majority of IT graduates in the Middle East are fimo and so there's a tremendous talent pool of of young dynamic female entrepreneurs coming out of not only the Gulf but the whole of the MENA region how about a relation with Amazon websites outside of their normal incubators they have incubators all over the place in the Amazon put out as Amazon Web Services put out a statement that said hey you know we have a lot of relationships with incubators this is normal course of business I know here in Silicon Valley at the startup loft this is this is their market filled market playbook so you fit into that is that correct as I'm I get that that's that's absolutely correct what we what is unusual about a table insists that this is a huge company that's focused on tiny startups a table started with startups it double uses first clients with startups and so here you have a huge business that has a deep understanding of startups and focus on startups and that's enormous the attractor for us and terrific for our accelerators department with them have you at c5 Capitol or individually have any formal or conversation with Amazon employees where you've had outside of giving feedback on products where you've tried to make change on their technology make change with their product management teams engineering you ever had at c5 capital whore have you personally been involved in influencing Amazon's product roadmap outside they're just giving normal feedback in the course of business that's way above my pay grade John firstly we don't have that kind of technical expertise in C 5 C 5 steam consists of a combination of entrepreneurs like myself people understand money really well and leaders we don't have that level of technical expertise and secondly that's what one our relationship with AWS is all about our relationship is entirely limited to the two startups and making sure that the two accelerators in making sure that the startups who pass through those accelerators succeed and make social impact and as a partner network component Amazon it's all put out there yes so in in a Barren accelerator we've we formed part of the Amazon partner network and the reason why we we did that was because we wanted to give some of the young people who come through the accelerator and know mastering cloud skills an opportunity to work on some real projects and real live projects so some of our young golf entrepreneurs female entrepreneurs have been working on building websites on Amazon Cloud and c5 capital has a relationship with former government officials you funded startups and cybersecurity that's kind of normal can you explain that positioning of it of how former government if it's whether it's US and abroad are involved in entrepreneurial activities and why that is may or may not be a problem certainly is a lot of kind of I would say smoke around this conversation around coffin of interest and you can you explain intelligence what that was it so I think the model for venture capital has been evolving and increasingly you get more and more differentiated models one of the key areas in which the venture capital model is changed is the fact that operating partners have become much more important to the success of venture capital firms so operating partners are people who bring real world experience to the investment experience of the investment team and in c-five we have the privilege of having a terrific group of operating partners people with both government and commercial backgrounds and they work very actively enough firm at all levels from our decision-making to the training and the mentoring of our team to helping us understand the way in which the world is exchanging to risk management to helping uh portfolio companies grow and Silicon Valley true with that to injuries in Horowitz two founders mr. friendly they bring in operating people that have entrepreneurial skills this is the new model understand order which has been a great source of inspiration to us for our model and and we built really believe this is a new model and it's really critical for the success of venture capitals to be going forward and the global impact is pretty significant one of things you mentioned I want to get your take on is as you operate a global transaction a lots happened a lot has to happen I mean we look at the ICO market on the cryptocurrency side its kind of you know plummeting obsoletes it's over now the mood security children's regulatory and transparency becomes critical you feel fully confident that you haven't you know from a regulatory standpoint c5 capital everything's out there absolutely risk management and regulated compliance and legal as the workstream have become absolutely critical for the success of venture capital firms and one of the reasons why this becomes so important John is because the venture capital world over the last few years have changed dramatically historically all the people involved in venture capital had very familiar names and came from very familiar places over the last few years with a diversification of global economic growth we've seen it's very significant amounts of money being invest invested in startups in China some people more money will invest in startups this year in China than in the US and we've seen countries like Saudi Arabia becoming a major source of venture capital funding some people say that as much as 70% of funding rounds this year in some way or another originated from the Gulf and we've seen places like Russia beginning to take an interest in technology innovation so the venture capital world is changing and for that reason compliance and regulation have become much more important but if Russians put 200 million dollars in face book and write out the check companies bright before that when the after 2008 we saw the rise of social networking I think global money certainly has something that I think a lot of people start getting used to and I want on trill down into that a little bit we talked about this BBC story that that hit and the the follow-on stories which actually didn't get picked up was mostly doing more regurgitation of the same story but one of the things that that they focus in on and the story was you and the trend now is your past is your enemy these days you know they try to drum up stuff in the past you've had a long career some of the stuff that they've been bringing in to paint you and the light that they did was from your past so I wanted to explore that with you I know you this is the first time you've talked about this and I appreciate you taking the time talk about your early career your background where you went to school because the way I'm reading this it sounds like you're a shady character I like like I interviewed on the queue but I didn't see that but you know I'm going to pressure here for that if you don't mind I'd like to to dig into that John thank you for that so I've had the I've had the privilege of a really amazingly interesting life and at the heart of at the heart of that great adventures been people and the privilege to work with really great people and good people I was born in South Africa I grew up in Africa went to school there qualified as a lawyer and then came to study in Britain when I studied international politics when I finished my studies international politics I got head hunted by a US consulting firm called crow which was a start of a 20 years career as an investigator first in crawl where I was a managing director in the London and then in building my own consulting firm which was called g3 and all of this led me to cybersecurity because as an investigator looking into organized crime looking into corruption looking into asset racing increasingly as the years went on everything became digital and I became very interested in finding evidence on electronic devices but starting my career and CRO was tremendous because Jules Kroll was a incredible mentor he could walk through an office and call everybody by their first name any Kroll office anywhere in the world and he always took a kindly interest in the people who work for him so it was a great school to go to and and I worked on some terrific cases including some very interesting Russian cases and Russian organized crime cases just this bag of Kroll was I've had a core competency in doing investigative work and also due diligence was that kind of focus yes although Kroll was the first company in the world to really have a strong digital practice led by Alan Brugler of New York Alan established the first computer forensics practice which was all focused about finding evidence on devices and everything I know about cyber security today started with me going to school with Alan Brolin crawl and they also focused on corruption uncovering this is from Wikipedia Kroll clients help Kroll helps clients improve operations by uncovering kickbacks fraud another form of corruptions other specialty areas is forensic accounting background screening drug testing electronic investigation data recovery SATA result Omar's McLennan in 2004 for 1.9 billion mark divested Kroll to another company I'll take credit risk management to diligence investigator in Falls Church Virginia over 150 countries call Kroll was the first CRO was the first household brand name in this field of of investigations and today's still is probably one of the strongest brand names and so it was a great firm to work in and was a great privilege to be part of it yeah high-end high-profile deals were there how many employees were in Kroll cuz I'd imagine that the alumni that that came out of Kroll probably have found places in other jobs similar to yes do an investigative work like you know they out them all over the world many many alumni from Kroll and many of them doing really well and doing great work ok great so now the next question want to ask you is when you in Kroll the South Africa connection came up so I got to ask you it says business side that you're a former South African spy are you a former South African spy no John I've never worked for any government agency and in developing my career my my whole focus has been on investigations out of the Kroll London office I did have the opportunity to work in South Africa out of the Kroll London office and this was really a seminal moment in my career when I went to South Africa on a case for a major international credit-card company immediately after the end of apartheid when democracy started to look into the scale and extent of credit card fraud at the request of this guy what year was there - how old were you this was in 1995 1996 I was 25 26 years old and one of the things which this credit card company asked me to do was to assess what was the capability of the new democratic government in South Africa under Nelson Mandela to deal with crime and so I had the privilege of meeting mr. Mandela as the president to discuss this issue with him and it was an extraordinary man the country's history because there was such an openness and a willingness to to address issues of this nature and to grapple with them so he was released from prison at that time I remember those days and he became president that's why he called you and you met with him face to face of a business conversation around working on what the future democracy is and trying to look at from a corruption standpoint or just kind of in general was that what was that conversation can you share so so that so the meeting involved President Mandela and and the relevant cabinet ministers the relevant secretaries and his cabinet - responsible for for these issues and the focus of our conversation really started with well how do you deal with credit card fraud and how do you deal with large-scale fraud that could be driven by organized crime and at the time this was an issue of great concern to the president because there was bombing in Kate of a Planet Hollywood cafe where a number of people got very severely injured and the president believed that this could have been the result of a protection racket in Cape Town and so he wanted to do something about it he was incredibly proactive and forward-leaning and in an extraordinary way he ended the conversation by by asking where the Kroll can help him and so he commissioned Kroll to build the capacity of all the black officers that came out of the ANC and have gone into key government positions on how to manage organized crime investigations it was the challenge at that time honestly I can imagine apartheid I remember you know I was just at a college that's not properly around the same age as you it was a dynamic time to say the least was his issue around lack of training old school techniques because you know that was right down post-cold-war and then did what were the concerns not enough people was it just out of control was it a corrupt I mean just I mean what was the core issue that Nelson wanted to hire Kroll and you could work his core issue was he wanted to ensure the stability of South Africa's democracy that was his core focus and he wanted to make South Africa an attractive place where international companies felt comfortable and confident in investing and that was his focus and he felt that at that time because so many of the key people in the ANC only had training in a cold war context that there wasn't a Nessy skill set to do complex financial or more modern investigations and it was very much focused he was always the innovator he was very much focused on bringing the best practices and the best investigative techniques to the country he was I felt in such a hurry that he doesn't want to do this by going to other governments and asking for the help he wanted to Commission it himself and so he gave he gave a crawl with me as the project leader a contract to do this and my namesake Francois Pienaar has become very well known because of the film Invictus and he's been he had the benefit of Mandela as a mentor and as a supporter and that changed his career the same thing happened to me so what did he actually asked you to do was it to train build a force because there's this talk that and was a despite corruption specifically it was it more both corruption and or stability because they kind of go hand in hand policy and it's a very close link between corruption and instability and and president Ellis instructions were very clear to Crowley said go out and find me the best people in the world the most experienced people in the world who can come to South Africa and train my people how to fight organized crime so I went out and I found some of the best people from the CIA from mi6 the British intelligence service from the Drug Enforcement Agency here in the US form officers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's detectives from Scotland Yard prosecutors from the US Justice Department and all of them for a number of years traveled to South Africa to train black officers who were newly appointed in key roles in how to combat organized crime and this was you acting as an employee he had crow there's not some operative this is he this was me very much acting as a as an executive and crow I was the project leader Kroll was very well structured and organized and I reported to the chief executive officer in the London office nor Garret who was the former head of the CIA's Near East Division and Nelson Mandela was intimately involved in this with you at Krall President Mandela was the ultimate support of this project and he then designated several ministers to work on it and also senior officials in the stories that had been put out this past week they talked about this to try to make it sound like you're involved on two sides of the equation they bring up scorpions was this the scorpions project that they referred to so it was the scorpions scorpion sounds so dangerous and a movie well there's a movie a movie does feature this so at the end of the training project President Mandela and deputy president Thabo Mbeki who subsequently succeeded him as president put together a ministerial committee to look at what should they do with the capacity that's been built with this investment that they made because for a period of about three years we had all the leading people the most experienced people that have come out of some of the best law enforcement agencies and some of the best intelligence services come and trained in South Africa and this was quite this was quite something John because many of the senior officers in the ANC came from a background where they were trained by the opponents of the people came to treat trained them so so many of them were trained by the Stasi in East Germany some of them were trained by the Russian KGB some of them were trained by the Cubans so we not only had to train them we also had to win their trust and when we started this that's a diverse set of potential dogma and or just habits a theory modernised if you will right is that what the there was there was a question of of learning new skills and there was a question about also about learning management capabilities there was also question of learning the importance of the media for when you do difficult and complex investigations there was a question about using digital resources but there was also fundamentally a question of just building trust and when we started this program none of the black officers wanted to be photographed with all these foreign trainers who were senior foreign intelligence officers when we finished that everyone wanted to be in the photograph and so this was a great South African success story but the President and the deputy president then reflected on what to do with his capacity and they appointed the ministerial task force to do this and we were asked to make recommendations to this Minister ministerial task force and one of the things which we did was we showed them a movie because you referenced the movie and the movie we showed them was the untouchables with Kevin Costner and Sean Connery which is still one of my favorite and and greatest movies and the story The Untouchables is about police corruption in Chicago and how in the Treasury Department a man called Eliot Ness put together a group of officers from which he selected from different places with clean hands to go after corruption during the Probie and this really captured the president's imagination and so he said that's what he want and Ella yeah okay so he said della one of the untouchables he wanted Eliot Ness exactly Al Capone's out there and and how many people were in that goodness so we asked that we we established the government then established decided to establish and this was passed as a law through Parliament the director of special operations the DSO which colloquy became known as the scorpions and it had a scorpion as a symbol for this unit and this became a standalone anti-corruption unit and the brilliant thing about it John was that the first intake of scorpion officers were all young black graduates many of them law graduates and at the time Janet Reno was the US Attorney General played a very crucial role she allowed half of the first intake of young cratchits to go to Quantico and to do the full FBI course in Quantico and this was the first group of foreign students who've ever been admitted to Quantico to do the full Quantico were you involved at what score's at that time yes sir and so you worked with President Mandela yes the set of the scorpions is untouchable skiing for the first time as a new democracy is emerging the landscape is certainly changing there's a transformation happening we all know the history laugh you don't watch Invictus probably great movie to do that you then worked with the Attorney General United States to cross-pollinate the folks in South Africa black officers law degrees Samar's fresh yes this unit with Quantico yes in the United States I had the privilege of attending the the graduation ceremony of the first of South African officers that completed the Quantico course and representing crow they on the day you had us relationships at that time to crawl across pollen I had the privilege of working with some of the best law enforcement officers and best intelligence officers that has come out of the u.s. services and they've been tremendous mentors in my career they've really shaped my thinking they've shaped my values and they've they've shaved my character so you're still under 30 at this time so give us a is that where this where are we in time now just about a 30 so you know around the nine late nineties still 90s yeah so client-server technologies there okay so also the story references Leonard McCarthy and these spy tapes what is this spy tape saga about it says you had a conversation with McCarthy me I'm thinking that a phone tap explain that spy tape saga what does it mean who's Lennon McCarthy explain yourself so so so Leonard McCarthy it's a US citizen today he served two terms as the vice president for institutional integrity at the World Bank which is the world's most important anti-corruption official he started his career as a prosecutor in South Africa many years ago and then became the head of the economic crimes division in the South African Justice Department and eventually became the head of the scorpions and many years after I've left Kroll and were no longer involved in in the work of the scorpions he texted me one evening expressing a concern and an anxiety that I had about the safety of his family and I replied to him with two text messages one was a Bible verse and the other one was a Latin saying and my advice name was follow the rule of law and put the safety of your family first and that was the advice I gave him so this is how I imagined the year I think of it the internet was just there this was him this was roundabout 2000 December 2007 okay so there was I phone just hit so text messaging Nokia phones all those big yeah probably more text message there so you sitting anywhere in London you get a text message from your friend yep later this past late tonight asking for help and advice and I gave him the best advice I can he unfortunately was being wiretapped and those wiretaps were subsequently published and became the subject of much controversy they've now been scrutinized by South Africa's highest court and the court has decided that those wiretaps are of no impact and of importance in the scheme of judicial decision-making and our unknown provenance and on and on unknown reliability they threw it out basically yeah they're basically that's the president he had some scandals priors and corruption but back to the tapes you the only involvement on the spy tapes was friend sending you a text message that says hey I'm running a corruption you know I'm afraid for my life my family what do I do and you give some advice general advice and that's it as there was there any more interactions with us no that's it that's it okay so you weren't like yeah working with it hey here's what we get strategy there was nothing that going on no other interactions just a friendly advice and that's what they put you I gave him my I gave him my best advice when you when you work in when you work as an investigator very much as and it's very similar in venture capital it's all about relationships and you want to preserve relationships for the long term and you develop deep royalties to its people particularly people with whom you've been through difficult situations as I have been with Leonard much earlier on when I was still involved in Kroll and giving advice to South African government on issues related to the scorpius so that that has a lot of holes and I did think that was kind of weird they actually can produce the actual tax I couldn't find that the spy tapes so there's a spy tape scandal out there your name is on out on one little transaction globbed on to you I mean how do you feel about that I mean you must've been pretty pissed when you saw that when you do it when when you do when you do investigative work you see really see everything and all kinds of things and the bigger the issues that you deal with the more frequently you see things that other people might find unusual I are you doing any work right now with c5 at South Africa and none whatsoever so I've I retired from my investigative Korea in 2014 I did terrific 20 years as an investigator during my time as investigator I came to understood the importance of digital and cyber and so at the end of it I saw an opportunity to serve a sector that historically have been underserved with capital which is cyber security and of course there are two areas very closely related to cyber security artificial intelligence and cloud and that's why I created c5 after I sold my investigator firm with five other families who equally believed in the importance of investing private capital to make a difference invest in private capital to help bring about innovation that can bring stability to the digital world and that's the mission of c-5 before I get to the heart news I want to drill in on the BBC stories I think that's really the focal point of you know why we're talking just you know from my standpoint I remember living as a young person in that time breaking into the business you know my 20s and 30s you had Live Aid in 1985 and you had 1995 the internet happened there was so much going on between those that decade 85 to 95 you were there I was an American so I didn't really have a lot exposure I did some work for IBM and Europe in 1980 says it's co-op student but you know I had some peak in the international world it must been pretty dynamic the cross-pollination the melting pot of countries you know the Berlin Wall goes down you had the cold war's ending you had apartheid a lot of things were going on around you yes so in that dynamic because if if the standard is you had links to someone you know talked about why how important it was that this melting pot and how it affected your relationships and how it looks now looking back because now you can almost tie anything to anything yes so I think the 90s was one of the most exciting periods of time because you had the birth of the internet and I started working on Internet related issues yet 20 million users today we have three and a half billion users and ten billion devices unthinkable at the time but in the wake of the internet also came a lot of changes as you say the Berlin Wall came down democracy in South Africa the Oslo peace process in the time that I worked in Kroll some of them made most important and damaging civil wars in Africa came to an end including the great war in the Congo peace came to Sudan and Angola the Ivory Coast so a lot of things happening and if you have a if you had a an international career at that time when globalization was accelerating you got to no a lot of people in different markets and both in crow and in my consulting business a key part of what it but we did was to keep us and Western corporations that were investing in emerging markets safe your credibility has been called in questions with this article and when I get to in a second what I want to ask you straight up is it possible to survive in the international theatre to the level that you're surviving if what they say is true if you if you're out scamming people or you're a bad actor pretty much over the the time as things get more transparent it's hard to survive right I mean talk about that dynamic because I just find it hard to believe that to be successful the way you are it's not a johnny-come-lately firms been multiple years operating vetted by the US government are people getting away in the shadows is it is is it hard because I almost imagine those are a lot of arbitrage I imagine ton of arbitrage that you that are happening there how hard or how easy it is to survive to be that shady and corrupt in this new era because with with with investigated with with intelligence communities with some terrific if you follow the money now Bitcoin that's a whole nother story but that's more today but to survive the eighties and nineties and to be where you are and what they're alleging I just what's your thoughts well to be able to attract capital and investors you have to have very high standards of governance and compliance because ultimately that's what investors are looking for and what investors will diligence when they make an investment with you so to carry the confidence of investors good standards of governance and compliance are of critical importance and raising venture capital and Europe is tough it's not like the US babe there's an abundance of venture capital available it's very hard Europe is under served by capital the venture capital invested in the US market is multiple of what we invest in Europe so you need to be even more focused on governance and compliance in Europe than you would be perhaps on other markets I think the second important point with Gmail John is that technology is brought about a lot of transparency and this is a major area of focus for our piece tech accelerator where we have startups who help to bring transparency to markets which previously did not have transparency for example one of the startups that came through our accelerator has brought complete transparency to the supply chain for subsistence farmers in Africa all the way to to the to the shelf of Walmart or a big grocery retailer in in the US or Europe and so I think technology is bringing a lot more more transparency we also have a global anti-corruption Innovation Challenge called shield in the cloud where we try and find and recognize the most innovative corporations governments and countries in the space so let's talk about the BBC story that hit 12 it says is a US military cloud the DoD Jedi contractor that's coming to award the eleventh hour safe from Russia fears over sensitive data so if this essentially the headline that's bolded says a technology company bidding for a Pentagon contract that's Amazon Web Services to store sensitive data has close partnerships with a firm linked to a sanctioned Russian oligarch the BBC has learned goes on to essentially put fear and tries to hang a story that says the national security of America is at risk because of c5u that's what we're talking about right now so so what's your take on this story I mean did you wake up and get an email said hey check out the BBC you're featured in and they're alleging that you have links to Russia and Amazon what Jon first I have to go I first have to do a disclosure I've worked for the BBC as an investigator when I was in Kroll and in fact I let the litigation support for the BBC in the biggest libel claim in British history which was post 9/11 when the BBC did a broadcast mistakenly accusing a mining company in Africa of laundering money for al-qaeda and so I represented the BBC in this case I was the manager hired you they hired me to delete this case for them and I'm I helped the BBC to reduce a libel claim of 25 million dollars to $750,000 so I'm very familiar with the BBC its integrity its standards and how it does things and I've always held the BBC in the highest regard and believed that the BBC makes a very important contribution to make people better informed about the world so when I heard about the story I was very disappointed because it seemed to me that the BBC have compromised the independence and the independence of the editorial control in broadcasting the story the reason why I say that is because the principal commentator in this story as a gentleman called John Wheeler who's familiar to me as a someone who's been trolling our firm on internet for the last year making all sorts of allegations the BBC did not disclose that mr. Weiler is a former Oracle executive the company that's protesting the Jedi bidding contract and secondly that he runs a lobbying firm with paid clients and that he himself often bid for government contracts in the US government context you're saying that John Wheeler who's sourced in the story has a quote expert and I did check him out I did look at what he was doing I checked out his Twitter he seems to be trying to socialise a story heavily first he needed eyes on LinkedIn he seems to be a consultant firm like a Beltway yes he runs a he runs a phone called in interoperability Clearing House and a related firm called the IT acquisition Advisory Council and these two organizations work very closely together the interoperability Clearing House or IC H is a consulting business where mr. Weiler acts for paying clients including competitors for this bidding contract and none of this was disclosed by the BBC in their program the second part of this program that I found very disappointing was the fact that the BBC in focusing on the Russian technology parks cocuwa did not disclose the list of skok of our partners that are a matter of public record on the Internet if you look at this list very closely you'll see c5 is not on there neither Amazon Web Services but the list of companies that are on there are very familiar names many of them competitors in this bidding process who acted as founding partners of skok about Oracle for example as recently as the 28th of November hosted what was described as the largest cloud computing conference in Russia's history at Skolkovo this is the this is the place which the BBC described as this notorious den of spies and at this event which Oracle hosted they had the Russian presidential administration on a big screen as one of their clients in Russia so some Oracle is doing business in Russia they have like legit real links to Russia well things you're saying if they suddenly have very close links with Skolkovo and so having a great many other Khayyam is there IBM Accenture cisco say Microsoft is saying Oracle is there so Skolkovo has a has a very distinguished roster of partners and if the BBC was fair and even-handed they would have disclosed us and they would have disclosed the fact that neither c5 nor Amazon feature as Corcovado you feel that the BBC has been duped the BBC clearly has been duped the program that they broadcasted is really a parlor game of six degrees of separation which they try to spun into a national security crisis all right so let's tell us John while ago you're saying John Wyler who's quoted in the story as an expert and by the way I read in the story my favorite line that I wanted to ask you on was there seems to be questions being raised but the question is being raised or referring to him so are you saying that he is not an expert but a plant for the story what's what's his role he's saying he works for Oracle or you think do you think he's being paid by Oracle like I can't comment on mr. Wireless motivation what strikes me is the fact that is a former Oracle executive what's striking is that he clearly on his website for the IC H identifies several competitors for the Jedi business clients and that all of this should have been disclosed by the BBC rather than to try and characterize and portray him as an independent expert on this story well AWS put out a press release or a blog post essentially hum this you know you guys had won it we're very clear and this I know it goes to the top because that's how Amazon works nothing goes out until it goes to the top which is Andy chassis and the senior people over there it says here's the relationship with c5 and ATS what school you use are the same page there but also they hinted the old guard manipulation distant I don't think they use the word disinformation campaign they kind of insinuate it and that's what I'm looking into I want to ask you are you part are you a victim of a disinformation campaign do you believe that you're not a victim being targeted with c5 as part of a disinformation campaign put on by a competitor to AWS I think what we've seen over the course of this last here is an enormous amount of disinformation around this contract and around this bidding process and they've a lot of the information that has been disseminated has not only not been factual but in some cases have been patently malicious well I have been covering Amazon for many many years this guy Tom Wyler is in seems to be circulating multiple reports invested in preparing for this interview I checked Vanity Fair he's quoted in Vanity Fair he's quoted in the BBC story and there's no real or original reporting other than those two there's some business side our article which is just regurgitating the Business Insider I mean the BBC story and a few other kind of blog stories but no real original yes no content don't so in every story that that's been written on this subject and as you say most serious publication have thrown this thrown these allegations out but in the in those few instances where they've managed to to publish these allegations and to leverage other people's credibility to their advantage and leverage other people's credibility for their competitive advantage John Wheeler has been the most important and prominent source of the allegations someone who clearly has vested commercial interests someone who clearly works for competitors as disclosed on his own website and none of this has ever been surfaced or addressed I have multiple sources have confirmed to me that there's a dossier that has been created and paid for by a firm or collection of firms to discredit AWS I've seen some of the summary documents of that and that is being peddled around to journalists we have not been approached yet I'm not sure they will because we actually know the cloud what cloud computing is so I'm sure we could debunk it by just looking at it and what they were putting fors was interesting is this an eleventh-hour a desperation attempt because I have the Geo a report here that was issued under Oracle's change it says there are six conditions why we're looking at one sole cloud although it's not a it's a multiple bid it's not an exclusive to amazon but so there's reasons why and they list six service levels highly specialized check more favorable terms and conditions with a single award expected cause of administration of multiple contracts outweighs the benefits of multiple awards the projected orders are so intricately related that only a single contractor can reasonably be perform the work meaning that Amazon has the only cloud that can do that work now I've reported on the cube and it's looking angle that it's true there's things that other clouds just don't have anyone has private they have the secret the secret clouds the total estimated value of the contract is less than the simplified acquisition threshold or multiple awards would not be in the best interest this is from them this is a government report so it seems like there's a conspiracy against Amazon where you are upon and in in this game collect you feel that collateral damage song do you do you believe that to be true collateral damage okay well okay so now the the John Wheeler guys so investigate you've been an investigator so you mean you're not you know you're not a retired into this a retired investigator you're retired investigated worked on things with Nelson Mandela Kroll Janet Reno Attorney General you've vetted by the United States government you have credibility you have relationships with people who have have top-secret clearance all kinds of stuff but I mean do you have where people have top-secret clearance or or former people who had done well we have we have the privilege of of working with a very distinguished group of senior national security leaders as operating partisan c5 and many of them have retained their clearances and have been only been able to do so because c5 had to pass through a very deep vetting process so for you to be smeared like this you've been in an investigative has you work at a lot of people this is pretty obvious to you this is like a oh is it like a deep state conspiracy you feel it's one vendor - what is your take and what does collateral damage mean to you well I recently spoke at the mahkum conference on a session on digital warfare and one of the key points I made there was that there are two things that are absolutely critical for business leaders and technology leaders at this point in time one we have to clearly say that our countries are worth defending we can't walk away from our countries because the innovation that we are able to build and scale we're only able to do because we live in democracies and then free societies that are governed by the rule of law the second thing that I think is absolutely crucial for business leaders in the technology community is to accept that there must be a point where national interest overrides competition it must be a point where we say the benefit and the growth and the success of our country is more important to us than making commercial profits and therefore there's a reason for us either to cooperate or to cease competition or to compete in a different way what might takes a little bit more simple than that's a good explanation is I find these smear campaigns and fake news and I was just talking with Kara Swisher on Twitter just pinging back and forth you know either journalists are chasing Twitter and not really doing the original courting or they're being fed stories if this is truly a smear campaign as being fed by a paid dossier then that hurts people when families and that puts corporate interests over the right thing so I think I a personal issue with that that's fake news that's just disinformation but it's also putting corporate inches over over families and people so I just find that to be kind of really weird when you say collateral damage earlier what did you mean by that just part of the campaign you personally what's what's your view okay I think competition which is not focused on on performance and on innovation and on price points that's competition that's hugely destructive its destructive to the fabric of innovation its destructive of course to the reputation of the people who fall in the line of sight of this kind of competition but it's also hugely destructive to national interest Andrae one of the key stories here with the BBC which has holes in it is that the Amazon link which we just talked about but there's one that they bring up that seems to be core in all this and just the connections to Russia can you talk about your career over the career from whether you when you were younger to now your relationship with Russia why is this Russian angle seems to be why they bring into the Russia angle into it they seem to say that c-5 Cable has connections they call deep links personal links into Russia so to see what that so c5 is a venture capital firm have no links to Russia c5 has had one individual who is originally of Russian origin but it's been a longtime Swiss resident and you national as a co investor into a enterprise software company we invested in in 2015 in Europe we've since sold that company but this individual Vladimir Kuznetsov who's became the focus of the BBC's story was a co investor with us and the way in which we structure our investment structures is that everything is transparent so the investment vehicle for this investment was a London registered company which was on the records of Companies House not an offshore entity and when Vladimir came into this company as a co investor for compliance and regulatory purposes we asked him to make his investment through this vehicle which we controlled and which was subject to our compliance standards and completely transparent and in this way he made this investment now when we take on both investors and Co investors we do that subject to very extensive due diligence and we have a very robust and rigorous due diligence regime which in which our operating partners who are leaders of great experience play an important role in which we use outside due diligence firms to augment our own judgment and to make sure we have all the facts and finally we also compare notes with other financial institutions and peers and having done that with Vladimir Kuznetsov when he made this one investment with us we reached the conclusion that he was acting in his own right as an independent angel investor that his left renova many years ago as a career executive and that he was completely acceptable as an investor so that you think that the BBC is making an inaccurate Association the way they describe your relationship with Russia absolutely the the whole this whole issue of the provenance of capital has become of growing importance to the venture capital industry as you and I discussed earlier with many more different sources of capital coming out of places like China like Russia Saudi Arabia other parts of the world and therefore going back again to you the earlier point we discussed compliance and due diligence our critical success factors and we have every confidence in due diligence conclusions that we reached about vladimir quits net source co-investment with us in 2015 so I did some digging on c5 razor bidco this was the the portion of the company in reference to the article I need to get your your take on this and they want to get you on the record on this because it's you mentioned I've been a law above board with all the compliance no offshore entities this is a personal investment that he made Co investment into an entity you guys set up for the transparency and compliance is that true that's correct no side didn't see didn't discover this would my my children could have found this this this company was in a transparent way on the records in Companies House and and Vladimir's role and investment in it was completely on the on the public record all of this was subject to financial conduct authority regulation and anti money laundering and no your client standards and compliance so there was no great big discovery this was all transparent all out in the open and we felt very confident in our due diligence findings and so you feel very confident Oh issue there at all special purpose none whatsoever is it this is classic this is international finance yes sir so in the venture capital industry creating a special purpose vehicle for a particular investment is a standard practice in c-five we focus on structuring those special-purpose vehicles in the most transparent way possible and that was his money from probably from Russia and you co invested into this for this purpose of doing these kinds of deals with Russia well we just right this is kind of the purpose of that no no no this so in 2015 we invested into a European enterprise software company that's a strategic partner of Microsoft in Scandinavian country and we invested in amount of 16 million pounds about at the time just more than 20 million dollars and subsequent in August of that year that Amir Kuznetsov having retired for nova and some time ago in his own right as an angel investor came in as a minority invest alongside us into this investment but we wanted to be sure that his investment was on our control and subject to our compliance standards so we requested him to make his investment through our special purpose vehicle c5 raised a bit co this investment has since been realized it's been a great success and this business is going on to do great things and serve great clients it c5 taking russian money no see if I was not taking Russian money since since the onset of sanctions onboarding Russian money is just impossible sanctions have introduced complexity and have introduced regulatory risk related to Russian capital and so we've taken a decision that we will not and we can't onboard Russian capital and sanctions have also impacted my investigative career sanctions have also completely changed because what the US have done very effectively is to make sanctions a truly global regime and in which ever country are based it doesn't really matter you have to comply with US sanctions this is not optional for anybody on any sanctions regime including the most recent sanctions on Iran so if there are sanctions in place you can't touch it have you ever managed Russian oligarchs money or interests at any time I've never managed a Russian oligarchs money at any point in time I served for a period of a year honest on the board of a South African mining company in which Renova is a minority invest alongside an Australian company called South 32 and the reason why I did this was because of my support for African entrepreneurship this was one of the first black owned mining companies in South Africa that was established with a British investment in 2004 this business have just grown to be a tremendous success and so for a period of a year I offered to help them on the board and to support them as they as they looked at how they can grow and scale the business I have a couple more questions Gabe so I don't know if you wanna take a break you want to keep let's take a break okay let's take a quick break do a quick break I think that's great that's the meat of it great job by the way fantastic lady here thanks for answering those questions the next section I want to do is compliment

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering AWS re:Invent 2018! Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. It's the Cube's live coverage here in Las Vegas, at AWS re:Invent 2018. I'm John Furrier, here with Lauren Cooney. Host of the Cube: Amazon web services. There are maybe 2,000 people here at their event, re:Invent annual conference, breaking it all down. Storage, computer networking, part of the main infrastructures involving changing very rapidly and spawning new use cases, new value propositions, it's creating a great ecosystem dynamic. We're here with Erik Kaulburg, who is the vice president of Infinidat, Cube alumni, great to see you again. >> Nice to see you as well. >> Been on the Cube multiple times. I think last time it was at VMWorld, or a studio? >> At, actually, our product launch for the cloud storage solution, as well. >> So, you guys got a great reputation. Take a minute, just, for the folks who might now know Infinidad, explain what you guys do, and your disruptive innovation. >> So, for Infinidad, we're all about tier-one environments, and it's the data piece of that environment, today, although that may not be forever. And, it's consumed through a couple of different modalities, so one of our big pieces of news earlier this year was that we were going beyond just the InfiniBox solution, which we shipped over four exabytes of to enterprises all around the world today, and broadening that to address the secondary storage market with InfiniGuard and Neutrix Cloud, which is a way to consume our capabilities completely as an iAd service in conjunction with other public clouds. >> Let's get that in a second, I want to get to the product in a second, but I want to first get your take on the market conditions, cloud storage, you're seeing pure storage had a big announcement of now they're doing a device, now doing software on premise, Amazon's going to have a device on premise, it's up for the cloud. Like, what the hell is going on? Storage is certainly growing like crazy. What does the market look like? Obviously, API, microservices, these are important things. Data still is the number one opportunity, but still a challenge. You guys are the center of it, what's the market look like to you? >> Absolutely, I couldn't agree more with the idea that data is at the middle of everything, and the lines are getting blurry between on-prem and public cloud environments as well. So, what I'm seeing in general is that companies which used to sell boxes, or primarily sell boxes today, are trying to figure out ways to play in the public cloud environments, and they're taking one of two paths. One is to develop a solution that's kind of leveraging the built-in infrastructure from the major public clouds, and the other is to build alongside it and enable those major public clouds, and potentially do so in a slightly less captive manner. So, that's what I'm kind of seeing across the industry, with regards to the public cloud. >> What's the role of storage here at re:Invent, because, like I said, Holy Trinity is of infrastructures, computer storage, and networking, and as that evolves, with each one having its new capabilities with Cloudify, is enabling new opportunities. What is the storage role now in the modern era of cloud as it is today? What's your view on that? >> Well, part of it is just providing excellent data services that are at the core of so many of these emerging environments. Like, we were listening to Monday Night Live yesterday, and one of the distinguished folks on there from the machine learning team was talking about the importance of getting more training data, so that you can run these more advanced machine learning workflows, and get things done quicker. We use less PHP type resources to get a problem solved, so I think that category of solutions, where you're using more storage capabilities as an enabler for more business value, or more value in the end application, is a trend that's going to absolutely continue for quite a while. >> What's the hottest area in Amazon cloud native world for storage that you see a lot of customers gravitating to? What's the number one? >> Well, I think, in general if you look at the adoption patterns of their block, file, and objects storage offerings, object is still dominating the vast majority of those kinds of use cases, and it comes from the perspective of applications that were written with cloud native services in mind. However, we think, I think, that there's a whole opportunity there, outside of the traditional, traditional cloud native object architectures, in the block and file arena, which has largely been untapped by the data and storage services, and that's an area where we and others in the industry are looking to augment. >> What is the competition? What's, like, NetApp doing? Let me ask, everyone's got to be on mobile clouds. Amazon, clearly the leader. They're making the market, so unless, say Kubernetes doesn't intermediate their services, for the most part, that's the market leader, but you got to play on a lot of clouds, because customers aren't going to have one cloud, they're going to certainly be hybrid on premises and cloud, but certainly be on multiple clouds. What's, like, NetApp and these guys doing? What's the competition doing? >> So, what I see NetApp doing is taking that kind of cloud captive approach, to be honest, what I see is they've got tied immigration, which is very impressive, with several major public cloud vendors. However, the challenge is, when you want cross those silos, you have a little bit more complexity that arises with that approach. >> Like what? >> So, you may have to spin up a separate set of data in Azure. Let's say, if you want to have an application cross the boundaries between AWS and Azure. >> Okay, let's get back to your storage solution. Neutrix Cloud, what is this about? Explain the product at a high level, we drill into it. >> So on a fundamental level, we believe in flexibility of Infinidad, and that's extended through all sorts of aspects of our product portfolio, but specifically, with regards to cloud storage, Neutrix delivers flexibility of having an outside set of infrastructure that's still tightly integrated with the major public clouds, including AWS, of course, and it delivers high resiliency, the five nines SLA, which we've talked about, which we believe is best in class, as well as enterprise-grade capabilities that previously you really had to look to an on-prem array to be able to achieve. Large-scale snapshot operations, asynchronous and synchronous replication natively built in, all these kinds of things, which make it easier to take tier one applications from an on-prem environment and bring those to the public cloud environments. >> And what's the core problem that you solved with this product? >> It's, you can't get tier one cloud storage today. What we would argue, anyway, and our customers are telling us that the features and capabilities, and even business guarantees provisions around the cloud storage offerings in the market today simply don't exist to the level that they need to be to support the last, let's say, 30% of applications that have not yet moved on to the public clouds. So, that's what we're addressing, making it easier for storage to accomplish that. >> You guys always have impressive customers, always see the big names, give some examples of some use cases. >> So, our customers have fallen into two categories, with regards to Neutrix Cloud adoption. The easy case, and the most natural for many of them, since they are buying our on-prem infrastructure at a large scale today, is, well, let's start replicating that infrastructure to the Neutrix cloud environment, maybe do it as a disaster-recovery target, things like that, and we think that there's value there. There's lots of companies which do DR as a service, to be honest, we don't see that as necessarily the core competency, but it's a stepping stone to the second use case, which is cloud adoption for these tier one applications, and bringing them the flexibility of potentially having multiple cloud platforms addressing the same data. >> We talked about the cloud guys, so we don't want to put you on the spot here, because this is the same patterns happening. Old world storage was stack up the storage, and provision the storage, stuff goes on there, block, file, that good stuff. Now, with the cloud, and Amazon, this is where I want to get the Amazon tie-in with you guys, because storage is not necessarily just a magic, quadrant-like thing. Oh, back-up and recovery, this and that, you're starting to see much more of a platform approach. And successful platforms enable things to be successful. It's not like I built it for this, purpose-built kind of storage. Do you guys see yourselves as a data platform, and if so, what does that mean, and what are those key value points that you're creating off that platform? >> I think you said it, actually, better than I did, that ultimately, we want customers to be able to consume our differentiated data services in whatever modality they prefer. So, if that's an on-prem infrastructure piece, if that's a back-up optimizing environment, if that's a public cloud service, we offer all those today, and customers can take their data from one to the other or even view it as a single, kind of, data architecture that crosses all of those traditional silos. >> So, were you looking at, you know, kind of one of the things that I'm listening to you guys chat, and one of the things that I'm thinking of is, how hard is it for a customer to actually adopt your technology and deliver it, you know, utilize it, across multiple environments? >> So, many of the traditional on-prem infrastructure players have great barriers associated with their public cloud services. We're not one of them. We took an intentionally different approach, and learned from companies like AWS on how you can get clients easily onto the solution, how they can pay for it easily, and how, ultimately, they can deploy it in a large scale public cloud environment very easily. That's a huge part of the investment that we put into developing the Neutrix Cloud service. >> Right. >> So we can have clients up and running in less than a day, from initial contact to large scale adoption, and it could be even faster than that as well. >> Now onto your relations with Amazon. What's it like, what's the details of it, what's the value, what's the connection point? >> I think we all agree that tier one applications are the last major bastion for public cloud adoption. These are things which you would have had on legacy big iron infrastructure, and so, to the extent Neutrix Cloud enables those tier one applications to move to the public cloud, to move to AWS, there's a lot of synergy there in the relationship, so we're absolutely an Amazon technology partner. We enjoy great working relationship with them, there are certainly areas where we overlap, but if we all agree on the end goal, we've been able to make some impressive business strategies. >> So, who are you competitors that you're most, kind of, focused on? Well, you shouldn't be focused on your competitors, you should be focused on what you're doing, but who are the competitors that kind of keep you up a little bit at night? >> I would say others that people would lump in this space, include NetApp Solutions in the public cloud environments, we see a couple of small start-ups, like Zadara, for example, from time to time, but to be honest, the biggest competitive kind of scenario that we see is just using the native public cloud services. And customers have to think about, well, I'm planning on replatforming my application, how am I going to design it from a storage perspective and often they don't even think that there are alternatives beyond the native offerings that could potentially add more value to their environments. So, that's when we come into the conversation, and from that point forward, generally, if we have a good enterprise type workload, the value proposition is instant and obvious. >> You know, when you guys came out, we've been following you guys since your founding, Gabe and I would always talk about Infinidat. You got good pedigree of a team. Classic storage. You have a good storage market. You guys take a different approach with this start-up. Founders did this time. How do you describe the key differentiator for you guys? What's the, you mentioned earlier, it's the tier one storage, but what's the secret sauce, what's the culture like? People want to peek inside Infinidad. What are they buying? What are they really getting, besides the product performance? What's the culture like, what's the company's view on the future world, serious insight. >> I think there's several elements to that, of course, but a lot of it comes from that founding DNA. So, Moshe Yanai, who basically defined the enterprise storage category overall back in EMC, had a succession of teams that he's built over the years, and he's really brought all of those key elements together. Three generations of storage expertise. >> Successful, by the way, three generations of exits, >> Absolutely, yeah. Building an organic business, selling a business, and now this is the business that he wants to leave to his grandchildren at some point. >> How's it going so far, how's business in general? >> Well, you know, we're private, so I can't say specifics, but I'd say we're definitely heading in the right direction. Growth has been phenomenal, the adoption of our portfolio solutions, in addition to just the core product, has really put us in a position of a very strong, long-term independence. >> Portfolios in terms of product capabilities or industries you're serving, or both? >> It's, actually, on both fronts. I was referring to the product portfolio but we've definitely broadened from our initial base in the financial services sector, which is a hard nut to crack in general, as a, you know, into a lot of different use cases, because it turns out that industries have a high demand for data across virtually every sector. So, we go where the data is. >> What's next? What's the next milestone for you guys? What're you lookin' to do next? >> Well, we did just have a major product release, so I'm glad that we've that, you know, out there, we're getting customers in the cloud space. I think the end of this year is going to be very, very strong for us from a business perspective and then next year, lots of great product announcements, and then ultimately, you know, we'll say some more on the business momentum there as well. >> All right, Erik, thanks for coming on the Cube show, thanks for the update. Infinidad, check them out, successful exit, multiple ties in the entrepreneurial team there, growing, doing great, storage has been going away, neither is networking, and neither is computing, it's only going to get better, stronger, as the cloud brings in more capabilities with machine learning and more use cases, new work loads, new capabilities. The Cube bringing it down with two sets here in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier and Lauren Cooney, on set one. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (electronic music)