>> Good afternoon from Vegas, guys and gals. We're so happy that you're with us. This is theCUBE live at AWS re:Invent '22. This is our third day of coverage. We started Monday night, so we're counting that as day one. Loads of conversations we've had already. We know that you know that 'cause you've been watching. I'm here with Dave Vellante. Dave, great to be here with you with somewhere between 50,000 and 70,000 people. And we're excited for our next conversation. We've got two folks joining us who are new to theCUBE, soon will be alumni. Milan Bhatt joins us, the president and head of Cloud at Hexaware. And Nikhil Date, the Director of Engineering and Application Services at Domestic & General. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Thank you >> Thanks for having us. >> So Domestic & General, or D&G, is a customer of Hexaware, but Milan, we want to start with you. Give the audience an overview of Hexaware. What do you do? What's the business model? >> Yeah. So, Hexaware is a technology services company. We are a global partner of AWS, and essentially, we help customers like Domestic & General, you know, accelerate their digital transformation journeys. We like to think of ourselves as a billion dollar startup. And like Amazon, it is always day one at Hexaware. And, you know, I look forward to the conversation, but any company in the world that is looking at cloud-led digital transformation, they have to put Hexaware on the consideration list. Because, you know, not only do we work with a lot of customers, analysts like Gartner, they have rated us as a visionary in helping customers become, you know, digitally enabled, bring better customer experience to their end customers. >> Excellent. Well, we're glad to feature Hexaware on the program. >> Milan: Thank you. >> Nikhil let's bring you into the conversation. Talk to the audience about Domestic & General. What kind of business is it? What's the business model? >> Sure, thank you. So we are, you know, 110-year-old business, right? I mean, we started insuring sheep in Australia, if you believe it, you know, which is quite an origin story. But at the moment, you know, the primary business is keeping our customers world running. So what do I mean by that? We protect in warranty and out-of-warranty care for domestic appliances. You know, TVs, boilers, refrigerators, washing machines, that kind of thing. But we are also a B2B company in the sense that, you know, you might think you are getting a warranty from some of our biggest customers, like Whirlpool or, you know, Bosch, Siemens, or Samsung, but actually it's D&G at the back trying to administer that for you. So, you know, we are in 13 countries. Just launched in the US last year, but big plans. >> So it's really interesting because we all have appliances, and we can relate to, especially, you know pre or post-pandemic, how difficult it is to get service. So you're kind of like, in a way, you've got to build a digital platform like Uber, connecting drivers and passengers, right? And so you've got the supply of individuals who know how to fix stuff, right? And you want to make it as easy as possible for the customer. So was that the genesis of this digital transformation? Can you talk about those business drivers? >> It was, actually, and it's a fantastic point, because trying to become a platform business is what this journey has been all about for us, right? I think, you know, we are a pioneer in what we consider the subscription model. So customers pay a small amount per month as opposed to a big lump sum amount that they have to pay at the point you buy the appliance. And importantly, you can actually buy our product to pay in installments at the point something breaks down. So it's not just something that you buy at the point of sale or at the point you try to register. You can buy it at any time. And the goal really is to have warranty in a box that you can take anywhere, you know, anywhere in the world. So, you know, but it's a great point. Digital transformation is what it is all about. >> And there is a real lack right now of qualified technicians. >> That's right. >> Is there anything within the platform to incent those individuals to participate in your business? >> You know, this is what we consider a multi-tier approach. I think at the moment, the service that we offer is largely top tier, right? So we will get you an engineer that is certified by the manufacturer with the manufacturer warranty. And it's a no fix, no fee model, you know? So, you know, we guarantee either to repair or replace the appliance, you know? That's the model. But you are right, I think in the future stage would be, you know, why wouldn't we want to have anybody who's got the right skills to come in and work off the platform? Absolutely right. >> Nikhil, talk about, you said this is a legacy business, been around for quite some time. You've been there for not quite two years. What drew you to the organization? And where were they in their digital transformation journey? Because I always think legacy companies, this a big challenge, and it's cultural challenge to really transform, but companies these days have no choice. >> Again, a fantastic point, right? I think some of the, you know, 110-year-old business, right? And some of the tech, you would be forgiven for thinking it's that old. But the assets that we had are our people, right? Who are really passionate about the business. And I think what we had to do is to find a partner that can upskill the tech, but also upskill the people at the same time and upskill the delivery model, right? So we've a very traditional left-to-right waterfall, you know, planet first, big upfront planning, and then deliver kind of organization. And by working with a partner such as Hexaware and embracing cloud, because, you know, our first and our go-to will be a SaaS or a cloud provider. And, you know, doing that was the massive agenda that drew me to the company. But I think what is also fair is, you know, digitization or digitalization, is a misunderstood and often abused term, right? Because for the most part, when companies start, and I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but, you know, for the most part, when companies start on this journey, they take a journey that works in the brick and mortar world, and we were a contact center business, and just try to move it to the digital journey, right? It's not a great customer experience. I'll give you an example, right? Now, if you call our agent and say, "Yeah, I'm trying to register an appliance," they will tell you where to look for the serial number. But if you're on a digital channel, you don't know where to look. There's nobody, you know, who can help you. The model number, who remembers the model number of the washing machine they bought, right? I mean, you know, it's stuff like that, you know, which would feel, you know, for a digital native, my son, you know, for example, would think, "How can you even ask a customer for that?" But, you know, it's that change in the model, that's what this is all about. >> Yeah, it's like when you get to go, "What's your account number?" I have no idea what my account number is. So when did this whole project start? How was Hexaware involved? And where did Hexaware start? Like, how did you sort of gauge what the requirement was? Take us through that little- >> Sure. So, you know, when Nikhil and the rest of the management team came in, they came up with a competitive process where, you know, and it is refreshing to remember, I think they've stuck true to their vision. They were very clear that they were not looking for someone who can just digitize their paper processes, but who can help them completely re-imagine, you know, what the new process would look like what the new experience would look like. And, you know, remember, they were running this process at the height of the pandemic, so we couldn't meet anybody in person. We did everything virtual. And we were using cloud technology, but, you know, the way they run the process, they wanted to make sure that a provider brings in a mix of experience and engineering expertise. And that's really hard to find. But equally importantly, you remember those culture sessions that we did? They figured out some very creative ways of making sure that there is a cultural fit. So, for example, they did virtual breakout sessions where, you know, people were sort of asking each other, you know, if you want to have dinner with someone like a celebrity, who would it be? So, you know, these little things to make sure that there is a match and people can actually work. >> Relationship building too. >> The relationship building. It's hard to do in a virtual environment, but it was a competitive process. They looked at us in terms of engineering, you know, experience, our ability to transcend change and run, and, you know, really focus and align to keep their objectives first, right? Work as a true partnership. Do you agree? >> I would agree. And I think, you know, one of the biggest goals here was to make sure that, this is not an arms length vendor relationship, right? You know, this is an extension of our team. So these are our people, you know, for the people that work on D&G, you know, they work in the D&G way, you know, and that means that they can also challenge us, you know, which is quite refreshing, right? People stopping and saying, "Why are you asking me to do this?" You know, it's very refreshing, I think, you know, to work with a partner that is sold on the vision and committed to helping you achieve success. >> That synergy creates that flywheel. And like you said, at D&G, Hexaware, we're a team, we're working together. Nikhil, share with us some of the significant business outcomes that Hexaware services and AWS are helping the company to achieve? Because there's some big numbers there. >> Indeed. Yeah. So, you know, in the digital journey itself, like I said, we are also a B2B business. You know, one of the key challenges is every client wants their own brand, right? So, you know, a journey for customer X has to look like the customer X brand. And our journey for customer Y will have to do the same. You know, when you try to stretch this to a technology problem though, it means that, you know, we were trying to be too many things for too many people, and that slowed things down and increased complexity. So from our point of view, you know, when we started with the digital journey or in the middle of the digital journey, we thought, we need to have a library of reusable components. We need white labeling, right? So there was a root in branch re-engineering of the digital proposition to allow us to, you know, serve multiple clients with the same underlying technology. And that has meant that, you know, in some cases, we are going to market, you know, two, three times faster than what we were. Costs, obviously, you know, 50% cheaper. But, you know, I think the big thing here, and, you know, this is the unstated benefit, is because now there is a common underlying technology innovation that client X wants to do becomes available for client Y. You know, which means that, you know, there's a virtual circle of, you know, constant improvement. So, you know that, from my point of view, that's the big benefit. >> And would you agree that you are still only in the first quarter of a football game? >> Absolutely. >> I think a lot of ambitious plans. So, you know, this is just the beginning. And the way they have built the organization, the way they have driven the culture change, you know, I'm very hopeful for great things to come. >> Paint a picture of the tech. I'm interested in the architecture, and I'm really interested in the data component and how that's affected your business. >> So I mean, you know, multilayered tech architecture, as you can imagine. Then, you know, we still have a legacy, you know, legacy components running off our own PET mainframe, as we like to call it. But, you know, from a forward point of view, what we really want is to allow clients to self-serve, right? Not have to, you know, because at the moment, the only service we can offer is what I call the white glove, right? Which means, you know, somebody has to sit down with us, have a discussion on the requirements, but people should be able to self-serve, you know, look at the catalog of what it is we can do for them and go for it. Data is a very interesting point, right? Because not only are there, you know, geography restrictions around where customer data can go to, obviously, payments and PCI compliance is an issue. But last but not least, you know, some of this data is very, you know, unique to what the clients want to own and manage. And, you know, if you are a, you know, a typical homeowner, you will have appliance from all kinds of manufacturers, right? Many of whom would be our customers. But how much data we can share, because we recognize you as a person, but how much data we can share, there are restrictions. But, you know, building our data abstraction layer allows us to, you know, take care of that. But you're absolutely right, in terms of, But again, the potential for where the data can be mined, because, you know, the engineer also has to be local to where you live. You know, you can't come from 100 miles away. So, you know, the ability to use data to, you know, not just transform our business, but our client's business is phenomenal, you know? >> Do you actually have a mainframe? >> Yes >> We do do. (laughter) >> Adam Selinsky wants to move it into the cloud. (laughter) >> They have every possible technology that you can think of. I mean, 100-year-old business evolved over a period of time. And, you know, if I could add, you know, what has been really impressive about the decision making at D&G is that they have adopted cloud in the right way, right? So they are one of the few customers who have truly taken AWS well architected to heart. They have taken things like, you know, take the right workloads to the cloud and wait to do the right remediations before you take the rest of the workloads to the cloud. They've used native services available on AWS from apps perspective as well as a data perspective. So that's sort of a little bit more color on the technology and architecture. >> But you've essentially SaaSified your business and you basically have D&G cloud that you're delivering to your customers for self-serve. Is that fair? >> That's the vision, yes. The idea is to get there. And, you know, if we assemble what I call, you know, out-the-box solutions in a clever way, then that becomes the platform that we can replicate success on. And at the moment, our business needs what I call boots on the ground. When we are a true platform business, we should be able to operate without having, you know, any presence in country, with the partners leveraging the platform to do what what's next. >> I'm curious, Milan, you said that one of the great things that D&G has done is really adopted cloud in the right way. Do you, Nikhil, think of cloud first or cloud right approach? Because you've got a mainframe, so I'm just wondering if it's more what's right for cloud versus everything cloud first. >> Correct. I mean, I actually, you know, or we actually tend to start even two steps before that, right? I think it's really whether we need to buy or whether we need to build, right? And if we need to buy, then, you know, how easily would that thing that has been bought fit into what is a very complex architecture, as Milan said, right? I mean, any technology you can imagine we probably have it, but we want to simplify it, right? And this is a journey. So which means that, you know, we start with can SaaS product do it? And then we also want to go wherever we are building, then it has to be on the cloud. It has to be designed for scaling. It has to be designed to be in multiple geographies, multiple countries with the relevant data protection baked in. So, you know, that's the decision-thinking process. You know, that the goal is to not, I mean, you know, we had a project started 18 months ago that wanted to buy more tin, but we put a stop to that, right? And saying that, "You know, come on, you can't have that." Not in this day and age, you know, when the cloud can pretty much do everything that you need. >> Do you think of D&G, this is a question for you. We're almost out of time, but I'm just curious, I'm looking at your website, D&G, the experts who repair and replace the household products everyone relies on. Do you think about it as a repair company? Do you think about it as a tech company that delivers these repair services? >> I mean, this is the conversation we have in our teams all the time, right? That when our vision is successful, we will become a tech business. At the moment, I don't think we are, you know? At the moment, I think we are on a journey, you know, because, you know, we are multi-channel, you know, and our customers love us, you know, touch wood. But are we a true tech company? No, but we are getting there, right? I think, you know, that's the plan. >> You're on the journey? >> Yeah. >> Awesome stuff. Last question for each of you, a little bit different. Milan, question for you. You have a billboard or a bumper sticker, whichever, or maybe a sticker for your laptop and it's about Hexaware, and you want to really convey, in a compelling, but really short way, why are we so great? What would that sticker say? >> Awesome. Like I said at the beginning, if you are thinking about a digital transformation, if you are a company that has been around for a long time, you've got to think of us, you know, as a partner. So that's what I would say, because, you know, the purpose of our company is creating smiles through a combination of great people and technology. So that's what we live for. And, you know, brought a smile to me when Nikhil said that our customers love us, and somewhere, we have a small role to play in that. >> I love that. Nikhil, I'm going to ask the same question. I was going to ask you a different one, but I would love to, I mean, we talked a lot about D&G and the incredible business transformation that you've been on. What's that bumper sticker for D&G? What is that bumper sticker for D&G? >> Oh, yeah. Okay. We want keep your world running, right? I mean, you know, from our point of view, you know, you rely on the appliances to keep your home running, and we want you to rely on us to make sure your world keeps running. You know, that's what this is all about. It has to be slick. Touch wood, hopefully, you never have a problem, but if you do, we want to be there, you know, to make sure that your world keeps running. >> I love it. Awesome, guys. Thank you, Milan. Nikhil, thank you so much for joining Dave and me on the program. >> Thank you. I enjoyed the conversation. >> Great partnership. Hexaware, first time on theCUBE, now you're an alumni. You're an alumni too. We appreciate your insights, sharing the story. It's a really compelling story. Thank you. >> And thank you for all the support, Nikhil. >> Of course. >> All right. >> For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> Good afternoon from Las Vegas. Lisa Martin, at The Cosmopolitan, here on day two of theCUBE's coverage of Coupa Inspire 2022. I'm excited to be joined by one of Coupa's many successful customers, Jaime Robles joins me, the chief procurement officer at Casey's General Stores. You're going to be talking about building a technology hub with source-to-pay and interconnecting ecosystem platforms. Welcome, Jaime. >> Thank you, Lisa. It's a pleasure to be here today in this week, hearing about Coupa and all the fabulous things that we can do around technology. >> Coupa is amazing, and in terms of their innovation, I don't know if you had a chance to see the Keynote this morning, but the slides that Raja showed with just the arrow going up and to the right. Talk to us a little bit about Casey's General Stores. This is the U.S's fourth largest convenience store retailer. But just for the audience who may not know, give us a background. >> So, just a little bit about Casey's. So, Casey's is, as you said, one of the largest convenience store chains out there. We got more than 2,500 locations in 16 states in the Midwest in the U.S. And just out of curiosity, we are the fifth largest pizza company as well. >> Lisa: Is that right? >> We make a great pizza and our guests love it. So, we are in three businesses. We are in convenience store, we are in fuel, and also we are in the food business, because we got a kitchen inside every single store that we got out there. So, for us it's been a fabulous journey with procurement, because we came to the company, joined the company two years ago in the middle of pandemic, and the whole idea was to build the procurement function from the ground up. Casey's didn't have a formal procurement function. So, pretty much, all the spend was done by the functions, by themselves, but no formal process, no technology, no platforms, nothing; very old school. And we came here to build a foundation and build, as I call it, a procurement tech house. >> A procurement tech house. So, talk to me, so I know that Casey's dates back to 1959, and what you described sounds like a lot of paper-based, manual processes; technology really wasn't in the mix. Is that what attracted you to take the role going, "I want to bring technology and build this powerhouse"? >> Yes, that was amazing. So, over my career, I've been doing this for several companies, such as in the past, in Phillips, G, and recently, with Walmart. And then, what attracted me for this opportunity was, well, everything is paper. Everything is manual. There's nothing digital in this company. There's no team, there's no sourcing, no process, no policies. It's like building everything from the ground up. So, it was very attractive. It's huge opportunities for the company, and we were going through this massive transformation to digitize the company all across the operations. So, procurement wasn't the core of those strategies for the CEO of the company, and that's what the opportunity lies. He was like, "How do we move from manual transactions to all this digital world?" and where, now everything is frictionless, that we move from 80%, 85%, that it was all manual. Now we are plus 65%, everything is digital now in the company, and just within one year of moving all over. So, the savings, the cost, the, the leakage, all the waste on the processes that we have, is just amazing, after one year. >> Sounds like the company had a cloud, a digitization strategy, brought you on board to help make that a reality for procurement. So, the appetite was there at Casey's from a cultural perspective, it wasn't battling uphill to get folks to go, "Let go of the paper. Let's go to Coupa." >> Yeah, that's the truth. So, it was the whole digital transformation for the company, not only on the procurement, spend side, but all the process in the company. So, as COVID hit our stores and the whole world, right? So, we had to move into more digital ordering, into more digital transaction, into more how my guests can interact with my stores without going to the stores, how they can order from the app, how they can get their food directly to their house, and all this stuff. And procurement was right there, hand to hand, as part of those strategies from the very beginning. And we were, I will say, very lucky to be on time to make all those digital transformations for the company, so when the COVID really hit, we were ready and prepared to take over. >> That's good, being ready and prepared. Oh my gosh. But some of the few people I've talked to. Talk to me about the core technology requirements that you had for the right BSM solution, and why Coupa ticked all those boxes. >> Yeah. So for us, it was one of the most important ones is as I said, bring the digital across the whole source to pay. Another big element for us, it was, how do we bring transparency into the process? How do we bring transparency on how much we pay, how do we spend our money, Which areas, which categories? We built a model in cases that are called, it's a self-service model. And this self service model is, I put the technology in its core, which is Coupa, and I give my users and my internal stakeholders all the power to take those decisions. So, now they can see how much they spend in different categories, with different suppliers, for the preferred vendors, what type of contracts do we have? And how do we manage that spend, versus the budget, as well? They have all that ability to take those decisions, and they don't need a procurement team. As I like to call, in my couple of speaker notes during this week, we like to make procurement invisible. We are in the back, they don't see us. And they got all the power to use the technology out there to do the job for us. >> Transparent, but empowered at the same time. >> Exactly, exactly. That's what we want, moving forward for this company. And I believe that is the vision that we got in the procurement 2.0. >> Procurement 2.0. Talk to me about some of the solutions that you implemented. You talked about source-to-pay, but give us kind of an idea if you double click on that, and then we'll kind of unpack ` what you talked about on your sessions. >> Yeah, pretty much, for Coupa, we implemented the whole source to pay. So, from sourcing, procurement, invoicing and payment. So, we implement all that at the core of the Coupa. I believe in an ecosystem of procurement technologies that are interconnected with Coupa, to interact for other needs, like contract lifecycle management, tail spend management, TNE, and some others that we're going after. Like, now for us, is going after supplier data hub, which for us is very important also to get it right. And that procurement ecosystem of different technologies connected is going to give us the ability to move faster, to be more lean and to have better data and technology accessible for the team that is in charge of procurement, to operate under that environment. >> You mentioned a few minutes ago that, when the pandemic hit, Casey's was ready, from a digital perspective. I imagine that was a huge advantage, going into such unknown times that we're still kind of in. >> Well, when I say ready, it's like, we were ready to go, and we were on the fly, implementing everything, and what the pandemic did is to accelerate all this. So, as many companies did, we were already in the process of going this direction, and when the pandemic start hitting, we accelerate everything, and we made it happen. So, we went live in three, four months, and a year later, we were completely live since we joined the company, and we were start seeing all this paying coming to ours. So, 18 months later, we are pretty much hitting best in class levels in terms of transactional, operational, tactical, savings, visibility, spend, transparency, risk management. Now we're going to take it to the next level of the maturity. It's like, how do we go for ESG? How do we go for supplier diversity? How do we manage risk management? Right? And all those things. >> You had a couple of presentations here at Inspire, talk to me about those, and some of the top takeaways that the audience gleaned from you. >> Yeah, one of the most important ones yesterday was about how to build a procurement organization from the ground up, or how to go through a digital transformation in procurement. That is something that has been on the topic on the procurement community for years now. Everybody talks about procurement transformation, et cetera. And I just showed to them, my journey in the companies that I've been doing this for the last two decades, across the world, in many different countries, and the things that work and the and the things that doesn't work, really. And how they need to build, for the future of procurement, a technology procurement house on the core. And that's how you operate day to day. And for us, organization was Coupa. And then on top of that, you need to build a procurement ops model, right? How you want to operate your procurement operating model. So, it's centralized, decentralized, a hybrid model. And it all depends about the type of company, the type of industry you are, how material is your organization, et cetera. And another big, big element in all your strategy is, how you're going to serve your customers, right? What type of service model do you have in place? If you're going to be like a full service mode, or you going to be in a strategic direction, or you going to be a self-service mode. And pretty much, what we have chosen as the best way to move forward in the future is, let's put the technology in the middle. Let's give the support our users need, but let them be self-service, and let's make our job invisible in the back, where we have all these sourcing events, all these beautiful negotiations, all these great deals, contracts, et cetera. So, by the time they use the technology, they know where to buy, how to buy, what's the right level, how to make it happen, and they don't need us. They can do it by their own. >> And they've got that visibility, that before, it sounds like they didn't have it at all. >> Exactly, so now we know how much we spend, where do we spend, and where are the opportunities? Where are some gaps that we can go after, as well? And I think one of the most important aspects in these transformations that many of my colleagues are going through is, then you have a model that you can repeat year over year and evolve with the company, so it's agile and it's flexible. Because companies keep evolving. You buy business, you sell business, you acquire, you expand, you grow, and how that model is going to shape around. So, by the time you're done, it's not obsolete again. So, technology is going to keep evolving with your model, and that for me, is the key part in all this. >> Do you feel like, this is a marketing term; future-proof, and it always is one of those things that, well what does that actually really mean? Do you feel though that, what you've put in place is future-proof? That it's going to be able to grow and scale as the company changes? >> Jaime: Totally, totally. Because as I said before, we put the technology on the core. And for us, having that technology on the core, and plugging different technologies around that and sourcing around that with our amazing sourcing team, is going to evolve whatever the company needs. If we expand into different regions, we're ready. If we expand into different business types, we're ready. I believe what we need to keep evolving, as well, is, there will be new emerging technologies. There's going to be way more AI. There's going to be way more machine learning. There's going to be more predictive analytic sourcing stuff. How do we keep pulling those technologies into our platforms to keep giving us that advantage and that edge to the market? I think we have the model, and I think it's one of the most advanced procurement functions that I've seen in the industries around. >> And it sounds like you designed and deployed it really quickly, >> We did. >> especially during a global crisis. >> Yeah, we are disruptors by nature. We love change. We love speed. And that is, I will say my procurement brand. We make it happen and we make it fast. That's how we do it. We keep momentum. >> That's incredibly important. I mean, one of the things that we've learned, many things the last two years, a couple things. Access to realtime data is no longer a "nice to have." It's absolutely business critical. The patience of many people, including myself, was quite thin, the last two years. But also, every company has to be a data company. Casey's has to be a data company. If I have the ability to order from my app, or order things, I want them to know when I'm here for, what I ordered before; make my visit personalized, efficient, easy. So, that data strategy, having that data at the core, is nowadays, you have to have it. >> It is essential. We're building a data hub for the company, completely showing us all that information. As you can imagine, being in those three business, on the food industry, on the retail convenience store, and in the fuel, so data for us is our living breath every single day. And not only having the data now, it's like, what type of decisions we're taking with all this data? And how fast we are adapting to all that, in pricing, in cost, in margin and availability and inventory and logistics and transportation, and in your whole supply chain. So, that is extremely important for us. Not only having the data, but what kind of decisions we're taking with the data, and everything starts with the transparency right? Whenever you see it, you act. >> You should be able to act, but to your point, you have to have that visibility. You have to be able to see it and act on it. Talk to me about what it's like being a Coupa customer. I know how I've been to many Inspires, and I always love seeing all the customer success stories everywhere across industries. What's it like being a Coupa customer, in terms of having the ability to influence, say, the roadmap? Is that something that you're able to work on in partnership with Raj's team? >> Yeah, that's great. So, Coupa has been a great company to work with, and I know them for some years now, and not only they been able to support our vision of what we're trying to build, but at the same time they're taking many of our feedback to make Coupa better, in many of the different models. Listen, Coupa's not perfect, right? And I don't think any tool out there is going to be perfect. But being in so many different industries and with so many opportunities in different areas, they've been able to take our feedback and make those improvements for ourselves. We have so many conversations with the Coupa product development team when we were going through a transformation, asking them for things that we thought it was very valuable to have on the tool, that was in our, in our eyes, no brainer, and they were very, very fast to react and make the change. And we are, I think, one of the most lousy customers, guilty as charged about that, but we just wanted to make it better because it's a benefit of the whole community. Everything that we've been talking this week about community AI, it's amazing. All the things that we're sharing during this week, all the ideas that we are getting about things that we can do. That's amazing. That's the value. >> It's huge value. And that's that sort of flywheel of the community and the power and the insights. Last question for you. If you talk to peers, or when you talk to peers who are maybe starting their procurement digitization journey, what advice do you give them? >> Don't take a no as an answer. Make it happen. Own it. Own it. I think you need to have a vision. You need to put in strategy in place. You need to build a business case. You need to earn your seat at the table at the C-suite. But you need to own it. You cannot let the IT, function, finance community too long, and decide how you want to operate and how you want to move your function as procurement, or build how you operate. You need to own it, and you need to build a business case and you need to make it happen. You need to, yeah. To struggle with that. But if you are a hustler, as we are in cases, we are disruptors. And if you don't disrupt, it's not going to happen. >> I completely agree. Own it, make it happen. Jaime, great to have you on the program. >> Jaime: Thanks so much. >> Thanks for hearing what Casey's is doing, how you're really leading the charge, and how you owned it and made it happen. That's awesome. >> Thank you, Lisa. Thank you for being here. >> Thanks. For Jaime Robles, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE's coverage day two, Coupa Inspire 22, from Las Vegas. Join me with my next guest, coming up shortly. (lighthearted upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to theCube's continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm Dave Nicholson, and we are running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events this year with AWS and its partners with two live sets on the scene. In addition to two remote studios. And we'll have somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred guests on the program this year at re:Invent. I'm extremely delighted to welcome a very, very special guest. Right now. He served as the director of the NSA under two presidents, and was the first commander of the U.S Cyber Command. He's a Cube alumni, he's founder and co-CEO of IronNet Cybersecurity. General Keith Alexander. Thanks for joining us today General. >> Thanks, David. It's an honor to be here at re:Invent, you know, with AWS. All that they're doing and all they're making possible for us to defend sector states, companies and nations in cyber. So an honor to be here. >> Well, welcome back to theCube. Let's dive right in. I'd like to know how you would describe the current cyber threat landscape that we face. >> Well, I think it's growing. Well, let's start right out. You know, the good news or the bad news, the bad news is getting worse. We're seeing that. If you think about SolarWinds, you think about the Hafnium attacks on Microsoft. You think about this rapid growth in ransomware. We're seeing criminals and nation states engaging in ways that we've never seen in the past. It's more blatant. They're going after more quickly, they're using cyber as an element of national power. Let's break that down just a little bit. Do you go back to two, July. Xi Jinping, talked about breaking heads in bloodshed when he was referring to the United States and Taiwan. And this has gone hot and cold, that's a red line for him. They will do anything to keep Taiwan from breaking away. And this is a huge existential threat to us into the region. And when this comes up, they're going to use cyber to go after it. Perhaps even more important and closer right now is what's going on with Russia in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. We saw this in 2014, when Russia took over the Crimea. The way they did it, staging troops. They did that in 2008 against Georgia. And now there are, by some reports over a hundred thousand troops on the border of Eastern Ukraine. Some call it an exercise, but that's exactly what they did in Georgia. That's what they did in the Crimea. And in both those cases, they preceded those attacks, those physical attacks with cyber attacks. If you go to 2017, when Russia hit the Ukrainian government with the NotPetya attack that had global repercussions. Russia was responsible for SolarWinds, they have attacked our infrastructure to find out what our government is doing and they continue going. This is getting worse. You know, it's interesting when you think about, so what do you do about something like that? How do we stop that? And the answer is we've got to work together. You know, Its slam commissioner addressed it. The meeting with the president on August 25th. This is a great statement by the CEO and chairman of Southern Company, Tom Fanning. He said this, "the war is being waged on our nation's critical infrastructure in particular, our energy sector, our telecommunications sector and financial sector." The private sector owns and operates 87% of the critical infrastructure in the United States, making collaboration between industry and the federal government imperative too, for these attacks. SO >> General, I want to dig just a little bit on that point that you make for generations, people have understood that the term is 'kinetic war', right? Not everyone has heard that phrase, but for generations we've understood the concept of someone dropping a bomb on a building as being an attack. You've just mentioned that, that a lot of these attacks are directed towards the private sector. The private sector doesn't have an army to respond to those attacks. Number one, that's our government's responsibility. So the question I have is, how seriously are people taking these kinds of threats when compared to the threat of kinetic war? Because my gosh, you can take down the entire electrical grid now. That's not something you can do with a single bomb. What are your, what are your thoughts on that? >> So you're hitting on a key point, a theoretical and an operational point. If you look back, what's the intent of warfare? It's to get the mass of people to give up. The army protects the mass of people in that fight. In cyber, there's no protection. Our critical infrastructure is exposed to our adversaries. That's the problem that we face. And because it's exposed, we have a tremendous vulnerability. So those who wish us harm, imagine the Colonial Pipeline attack an order of magnitude or two orders of magnitude bigger. The impact on our country would paralyze much of what we do today. We are not ready for that. That's the issue that Tom Fanning and others have brought up. We don't practice between the public sector and the private sector working together to defend this country. We need to do that. That's the issue that we have to really get our hands around. And when we talk about practice, what do we mean? It means we have to let that federal government, the ones that are going to protect us, see what's going on. There is no radar picture. Now, since we're at re:Invent, the cloud, where AWS and others have done, is create an infrastructure that allows us to build that bridge between the public and private sector and scale it. It's amazing what we can now do. We couldn't do that when I was running Cyber Command. And running Cyber Command, we couldn't see threats on the government. And we couldn't see threats on critical infrastructure. We couldn't see threats on the private sector. And so it all went and all the government did was say, after the fact you've been attacked. That's not helpful. >> So >> It's like they dropped a bomb. We didn't know. >> Yeah, so what does IronNet doing to kind of create this radar capability? >> So, well, thanks. That's a great question because there's four things that you really got to do. First. You've got to be able to detect the SolarWinds type attacks, which we did. You've got to have a hunt platform that can see what it is. You've got to be able to use machine learning and AI to really cut down the number of events. And the most important you need to be able to anonymize and share that into the cloud and see where those attacks are going to create that radar picture. So behavioral analytics, then you use signature based as well, but you need those sets of analytics to really see what's going on. Machine learning, AI, a hunt platform, and cloud. And then analytics in the cloud to see what's going on, creates that air traffic control, picture radar, picture for cyber. That's what we're doing. You see, I think that's the important part. And that's why we really value the partnership with AWS. They've been a partner with us for six years, helping us build through that. You can see what we can do in the cloud. We could never do in hardware alone. Just imagine trying to push out equipment and then do that for hundreds of companies. It's not viable. So SaaS, what we are as a SaaS company, you can now do that at scale, and you can push this out and we can create, we can defend this nation in cyber if we work together. And that's the thing, you know, I really, had a great time in the military. One of the things I learned in the military, you need to train how you're going to fight. They're really good at that. We did that in the eighties, and you can see what happened in 1990 in the Gulf war. We need to now do that between the public and private sector. We have to have those training. We need to continuously uplift our capabilities. And that's where the cloud and all these other things make that possible. That's the future of cybersecurity. You know, it's interesting David, our country developed the internet. We're the ones that pioneered that. We ought to be the first to secure. >> Seems to make sense. And when you talk about collective defense in this private public partnership, that needs to happen, you get examples of some folks in private industry and what they're doing, but, but talk a little bit more about, maybe what isn't happening yet. What do we need to do? I don't want you to necessarily get political and start making budgetary suggestions, but unless you want to, but what, but where do you see, where do we really need to push forward from a public perspective in order to make these connections? And then how is that connection actually happen? This isn't someone from the IronNet security service desk, getting on a red phone and calling the White House, how are the actual connections made? >> So it has to be, the connections have to be just like we do radar. You know, when you think about radars across our nation or radar operator doesn't call up one of the towers and say, you've got an aircraft coming at you at such and such a speed. I hope you can distinguish between those two aircraft and make sure they don't bump into each other. They get a picture and they get a way of tracking it. And multiple people can see that radar picture at a speed. And that's how we do air traffic control safety. We need the same thing in cyber, where the government has a picture. The private sector has a picture and they can see what's going on. The private sector's role is I'm going to do everything I can, you know, and this is where the energy sector, I use that quote from Tom Fanning, because what they're saying is, "it's our job to keep the grid up." And they're putting the resources to do it. So they're actually jumping on that in a great way. And what they're saying is "we'll share that with the government", both the DHS and DOD. Now we have to have that same picture created for DHS and DOD. I think one of the things that we're doing is we're pioneering the building of that picture. So that's what we do. We build the picture to bring people together. So think of that is that's the capability. Everybody's going to own a piece of that, and everybody's going to be operating in it. But if you can share that picture, what you can begin to do is say, I've got an attack coming against company A. Company A now sees what it has to do. It can get fellow companies to help them defend, collective defense, knowledge sharing, crowdsourcing. At the same time, the government can see that attack going on and say, "my job is to stop that." If it's DHS, I could see what I have to do. Within the country, DOD can say, "my job is to shoot the archers." How do we go do what we're authorized to do under rules of engagement? So now you have a way of the government and the private sector working together to create that picture. Then we train them and we train them. We should never have had an event like SolarWinds happen in the future. We got to get out in front. And if we do that, think of the downstream consequences, not only can we detect who's doing it, we can hold them accountable and make them pay a price. Right now. It's pretty free. They get in, pap, that didn't work. They get away free. That didn't work, we get away free. Or we broke in, we got, what? 18,000 companies in 30,000 companies. No consequences. In the future there should be consequences. >> And in addition to the idea of consequences, you know, in the tech sector, we have this concept of a co-op petition, where we're often cooperating and competing. The adversaries from, U.S perspective are also great partners, trading partners. So in a sense, it sounds like what you're doing is also kind of adhering to the old adage that, that good fences make for great neighbors. If we all know that our respective infrastructures are secure, we can sort of get on with the honest business of being partners, because you want to make the cost of cyber war too expensive. Is that, is that a fair statement? >> Yes. And I would take that analogy and bend it slightly to the following. Today every company defends itself. So you take 90 companies with 10 people, each doing everything they can to defend themselves. Imagine in the world we trying to build, those 90 companies work together. You have now 900 people working together for the collective defense. If you're in the C-suite or the board of those companies, which would rather have? 900 help new security or 10? This isn't hard. And so what we say is, yes. That neighborhood watch program for cyber has tremendous value. And beyond neighborhood watch, I can also share collaboration because, I might not have the best people in every area of cyber, but in those 900, there will be, and we can share knowledge crowdsource. So it's actually let's work together. I would call it Americans working together to defend America. That's what we need to do. And the states we going to have a similar thing what they're doing, and that's how we'll work this together. >> Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. General Alexander it's been a pleasure. Thanks so much for coming on to theCube as part of our 2021 AWS re:Invent coverage. Are you going to get a chance to spend time during the conference in Las Vegas? So you just flying in, flying out. Any chance? >> Actually yeah. >> It's there, we're still negotiating working that. I've registered, but I just don't know I'm in New York city for two meetings and seeing if I can get to Las Vegas. A lot of friends, you know, Adam Solski >> Yes >> and the entire AWS team. They're amazing. And we really liked this partnership. I'd love to see you there. You're going to be there, David? Absolutely. Yes, absolutely. And I look forward to that, so I hope hopefully we get that chance again. Thank you so much, General Alexander, and also thank you to our title sponsor AMD for sponsoring this year's re:Invent. Keep it right here for more action on theCube, you're leader in hybrid tech event coverage, I'm Dave Nicholson for the Cube. Thanks. (upbeat music)

(bright music) >> Hello and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards for the award for Best Partner Transformation, Best Cybersecurity Solution. I'm now honored to welcome our next guests, General Keith Alexander, Founder, and Co-CEO of IronNet Cybersecurity, as well as Gil Quiniones, President and CEO of the New York Power Authority. Welcome to the program gentlemen, delighted to have you here. >> Good to be here. >> Terrific. Well, General Alexander, I'd like to start with you. Tell us about the collective defense program or platform and why is it winning awards? >> Well, great question and it's great to have Gil here because it actually started with the energy sector. And the issue that we had is how do we protect the grid? The energy sector CEOs came together with me and several others and said, how do we protect this grid together? Because we can't defend it each by ourselves. We've got to defend it together. And so the strategy that IronNet is using is to go beyond what the conventional way of sharing information known as signature-based solutions to behavioral-based so that we can see the events that are happening, the unknown unknowns, share those among companies and among both small and large in a way that helps us defend because we can anonymize that data. We can also share it with the government. The government can see a tax on our country. That's the future, we believe, of cybersecurity and that collective defense is critical for our energy sector and for all the companies within it. >> Terrific. Well, Gil, I'd like to shift to you. As the CEO of the largest state public power utility in the United States, why do you think it's so important now to have a collective defense approach for utility companies? >> Well, the utility sector lied with the financial sector as number one targets by our adversaries and you can't really solve cybersecurity in silos. We, NYPA, my company, New York Power Authority alone cannot be the only one and other companies doing this in silos. So what's really going to be able to be effective if all of the utilities and even other sectors, financial sectors, telecom sectors cooperate in this collective defense situation. And as we transform the grid, the grid is getting transformed and decentralized. We'll have more electric cars, smart appliances. The grid is going to be more distributed with solar and batteries charging stations. So the threat surface and the threat points will be expanding significantly and it is critical that we address that issue collectively. >> Terrific. Well, General Alexander, with collective defense, what industries and business models are you now disrupting? >> Well, we're doing the energy sector, obviously. Now the defense industrial base, the healthcare sector, as well as international partners along the way. And we have a group of what we call technical and other companies that we also deal with and a series of partner companies, because no company alone can solve this problem, no cybersecurity company alone. So partners like Amazon and others partner with us to help bring this vision to life. >> Terrific. Well, staying with you, what role does data and cloud scale now play in solving these security threats that face the businesses, but also nations? >> That's a great question. Because without the cloud, bringing collective security together is very difficult. But with the cloud, we can move all this information into the cloud. We can correlate and show attacks that are going on against different companies. They can see that company A, B, C or D, it's anonymized, is being hit with the same thing. And the government, we can share that with the government. They can see a tax on critical infrastructure, energy, finance, healthcare, the defense industrial base or the government. In doing that, what we quickly see is a radar picture for cyber. That's what we're trying to build. That's where everybody's coming together. Imagine a future where attacks are coming against our country can be seen at network speed and the same for our allies and sharing that between our nation and our allies begins to broaden that picture, broaden our defensive base and provide insights for companies like NYPA and others. >> Terrific. Well, now Gil, I'd like to move it back to you. If you could describe the utility landscape and the unique threats that both large ones and small ones are facing in terms of cybersecurity and the risks, the populous that live there. >> Well, the power grid is an amazing machine, but it is controlled electronically and more and more digitally. So as I mentioned before, as we transform this grid to be a cleaner grid, to be more of an integrated energy network with solar panels and electric vehicle charging stations and wind farms, the threat is going to be multiple from a cyber perspective. Now we have many smaller utilities. There are towns and cities and villages that own their poles and wires. They're called municipal utilities, rural cooperative systems, and they are not as sophisticated and well-resourced as a company like the New York Power Authority or our investor on utilities across the nation. But as the saying goes, we're only as strong as our weakest link. And so we need- >> Terrific. >> we need to address the issues of our smaller utilities as well. >> Yeah, terrific. Do you see a potential for more collaboration between the larger utilities and the smaller ones? What do you see as the next phase of defense? >> Well, in fact, General Alexander's company, IronNet and NYPA are working together to help bring in the 51 smaller utilities here in New York in their collective defense tool, the IronDefense or the IronDome as we call it here in New York. We had a meeting the other day, where even thinking about bringing in critical state agencies and authorities. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and other relevant critical infrastructure state agencies to be in this cloud and to be in this radar of cybersecurity. And the beauty of what IronNet is bringing to this arrangement is they're trying to develop a product that can be scalable and affordable by those smaller utilities. I think that's important because if we can achieve that, then we can replicate this across the country where you have a lot of smaller utilities and rural cooperative systems. >> Yeah. Terrific. Well, Gil, staying with you. I'd love to learn more about what was the solution that worked so well for you? >> In cybersecurity, you need public-private partnerships. So we have private companies like IronNet that we're partnering with and others, but also partnering with state and federal government because they have a lot of resources. So the key to all of this is bringing all of that information together and being able to react, the General mentioned, network speed, we call it machine speed, has to be quick and we need to protect and or isolate and be able to recover it and be resilient. So that's the beauty of this solution that we're currently developing here in New York. >> Terrific. Well, thank you for those points. Shifting back to General Alexander. With your depth of experience in the defense sector, in your view, how can we stay in front of the attacks, mitigate them, and then respond to them before any damage is done? >> So having run our nations, the offense. I know that the offense has the upper hand almost entirely because every company and every agency defends itself as an isolated entity. Think about 50 mid-sized companies, each with 10 people, they're all defending themselves and they depend on that defense individually and they're being attacked individually. Now take those 50 companies and their 10 people each and put them together and collect the defense where they share information, they share knowledge. This is the way to get out in front of the offense, the attackers that you just asked about. And when people start working together, that knowledge sharing and crowdsourcing is a solution for the future because it allows us to work together where now you have a unified approach between the public and private sectors that can share information and defend each of the sectors together. That is the future of cybersecurity. What makes it possible is the cloud, by being able to share this information into the cloud and move it around the cloud. So what Amazon has done with AWS has exactly that. It gives us the platform that allows us to now share that information and to go at network speed and share it with the government in an anonymized way. I believe that will change radically how we think about cybersecurity. >> Yeah. Terrific. Well, you mention data sharing, but how is it now a common tactic to get the best out of the data? And now, how is it sharing data among companies accelerated or changed over the past year? And what does it look like going forward when we think about moving out of the pandemic? >> So first, this issue of sharing data, there's two types of data. One about the known threats. So sharing that everybody knows because they use a signature-based system and a set of rules. That shared and that's the common approach to it. We need to go beyond that and share the unknown. And the way to share the unknown is with behavioral analytics. Detect behaviors out there that are anonymous or anomalous, are suspicious and are malicious and share those and get an understanding for what's going on in company A and see if there's correlations in B, C and D that give you insights to suspicious activity. Like solar winds, recognizes solar winds at 18,000 companies, each defending themselves. None of them were able to recognize that. Using our tools, we did recognize it in three of our companies. So what you can begin to see is a platform that can now expand and work at network speed to defend against these types of attacks. But you have to be able to see that information, the unknown unknowns, and quickly bring people together to understand what that means. Is this bad? Is this suspicious? What do I need to know about this? And if I can share that information anonymized with the government, they can reach in and say, this is bad. You need to do something about it. And we'll take the responsibility from here to block that from hitting our nation or hitting our allies. I think that's the key part about cybersecurity for the future. >> Terrific. General Alexander, ransomware of course, is the hottest topic at the moment. What do you see as the solution to that growing threat? >> So I think, a couple things on ransomware. First, doing what we're talking about here to detect the phishing and the other ways they get in is an advanced way. So protect yourself like that. But I think we have to go beyond, we have to attribute who's doing it, where they're doing it from and hold them accountable. So helping provide that information to our government as it's going on and going after these guys, making them pay a price is part of the future. It's too easy today. Look at what happened with the DarkSide and others. They hit Colonial Pipeline and they said, oh, we're not going to do that anymore. Then they hit a company in Japan and prior to that, they hit a company in Norway. So they're attacking and they pretty much operate at will. Now, let's indict some of them, hold them accountable, get other governments to come in on this. That's the way we stop it. And that requires us to work together, both the public and private sector. It means having these advanced tools, but also that public and private partnership. And I think we have to change the rhetoric. The first approach everybody takes is, Colonial, why did you let this happen? They're a victim. If they were hit with missiles, we wouldn't be asking that, but these were nation state like actors going after them. So now our government and the private sector have to work together and we need to change that to say, they're victim, and we're going to go after the guys that did this as a nation and with our allies. I think that's the way to solve it. >> Yeah. Well, terrific. Thank you so much for those insights. Gil, I'd also like to ask you some key questions and of course, certainly people today have a lot of concerns about security, but also about data sharing. How are you addressing those concerns? >> Well, data governance is critical for a utility like the New York Power Authority. A few years ago, we declared that we aspire to be the first end-to-end digital utility. And so by definition, protecting the data of our system, our industrial controls, and the data of our customers are paramount to us. So data governance, considering data or treating data as an asset, like a physical asset is very, very important. So we in our cybersecurity, plans that is a top priority for us. >> Yeah. And Gil thinking about industry 4.0, how has the surface area changed with Cloud and IoT? >> Well, it's grown significantly. At the power authority, we're installing sensors and smart meters at our power plants, at our substations and transmission lines, so that we can monitor them real time, all the time, know their health, know their status. Our customers we're monitoring about 15 to 20,000 state and local government buildings across our states. So just imagine the amount of data that we're streaming real time, all the time into our integrated smart operations center. So it's increasing and it will only increase with 5G, with quantum computing. This is just going to increase and we need to be prepared and integrate cyber into every part of what we do from beginning to end of our processes. >> Yeah. And to both of you actually, as we see industry 4.0 develop even further, are you more concerned about malign actors developing more sophistication? What steps can we take to really be ahead of them? Let's start with General Alexander. >> So, I think the key differentiator and what the energy sector is doing, the approach to cybersecurity is led by CEOs. So you bring CEOs like Gil Quiniones in, you've got other CEOs that are actually bringing together forums to talk about cybersecurity. It is CEO led. That the first part. And then the second part is how do we train and work together, that collective defense. How do we actually do this? I think that's another one that NYPA is leading with West Point in the Army Cyber Institute. How can we start to bring this training session together and train to defend ourselves? This is an area where we can uplift our people that are working in this process, our cyber analysts if you will at the security operations center level. By training them, giving them hard tests and continuing to go. That approach will uplift our cybersecurity and our cyber defense to the point where we can now stop these types of attacks. So I think CEO led, bring in companies that give us the good and bad about our products. We'd like to hear the good, we need to hear the bad, and we needed to improve that, and then how do we train and work together. I think that's part of that solution to the future. >> And Gil, what are your thoughts as we embrace industry 4.0? Are you worried that this malign actors are going to build up their own sophistication and strategy in terms of data breaches and cyber attacks against our utility systems? What can we do to really step up our game? >> Well, as the General said, the good thing with the energy sector is that on the foundational level, we're the only sector with mandatory regulatory requirements that we need to meet. So we are regulated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation to meet certain standards in cyber and critical infrastructure. But as the General said, the good thing with the utility is by design, just like storms, we're used to working with each other. So this is just an extension of that storm restoration and other areas where we work all the time together. So we are naturally working together when it comes to to cyber. We work very closely with our federal government partners, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Energy and the National Labs. The National Labs have a lot of expertise. And with the private sector, like great companies like IronNet, NYPA, we stood up an excellence, center of excellence with private partners like IronNet and Siemens and others to start really advancing the art of the possible and the technology innovation in this area. And as the governor mentioned, we partnered with West Point because just like any sporting or just any sport, actual exercises of the red team, green team, and doing that constantly, tabletop exercises, and having others try and breach your walls. Those are good exercises to really be ready against the adversaries. >> Yeah. Terrific. Thank you so much for those insights. General Alexander, now I'd like to ask you this question. Can you share the innovation strategy as the world moves out of the pandemic? Are we seeing new threats, new realities? >> Well, I think, it's not just coming out of the pandemic, but the pandemic actually brought a lot of people into video teleconferences like we are right here. So more people are working from home. You add in the 5G that Gil talked about that gives you a huge attack surface. You're thinking now about instead of a hundred devices per square kilometer up to a million devices. And so you're increasing the attack surface. Everything is changing. So as we come out of the pandemic, people are going to work more from home. You're going to have this attack surface that's going on, it's growing, it's changing, it's challenging. We have to be really good about now, how we trained together, how we think about this new area and we have to continue to innovate, not only what are the cyber tools that we need for the IT side, the internet and the OT side, operational technology. So those kinds of issues are facing all of us and it's a constantly changing environment. So that's where that education, that training, that communication, working between companies, the customers, the NYPA's and the IronNet's and others and then working with the government to make sure that we're all in sync. It's going to grow and is growing at an increased rate exponentially. >> Terrific. Thank you for that. Now, Gil, same question for you. As a result of this pandemic, do you see any kind of new realities emerging? What is your position? >> Well, as the General said, most likely, many companies will be having this hybrid setup. And for company's life like mine, I'm thinking about, okay, how many employees do I have that can access our industrial controls in our power plants, in our substations, and transmission system remotely? And what will that mean from a risk perspective, but even on the IT side, our business information technology. You mentioned about the Colonial Pipeline type situation. How do we now really make sure that our cyber hygiene of our employees is always up-to-date and that we're always vigilant from potential entry whether it's through phishing or other techniques that our adversaries are using. Those are the kinds of things that keep myself like a CEO of a utility up at night. >> Yeah. Well, shifting gears a bit, this question for General Alexander. How come supply chain is such an issue? >> Well, the supply chain, of course, for a company like NYPA, you have hundreds or thousands of companies that you work with. Each of them have different ways of communicating with your company. And in those communications, you now get threats. If they get infected and they reach out to you, they're normally considered okay to talk to, but at the same time that threat could come in. So you have both suppliers that help you do your job. And smaller companies that Gil has, he's got the 47 munis and four co-ops out there, 51, that he's got to deal with and then all the state agencies. So his ecosystem has all these different companies that are part of his larger network. And when you think about that larger network, the issue becomes, how am I going to defend that? And I think, as Gil mentioned earlier, if we put them all together and we operate and train together and we defend together, then we know that we're doing the best we can, especially for those smaller companies, the munis and co-ops that don't have the people and a security ops centers and other things to defend them. But working together, we can help defend them collectively. >> Terrific. And I'd also like to ask you a bit more on IronDefense. You spoke about its behavioral capabilities, it's behavioral detection techniques, excuse me. How is it really different from the rest of the competitive landscape? What sets it apart from traditional cybersecurity tools? >> So traditional cybersecurity tools use what we call a signature-based system. Think of that as a barcode for the threat. It's a specific barcode. We use that barcode to identify the threat at the firewall or at the endpoint. Those are known threats. We can stop those and we do a really good job. We share those indicators of compromise in those barcodes, in the rules that we have, Suricata rules and others, those go out. The issue becomes, what about the things we don't know about? And to detect those, you need behavioral analytics. Behavioral analytics are a little bit noisier. So you want to collect all the data and anomalies with behavioral analytics using an expert system to sort them out and then use collected defense to share knowledge and actually look across those. And the great thing about behavioral analytics is you can detect all of the anomalies. You can share very quickly and you can operate at network speed. So that's going to be the future where you start to share that, and that becomes the engine if you will for the future radar picture for cybersecurity. You add in, as we have already machine learning and AI, artificial intelligence, people talk about that, but in this case, it's a clustering algorithms about all those events and the ways of looking at it that allow you to up that speed, up your confidence in and whether it's malicious, suspicious or benign and share that. I think that is part of that future that we're talking about. You've got to have that and the government can come in and say, you missed something. Here's something you should be concerned about. And up the call from suspicious to malicious that gives everybody in the nation and our allies insights, okay, that's bad. Let's defend against it. >> Yeah. Terrific. Well, how does the type of technology address the President's May 2021 executive order on cybersecurity as you mentioned the government? >> So there's two parts of that. And I think one of the things that I liked about the executive order is it talked about, in the first page, the public-private partnership. That's the key. We got to partner together. And the other thing it went into that was really key is how do we now bring in the IT infrastructure, what our company does with the OT companies like Dragos, how do we work together for the collective defense for the energy sector and other key parts. So I think it is hit two key parts. It also goes on about what you do about the supply chain for software were all needed, but that's a little bit outside what we're talking about here today. The real key is how we work together between the public and private sector. And I think it did a good job in that area. >> Terrific. Well, thank you so much for your insights and to you as well, Gil, really lovely to have you both on this program. That was General Keith Alexander, Founder and Co-CEO of IronNet Cybersecurity, as well as Gil Quiniones, the President and CEO of the New York Power Authority. That's all for this session of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. I'm your host for theCUBE, Natalie Erlich. Stay with us for more coverage. (bright music)

from around the globe it's thecube presenting the convergence of file and object brought to you by pure storage we're back with the convergence of file and object a special program made possible by pure storage and co-created with the cube so in this series we're exploring that convergence between file and object storage we're digging into the trends the architectures and some of the use cases for unified fast file and object storage uffo with me is matt burr who's the vice president general manager of flashblade at pure storage hello matt how you doing i'm doing great morning dave how are you good thank you hey let's start with a little 101 you know kind of the basics what is unified fast file and object yeah so look i mean i think you got to start with first principles talking about the rise of unstructured data so when we think about unstructured data you sort of think about the projections 80 of data by 2025 is going to be unstructured data whether that's machine generated data or you know ai and ml type workloads you start to sort of see this i don't want to say it's a boom uh but it's sort of a renaissance for unstructured data if you will where we move away from you know what we've traditionally thought of as general purpose nas and and file shares to you know really things that focus on uh fast object taking advantage of s3 cloud native applications that need to integrate with applications on site um you know ai workloads ml workloads tend to look to share data across uh you know multiple data sets and you really need to have a platform that can deliver both highly performant and scalable fast file and object from one system so talk a little bit more about some of the drivers that you know bring forth that need to unify file an object yeah i mean look you know there's a there's there's a real challenge um in managing you know bespoke uh bespoke infrastructure or architectures around general purpose nas and daz etc so um if you think about how a an architect sort of looks at an application they might say well okay i need to have um you know fast daz storage proximal to the application um but that's gonna require a tremendous amount of dabs which is a tremendous amount of drives right hard drives are you know historically pretty pretty pretty unwieldy to manage because you're replacing them relatively consistently at multi-petabyte scale so you start to look at things like the complexity of das you start to look at the complexity of general purpose nas and you start to just look at quite frankly something that a lot of people don't really want to talk about anymore but actual data center space right like consolidation matters the ability to take you know something that's the size of a microwave like a modern flash blade or a modern um you know uffo device replaces something that might be you know the size of three or four or five refrigerators so matt why is is now the right time for this i mean for years nobody really paid much attention to object s3 already obviously changed you know that course most of the world's data is still stored in file formats and you get there with nfs or smb why is now the time to think about unifying object and and file well because we're moving to things like a contactless society um you know the the things that we're going to do are going to just require a tremendous amount more compute power network and quite frankly storage throughput and you know i can give you two sort of real primary examples here right um you know warehouses are being you know taken over by robots if you will um it's not a war it's a it's a it's sort of a friendly advancement in you know how do i how do i store a box in a warehouse and you know we have we have a customer who focuses on large sort of big box distribution warehousing and you know a box that carried a an object uh two weeks ago might have a different box size two weeks later well that robot needs to know where the space is in the data center in order to put it but also needs to be able to process hey i don't want to put the thing that i'm going to access the most in the back of the warehouse i'm going to put that thing in the front of the warehouse all of those types of data you know sort of real time you can think of the robot as almost an edge device uh is processing in real time unstructured data and its object right so it's sort of the emergence of these new types of workloads and i give you the opposite example the other end of the spectrum is ransomware right you know today you know we'll talk to customers and they'll say quite commonly hey if you know anybody can sell me a backup device i need something that can restore quickly if you had the ability to restore something in 270 terabytes an hour or 250 terabytes an hour that's much faster when you're dealing with a ransomware attack you want to get your data back quickly you know so i want to actually i was going to ask you about that later but since you brought it up what is the right i guess call it architecture for for for ransomware i mean how and explain like how unified object and file would support me i get the fast recovery but how would you recommend a customer uh go about architecting a ransomware proof you know system yeah well you know with with flashblade and and with flasharray there's an actual feature called called safe mode and that safe mode actually protects uh the snapshots and and the data from uh sort of being is a part of the of the ransomware event and so if you're in a type of ransomware situation like this you're able to leverage safe mode and you say okay what happens in a ransomware attack is you can't get access to your data and so you know the bad guy the perpetrator is basically saying hey i'm not going to give you access to your data until you pay me you know x in bitcoin or whatever it might be right um with with safe mode those snapshots are actually protected outside of the ransomware blast zone and you can bring back those snapshots because what's your alternative if you're not doing something like that your alternative is either to pay and unlock your data or you have to start retouring restoring excuse me from tape or slow disk that could take you days or weeks to get your data back so leveraging safe mode um you know in either the flash for the flash blade product is a great way to go about uh architecting against ransomware i got to put my i'm thinking like a customer now so safe mode so that's an immutable mode right can't change the data um is it can can an administrator go in and change that mode can he turn it off do i still need an air gap for example what would you recommend there yeah so there there are still um uh you know sort of our back or rollback role-based access control policies uh around who can access that safe mode and who can right okay so uh anyway subject for a different day i want to i want to actually bring up uh if you don't object a topic that i think used to be really front and center and it now be is becoming front and center again i mean wikibon just produced a research note forecasting the future of flash and hard drives and those of you who follow us know we've done this for quite some time and you can if you could bring up the chart here you you could see and we see this happening again it was originally we forecast the the death of of quote unquote high spin speed disk drives which is kind of an oxymoron but you can see on here on this chart this hard disk had a magnificent journey but they peaked in volume in manufacturing volume in 2010 and the reason why that is is so important is that volumes now are steadily dropping you can see that and we use wright's law to explain why this is a problem and wright's law essentially says that as you your cumulative manufacturing volume doubles your cost to manufacture decline by a constant percentage now i won't go too much detail on that but suffice it to say that flash volumes are growing very rapidly hdd volumes aren't and so flash because of consumer volumes can take advantage of wright's law and that constant reduction and that's what's really important for the next generation which is always more expensive to build and so this kind of marks the beginning of the end matt what do you think what what's the future hold for spinning disc in your view uh well i can give you the answer on two levels on a personal level uh it's why i come to work every day uh you know the the eradication or or extinction of an inefficient thing um you know i like to say that inefficiency is the bane of my existence uh and i think hard drives are largely inefficient and i'm willing to accept the sort of long-standing argument that um you know we've seen this transition in block right and we're starting to see it repeat itself in in unstructured data um and i'm willing to accept the argument that cost is a vector here and it most certainly is right hdds have been considerably cheaper uh than than than flash storage um you know even to this day uh you know up to this point right but we're starting to approach the point where you sort of reach a 3x sort of you know differentiator between the cost of an hdd and an sdd and you know that really is that point in time when uh you begin to pick up a lot of volume and velocity and so you know that tends to map directly to you know what you're seeing here which is you know a slow decline uh which i think is going to become even more rapid kind of probably starting around next year where you start to see sds excuse me ssds uh you know really replacing hdds uh at a much more rapid clip particularly on the unstructured data side and it's largely around cost the the workloads that we talked about robots and warehouses or you know other types of advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence type applications and workflows you know they require a degree of performance that a hard drive just can't deliver we are we are seeing sort of the um creative innovative uh disruption of an entire industry right before our eyes it's a fun thing to live through yeah and and we would agree i mean it doesn't the premise there is it doesn't have to be less expensive we think it will be by you know the second half or early second half of this decade but even if it's a we think around a 3x delta the value of of ssd relative to spinning disk is going to overwhelm just like with your laptop you know it got to the point where you said why would i ever have a spinning disc in my laptop we see the same thing happening here um and and so and we're talking about you know raw capacity you know put in compression and dedupe and everything else that you really can't do with spinning discs because of the performance issues you can do with flash okay let's come back to uffo can we dig into the challenges specifically that that this solves for customers give me give us some examples yeah so you know i mean if we if we think about the examples um you know the the robotic one um i think is is is the one that i think is the marker for you know kind of of of the the modern side of of of what we see here um but what we're you know what we're what we're seeing from a trend perspective which you know not everybody's deploying robots right um you know there's there's many companies that are you know that aren't going to be in either the robotic business uh or or even thinking about you know sort of future type oriented type things but what they are doing is greenfield applications are being built on object um generally not on not on file and and not on block and so you know the rise of of object as sort of the the sort of let's call it the the next great protocol for um you know for uh for for modern workloads right this is this is that that modern application coming to the forefront and that could be anything from you know financial institutions you know right down through um you know we've even see it and seen it in oil and gas uh we're also seeing it across across healthcare uh so you know as as as companies take the opportunity as industries to take this opportunity to modernize you know they're modernizing not on things that are are leveraging you know um you know sort of archaic disk technology they're they're they're really focusing on on object but they still have file workflows that they need to that they need to be able to support and so having the ability to be able to deliver those things from one device in a capacity orientation or a performance orientation while at the same time dramatically simplifying the overall administration of your environment both physically and non-physically is a key driver so the great thing about object is it's simple it's a kind of a get put metaphor um it's it scales out you know because it's got metadata associated with the data uh and and it's cheap the drawback is you don't necessarily associate it with high performance and and as well most applications don't you know speak in that language they speak in the language of file you know or as you mentioned block so i i see real opportunities here if i have some some data that's not necessarily frequently accessed you know every day but yet i want to then whether end of quarter or whatever it is i want to i want to or machine learning i want to apply some ai to that data i want to bring it in and then apply a file format uh because for performance reasons is that right maybe you could unpack that a little bit yeah so um you know we see i mean i think you described it well right um but i don't think object necessarily has to be slow um and nor does it have to be um you know because when you think about you brought up a good point with metadata right being able to scale to a billions of objects being able to scale to billions of objects excuse me is of value right um and i think people do traditionally associate object with slow but it's not necessarily slow anymore right we we did a sort of unofficial survey of of of our of our customers and our employee base and when people described object they thought of it as like law firms and storing a word doc if you will um and that that's just you know i think that there's a lack of understanding or a misnomer around what modern what modern object has become and perform an object particularly at scale when we're talking about billions of objects you know that's the next frontier right um is it at pace performance wise with you know the other protocols no but it's making leaps and grounds so you talked a little bit more about some of the verticals that you see i mean i think when i think of financial services i think transaction processing but of course they have a lot of tons of unstructured data are there any patterns you're seeing by by vertical market um we're you know we're not that's the interesting thing um and you know um as a as a as a as a company with a with a block heritage or a block dna those patterns were pretty easy to spot right there were a certain number of databases that you really needed to support oracle sql some postgres work etc then kind of the modern databases around cassandra and things like that you knew that there were going to be vmware environments you know you could you could sort of see the trends and where things were going unstructured data is such a broader horizontal um thing right so you know inside of oil and gas for example you have you know um you have specific applications and bespoke infrastructures for those applications um you know inside of media entertainment you know the same thing the the trend that we're seeing the commonality that we're seeing is the modernization of you know object as a starting point for all the all of the net new workloads within within those industry verticals right that's the most common request we see is what's your object roadmap what's your you know what's your what's your object strategy you know where do you think where do you think object is going so um there isn't any um you know sort of uh there's no there's no path uh it's really just kind of a wide open field in front of us with common requests across all industries so the amazing thing about pure just as a kind of a little you know quasi you know armchair historian the industry is pure was really the only company in many many years to be able to achieve escape velocity break through a billion dollars i mean three part couldn't do it isilon couldn't do it compellent couldn't do it i could go on but pure was able to achieve that as an independent company uh and so you become a leader you look at the gartner magic quadrant you're a leader in there i mean if you've made it this far you've got to have some chops and so of course it's very competitive there are a number of other storage suppliers that have announced products that unify object and file so i'm interested in how pure differentiates why pure um it's a great question um and it's one that uh you know having been a long time puritan uh you know i take pride in answering um and it's actually a really simple answer um it's it's business model innovation and technology right the the technology that goes behind how we do what we do right and i don't mean the product right innovation is product but having a better support model for example um or having on the business model side you know evergreen storage right where we sort of look at your relationship to us as a subscription right um you know we're gonna sort of take the thing that that you've had and we're gonna modernize that thing in place over time such that you're not rebuying that same you know terabyte or you know petabyte of storage that you've that you that you've paid for over time so um you know sort of three legs of the stool uh that that have made you know pure clearly differentiated i think the market has has recognized that um you're right it's it's hard to break through to a billion dollars um but i look forward to the day that you know we we have two billion dollar products and i think with uh you know that rise in in unstructured data growing to 80 by 2025 and you know the massive transition that you know you guys have noted in in in your hdd slide i think it's a huge opportunity for us on you know the other unstructured data side of the house you know the other thing i'd add matt and i've talked to cause about this is is it's simplicity first i've asked them why don't you do this why don't you do it and the answer is always the same is that adds complexity and we we put simplicity for the customer ahead of everything else and i think that served you very very well what about the economics of of unified file and object i mean if you bringing additional value presumably there's a there there's a cost to that but there's got to be also a business case behind it what kind of impact have you seen with customers yeah i mean look i'll i'll go back to something i mentioned earlier which is just the reclamation of floor space and power and cooling right um you know there's a you know there's people people people want to search for kind of the the sexier element if you will when it comes to looking at how we how you derive value from something but the reality is if you're reducing your power consumption by you know by by a material percentage um power bills matter in big in big data centers you know customers typically are are facing you know a paradigm of well i i want to go to the cloud but you know the clouds are not being more expensive than i thought it was going to be or you know i've figured out what i can use in the cloud i thought it was going to be everything but it's not going to be everything so hybrid's where we're landing but i want to be out of the data center business and i don't want to have a team of 20 storage people to match you know to administer my storage um you know so there's sort of this this very tangible value around you know hey if i could manage um you know multiple petabytes with one full-time engineer uh because the system uh to your and kaza's point was radically simpler to administer didn't require someone to be running around swapping drives all the time would that be a value the answer is yes 100 of the time right and then you start to look at okay all right well on the uffo side from a product perspective hey if i have to manage a you know bespoke environment for this application if i have to manage a bespoke environment for this application and a spoke environment for this application and this focus environment for this application i'm managing four different things and can i actually share data across those four different things there's ways to share data but most customers it just gets too complex how do you even know what your what your gold.master copy is of data if you have it in four different places or you try to have it in four different places and it's four different siloed infrastructures so when you get to the sort of the side of you know how do we how do you measure value in uffo it's actually being able to have all of that data concentrated in one place so that you can share it from application to application got it i'm interested we use a couple minutes left i'm interested in the the update on flashblade you know generally but also i have a specific question i mean look getting file right is hard enough uh you just announced smb support for flashblade i'm interested in you know how that fits in i think it's kind of obvious with file and object converging but give us the update on on flashblade and maybe you could address that specific question yeah so um look i mean we're we're um you know tremendously excited about the growth of flashblade uh you know we we we found workloads we never expected to find um you know the rapid restore workload was one that was actually brought to us from from a customer actually um and has become you know one of our one of our top two three four you know workloads so um you know we're really happy with the trend we've seen in it um and you know mapping back to you know thinking about hdds and ssds you know we're well on a path to building a billion dollar business here so you know we're very excited about that but to your point you know you don't just snap your fingers and get there right um you know we've learned that doing file and object uh is is harder than block um because there's more things that you have to go do for one you're basically focused on three protocols s b nfs and s3 not necessarily in that order um but to your point about s b uh you know we we are on the path through to releasing um you know smb full full native smb support in in the system that will allow us to uh service customers we have a limitation with some customers today where they'll have an smb portion of their nfs workflow um and we do great on the nfs side um but you know we didn't we didn't have the ability to plug into the s p component of their workflow so that's going to open up a lot of opportunity for us um on on that front um and you know we continue to you know invest significantly across the board in in areas like security which is you know become more than just a hot button you know today security's always been there but it feels like it's blazing hot today and so you know going through the next couple years we'll be looking at uh you know developing some some uh you know pretty material security elements of the product as well so uh well on a path to a billion dollars is the net on that and uh you know we're we're fortunate to have have smb here and we're looking forward to introducing that to to those customers that have you know nfs workloads today with an s b component yeah nice tailwind good tam expansion strategy matt thanks so much we're out of time but really appreciate you coming on the program we appreciate you having us and uh thanks much dave good to see you all right good to see you and you're watching the convergence of file and object keep it right there we'll be back with more right after this short break [Music]

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi, and welcome to this CUBE Conversation, from our Boston area studio, I'm Stu Miniman, happy to welcome to the program, first of all we have a first time guest, always love when we have a founder on the program, Anurag Goel is the founder and CEO of Render, and we've brought along a longtime friend of the program, Dr. Steve Herrod, he is a managing director at General Catalyst, a investor in Render. Anurag and Steve, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> Yeah, thanks, Stu. >> All right, so Anurag, Render, your company, the tagline is the easiest cloud for developers and startups. It's a rather bold statement, most people feel that the first generation of cloud has happened and there were certain clear winners there. The hearts and minds of developers absolutely has been a key thing for many many companies, and one of those drivers in the software world. Why don't you give us a little bit of your background, and as the founder of the company, what was it, the opportunity that you saw, that had you create Render? >> Yeah, so I was the fifth engineer at Stripe, and helped launch the company and grow it to five billion dollars in revenue. And throughout that period, I saw just how much money we were spending on just hiring DevOps engineers, AWS was a huge huge management headache, really, there's no other way to describe it. And even after I left Stripe, I was thinking hard about what I wanted to do next, and a lot of those ideas required some form of development and deployment, and putting things in production, and every single time I had to do the same thing over and over and over again, as a developer, so despite all the advancements in the cloud, it was always repetitive work, that wasn't just for my projects, I think a lot of my friends felt the same way. And so, I decided that we needed to automate some of these new things that have come about, as part of the regular application deployment process, and how it evolves, and that's how Render was born. >> All right, so Steve, remember in the early days, cloud was supposed to be easy and inexpensive, I've been saying on theCUBE it's like well, I guess it hasn't quite turned out that way. Love your viewpoint a little bit, because you've invested here, to really be competitive in the cloud, tens of billions of dollars a year, that need to go into this, right? >> Yeah, I had the fortunate chance to meet Anurag early on, General Catalyst was an investor in Stripe, and so seeing what they did sort of spurred us to think about this, but I think we've talked about this before, also, on theCUBE, even back, long ago in the VMware days, we looked very seriously at buying Heroku, one of the early players, and still around, obviously, at Salesforce in this PaaS space, and every single infrastructure conversation I've had from the start, I have to come back to myself and come back to everyone else and just say, don't forget, the only reason any infrastructure even exists is to run applications. And as we talked about, the first generation of cloud, it was about, let's make the infrastructure disappear, and make it programmatic, but I think even that, we're realizing from developers, that is just still way too low of an abstraction level. You want to write code, you want to have it in GitHub, and you want to just press go, and it should automatically deploy, automatically scale, automatically secure itself, and just let the developer focus purely on the app, and that's a idea that people have been talking about for 20 years, and should continue to talk about, but I really think with Render, we found a way to make it just super easy to deploy and run, and certainly it is big players out there, but it really starts with developers loving the platform, and that's been Anurag's obsession since I met him. >> Yeah, it's interesting, when I first was reading I'm like "Wait," reminds me a lot of somebody like DigitalOcean, cloud for developers who are, Steve, we walked through, the PaaS discussion has gone through so many iterations, what would containerization do for things, or serverless was from its name, I don't need to think about that underlying layer. Anurag, give us a little bit as to how should we think of Render, you are a cloud, but you're not so much, you're not an infrastructure layer, you're not trying to compete against the laundry list of features that AWS, Azure, or Google have, you're a little bit different than some of the previous PaaS players, and you're not serverless, so, what is Render? >> Yeah, it is actually a new category that has come about because of the advent of containers, and because of container orchestration tools, and all of the surrounding technologies, that make it possible for companies like Render to innovate on top of those things, and provide experiences to developers that are essentially serverless, so by serverless you could mean one of two things, or many things really, but the way in which Render is serverless is you just don't have to think about servers, all you need to do is connect your code to GitHub, and give Render a quick start command for your server and a build command if needed, and we suggest a lot of those values ourselves, and then every push to your GitHub repo deploys a new version of your service. And then if you wanted to check out pull requests, which is a way developers test out code before actually pushing it to deployment, every pull request ends up creating a new instance of your service, and you can do everything from a single static site, to building complex clusters of several microservices, as well as managed Postgres, things like clustered Kafka and Elasticsearch, and really one way to think about Render, is it is the platform that every company ends up building internally, and spends a lot of time and money to build, and we're just doing it once for everyone and doing it right, and this is what we specialize in, so you don't have to. >> Yeah, just to add to that if I could, Stu, what's I think interesting is that we've had and talked about a lot of startups doing a lot of different things, and there's a huge amount of complexity to enable all of this to work at scale, and to make it work with all the things you look for, whether it's storage or CDNs, or metrics and alerting and monitoring, all of these little startups that we've gone through and big companies alike, if you could just hide that entirely from the developer and just make it super easy to use and deploy, that's been the mission that Anurag's been on to start, and as you hear it from some of the early customers, and how they're increasing the usage, it's just that love of making it simple that is key in this space. >> All right, yeah, Anurag, maybe it would really help illustrate things if you could talk a little bit about some of your early customers, their use case, and give us what stats you can about how your company's growing. >> Certainly. So, one of our more prominent customers was the Pete Buttigieg campaign, which ran through most of 2019, and through the first couple of months of 2020. And they moved to us from Google Cloud, because they just could not or did not want to deal with the complexity in today's standard infrastructure providers, where you get a VM and then you have to figure out how to work with it, or even Managed Kubernetes, actually, they were trying to run on Managed Kubernetes on GKE, and that was too complex or too much to manage for the team. And so they moved all of their infrastructure over to Render, and they were able to service billions of requests over the next few months, just on our platform, and every time Pete Buttigieg went on stage during a debate and said "Oh, go to PeteForAmerica.com," there's a huge spike in traffic on our platform, and it scaled with every debate. And so that's just one example of where really high quality engineering teams are saying "No, this stuff is too complex, it doesn't need to be," and there is a simpler alternative, and Render is filling in that gap. We also have customers all over, from single indie hackers who are just building out their new project ideas, to late stage companies like Stripe, where we are making sure that we scale with our users, and we give them the things that they would need without them having to "mature" into AWS, or grow into AWS. I think Render is built for the entire lifecycle of a company, which is you start off really easily, and then you grow with us, and that is what we're seeing with Render where a lot of customers are starting out simple and then continuing to grow their usage and their traffic with us. >> Yeah, I was doing some research getting ready for this, Anurag, I saw, not necessarily you're saying that you're cheaper, but there are some times that price can help, performance can be better, if I was a Heroku customer, or an AWS customer, I guess what might be some of the reasons that I'd be considering Render? >> So, for Heroku, I think the comparison of course, there's a big difference in price, because we think Heroku is significantly overpriced, because they have a perpetual free tier, and so their paid customers end up footing the bill for that. We don't have a perpetual free tier that way, we make sure that our paid customers pay what's fair, but more importantly, we have features that just haven't been available in any platform as a service up until now, for example, you cannot spin up persistent storage, block storage, in Heroku, you cannot set up private networking in Heroku as a developer, unless you pay for some crazy enterprise tier which is 1500, 3000 dollars a month. And Render just builds all of that into the platform out of the box, and when it comes to AWS, again, there's no comparison in terms of ease of use, we'll never be cheaper than AWS, that's not our goal either, it's our goal to make sure that you never have to deal with the complexity of AWS while still giving you all of the functionality that you would need from AWS, and when you think about applications as applications and services as opposed to applications that are running on servers, that's where Render makes it much easier for developers and development teams to say "Look, we don't actually need "to hire hundreds of DevOps people," we can significantly reduce our DevOps team and the existing DevOps team that we have can focus on application-level concerns, like performance. >> All right, so Steve, I guess, a couple questions for you, number one is, we haven't talked about security yet, which I know is a topic near and dear to your heart, was one of the early concerns about cloud, but now often is a driver to move to cloud, give us the security angle for this space. >> Yeah, I mean the key thing in all of the space is to get rid of the complexity, and complexity and human error is often, as we've talked about, that is the number one security problem. So by taking this fresh approach that's all about just the application, and a very simple GitOps-based workflow for it, you're not going to have the human error that typically has misconfigured things and coming into there, I think more broadly, the overall notion of the serverless world has also been a very nice move forward for security. If you're only bringing up and taking down the pieces of the application as needed, they're not there to be hacked or attacked. So I think for those two reasons, this is really a more modern way of looking at it, and again, I think we've talked about many times, security is the bane of DevOps, it's the slowest part of any deployment, and the more we get rid of that, the more the extra value proposition comes safer and also faster to deploy. >> The question I'd like to hear both of you is, the role of the developer has changed an awful lot. Five years ago, if I talked to companies, and they were trying to bring DevOps to the enterprise, or anything like that, it seemed like they were doomed, but things have matured, we all understand how important the developer is, and it feels like that line between the infrastructure team and the developer team is starting to move, or at least have tools and communication happening between them, I'd love, maybe Steve if you can give us a little bit your macroview of it, and Anurag, where that plays for Render too. >> Yeah, and Anurag especially would be able to go into our existing customers. What I love about Render, this is a completely clean sheet approach to thinking about, get rid of infrastructure, just make it all go away, and have it be purely there for the developers. Certainly the infrastructure people need to audit and make sure that you're passing the certifications and make sure that it has acceptable security, and data retention and all those other pieces, but that becomes Anurag's problem, not the developer problem. And so that's really how you look at it. The second thing I've seen across all these startups, you don't typically have, especially, you're not talking about startups, but mid-sized companies and above, they don't convert all the way to DevOps. You typically have people peeling off individual projects, and trying to move faster, and use some new approach for those, and then as those hopefully go successful, more and more of the existing projects will begin to move over there, and so what Render's been doing, and what we've been hoping from the start, is let's attract some of the key developers and key new projects, and then word will spread within the companies from there, but so the answer, and a lot of these companies make developers love you, and make the infrastructure team at least support you. >> Yeah, and that was a really good point about developers and infrastructure, DevOps people, the line between them sort of thinning, and becoming more of a gray area, I think that's absolutely right, I think the developers want to continue to think about code, but then, in today's environment, outside of Render when we see things like AWS, and things like DigitalOcean, you still see developers struggling. And in some ways, Render is making it easy for smaller companies and developers and startups to use the same best practices that a fully fledged DevOps team would give them, and then for larger companies, again, it makes it much easier for them to focus their efforts on business development and making sure they're building features for their users, and making their apps more secure outside of the infrastructure realm, and not spending as much time just herding servers, and making those servers more secure. To give you an example, Render's machines aren't even accessible from the public internet, where our workloads run, so there's no firewall to configure, really, for your app, there's no DMZ, there's no VPN. And then when you want to make sure that you're just, you want a private network, that's just built into Render along with service discovery. All your services are visible to each other, but not to anyone else. And just setting those things up, on something like AWS, and then managing it on an ongoing basis, is a huge, huge, huge cost in terms of resources, and people. >> All right, so Anurag, you just opened your first region, in Europe, Frankfurt if I remember right. Give us a little bit as to what growth we should expect, what you're seeing, and how you're going to be expanding your services. >> Yeah, so the expansion to Europe was by far our most requested feature, we had a lot of European users using Render, even though our servers were, until now, based in the US. In fact, one of, or perhaps the largest recipe-sharing site in Italy was using Render, even though the servers were in the US, and all their users were in Italy, and when we moved to Europe, that was like, it was Christmas come early for them, and they just started moving over things to our European region. But that's just the start, we have to make sure that we make compute as accessible to everyone, not just in the US or Europe but also in other places, so we're looking forward to expanding in Asia, to expanding in South America, and even Africa. And our goal is to make sure that your applications can run in a way that is completely transparent to where they're running, and you can even say "Look, I just want my application to run "in these four regions across the globe, "you figure out how to do it," and we will. And that's really the sort of dream that a lot of platforms as service have been selling, but haven't been able to deliver yet, and I think, again, Render is sort of this, at this point in time, where we can work on those crazy crazy dreams that we've been selling all along, and actually make them happen for companies that have been burned by platforms as a service before. >> Yeah, I guess it brings up a question, you talk about platforms, and one of the original ideas of PaaS and one of the promises of containerization was, I should be able to focus on my code and not think about where it lives, but part of that was, if I need to be able to run it somewhere else, or want to be able to move it somewhere else, that I can. So that whole discussion of portability, in the Kubernetes space, it definitely is something that gets talked quite a bit about. And can I move my code, so where does multicloud fit into your customers' environments, Anurag, and is it once they come onto Render, they're happy and it's easy and they're just doing it, or are there things that they develop on Render and then run somewhere else also, maybe for a region that you don't have, how does multicloud fit into your customers' world? >> That's a great question, and I think that multicloud is a reality that will continue to exist, and just grow over time, because not every cloud provider can give you every possible service you can think of, obviously, and so we have customers who are using, say, Redshift, on AWS, but they still want to run their compute workloads on Render. And as a result, they connect to AWS from their services running on Render. The other thing to point out here, is that Render does not force you into a specific paradigm of programming. So you can take your existing apps that have been containerized, or not, and just run them as-is on Render, and then if you don't like Render for whatever reason, you can take them away without really changing anything in your app, and run them somewhere else. Now obviously, you'll have to build out all the other things that Render gives you out of the box, but we don't lock you in by forcing you to program in a way that, for example, AWS Lambda does. And when it comes to the future, multicloud, I think Render will continue to run in all the major clouds, as well as our own data centers, and make sure that our customers can run the appropriate workloads wherever they are, as well as connect to them from the Render services with ease. >> Excellent. >> And maybe I'll make one more point if I could, Stu, which is one thing I've been excited to watch is the, in any of these platform as a services, you can't do everything yourself, so you want the opensource package vendors and other folks to really buy into this platform too, and one exciting thing we've seen at Render is a lot of the big opensource packages are saying "Boy, it'd be easier for our customers to use our opensource "if it were running on Render." And so this ecosystem and this set of packages that you can use will just be easier and easier over time, and I think that's going to lead to, at the end of the day people would like to be able to move their applications and have it run anywhere, and I think by having those services here, ultimately they're going to deploy to AWS or Google or somewhere else, but it is really the right abstraction layer for letting people build the app they want, that's going to be future-proof. >> Excellent, well Steve and Anurag, thank you so much for the update, great to hear about Render, look forward to hearing more updates in the future. >> Thank you, Stu. >> Thanks, Stu, good to talk to you. >> All right, and stay tuned, lots more coverage, if you go to theCUBE.net you can see all of the events that we're doing with remote coverage, as well as the back catalog of what we've done. I'm Stu Miniman, thank you for watching theCUBE. (calm music)

(upbeat music playing) >> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE! Covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, brought to you by Red Hat, the cloud native computing foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, here at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2019 in San Diego, I am Stu Miniman John Troyer is my co-host and joining us is one of our esteemed Cube alumni multi-time guests. Steve Herrod who is the managing director at General Catalyst. Steve, thanks so much for joining us. Always great to see you. >> It's good to see you again. >> Stu: All right I'm having >> And John. >> A flashback meeting with the two of you at a certain campus in Palo Alto and the like. But, you know it's interesting Steve, before we get into this technology, we kicked off this morning talking about a company, Docker. We knew Docker from the early on. I said, look Docker had the opportunity to be this generation's VM-ware. It has had a huge impact on the market. You know, we wouldn't have 12 thousand people here if it wasn't for them. Give us your take kind of as to, you know, this wave of technology and we'll start there. >> Yeah, well I guess I'll start with Docker the company. I mean, it just shows you boy, it's hard to build big companies these days and I think there will be plenty of people talking about why that didn't work out or did work out. Maybe there was too much stuff given to open source. Maybe not enough, maybe there isn't enough community. But I do think, I think that's the tale of just how hard it is to be out in this world. But on the flip side they certainly moved for the idea of containers and got things going. We always have a saying in the venture business, actually in the startup business, which is it's sometimes the second mouse that gets the cheese. Someone's got to break a little glass and then sometimes someone else comes in afterwards and gets some of the reward for it. >> Well Steve this is a sprawling ecosystem. We went from 8 thousand people last year, 4 thousand the year before to over 12 thousand, and this ecosystem keeps growing. You've got a portfolio company that launched this week. You're checking out the show floor. Maybe let's start with the new one coming out from your side. >> Yeah you know I have several startups that are here but I think what's been interesting is the opportunity to create new companies. If you look at the, I'm sure you've covered a lot of them. But if you look at the sponsor sheets here, there's literally hundreds of booths that you can go see and many of which are in similar areas, many of which are open source. So it's really a challenge, like as you all trained interviewers and me trained looking at the space. Think how complex it is to a customer right now. Do that, think about like which service mesh do I pull together with this and that and which command line and which API tool, so I think that's both the challenge and the opportunity you often see this early on. One company that we just had coming out is called Render and their idea is to build an application platform service kind of on top of all this and just to hide it all from the user which I think is, I think that's what always happens in these ecosystems. You get so many players and then someone will be the bundler and make a suite out of it. Or someone will write a service on top of it all and take it away from you. So I think it's sort of a healthy part of a rapidly changing ecosystem. And Render will be doing some interesting things, but they talk to Application developers, not to infrastructure people. App developers don't want to know about any of this. >> Well we're sitting here at KubeCon in the midst of kind of, right at that margin, right at that boundary between from one perspective it looks very developer-y, But from another perspective, this seems very operator-y here. How do you see, in the market in the place, with the buyers, the CIOs or the technical buyers out there. I mean how are you looking at infrastructure versus developers and cloud et cetera? >> It's funny, you know we're all infrastructure people for the most part. What I often say, I know you all know that as well, like at the end of the day infrastructure is only there to run applications. It has no other purpose in life except to be a great place to run applications. But it's also accountable for doing a lot of the things you need. It has to make it run fairly at a certain performance. It has to make sure it's safe from attack. It needs to make sure the data is backed up. So I always just try to think about that when I'm looking at these startups, and we were just talking about this before the show. When I go up to one of the booths and I ask, I usually ask, how do you make someone's life better? Sometimes you get someone who's not the most senior person at the company and they'll quickly go into the technology on how it's this or that. But if you can't frame it in the context of how some enterprises' applications are better, faster, safer then it's really not that interesting, I think, to a CIO that has all these decision making. So, anyway I keep coming back to that with what ever infrastructure or application companies out there and try to wonder what's going on. >> Yeah, no I do really like that as we often frame it, it's what is the business value? It's, you know, nobody really has a problem that I need to rub Kubernetes on. Yes, I need agility, I need you know, the result of what having a distributed architecture drives from my business is what I need. Not the niggling little details there. Um, so I love that piece of what you do better for a company. The other thing, I walk around and I talk to some of these companies and some of them, I scratch my head a little bit as to the oh well I created a cool project, and we've open sourced it and that's my business. And as you know we've talked about the cautionary tale of Docker. Where are we with open source and business model and what's your latest take on that? >> Boy, that is ever evolving. It's funny though, if you look at even just the last ten years since you've been covering things. The go to model for most open source companies has shifted from maybe supportive subscription to really, some of them are open core meaning that parts of it are closed source. But, more and more that the really well to do ones are running them as a service. So that tends to be what we look for now is, whether you're running it directly, or you're doing something with a Microsoft, Google, Amazon where you get some of the revenue from it, which is a big, a big if. That seems to be one of the better ways to consume it and the people who have control over the software should be the best at operationalizing it. So that's kind of the change that we've seen as of late. >> Yeah, quick follow up on that, when we look at the hyper scale, the public clouds. Their marketplaces are getting more and more, you know, it's just a big force in the marketplace. Especially AWS, but Azure's pushing that way and Google to some extent there. Do you give any advice to your portfolio customers? How they should think about their relationships with the big cloud players? >> Well yeah, I mean that's one of the biggest discussions, not even just for our tech companies, but our commerce companies and everywhere else. But I do think what's kind of interesting, in many cases we're seeing the companies talk about maybe Amazon or someone is running that software as a service and it's maybe it's a little older version or maybe it's not all the bells and whistles. So there's certainly a case where good enough is good enough and it kind of crushes the startup, but you also hear a fair amount of tales of where it introduces them to this concept for the first time and then they're going to move over to perhaps the best of breed case, so obviously getting that right is a big job for the founder as well as for an investor. But, um I really see it as a mixed bag. The notion of being introduced to a customer at a lower cost than ever before matters a lot if they then switch to you. >> Well Steve, another boundary that you're sitting at is the boundary between all these technology providers and the customer. Any particular observations on trends over in the customer side? Are people looking to save money, are people feeling good, are the techies really leading the adoption? Is CIO down? Digital transformation? I mean, you're sitting right there in the middle. >> Yeah I mean the good news for I think all startups are that software matters and the digital transformation that's been going on for many, many years continues in a broad way. I would say at the end of the day though, the one question that I almost ask just back to your point on business value. I ask any startup, tell me why you are at least 10 times better than everyone else in this space. And because it is, the bad news of so many startups and so many cool ideas is how's anyone to choose? So if you ask any of your CIOs, they're just massively confused. They try to look for a bigger vendor who could possibly bundle it all together and make it a suite. That's super enticing as you know to all these guys. But when you have this much churn and change going on, you know someone has to step into that role, so I would just say that the ideal thing is you have smaller number of vendors, that never works with a lot of rapid innovation so somewhere in the middle you need to have startups that are really good at bundling in with other folks and fitting into APIs and doing that. >> Alright, so Steve, we've had an interesting view on what's going on in the security industry this week and I know you've got a perspective on it. Our team did the AWS reinforce show in Boston and it was generally upbeat, talking about all the great things that cloud's doing and you know, modernize everything we're doing. Pat Gelsinger from VMware, you know, banging on the table at VMware saying you know, we need a do-over, we need to start over with security. Here at this show, if some people are very cautiously optimistic that we've solved a bunch of the problems of security. You know, where in your view are we, and where are we going? >> I think we'll never be done with security. However, I do think we've reached a maturity level, if you, well, you were here. A couple years ago, there were so many security companies just for containers and I think, you know that's interesting to some extent, but, every CIO is going to have a mixed environment. And so I think what you see this year and what you saw with Palo Alto's acquisitions, so my companies Alumio I know you've talked to. It's really saying let's have one master policy and have it actually then go out and talk to Amazon, talk to my local infrastructure, talk to containers, talk to server lists. That will be the next wave of things going on. But, um, I think whenever you see a maturing of a company like this, the management tools and the security tools that have to inter operate start to really make a showing. And I actually see that quite a bit in this show, so that's a sign of a little bit of maturity going on here. >> Okay, last thing, Steve, I guess, what's catching your eye? Anything interesting or spaces there that you'd call out that we haven't already touched on? >> Well, I spend a lot of time these days actually on, and I hesitate to say it, but on AI. And I mean specifically it is such a hyped term and it's used in many ways like cloud used to be used, so it's just sort of a marketing term in many ways. But specifically, the picks and shovels that are enabling that, many of which show up here too because it is being deployed in containers, that sort of thing. So certainly the tools, but more importantly the vertical applications that can have a meaningful benefit from it. And I'll say, same thing as with infrastructure. AI is a means to an end, it's not the actual thing you're trying to do. But there's real, there's been a real advance there and so I'm really enjoying watching where you get these 10x improvements because you're using the data and AI there. So I continue to love infrastructure and developer tools and I think especially as they get applied to some of these new areas, like AI. That's where I'm excited about what we'll be seeing. >> Well, Steve, really appreciate you coming by. Congrats to the Demon Render, definitely look to catch up there if we don't catch him this week, we'll get him to our Palo Alto studios sometime. >> Yeah, Render is cool. You can go try it out. Render.com >> All right. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman. Getting towards the end of day 1 of 3 days. Wall to wall coverage. Check out theCUBE.net for all of the coverage, and as always, thanks for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music playing)

>> from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California It is a cute conversation. >> Hello and welcome to the Special Cube conversation with remote gas. Steve, harried managing director of General Catalyst, is he's a venture capitalist. >> Former >> CTO of the M. Where? Cube alumni. Steve, welcome to this special cube conversation coming in remote from Palo Alto. You're right across town, but still grab you big news happening. And also get your thoughts on the emerald 2019. Welcome to our remote conversation. >> Yeah, we were close. And yet this makes it even more convenient. We >> love the new format. Bring people into no matter where they are, no matter. Whatever it takes to get the stories we want to do that. And two important ones having. We know the emeralds coming next week. But congratulations. In order to you and your portfolio companies signal FX, another cube alumni from we've been covering since the beginning of their funding acquisition. Bye, Splunk today for over a billion dollars. 60% in cash and 40%. And stop. Congratulations. You've been on the board. You've known these guys from VM. We're quite a team. Quite an exit It's a win win for those guys. Congratulations. >> Yeah, Great group of guys. Several, which were at being where, as you as you mentioned, and as you've had on your show, that's great. They were doing a really good job of monitoring and getting metrics about applications and how they're doing it. And they're marrying it with spunk, stability to ingest logs and really understand operational >> data. And I think that combination will be very powerful. >> It brings kind of what we've been monitored. Calling Cloud 2.0, Suzie, monitoring 2.0, is really observe ability As the world starts moving into the kinds of service is we're seeing with Cloud on premises operations more than ever, that game has changed much more dynamic, and the security impact is significant. And certainly as as applications connect with its coyote or any I p device having that day, that scales really critical part of that. And I know signal left fax was one of those companies where you invested early, and I remember interviewing a couple of years ago in saying, Damn, these guys might be too early. I mean, they're so smart, they're so on it. But this is an example of skating to where the puck is As we increase, Key would say, These guys were just hitting their stride. Steve, can you Can you share any color commentary on on the deal and or you know why this is so important? >> Well, they've been at this for a long time, and they're a great team. I've been involved. Is investor less time? Obviously. But it was the really original team out of Facebook monitoring really at scale applications and then trying to take that technology that Facebook could use and applied it to our world. And, you know, as you discovered, we're in a world of micro service's and containers, and that is definitely hitting its stride right now. And so they were in the right place knowing how >> to monitor this very fast moving >> information and make some sense out of it. So you're a really good job on their part, and it was a pleasure to be >> along for part of the ride with him. >> It's great to me, great founders that have a vision and stay the course because, you know it's always it's always tricky when you're early to see the future especially around their top micro surfaces and containers way back before became the rage and now more relevant operationally for enterprises, it's easy to get distracted and man that fashion. We'll just jump on this trend of this way. They stayed the course. They stayed the nose to the grindstone and now observe ability. Which, to me is code word for monitoring. 2.0 is probably one of the hottest segments you saw Cummings going public companies filing the pager Duty dynatrace. Now you guys with your acquisition with Signal FX, This is an important sector this would normally be viewed in. I t. Rule is kind of list of white space, but it seems to be a much bigger landscape. Can you comment on your view on this and why it's so important? Why is observe ability so hot? Steve? >> Well, it's been this actually had a great market to be in for quite a while. They've been a large number of companies, continue to be both built up, and it's pretty simple. That amount of e commerce, or the amount of customer interactions you're having over applications and over the Web has gone up, and so anything that's not performing well or as downtime literally cost you a lot of money as a company. And so as these applications get more complex and they're being relied on >> Maur for revenue and for custom directions, >> you simply have to have better tools. And that's gonna be something that continues to evolve, that we got more complex, absent, more commerce is going >> to go through them. >> Complexity is actually something that people, a lot of people are talking about. I want to ask you something around today's marketplace, but I want you to compare and contrast it, similar to what your experience wasn't v m Where were you? The CTO virtual ization of all very, very quickly on ended up becoming a really critical component of the infrastructure, and a lot of people were pooh poohing that initially at first, then all sudden became. We've got to kill the M where you know so the resiliency of the M, where was such that they continue to innovate on virtualization, and so that's been a part of the legacy of V M wear, and the embers will cover next next week. But when you look at what's happening now with cloud computing and now some of the hybrid cloud up opportunities with Micro Service's and other other cool things. The role of the application is being is important part of the equation. It used to be the standup infrastructure, and that would enable the application to do things virtualization kind of change that game. Now you don't need to stand up. Any infrastructure could just deploy an application, and the infrastructure can be code and be self form, so you can have unique requirements. As infrastructure driven by the application, the whole world seemed to have flipped around. Do you see it that way? Is that accurate assessment? What's your thoughts on that? >> I think you're right on a bunch of fronts. People have been calling a different things, but the beauty of the, um where and you know this is a while ago now, but the reason it was successful is that you didn't have to change any of your software to use. It sort of slid him underneath an added value. But at the same time applications evolved. And so the that path of looking like hardware was something that was great for not changing applications. You have to think about a little differently when people are taking advantage of new application patterns or new service. Is that air in the cloud? And as you build up these as they're called cloud Native applications, it really is about the infrastructure. You know. It's job in life is to run applications. It sort of felt like the other way around. It used to be you wrote an application for what your infrastructure was. It shouldn't be like that anymore. It's about what you need to do to get the job done. And so we see the evolution of the clouds and their service. Is that air there? Certainly the notion of containers and a lot of the stuff that being where is now doing has been focused on those new applications and making sure Veum, where adds value to them, whatever type >> of application they are. >> It's interesting one of the exciting things in this way that we're on this year around multi cloud hybrid cloud in Public Cloud Now that we've kind of crossed over to the reality that public cloud has been there, done that succeeded I call that cloud 1.0, you saw the emergence of hybrid cloud. Even early on, around 2012 2013 we were talking about that of'em world instantly pad Kelsey here, but now you're seeing hybrid cloud validated. You got Outpost, you've got Azure stack, among other things. The reality is, if you are cloud native, you might not need to have anything on premise. Like companies like ours with 50 plus people. We don't have an I T department, but most enterprises have stuff on premise, so the nuance these days is around. You know, what's the architecture of of I T. These days, we add security into It's complicated. So these debates can there be a soul cloud for a workload? Certainly that's been something that we've been covering with the Amazon Jet I contract, where it's not necessarily a soul cloud for the entire Department of Defense. It's a soul cloud for the workload, the military application workload or app. The military. It's $10 million application, and it's okay to have one cloud, as we would say, But yet they're going to use Microsoft's cloud for other things. So the ODS having a multiple cloud approach, multiple environments, multiple vendors, if you will, but you don't have to split the cloud up. Her say This is kind of one of those conversations really evolving quickly because there's no real school of thought around this other than the old way, which was have a multi vendor environment split the things. What's your thoughts on the the workload relationship to the cloud? Is it okay to have a workload, have a single cloud for that workload and coexist with other clouds? >> It's funny. I've been thinking about this more lately. Where if you went back earlier in time, forgetting cloud, there used to be a lot of different type of servers that you >> can run on, whether it >> be a mainframe or a mini mainframe or Unix system or Olynyk system. And to some extent, people are choosing what would run where, based on the demands of the application, sometimes on price, sometimes on certifications or even what's been poured into the right one. So this is a beating myself, you know, that's that's a while ago. It's not too different to kind of think about the different kind of cloud service is there out there, whether you're running your own on your own data center or whether you're leveraging one from the other partners. I really do think in the ideal world you get your choice of the best possible platform for the application across a variety of characteristics. And it's kind of up to the vendors of management software and monitoring software at security software to give you more flexibility to choose where to run. And so for getting D'Amore exactly. But think of a virtualization layer that really tries to abstract out and let you more fluidly run things on different clouds. Do you think that's where a lot of the the core software is head of these days really >> enable that toe work better >> as a >> 1,000,000 other use cases, but with storage being moved around >> for disaster recovery or for whatever it else might >> be? But that quarter flexibility reminds me a lot of choosing what application >> would want. Run would run where within your own company >> and the kubernetes trend in containers certainly really makes that so much more flexible because you can still run VM. Where's viens beams under the covers over Put stuff on bare metal a lot of great opportunities that's exciting >> and you slap in a P I in front of them and micro service is sort of works in tandem with that so that you could really have your application composed >> across multiple environments. >> And I think the ob surveilling observe ability is so hot because it takes what network management was doing in the old way, which is monitoring. Make sure things are operating effectively and combining with data. And so when I heard about the acquisition of signal effects into Splunk, I'm like, There it is. We're back to data. So observe ability is really a data challenge and opportunity for using what would be a white space monitoring. But it's more than monitoring because it's about the data and the efficacy of that data and how it's being used, whether it's for security or whatever your thoughts >> s. So there's more data than ever, for sure, and so being able to stream that in being able to capture it at cost, all that is a big part of our environment still working. The key thing is turning that into some actionable insight, and whether you're using no interesting calculations for that or different forms of machine learning like that's where this really has to go is with all this data coming in. How do >> I avoid false false >> positives? How do I only alert people when needed, then that allows you to do what everyone's talked about for 30 years, which is automatic remediation. But for now, let's talk about it. Is how do I process all of this rich data and give me the right information to take action? >> Do you want to thank you for coming on this promote cube conversation? You've been with us at the Cube since 2010. I think our first cube event was A M C. World 2010. That show doesn't existing longer because that folded into Del Technologies world. So VM world next week is the last show standing that has been around since the Cube. You've been around? Of course, you guys had VM worlds had their 10th anniversary was 2013 as a show. But this is our 10th year. Well, thank you for being part of our community and being a contributor with your commentary and your friendship and referral. Appreciate all that. So I gotta ask you looking back over the 10 years since you been with Doug, you've vm world. What's the most exciting moments? What are moments that you can say? Hey, that was an amazing time. That was a grind, but we got through it. Funny moments. Your thoughts. >> Boy, that's a tough question. I've enjoyed working with you, John and the Cube. There's been somebody really interesting things for me. The sum of the big acquisitions that we went through a V Um, where? Where? I think the NSX exposition. When we get a syrah, I think that really pushed us an interesting spots. But we have gone through, uh, I pose an acquisition ourself by the emcee begun Theo. It's a pretty vicious competition from Be Citrix Airs in or Microsoft. Yeah, that's just the joy of being a These companies is lots of ups and downs along the way that they almost kind of fit together to make an exciting life. >> What was some moments for you? I know you had left was the 2015 or 26 boys with your last day of >> the world. You go now, you know about six years. >> What do you miss about the end? Where >> the team is what everyone kind of cliche says. But it's totally true. The chance to kind of work with all those people at the executive staff all the way down to like these awesome engineers with Koi is so I definitely missed that Miss Shipping products. You don't get to do that as much directly as a venture capitalist. But on the flip side, this is a great world to be, and I get to see enthusiastic. You're very optimistic founders all day long, pushing the envelope. And while that was existing at the end where, uh, it's it's what I see every single day here. >> You've been on The Cube 10 times at the M World. That's the all time spot you're tied for. First congratulates on the leaderboard. It's been a great 10 years. Going forward. We've seen are so good. Looking back, I would say that you know Palmer, it's taking over from Diane Greene. Really set the table. He actually laid out. Essentially, what I think now is a clearly a cloud SAS architecture. I think he got that pretty much right again. Or maybe early in certain spots of what he proposed at that time. There's some things that didn't materialize is fast, but ultimately from core perspective. You guys got that right, Um, and then went in Try to do the cloud. But then and this year it comes in for suffered to find, you know, line with Amazon. And since that time, the stock has been really kind of it on the right. So, you know, some key moments there for Of'em. Where from Self >> Somali. More stuff. It's fun to see Pivotal now possibly coming back into after after getting started there. But I think you know, there's there's a hugely talented team of execs there. Pat L Singers come >> in and done a great job. I think, Greg, >> you and all these folks that Aaron, >> there are good thinkers. And so I >> think you'll consider just continue to see it evolved. Quite event and probably some cool announcements next week. >> Talk aboutthe roll Ragu and the team play because he doesn't really get a lot of the spotlight. He avoids it. I know he did talk to him privately that he won't come on the Q. I don't know what the other guys go on other guys in jail, so he's been instrumental. He was really critical in multiple deals. Could you share some insight into his role at bm bm were and why it's been so important. >> I'll push him to get on, especially now that you have remote. You can probably grab him now. He and Rajiv and Rayo Funeral Just all the guys air. I think he and Reggie basically split up half and half of the products. But Roger is very, very seminal in the whole cloud strategy that has clearly been working Well, he's a good friend in a very smart guy. >> Well, I want you to give me a personal word that you're gonna get me in a headlock and tell him to come on the Cube this year. We want him on. He's a great, great great guest. He's certainly knowledgeable going forward. Steve, 10 years out, we still got 10 more years of great change coming. If you look at the wee that's coming, you're out investing in companies again. You had one big exit today with the $1,000,000,000 acquisition that was happen by Splunk and signal effects. Ah, lot more action. You've been investing in security. What's your outlook? As you look at the next 10 years is a lot more action to happen. We seem to be early days in this new modern era. Historic time in the computer industry as applications without dictating infrastructure capabilities is still a lot more to do. What do you excited about? >> There's a million things I get to see every day, which are clearly where the world is headed. But I think at the end of the day there's there's infrastructure, which the job in life of infrastructure is to run applications. And so then you look at applications. How are they changing and what is the underlying fabric gonna need to do to support them? And if you look at the future of applications, it's clearly some amazing things around artificial intelligence and machine learning to actually make them smarter. It's all different factors form factors that they're running on and being displayed on. I think we clearly have a world where with the next generation of networking, you could do even more at the edge and communicate in a very different way with the back end. I kind of look at all these application patterns and really trying to think about what is the change to the underlying clouds and fabrics and compute that's gonna be needed to run them. I think we have plenty of head room of interesting ideas ahead. >> Stew, Dave and I were talks to Dave. Stupid Valenti student and I were talking about, you know, as infrastructure and cloud get automate as automation comes in, new waves are gonna be formed from it. What new waves do you see? Is it like R P ay, ay, ay, ay. Because as those things get sucked in and the ships and two new waves What? Oh, that's some of the key ways people should pay attention to. I'm not saying the industries is going away, but as it becomes automated, and as the shift happens, the value still is there. Where is those new waves? >> Well, then, today it looks like most applications they're gonna be composed of a lot of service is, um and I think they're gonna be able. They're going to need to be displaying on everything from big screens to small screens to purely as a headless 80. I front ends, and so again, I think at the end of the day, this this infrastructure is gonna have to have a lot of computation capability after crunch do tons of data but also have to stitch together these connections between components and provide really good experiences and predictability in the network and all those air very hard problems that we've been working on for a while. I think we'll keep working on them and new forms for the next 10 years at least. >> Awesome. Steve. Thanks for being a friend with us in the queue, but you're funny. Favorite moment of the Q. Can you share any observations about the cube and your experiences? Your observations over the 10 years we've come a long way, >> you go ugly, actually enjoyed it. I mean, it's a microcosm of all the other stuff going on, but I saw your first little box that you built and used for the Cube like that was that was really cool. But now the fact that I'm on my laptop, you doing this over the network and it's showing up is pretty awesome. So think you're following the same patterns of the other, have the other applications moving the cloud and having good user experiences. >> Cube native here software native Steve. Thank you so much for stating the time commenting on the acquisition. I know it's fresh on the press. Ah, lot more analysis and cut to come next week. It's certainly I'll be co hosting at Splunk dot com later in the year. So I'm looking forward to connect with a team there and again. Thanks for all your contribution into the cube community. We really appreciate one. Thank you for your time. >> Thanks. You guys are awesome. Thanks for chatting. >> Okay. Steve Herod, managing director at general counsel, Top tier VC From here in Silicon Valley and offices around the world, I'm John for breaking down the news as well as a V Emerald preview with the former CTO of'em. Were Steve hair now a big time venture capitalists. I'm John Ferrier. Thanks for watching.

our Studios in the heart of Silicon Valley Palo Alto California this is a cute conversation hello everyone welcome to the special cube conversation with a remote guest Steve Herod managing director of general kennel s he's a venture capitalist former CTO of VMware cube alumni Steve welcome to this special cube conversation coming in remote from Palo Alto you're right across town but still we're gonna grab you big news happening and also get your thoughts on the Emerald 2019 welcome to our remote conversation yeah hey Jon yeah we're close and yet this makes it even more convenient go we'd love the new format of bring people into no matter where they are no matter what whatever it takes to get the stories we want to do that and and two important ones to having we we know vm world's coming next week but congratulations in order to you and your portfolio companies signal FX another cube alumni firm we've been covering since the beginning of their funding acquisition by Splunk today for over a billion dollars sixty percent in cash and forty percent in stop congratulations you've been on the board you've known these guys from VMware quite a team quite an exit it's a win-win for those guys congratulations yeah great group of guys several of which were at VMware has you as you mentioned and as you've had on your show that's great they were doing a really good job of monitoring and getting metrics about applications and how they're doing it and they're marrying it with spunks ability to ingest logs and really understand operational data and I think the combination will be very powerful it brings kind of what we've been monitoring cloud 2.0 essentially monitoring 2.0 is really observability as the world starts moving into the the kinds of services we're seeing with cloud and on-premises operations more than ever that game has changes much more dynamic and the security impact is significant and certainly as applications connect whether it's IOT or any IP device having that data at scale is really a critical part of that and I know signal FX was one of those companies where you invested early and I remember interview them a couple years ago and saying damn these guys might be too early I mean they're so smart they're so on it but this is an example of skating to where the as Wayne Gretzky would say these guys were just hitting their stride Steve can you can you share any color commentary on on the deal and or you know why this is so important well they've been at this for a long time and they're a great team I've been involved as an investor less time obviously but yeah it was the really original team out of Facebook monitoring really at scale applications and then trying to take that technology that Facebook could use and applied it to our world and you know as you discovered we're in a world of micro services and containers and that is definitely hitting its stride right now and so they were in the right place knowing how to monitor this very fast moving information and and make some sense out of it so yeah really good job on their part and it was a pleasure to be along for part of the ride with them it's great to meet great founders that have a vision and stay the course because you know it's always tricky when you're early to see the future especially around ok we're talking micro services and containers way back before it became the rage and now more relevant operationally for enterprises it's easy to get distracted and it's fashion well just jump on this trend or this wave they stayed the course they stayed the nose to the grindstone and now observability which to me is code word for monitoring 2.0 is probably one of the hottest segments you saw companies going public companies filing the pager Duty dynaTrace now the you guys with your acquisition with signal FX this is an important sector this would normally be viewed in the IT world as kind of lists of white space but it seems to be a much bigger landscape can you comment on your view on this and why it's so important why is observability so hot Steve well it's been this actually been a great market to be in for quite a while they've been a large number of companies continuing to be both built up and it's pretty simple the amount of e-commerce or the amount of customer interactions you're having over applications and over the web has gone up and so anything is not performing well or house downtime literally cost you a lot of money as a company and so as these applications get more complex and they're being relied on more for revenue and for customer interactions you know simply you have to have better tools and that's gonna be something that continues to evolve we have more complex apps and more commerce is going to go through them complexity is obviously something that people a lot of people are talking about I want to ask you something around today's marketplace but I want you to compare and contrast it similarly to what your experience was at VMware when you the CTO you know virtualization evolved very very quickly and ended up becoming a really critical component of the infrastructure and a lot of people were pooh-poohing that initially at first and then all the sudden became we got to kill VMware and you know so the resiliency of VMware was such that they continued to innovate on virtualization and so that's been you know part of the legacy of VMware and VM roads will cover next next week but when you look at what's happening now with cloud computing and now some of the hybrid cloud opportunities with micro services and other other cool things the the role of the application is being is important part of the equation it used to be the stand up infrastructure and that would enable the application to do things virtualization kind of changed that game now you don't need to stand up any infrastructure you can just deploy an application then the infrastructure can be code and be self formed so you can have unique requirements as infrastructure driven by the application the whole world seems to have flipped around do you see it that way is that accurate assessment and what's your thoughts on that I think you're right on a bunch of fronts people have been calling it different things but the beauty of VMware and you know this is a while ago now but the reason it was successful is that you didn't have to change any of your software to use it sort of slid in underneath and added value but at the same time applications evolved and so the path of looking like hardware was something that was great for not changing applications you have to think about a little differently when people are taking advantage of new application patterns or new services that are in the cloud and as you build up these as they're called cloud native applications it really is about the infrastructure you know it's job and life as to run applications and it's it sort of felt like the other way around it needs to be you wrote an application for what your infrastructure was it shouldn't be like that anymore it's about what what you need to do to get the job done and so we see the evolution of the clouds and their services that are there certainly the notion of containers and a lot the stuff that VMware is now doing has been focused on those new applications and making sure VMware adds value to them whatever type of application they are it's interesting one of the exciting things in this wave that we're on this year around multi cloud hybrid cloud and public cloud now that we've kind of crossed over to the reality that public cloud has been there done that succeeded I call that cloud 1.0 you saw the emergence of hybrid cloud even early on around 2012-2013 we were talking about that at VMworld you know certainly Pat Kelson here but now you're seeing hybrid cloud validated you got outpost you got Azure stack among other things the reality is if you are cloud native you might not need to have anything on premise like companies like ours with 50 plus people we don't have an IT department but most enterprises have stuff on premise so the the nuance these days is around you know what's the architecture of IT these days when you add security into it's complicated so there's debates can there be a sole cloud for a workload certainly that's been something that we've been covering with the Amazon Jedi contract where it's not necessarily a sole cloud for the entire department of defense it's a sole cloud for the workload the military application workload or app the military it's 10 billion dollar application and it's okay to have one cloud as we would say but yet they're gonna use Microsoft's cloud for other things so the DoD's having a multiple cloud approach multiple environments multiple vendors if you will but you don't have to split the cloud up or say this is kind of one of those conversations really evolving quickly because there's no real school of thought around this other than the old way which was have a multi-vendor environment split two things what's your thoughts on the the workload relationship to the cloud is it okay to have a workload have a single clap for that workload and coexist with other clouds it's funny I've been thinking about this more lately where if you went back earlier in time forgetting cloud there used to be a lot of different type of servers that you could run on whether it be a mainframe or a mini mainframe or UNIX system or a Linux system and to some extent people are choosing what would run where based on the demands of the application sometimes on price sometimes on certifications or even what's been ported to the right one so this is I'm beating myself but you know that's that's a while ago it's not too different to kind of think about the different kind of cloud services are out there whether you're running your own on your own data center or whether you're leveraging one from the other partners I really do think in the ideal world you get your choice of the best possible platform for the application across a variety of characteristics and it's kind of up to the vendors of management software and monitoring software at security software to give you more flexibility to choose where to run and so forgetting VMware exactly but think of a virtualization layer that that really tries to abstract out and let you more fluidly run things on different clouds I do think that's where a lot of the you know the core software is head of these days to really enable that to work better and so a million other use cases with with you know storage being moved around for disaster recovery or for whatever it else might be but that core of flexibility reminds me a lot of you know choosing what application would one run would run where within your own company and the kubernetes trend in container certainly really makes that so much more flexible because you can still run VMware's on the ends beams under the covers or put stuff on bare metal a lot of great opportunities so it's exciting and you slap an API in front of them and and micro-services sort of works in tandem with that so that you you could really have your application composed across multiple environments and I think the observable observability is so hot because it takes what network management was doing in the old way which is monitoring making sure things are operating effectively and combining with data and so when I heard about the acquisition of signal FX into Splunk I'm like there it is we're back to data so observability is really a data challenge and opportunity for using what would be a white space monitoring but it's more than monitoring because it's about the data and the efficacy of that data and how it's being used whether it's for security or whatever your thoughts so there's more data than ever for sure and so being able to stream that in being able to capture it at cost all that is a big part of our you know the environments we all work and the key thing is turning that into some actionable insight and whether you're using you know interesting calculations for that or different forms of machine learning like that's where this really has to go is with all this data coming in do I avoid false false positives how do i only alert people when needed and then that allows you to do what everyone has talked about for 30 years which is automatic remediation but for now let's talk about it is how do i process all of this rich data and give me the right information to take action see we want to thank you for coming on this promote cube conversation you've been with us at the cube since 2010 I think our first cube event was EMC world 2010 that show doesn't exist any longer because that folded into Dell technologies world so VM world next week is the last show standing that has been around since the cube cubes been around of course you guys had the VM worlds had their 10th anniversary I think was 2013 as a show but this is our 10th year I want to thank you for being part of our community and being a contributor with your commentary and your friendship and referral appreciate all that so I gotta ask you looking back over the 10 years since you've been with the cube VMworld what's the most exciting moments what are moments that you can say hey that was an amazing time that was a grind but we got through it funny moments your thoughts yeah boy that's a tough question I've enjoyed you know working with you John and the cube there have been so many really interesting things for me the some of the big acquisitions that we went through at VMware where I think the nsx acquisition when we get nasarah I think that really pushed us in an interesting spot but we had gone through IPOs and acquisition ourselves by EMC and we've gone through some pretty vicious competition from whether it be Citrix or Zin or Microsoft yeah that's just the joy of being at these companies it's lots of ups and downs along the way but they all kind of fit together to make an exciting life what were some moments for you I know you had left was a twenty fifteen or twenty six point eight vs world you go down there yeah about six years what do you miss about VMware the team is what everyone kind of cliche says but it's totally true the chance to kind of work with all those people at the executive staff all the way down to like these awesome engineers with Co ideas so I definitely missed that miss shipping products you don't get to do that as much as a venture capitalist but but on the flip side this is a great world to be and I get to see enthusiastic you know very optimistic founders all day long pushing the envelope and while that was existing at the EM where it's it's what I see every single day here you've been on the cube ten times at vmworld that's the all time spot you're tied but first congratulations on the leaderboard well it's been a great ten years going forward we've seen more so go looking back I would say that you know Palmer it's taking over from Diane Greene really set the table he actually laid out essentially what I think now as a clearly a cloud SAS architecture I think he got that pretty much right again or maybe early in certain spots of what he proposed at that time though some things that didn't materialize as fast but ultimately from a core perspective you guys got that right and then went in try to do the cloud but then and this year it comes in for a software-defined you know line with Amazon and since that time the stock has been really kind of up to the right so you know some key moments there for VMware from small somalia more stuff it's fun to see pivotal now possibly coming back into after after getting started there but I think you know there's there's a hugely talented team of executives there Pat Yeltsin jurors come in and done a great job I think Raghu and all these folks that are in there are good thinkers and so I think you'll consider to continue to see it evolve quite a bit and probably some cool announcements next week talk about the role Raghu and the team played because he doesn't really get a lot of the spotlight he avoids it I know he'd I've talked to him privately he won't come on the qoi let the other guys go on other guys and gals so he's been instrumental he was really critical in multiple deals could you share some insight into his role at VMware VMware and why it's been so important well I'll push them to get on especially now that you have remote you can probably grab him no he and Rajiv and andraia Ferrell just all the guys are I think he and regime basically split up half and half of the products but I know Raghu is very very similar in the whole cloud strategy that has clearly been working well he's good friend in a very smart guy well I want you to give me a personal word that you're gonna give him in a headlock and tell him to come on the cube this year we want him on he's a great great great guest he's certainly knowledgeable going forward Steve 10 years out we still got 10 more years of great change coming if you look at the wave that's coming you're out investing in companies again you had one big exit today with the billion dollar acquisition that was happening by Splunk and signal affects a lot more action you've been investing in security what's your outlook as you look at the next ten years there's a lot more action to happen we seem to be early days in this new modern era historic time in the computer industry has applications of now dictating infrastructure capabilities is still a lot more to do what are you excited about there's there's a million things I get to see everyday which are clearly where the world is headed but I think at the end of the day there's there's infrastructure which the job and life of infrastructure is to run applications and so then you look at applications how are they changing and and what is the underlying fabric gonna need to do to support them and if you look at the future of applications it's clearly some amazing things around artificial intelligence and machine learning to actually make them smarter it's all different factors form factors that they're running on and being displayed on I think we clearly have a world where with the next generation of networking you can do even more at the edge and communicate in a very different way with the backend so I kind of look at all these application patterns and really try to think about what is the change to the underlying clouds and fabrics and compute that's going to be needed to run them I think we have plenty of headroom of interesting ideas ahead stew Dave and I were talks to Dave Stuben they want this too many man died we're talking about you know as infrastructure and cloud get automated as automation comes in new waves are gonna be formed from it what new waves do you see is it's like RPAs a I I mean because as those things get sucked in and they ships in to new waves what are the some of the key ways people should pay attention to I'm not saying the inverse tress is going away but as it becomes automated and as the shift happens the value still is there where is those new waves well I think today it looks like most applications are going to be composed of a lot of services and I think they're gonna be able they're gonna need to be displaying on everything from big screens to small screens to purely as headless api friends and so again I think at the end of the day this this infrastructure is gonna have to have a lot of computation capability have to crunch through tons of data but also have to stitch together these connections between components and provide really good experiences and ability in the network and all those are very hard problems that we've been working on for a while I think we're gonna keep working on them and new forms for the next ten years at least awesome see thanks for being a friend with us in the cube what's your funny favorite moment of the Q can you share any observations about the cube and your experiences your observations over the 10 years we've come a long way you've come a long way actually I've enjoyed it I mean it's a microcosm of all the other stuff going on but I saw your first little box that you built and used for the cube like that was that was really cool but now the fact that I'm on my laptop you know doing this over the network and it's showing up is pretty awesome so I think you're following the same patterns of the other of the other applications moving to the cloud and having good user experience because cube native here software if the male native Steve thank you so much for staying the time commenting on the acquisition I know it's fresh on the press a lot more analysis and cut to come next week it's certainly I'll be co-hosting ATS plunks Kampf later in the year so I'm looking forward to connecting with the team there and again thanks for all your contribution into the cube community we really appreciate it one thank you for your time thanks John you guys are awesome thanks for chatting okay Steve Herod managing director at General Counsel top tier VC from here in Silicon Valley and they have offices around the world I'm Jean ferré breaking down the news as well as a VM real preview with the former CTO of VMware Steve hare now a big-time venture capitalist I'm John Ferrier thanks for watching [Music] you [Music]

(upbeat music) >> Live, from Washington DC. It's theCUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Summit. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Public Sector Summit here in Washington DC. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside of John Furrier. We are excited to welcome to the program, General Keith Alexander former NSA Director, the first Commander to lead the US Cyber Command, Four-star General with a 40 year career. Thank you so much for coming theCUBE, we are honored, we are honored to have you. >> It is an honor to be here. Thank you. >> So let's talk about cyber threats. Let's start there and have you just give us your observations, your thoughts on what are the most pressing cyber threats that keep you up at night? >> Well, so, when you think about threats, you think about Nation States, so you can go to Iran, Russia, China, North Korea. And then you think about criminal threats, well all the things like ransomware. Some of the Nation State actors are also criminals at night so they can use Nation State tools. And my concern about all the evolution of cyber-threats, is that the attacks are getting more destructive, the malware has more legs with worms and the impact on our commercial sector and our nation, increasingly bigger. So you have all those from cyber. And then I think the biggest impact to our country is the theft of intellectual property, right. That's our future. So you look out on this floor here, think about all the technical talent. Now imagine that every idea that we have, somebody else is stealing, making a product out of it, competing with us, and beating us. That's kind of what Huawei did, taking CISCO code to make Huawei, and now they're racing down that road. So we have a couple of big issues here to solve, protect our future, that intellectual property, stop the theft of money and other ideas, and protect our nation. So when you think about cyber, that's what I think about going to. Often times I'll talk about the Nation State threat. The most prevalent threats is this criminal threat and the most, I think, right now, important for us strategically is the theft of intellectual property. >> So why don't we just have a digital force to counter all this? Why doesn't, you know, we take the same approach we did when we, you know, we celebrated the 75th anniversary D-day, okay, World War II, okay, that was just recently in the news. That's a physical war, okay. We have a digital war happening whether you call it or not. I think it is, personally my opinion. I think it is. You're seeing the misinformation campaigns, financial institutions leaving England, like it's nobody's business. I mean it crippled the entire UK, that like a big hack. Who knows? But its happening digitally. Where's the forces? Is that Cyber Command? What do you do? >> So that's Cyber Command. You bring out an important issue. And protecting the nation, the reason we set up Cyber Command not just to get me promoted, but that was a good outcome. (laughing) But it was actually how do we defend the country? How do we defend ourselves in cyber? So you need a force to do it. So you're right, you need a force. That force is Cyber Command. There's an issue though. Cyber Command cannot see today, attacks on our country. So they're left to try to go after the offense, but all the offense has to do is hit over here. They're looking at these sets of targets. They don't see the attacks. So they wouldn't have seen the attack on Sony. They don't see these devastating attacks. They don't see the thefts. So the real solution to what you bring up is make it visible, make it so our nation can defend itself from cyber by seeing the attacks that are hitting us. That should help us protect companies in sectors and help us share that information. It has to be at speed. So we talk about sharing, but it's senseless for me to send you for air traffic control, a letter, that a plane is located overhead. You get it in the mail seven days later, you think, well-- >> Too late. >> That's too late. >> Or fighting blindfolded. >> That's right. >> I mean-- >> So you can't do either. And so what it gets you to, is we have to create the new norm for visibility in cyber space. This does a whole host of things and you were good to bring out, it's also fake news. It's also deception. It's all these other things that are going on. We have to make that visible. >> How do you do that, though? >> What do you do? I do that. (laughing) So the way you do it, I think, is start at the beginning. What's happening to the network? So, on building a defensible framework, you've got to be able to see the attacks. Not what you expect, but all the attacks. So that's anomaly detection. So that's one of the things we have to do. And then you have to share that at network speed. And then you have to have a machine-learning expert system AI to help you go at the speeds the attacker's going to go at. On fake-news, this is a big problem. >> Yeah. >> You know. This has, been throughout time. Somebody pointed out about, you know, George Washington, right, seven fake letters, written to say, "Oh no, I think the King's good." He never wrote that. And the reason that countries do it, like Russia, in the elections, is to change something to more beneficial for them. Or at least what they believe is more beneficial. It is interesting, MIT has done some studies, so I've heard, on this. And that people are 70% more like to re-Tweet, re-Tweet fake news than they are the facts. So. >> Because it's more sensational, because it's-- >> That's food. It's good for you, in a way. But it's tasty. >> Look at this. It's kind of something that you want to talk about. "Can you believe what these guys are doing? "That's outrageous, retweet." >> Not true. >> Not true. Oh, yeah, but it makes me mad just thinking about it. >> Right, right. >> And so, you get people going, and you think, You know, it's like going into a bar and you know, you go to him, "He thinks you're ugly." and you go to me, and you go, "He thinks you're ugly." (laughs) And so we get going and you started it and we didn't even talk. >> Right, right. >> And so that's what Russia does. >> At scale too. >> At scale. >> At the scale point. >> So part of the solution to that is understanding where information is coming from, being able to see the see the environment like you do the physical environment at speed. I think step one, if I were to pick out the logical sequence of what'll happen, we'll get to a defensible architecture over the next year or two. We're already starting to see that with other sectors, so I think we can get there. As soon as you do that, now you're into, how do I know that this news is real. It's kind of like a block-chain for facts. How do we now do that in this way. We've got to figure that out. >> We're doing our part there. But I want to get back to this topic of infrastructure, because digital, okay, there's roads, there's digital roads, there's packets moving round. You mentioned Huawei ripping off CISCO, which takes their R and D and puts it in their pockets. They have to get that. But we let fake news and other things, you've got payload, content or payload, and then you've got infrastructure distribution. Right, so, we're getting at here as that there are literally roads and bridges and digital construction apparatus, infrastructure, that needs to be understood, addressed, monitored, or reset, because you've had email that's been around for awhile. But these are new kinds of infrastructure, but the payload, malware, fake news, whatever it is. There's an interaction between payload and infrastructure. Your thoughts and reaction to that as a Commander, thinking about how to combat all this? >> I, my gut reaction, is that you're going to have to change, we will have to change, how we think about that. It's not any more roads and avenues in. It's all the environment. You know, it's like this whole thing. Now the whole world is opened up. It's like the Matrix. You open it up and there it is. It's everything. So what we have to do is think about is if it's everything, how do we now operate in a world where you have both truths and fiction? That's the harder problem. So that's where I say, if we solve the first problem, we're so far along in establishing perhaps the level so it raises us up to a level where we're now securing it, where we can begin to see now the ideas for the pedigree of information I think will come out. If you think about the amount of unique information created every year, there are digital videos that claim it's doubling every year or more. If that's true, that half of, 75% of it is fiction, we've got a big road to go. And you know there is a lot of fiction out there, so we've got to fix it. And the unfortunate part is both sides of that, both the fiction and the finding the fiction, has consequences because somebody says that "A wasn't true, "That person, you know, they're saying, he was a rapist, "he was a robber, he was a drugger," and then they find out it was all fake, but he still has that stigma. And then the person over here says, "See, they accused me of that. "They're out to get me in other areas. "They can exclaim what they want." >> But sometimes the person saying that is also a person who has a lot of power in our government, who is saying that it's fake news, when it's not fake news, or, you know what, I-- >> So that's part of the issue. >> It's a very different climate >> Some of it is fake. Some of it's not. And that's what makes it so difficult for the public. So you could say, "That piece was fake, "maybe not the other six." But the reality is, and I think this is where the media can really help. This is where you can help. How do we set up the facts? And I think that's the hardest part. >> It's the truth. >> Yeah, yeah. >> It's a data problem. And you know, we've talked about this off camera in the past. Data is critical for the systems to work. The visibility of the data. Having contextual data, the behavioral data. This gets a lot of the consequences. There's real consequences to this one. Theft, IP, freedom, lives. My son was video-gaming the other day and I could hear his friends all talking, "What's your ping start word? "What's your ping time? "I got lag, I'm dead." And this is a video game. Military, lagging, is not a game. People are losing their lives, potentially if they don't have the right tactical edge, access to technology. I know this is near and dear to your heart. I want to get your reaction. The Department of Defense is deploying strategies to make our military in the field, which represents 85% infantry, I believe, some statistic around that number, is relying on equipment. Technology can help, you know, that. Your thoughts on, the same direction. >> Going to the Cloud. Their effort to go to the Cloud is a great step forward, because it addresses just what you're saying. You know, everybody used to have their own data centers. But a data center has a fixed amount of computational capability. Once you reach it, you have to get another data center, or you just live with what you've got. In the Cloud if the problem's bigger, elasticity. Just add more corridors. And you can do things now that we could never do before. Perhaps even more importantly, you can make the Clouds global. And you can see around the world. Now you're talking about encrypted data. You're talking about ensuring that you have a level of encryption that you need, accesses and stuff. For mobile forces, that's the future. You don't carry a data center around with an infantry battalion. So you want that elasticity and you need the connectivity and you need the training to go with it. And the training gets you to what we were just talking about. When somebody serves up something wrong, and this happened to me in combat, in Desert Storm. We were launched on, everybody was getting ready to launch on something, and I said, "This doesn't sound right." And I told the Division Commander, "I don't agree. "I think this is crazy. "The Iraqis are not attacking us down this line. "I think it's old news. "I think somebody's taken an old report that we had "and re-read it and said oh my God, they're coming." And when we found out that was a JSTARS, remember how the JSTARS MTI thing would off of a wire, would look like a convoy. And that's what it was. So you have to have both. >> So you were on the cusp of an attack, deploying troops. >> That's right. >> On fake information, or misinformation, not accurate-- >> Old information. >> Old information. >> Old information. >> Old, fake, it's all not relevant. >> Well what happens is somebody interprets that to be true. So it gets back to you, how do you interpret the information? So there's training. It's a healthy dose of skepticism, you know. There are aliens in this room. Well, maybe not. (laughing) >> As far as we know. >> That's what everybody. >> But what a fascinating anecdote that you just told, about being in Desert Storm and having this report come and you saying, "Guys, this doesn't sound right." I mean, how often do you harken back to your experience in the military and when you were actually in combat, versus what you are doing today in terms of thinking about these threats? >> A lot. Because in the military, when you have troops in danger your first thought is how can I do more, how can I do better, what can I do to get them the intelligence they need? And you can innovate, and pressure is great innovator. (crunching sound) And it was amazing. And our Division Commander, General Griffith, was all into that. He said, "I trust you. "Do whatever you want." And we, it was amazing. So, I think that's a good thing. Note that when you go back and look at military campaigns, there's always this thing, the victor writes the history. (laughing) So you know, hopefully, the victor will write the truthful history. But that's not always the case. Sometimes history is re-written to be more like what they would like it to be. So, this fake news isn't new. This is something where I think journalists, historians, and others, can come together and say, "You know, that don't make sense. "Let's get the facts." >> But there's so much pressure on journalists today in this 24-hour news cycle, where you're not only expected to write the story, but you're expected to be Tweeting about it, or do a podcast about it later, to get that first draft of history right. >> So it may be part of that is as the reporter is saying it, step back and say, "Here's what we've been told." You know, we used to call those a certain type of sandwich, not a good-- (laughing) If memory serves it's a sandwich. One of these sandwiches. You're getting fed that, you're thinking, "You know, this doesn't make sense. "This time and day that this would occur." "So while we've heard this report. "It's sensational. "We need to go with the facts." And that's one of the areas that I think we really got to work. >> Journalism's changing too. I can tell you, from we've talked, data drives us. We've no advertising. Completely different model. In-depth interviews. The truth is out there. The key is how do you get the truth in context to real-time information for those right opportunities. Well, I want to get before we go, and thanks for coming on, and spending the time, General, I really appreciate it. Your company that you've formed, IronNet, okay, you're applying a lot of your discipline and knowledge in military cyber and cutting-edge tech. Tell us about your company. >> So one of the things that you, we brought up, and discussed here. When I had Cyber Command, one of the frustrations that I discussed with both Secretary Gates and Secretary Panetta, we can't see attacks on our country. And that's the commercial sector needs to help go fix that. The government can't fix that. So my thought was now that I'm in the commercial sector, I'll help fix the ability to see attacks on the commercial sector so we can share it with the government. What that entails is creating a behavioral analytic system that creates events, anomalies, an expert system with machine-learning and AI, that helps you understand what's going on and the ability to correlate and then give that to the government, so they can see that picture, so they have a chance of defending our country. So step one is doing that. Now, truth and lending, it's a lot harder than I thought it would be. (laughing) You know, I had this great saying, "Nothing is too hard "for those of us who don't have to do it." "How hard can this be?" Those were two of my favorite sayings. Now that I have to do it, I can say that it's hard, but it's doable. We can do this. And it's going to take some time. We are getting traction. The energy sector has been great to work with in this area. I think within a year, what we deploy with the companies, and what we push up to the Cloud and the ability to now start sharing that with government will change the way we think about cyber security. I think it's a disruptor. And we have to do that because that's the way they're going to attack us, with AI. We have to have a fast system to defend. >> I know you got to go, tight schedule here, but I want to get one quick question in. I know you're not a policy, you know, wonk, as they say, or expert. Well, you probably are an expert on policy, but if we can get a re-do on reshaping policy to enable these hard problems to be solved by entrepreneurs like yourself expertise that are coming into the space, quickly, with ideas to solve these big problems, whether it's fake news or understanding attacks. What do the policy makers need to do? Is it get out of the way? Do they rip up everything? Do they reshape it? What's your vision on this? What's your opinion? >> I think and I think the acting Secretary of Defense is taking this on and others. We've got to have a way of quickly going, this technology changes every two years or better. Our acquisition cycle is in many years. Continue to streamline the acquisition process. Break through that. Trust that the military and civilian leaders will do the right thing. Hold 'em accountable. You know, making the mistake, Amazon, Jeff Bezos, says a great thing, "Go quickly to failure so we can get "to success." And we in the military say, "If you fail, you're a dummy." No, no, try it. If it doesn't work, go on to success. So don't crush somebody because they failed, because they're going to succeed at some point. Try and try again. Persevere. The, so, I think a couple of things, ensure we fix the acquisition process. Streamline it. And allow Commanders and thought leaders the flexibility and agility to bring in the technology and ideas we need to make this a better military, a better intelligence community, and a better country. We can do this. >> All right. All right, I'm thinking Rosie the Riveter. We can do this. (laughing) >> We can do it. Just did it. >> General Alexander, thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE. (electronic music)

>> Live from Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and Cloud Native Con North America 2018 brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hey welcome back everyone, we are live here in Seattle. It's theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon, Cloud Native Con, a part of CNCF, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, the rise of Kubernetes, this is what the show is all about. Three days of wall to wall coverage. We've been there from the beginning covering this KubeCon effort from the beginning. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman, we're here to analyze and break down the event with our guest analyst for the segment, Steve Herrod, CUBE alumni, he was there the first day we ever did theCUBE in 2010. He's been a good friend of theCUBE. Now he's a venture capitalist, managing director at General Catalyst, a premiere VC in the industry. Steve, great to see you. >> Good to be here. >> Thanks for coming on. >> Feels like the early days of some of the other conferences, too, doesn't it? >> It feels like AWS, you know seven/eight years ago where it tips over, there's a tipping point. We see that doubling, so you know, it's kind of that tipping point where there's more demand for theCUBE and we can fill it so there's great content but it's a bigger picture, right? And I want to break through that, I want to get your thoughts and let's have a shared conversation around what's really going on here. You're talking about a disruption in the industry of cloud computing. You got Amazon, just a freight train just taking all the beach, the waves coming in and this is an opportunity, this is my opinion, for the industry to kind of say, hey, it's a multi cloud world so you're not going to take all of it. You got Google, you got Microsoft, you got start ups. This is a way to create an opensource way to fill the gap. Your thoughts? You agree? >> I totally agree and I think what's interesting, this conference does not have a corporate, at least an explicit corporate sponsor. It has four or five that are all trying to have their play in it. Microsoft's not one of them, which is sort of interesting. But it was, I think, a very bold thing this year to have this big of a venue and invite this many people and then hope that you're going to get the sponsorships and all the other stuff that follows. >> In Seattle. >> In Seattle. Yeah, our weather is a little bit-- >> It's very meta. (laughing) >> Interesting. But, just to your point, I do think this is really interesting because it is more open than a lot of these conferences where people are coming together. Both open source but also so much focus on how do you do functions in a way that works across places, how do you service meshes. Like everything is, it's both good and bad because there's so many choices that people are being seen right now. >> You were the CTO of VMware, Stu you worked in the CTO office at EMC back in the day, you're seeing a systems kind of vibe going on in cloud and you got application renaissance, kind of almost like the app server days, think WebSphere or whatever, that movement in the 90's and 2000's, that kind of grew quickly, all kind of being modernized. So you have cloud scale. >> Mm-hmm. >> AI has been around for a long time but because of the cloud, there's a renaissance. Video's been around for a long time but because of the cloud, things like theCUBE is happening. So the cloud is enabling a rebirth of a lot of things. >> Mm-hmm. >> And enabling a lot of new things, how do you guys view that systems view, application renaissance? Jassy talks about a reinvent as a new kind of persona developing. >> Mm-hmm. >> As a buyer and IT investments are changing, you're making start up investments, it's crazy. >> Yep. >> What do you think? >> Yeah, so first of all John, I like what you're saying about that systems view because too often we would kind of focus on a specific tool. So virtualization was great, but, you know, big thing, I took a bunch of servers and made it smaller servers but I took the same old application and I shoved it in there, and I left it running for another five or 10 years when I probably should have modernized it. Today, you know we just had Cheryl on talking about the ecosystem and customers and what I want to focus on is how the users get value. What are building on top of this? >> Right. >> Not the next cool thing to build, but how do I run my business? How do I do cool things with genomics? How do I improve healthcare? And in many ways we're seeing some of these top down things. I mean what's gotten me so excited about things like serverless and been really poking and teasing at how that fits in with this ecosystem is it's not just about a way to kind of turn the crank on making things a little bit more efficient or, you know, I can manage more machines with fewer people, but you know it moves up things and for someone like myself, a networking guy with an infrastructure background? >> Right. >> It's a little out of my comfort zone and that's okay. You know we talked to Lou Tucker, Lou's really excited about where AI's going and what's there, so I think we're in a real renaissance here and it's a big inflection point. >> Well I think to your point, what's interesting, whenever I do a teacher course to a college or when I'm talking to start ups or even in the old days it's really easy to forget that infrastructure is not a thing in it's own right. It's solely there to enable applications and to enable other things and so whenever you get really deep in the weeds on this is a new security model for this type of container or this, it's important and you're thinking about the best way to do it but, really you're right, you have to abstract it out to can I ship value faster? Can I save customers money? Can I do something safer? You really have to think about it in that context. And there's so much activity here you have to really make sure you're thinking about where it all fits together. >> And you know, the computer science conversations changes, too. The nature of what is computer science is evolving. I want to get to that in the next kind of discussion point but I want to just, Steve, ask you, you were on the VMware side when VMware kind of entered in with virtualization. It was a desktop, it was an app, it was like you loaded it on a machine and then that ended up transforming a massive industry and so a lot of people compare what VMware did in it's growth and it's impact but saying the cloud has got certainly more orders of magnitude, you mentioned security. >> Mm-hmm. >> Where's the VMware moment in this cloud transformation impact? Your thoughts there, just because you've been on both sides, one as a driver, CTO at VMware and now as an investor. Where do you see cloud-- >> Yeah, I kind of thought of it as two different angles. One is, appealing to developers and then that taking you all the way through operations which is, I mean that is, dev ops is sort of looking at that. VMware's first product was a workstation product that made developers have a bunch of environments right in front of them and we always had a vision for getting into the operations center but we knew we had to kind of come up through that path and I think likewise, a lot of this tooling that we see here is developer first and it's them saying, "I like this tool "and I can make my job be more enjoyable this way." But what you're really seeing, especially at this one is, how do you start in the developer tools and then not be detested by developers but then actually be paid for it by the operations side. So if you look at the type of vendors that are here? You start having venture capitalists here. You have a few people wearing suits here. It is about making this more enterprisey, more production ready and that's kind of the natural progression of any major impact like this. >> And Heptio, certainly Stu was reporting earlier, the number has been better than the filing of VMware. You know, a half a billion dollar acquisition for talent and a position in the marketplace. There's liquidity so there's investment opportunities. We talked to Jerry Chan about this at AWS, I want to get your thoughts, how is the investment thesis going on because what are you investing in? The notion of a stack, has kind of transformed into Lego blocks and services. >> Yep. >> So the notion of a stack is kind of changing although I've heard people say the, "Kubernetes stack." I'm like, well, what does that mean? (laughing) >> Which one? Yeah. >> So there's a lot of kind of stack derivatives. >> Mm-hmm. >> But how do you invest in this? What are you looking for? Where is the value? >> Yep. >> Where are sniffing out the deals? Where's the white spaces? And where should entrepreneurs go? >> Yeah, and I have several companies presenting here so I've certainly done some investments around this space, but I focus on a few things very specifically. I've been around this a little while. I really like to think about not tools that go to the new, hot new companies. I really try to think about what is more mainstream company going to adopt? And that usually means a few things. It has to have enterprise capabilities. It has to fit into the rest of the things. But I look at like how are you going to digest this with your other tools and the other processes that you have in place? If it's a security solution, I look at, I don't want really something that only protects the brave new world, I want it to fit in somehow with security policies and other things that are happening. >> So mainstream adoption? IT kind of impact? >> Yeah, just like a tool that actually works across environments and lets you go from here to there. You all have talked to Illumio several times? >> Yeah. >> They're trying to do micro segmentation for physical machines all the way through containers. The other thing I'm keeping a close eye on is, this is chaos, in terms of the number of start ups doing very specific point solutions and you have to really think about how does that grow into a big enough chunk of a budget or a big enough problem. So every single time I make an investment, I ask how does this do something 10 times better than something else and is that important to the company? And that's really hard to answer sometimes. >> Steve, and what's your take on the kind of opensource, open core, business model today? To be honest, I go around, I talked to some of the founders there, and everybody wants to contribute to opensource but maybe I don't want to build a business around it, because actually monetizing that is really tough. Is it just, I look to get acquired by one of the big players here? Or can I actually build a business with opensource at it's core? >> That's literally the billion dollar question. >> Yeah. >> But I do think, like on the positive side, the number of exits or big things recently with Magento, with Cloudera doing great, with, obviously, Red Hat, but we've seen, and Neilsoft, like a lot of big acquisitions and some good IPOs. But on the flip side, you definitely have to think about it differently now. There's a growing license that is very careful about allowing clouds to host your opensource project without contributing back. Hopefully that'll allow this hosted model to play out. I personally, I certainly look to opensource. You can see what's going on from traction but when you see it as a great lead generation engine which it often is for folks, I think that's a really healthy way to avoid spending a bunch of marketing money. >> Yeah, it's been fun. A lot of different shows we go to. Love your analysis, thanks for coming on, appreciate it. Just in general, as not a VC, but as a tech person and in the industry, I want to ask you and Stu what wave are we on? Obviously Kubernetes is now kind of front and center but we've still got cloud native. Is it the cloud? You got IoT and Amazon ARM, but we saw a lot of conversations around Edge. They had some interesting announcements around satellite telemetry coming in to regions. So you got Google, you got Microsoft, you got the big players. Is it the rich get richer? Is there going to be a new second tier? Cloud service provider? Where is this going? How is it going to reshape the industry? I mean, just big picture, what's your thoughts? >> Well, this is literally what I get paid to do is figure out where things are headed. I'd say, just at a top level, this is a super fun time to be in this lower level of the stack. You mentioned already AI gets, sort of AI washing goes on a lot right now but the very core of it is literally changing every application in interesting ways. And for me, I was a former hardware designer. The fact that you can now build and have really cool new hardware that's accelerating this stuff is really exciting. You saw Amazon's announcements, not only an ARM based server but Inferentia chips. Google has been doing this with TPUs-- >> Hundred gig networking in there, like, you know, high speed-- >> It is impressive. >> Cluster configurations, it's amazing stuff. >> So I love the fact that we can actually have very big innovation at each stage of the stack and it's because the combination of every company becoming an app, digital company coupled with the power of AI to transform things means you need dev ops to faster, you need these platforms that let you do more self service. And then I sprinkle on top of that is just the ridiculous demand for high quality engineers and if you don't give them an environment where they feel productive, they're just not going to stay at your company. And so all the mix comes together. I don't think they're going to be, there'll be some giant companies that already are, but I think the ability to create a new company that becomes large quickly or becomes small quickly if you screw up is bigger than ever. >> Yeah, I think it's total acceleration. >> Everything's faster. >> Values accelerated but it's also failure, too, right? >> Exactly, everything is accelerated. >> You have an option to abandon in you NPV calculations and IRRS (laughing) in your portfolio. >> Exactly, no it's-- >> The word pivot comes to mind. >> Everything is faster, that's the right way to think about it. >> Stu what's your take on this? >> Yeah, so we're at an interesting point in the industry. It's a bit of a paradox. On the one hand, the challenge of our time, we've been talking on theCUBE since the early days, John, is it's about distributed architectures and we're decomposing all of the pieces. Even Kubernetes itself, we're going to talk about how it's decomposing. On the other hand, everything is consolidating. >> That's right. >> I've seen more vertical stack integration from the chip and hardware level all the way through. You see Apple, Microsoft, Google-- >> That's right. >> And Amazon, all have chips companies and are going really interesting stuff there but it is such a complex individual. >> It is. >> That no one company can do it all, so there is opportunity for people to build on top of that. We have new marketplaces, we have new ways of doing it so it's, yes, there's going to be some really big winners and we have seen changes but there are still opportunities and yeah, John, keeps us busy always. >> Well here's my take on it, I want to get you guys' reaction to my view on this. So obviously we're in the media business, we're disrupting media with theCUBE so we look at the market and it's kind of matched the music industry. The power curve, the power law is very flat and straight and then a very long tail, with the head of the power law is the big players. But then when media came out, it kind of created a fatter tail and a bigger torso. I think that I see in the cloud, I see the rich getting richer. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Alibaba, and maybe a couple players underneath there, IBM, Oracle, those big guys. And then it's going to be a second tier of cloud service providers. Someone who's going to package all these awesome sets of features in the long tail so you're going to start to see a growth because the big guys cannot be winning all the mid range business. I think, you're right, I think there's going to be a lot of solutions that are just exceptional. >> Mm-hmm. >> And I think the scale of the cloud is going to create an opportunity for new kinds of service providers. Someone who says, hey, you know what? I'm going to package this differently. I'm going to assemble-- >> I think so. >> A cloud solution, on either one of all of the clouds. Why wouldn't I use the accelerated Amazon, or the power of Google? >> I think that's well thought and I do think, we've talked about this for a while too, but I do believe there's going to be specialization by industry where you have certain algorithms and data that's unique to it, by geography. There's still going to be sovereignty issues. Even by just what type of things am I trying to build. So I do think simultaneously there's commonality on the platform but that allows you to do specialization and to really serve a specific industry quite well. >> And machine learning is a great specialty thing. The metadata to power machine learning. >> So Steve, do you have final questions you want to ask us before we run out of time? >> Well I would just say, you see a lot of these conferences. I actually like to show up at these and say, what in point time does this look like the AWS reinvent. For me, what point in time does this look like maybe the VMware event in my case, but I don't know, it just feels to me like we've jumped over, we're sort of at that point where this is going to keep going and growing. >> Yeah, how do we make sure we've hit the inflection point but not jumped the charts? >> Yeah, I mean, do you think we are here? And how does this feel versus some of the other events that you spend time on? >> Yeah, I mean, John you want me to? >> I mean, you know. >> So my take, first of all, is there's a little worry and there's some concern of us that have been through this before, is like, wait, did we just create another OpenStack? >> Yeah. >> And my resounding answer so far, is no. While there might be 35 main projects here each one of those was started for a reason. They stand on their alone, they have, you know we've got Matt Klein on from Lyft, as our next guest here. >> Yeah. >> You know, Envoy, if Kubernetes didn't exist, Envoy would probably still exist. So there's a lot of these pieces that are good but it is complicated. >> It is very complicated. >> And there's all these pieces but that's a real opportunity for a lot of companies. The SIs, the big platforms, to be able to help put this together. >> Yeah. >> And the customers are thrilled with what is going on. >> That's well stated, yeah. >> There's interesting things there. Right, this ecosystem, the only ecosystem I've seen probably grow faster is the Amazon one so it is doing well and we've been looking for years as to like a nice, vendor independent ecosystem. >> Right. >> To grow because, you know, there's some of the ones in the storage industry and things like that. >> Yeah. >> All died. >> That's right. >> So there are vendor shows and this, you know the Lennox Foundation's done a nice job. >> Right, I agree. >> With it and it's been-- >> That's the unique part here for me. >> We bet early on it, so. >> Well we bet early on it, it was a good bet, but here's the challenge that they have; they have lightning in a bottle and it's definitely arrived so there's a little bit of jump to shark moment. You got some things happening that's kind of glam oriented but absolutely it's arrived. I think the challenge that they have is opensource community is a core constituency of this event, and the Lennox Foundation is structured to be kind of a very tight top, thin at the top period of management and the scale of this event and this movement is too big for them, I think, to handle. I think they either have to have sub brand or start segmenting out because if they lose the opensource community, the they're going to lose the vibe of the event and that's the core of what it is. >> Right. >> The downstream benefits, kind of a an opensource parlance, is the IT impact and the developer impact. And inherent in that is business benefits so you're going to start to see more suits coming in and you're going to start to have a melting pot and that is a risky proposition if they don't get out front on that. So yes, it's arrived, but there's so much time they're going to be doing it just to the projects. >> Right. >> Just to the innovation. >> You're going to have to wear these next time that you see them. >> There's a money making aspect of it, yes. >> Right. >> The money making aspect of this is huge. >> Yeah. >> And I think that's what we're watching. >> Yep. >> As the business people come in and say, look at this, this is billions and billions of dollars. >> Yeah. >> This is-- >> Maybe just one more thought on that. The notion is really important, this is a distributed, not really owned by one person, one company, and there's the chaos that comes with that and so how do you do the balance between these two things? >> Yeah, yeah. >> Its like when, I know, when Amazon announced their Blockchain thing, it's like, Blockchain's supposed to be distributed. Now we have a company running it in one cloud. It's like that balance between the push and pull of centralization that we're going to see. >> Well have to put some computer science architecture together and put an operating system around it. >> There ya go. >> We'll have some dev ops. Steve, thanks for coming on theCUBE, great to have you on. >> Good to see you guys. >> Well it's great to see you. A legend in the industry, Steve Herrod, CUBE alumni from 2010, been on every year. Now a venture capitalist, former CTO of VMware. With Stu Miniman, I'm John Furrier, analyst of KubeCon, stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (upbeat techno music)

For Las Vegas, it's the cube covering vm world 2018, brought to you by vm ware and its ecosystem partners. Ladies and gentlemen, Vm ware would like to thank it's global diamond sponsors and it's platinum sponsors for vm world 2018 with over 125,000 members globally. The vm ware User Group connects via vmware customers, partners and employees to vm ware, information resources, knowledge sharing, and networking. To learn more, visit the [inaudible] booth in the solutions exchange or the hemoglobin gene vm village become a part of the community today. This presentation includes forward looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially as a result of various risk factors including those described in the 10 k's 10 q's and k's vm ware. Files with the SEC. Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome Pat Gelsinger. Welcome to vm world. Good morning. Let's try that again. Good morning and I'll just say it is great to be here with you today. I'm excited about the sixth year of being CEO. When it was on this stage six years ago were Paul Maritz handed me the clicker and that's the last he was seen. We have 20,000 plus here on site in Vegas and uh, you know, on behalf of everyone at Vm ware, you know, we're just thrilled that you would be with us and it's a joy and a thrill to be able to lead such a community. We have a lot to share with you today and we really think about it as a community. You know, it's my 23,000 plus employees, the souls that I'm responsible for, but it's our partners, the thousands and we kicked off our partner day yesterday, but most importantly, the vm ware community is centered on you. You know, we're very aware of this event would be nothing without you and our community and the role that we play at vm wares to build these cool breakthrough innovations that enable you to do incredible things. You're the ones who take our stuff and do amazing things. You altogether. We have truly changed the world over the last two decades and it is two decades. You know, it's our anniversary in 1998, the five people that started a vm ware, right. You know, it was, it was exactly 20 years ago and we're just thrilled and I was thinking about this over the weekend and it struck me, you know, anniversary, that's like old people, you know, we're here, we're having our birthday and it's a party, right? We can't have a drink yet, but next year. Yeah. We're 20 years old. Right. We can do that now. And I'll just say the culture of this community is something that truly is amazing and in my 38 years, 38 years in tech, that sort of sounds like I'm getting old or something, but the passion, the loyalty, almost a cult like behavior that we see in this team of people to us is simply thrilling. And you know, we put together a little video to sort of summarize the 20 years and some of that history and some of the unique and quirky aspects of our culture. Let's watch that now. We knew we had something unique and then we demonstrated that what was unique was also some reasons that we love vm ware, you know, like the community out there. So great. The technology I love it. Ware is solid and much needed. Literally. I do love Vmr. It's awesome. Super Awesome. Pardon? There's always someone that wants to listen and learn from us and we've learned so much from them as well. And we reached out to vm ware to help us start building. What's that future world look like? Since we're doing really cutting edge stuff, there's really no better people to call and Bmr has been known for continuous innovation. There's no better way to learn how to do new things in it than being with a company that's at the forefront of technology. What do you think? Don't you love that commitment? Hey Ashley, you know, but in the prep sessions for this, I thought, boy, what can I do to take my commitment to the next level? And uh, so, uh, you know, coming in a couple days early, I went to down the street to bad ass tattoo. So it's time for all of us to take our commitment up level and sometimes what happens in Vegas, you take home. Thank you. Vm Ware has had this unique role in the industry over these 20 years, you know, and for that we've seen just incredible things that have happened over this period of time and it's truly extraordinary what we've accomplished together. And you know, as we think back, you know, what vm ware has uniquely been able to do is I'll say bridge across know and we've seen time and again that we see these areas of innovation emerging and rapidly move forward. But then as they become utilized by our customers, they create this natural tension of what business wants us flexibility to use across these silos of innovation. And from the start of our history, we have collectively had this uncanny ability to bridge across these cycles of innovation. You know, an act one was clearly the server generation. You know, it may seem a little bit, uh, ancient memory now, but you remember you used to walk into your data center and it looked like the loove the museum of it passed right? You know, and you had your old p series and your z series in your sparks and your pas and your x86 cluster and Yo, it had to decide, well, which architecture or am I going to deploy and run this on? And we bridged across and that was the magic of Esx. You don't want to just changed the industry when that occurred. And I sort of called the early days of Esx and vsphere. It was like the intelligence test. If you weren't using it, you fail because Yup. Servers, 10 servers become one months, become minutes. I still have people today who come up to me and they reflect on their first experience of vsphere or be motion and it was like a holy moment in their life and in their careers. Amazing and act to the Byo d, You know, can we bridge across these devices and users wanted to be able to come in and say, I have my device and I'm productive on it. I don't want to be forced to use the corporate standard. And maybe more than anything was the power of the iphone that was introduced, the two, seven, and suddenly every employee said this is exciting and compelling. I want to use it so I can be more productive when I'm here. Bye. Jody was the rage and again it was a tough challenge and once again vm ware helped to bridge across the surmountable challenge. And clearly our workspace one community today is clearly bridging across these silos and not just about managing devices but truly enabling employee engagement and productivity. Maybe act three was the network and you know, we think about the network, you know, for 30 years we were bound to this physical view of what the network would be an in that network. We are bound to specific protocols. We had to wait months for network upgrades and firewall rules. Once every two weeks we'd upgrade them. If you had a new application that needed a firewall rule, sorry, you know, come back next month we'll put, you know, deep frustration among developers and ceos. Everyone was ready to break the chains. And that's exactly what we did. An NSX and Nice Sierra. The day we acquired it, Cisco stock drops and the industry realizes the networking has changed in a fundamental way. It will never be the same again. Maybe act for was this idea of cloud migration. And if we were here three years ago, it was student body, right to the public cloud. Everything is going there. And I remember I was meeting with a cio of federal cio and he comes up to me and he says, I tried for the last two years to replatform my 200 applications I got to done, you know, and all of a sudden that was this. How do I do cloud migration and the effective and powerful way. Once again, we bridged across, we brought these two worlds together and eliminated this, uh, you know, this gap between private and public cloud. And we'll talk a lot more about that today. You know, maybe our next act is what we'll call the multicloud era. You know, because today in a recent survey by Deloitte said that the average business today is using eight public clouds and expected to become 10 plus public clouds. And you know, as you're managing different tools, different teams, different architectures, those solution, how do you, again bridge across, and this is what we will do in the multicloud era, we will help our community to bridge across and take advantage of these powerful cycles of innovation that are going on, but be able to use them across a consistent infrastructure and operational environment. And we'll have a lot more to talk about on this topic today. You know, and maybe the last item to bridge across maybe the most important, you know, people who are profit. You know, too often we think about this as an either or question. And as a business leader, I'm are worried about the people or the And Milton Friedman probably set us up for this issue decades ago when he said, planet, right? the sole purpose of a business is to make profits. You want to create a multi-decade dilemma, right? For business leaders, could I have both people and profits? Could I do well and do good? And particularly for technology, I think we don't have a choice to think about these separately. We are permeating every aspect of business. And Society, we have the responsibility to do both and have all the things that vm ware has accomplished. I think this might be the one that I'm most proud of over, you know, w we have demonstrated by vsphere and the hypervisor alone that we have saved over 540 million tons of co two emissions. That is what you have done. Can you believe that? Five hundred 40 million tons is enough to have 68 percent of all households for a year. Wow. Thank you for what you have done. Thank you. Or another translation of that. Is that safe enough to drive a trillion miles and the average car or you could go to and from Jupiter just in case that was in your itinerary a thousand times. Right? He was just incredible. What we have done and as a result of that, and I'll say we were thrilled to accept this recognition on behalf of you and what you have done. You know, vm were recognized as number 17 in the fortune. Change the world list last week. And we really view it as accepting this honor on behalf of what you have done with our products and technology tech as a force for good. We believe that fundamentally that is our opportunity, if not our obligation, you know, fundamentally tech is neutral, you know, we together must shape it for good. You know, the printing press by Gutenberg in 1440, right? It was used to create mass education and learning materials also can be used for extremist propaganda. The technology itself is neutral. Our ecosystem has a critical role to play in shaping technology as a force for good. You know, and as we think about that tomorrow, we'll have a opportunity to have a very special guest and I really encourage you to be here, be on time tomorrow morning on the stage and you know, Sanjay's a session, we'll have Malala, Nobel Peace Prize winner and fourth will be a bit of extra security as you come in and you understand that. And I just encourage you not to be late because we see this tech being a force for good in everything that we do at vm ware. And I hope you'll enjoy, I'm quite looking forward to the session tomorrow. Now as we think about the future. I like to put it in this context, the superpowers of tech know and you know, 38 years in the industry, you know, I am so excited because I think everything that we've done over the last four decades is creating a foundation that allows us to do more and go faster together. We're unlocking game, changing opportunities that have not been available to any people in the history of humanity. And we have these opportunities now and I, and I think about these four cloud, you have unimaginable scale. You'll literally with your Amex card, you can go rent, you know, 10,000 cores for $100 per hour. Or if you have Michael's am ex card, we can rent a million cores for $10,000 an hour. Thanks Michael. But we also know that we're in many ways just getting started and we have tremendous issues to bridge across and compatible clouds, mobile unprecedented scale. Literally, your application can reach half the humans on the planet today. But we also know that five percent, the lowest five percent of humanity or the other half of humanity, they're still in the lower income brackets, less than five percent penetrated. And we know that we have customer examples that are using mobile phones to raise impoverished farmers in Africa, out of poverty just by having a smart phone with proper crop, the information field and whether a guidance that one tool alone lifting them out of poverty. Ai knows, you know, I really love the topic of ai in 1986. I'm the chief architect of the 80 46. Some of you remember what that was. Yeah, I, you know, you're, you're my folk, right? Right. And for those of you who don't, it was a real important chip at the time. And my marketing manager comes running into my office and he says, Pat, pat, we must make the 46 a great ai chip. This is 1986. What happened? Nothing an AI is today, a 30 year overnight success because the algorithms, the data have gotten so much bigger that we can produce results, that we can bring intelligence to everything. And we're seeing dramatic breakthroughs in areas like healthcare, radiology, you know, new drugs, diagnosis tools, and designer treatments. We're just scratching the surface, but ai has so many gaps, yet we don't even in many cases know why it works. Right? And we'll call that explainable ai and edge and Iot. We're connecting the physical and the digital worlds was never before possible. We're bridging technology into every dimension of human progress. And today we're largely hooking up things, right? We have so much to do yet to make them intelligent. Network secured, automated, the patch, bringing world class it to Iot, but it's not just that these are super powers. We really see that each and each one of them is a super power in and have their own right, but they're making each other more powerful as well. Cloud enables mobile conductivity. Mobile creates more data, more data makes the AI better. Ai Enables more edge use cases and more edge requires more cloud to store the data and do the computing right? They're reinforcing each other. And with that, we know that we are speeding up and these superpowers are reshaping every aspect of society from healthcare to education, the transportation, financial institutions. This is how it all comes together. Now, just a simple example, how many of you have ever worn a hardhat? Yeah, Yo. Pretty boring thing. And it has one purpose, right? You know, keep things from smacking me in the here's the modern hardhat. It's a complete heads up display with ar head. Well, vr capabilities that give the worker safety or workers or factory workers or supply people the ability to see through walls to understand what's going on inside of the equipment. I always wondered when I was a kid to have x Ray Vision, you know, some of my thoughts weren't good about why I wanted it, but you know, I wanted to. Well now you can have it, you know, but imagine in this environment, the complex application that sits behind it. You know, you're accessing maybe 50 year old building plants, right? You're accessing HVAC systems, but modern ar and vr capabilities and new containerized displays. You'll think about that application. You know, John Gage famously said the network is the computer pat today says the application is now a network and pretty typically a complicated one, you know, and this is the vm ware vision is to make that kind of environment realizable in every aspect of our business and community and we simply have been on this journey, any device, any application, any cloud with intrinsic security. And this vision has been consistent for those of you who have been joining us for a number of years. You've seen this picture, but it's been slowly evolving as we've worked in piece by piece to refine and extend this vision, you know, and for it, we're going to walk through and use this as the compass for our discussion today as we walk through our conversation. And you know, we're going to start by a focus on any cloud. And as we think about this cloud topic, you know, we see it as a multicloud world hybrid cloud, public cloud, but increasingly seeing edge and telco becoming clouds in and have their own right. And we're not gonna spend time on it today, but this area of Telco to the is an enormous opportunity for us in our community. You know, data centers and cloud today are over 80 percent virtualized. The Telco network is less than 10 percent virtualized. Wow. An industry that's almost as big as our industry entirely unvirtualized, although the technologies we've created here can be applied over here and Telco and we have an enormous buildout coming with five g and environments emerging. What an opportunity for us, a virgin market right next to us and we're getting some early mega winds in this area using the technologies that you have helped us cure rate than the So we're quite excited about this topic area as well. market. So let's look at this full view of the multicloud. Any cloud journey. And we see that businesses are on a multicloud journey, you know, and today we see this fundamentally in these two paths, a hybrid cloud and a public cloud. And these paths are complimentary and coexisting, but today, each is being driven by unique requirements and unique teams. Largely the hybrid cloud is being driven by it. And operations, the public cloud being driven more by developers and line of business requirements and as some multicloud environment. So how do we deliver upon that and for that, let's start by digging in on the hybrid cloud aspect of this and as we think about the hybrid cloud, we've been talking about this subject for a number of years and I want to give a very specific and crisp definition. You're the hybrid cloud is the public cloud and the private cloud cooperating with consistent infrastructure and consistent operations simply put seamless path to and from the cloud that my workloads don't care if it's here or there. I'm able to run them in a agile, scalable, flexible, efficient manner across those two environments, whether it's my data center or someone else's, I can bring them together to make that work is the magic of the Vm ware Cloud Foundation. The vm ware Cloud Foundation brings together computer vsphere and the core of why we are here, but combines with that networking storage delivered through a layer of management and automation. The rule of the cloud is ruthlessly automate everything. We laid out this vision of the software defined data center seven years ago and we've been steadfastly working on this vision and vm ware. Cloud Foundation provides this consistent infrastructure and operations with integrated lifecycle management automation. Patching the m ware cloud foundation is the simplest path to the hybrid cloud and the fastest way to get vm ware cloud foundation is hyperconverged infrastructure, you know, and with this we've combined integrated then validated hardware and as a building block inside of this we have validated hardware, the v Sand ready environments. We have integrated appliances and cloud delivered infrastructure, three ways that we deliver that integrate integrated hyperconverged infrastructure solution. And we have by far the broadest ecosystem of partners to do it. A broad set of the sand ready nodes from essentially everybody in the industry. Secondly, we have integrated appliances, the extract of vxrail that we have co engineered with our partners at Dell technology and today in fact Dell is releasing the power edge servers, a major step in blade servers that again are going to be powering vxrail and vxrack systems and we deliver hyperconverged infrastructure through a broader set of Vm ware cloud partners as well. At the heart of the hyperconverged infrastructure is v San and simply put, you know, be San has been the engine that's just been moving rapidly to take over the entire integration of compute and storage and expand to more and more areas. We have incredible momentum over 15,000 customers for v San Today and for those of you who joined us, we say thank you for what you have done with this product today. Really amazing you with 50 percent of the global 2000 using it know vm ware. V San Vxrail are clearly becoming the standard for how hyperconverge is done in the industry. Our cloud partner programs over 500 cloud partners are using ulv sand in their solution, you know, and finally the largest in Hci software revenue. Simply put the sand is the software defined storage technology of choice for the industry and we're seeing that customers are putting this to work in amazing ways. Vm Ware and Dell technologies believe in tech as a force for good and that it can have a major impact on the quality of life for every human on the planet and particularly for the most underdeveloped parts of the world. Those that live on less than $2 per day. In fact that this moment 5 billion people worldwide do not have access to modern affordable surgery. Mercy ships is working hard to change the global surgery crisis with greater than 400 volunteers. Mercy ships operates the largest NGO hospital ship delivering free medical care to the poorest of the poor in Africa. Let's see from them now. When the ship shows up to port, literally people line up for days to receive state of the art life, sane changing life saving surgeries, tumor site limbs, disease blindness, birth defects, but not only that, the personnel are educating and training the local healthcare providers with new skills and infrastructure so they can care for their own. After the ship has left, mercy ships runs on Vm ware, a dell technology with VX rail, Dell Isilon data protection. We are the it platform for mercy ships. Mercy ships is now building their next generation ship called global mercy, which were more than double. It's lifesaving capacity. It's the largest charity hospital ever. It will go live in 20 slash 20 serving Africa and I personally plan on being there for its launch. It is truly amazing what they are doing with our technology. Thanks. So we see this picture of the hybrid cloud. We've talked about how we do that for the private cloud. So let's look over at the public cloud and let's dig into this a little bit more deeply. You know, we're taking this incredible power of the Vm ware Cloud Foundation and making it available for the leading cloud providers in the world and with that, the partnership that we announced almost two years ago with Amazon and on the stage last year, we announced their first generation of products, no better example of the hybrid cloud. And for that it's my pleasure to bring to stage my friend, my partner, the CEO of aws. Please welcome Andy Jassy. Thank you andy. You know, you honor us with your presence, you know, and it really is a pleasure to be able to come in front of this audience and talk about what our teams have accomplished together over the last, uh, year. Yo, can you give us some perspective on that, Andy and what customers are doing with it? Well, first of all, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. It's great to be here with all of you. Uh, you know, the offering that we have together customers because it allows them to use the same software they've been using to again, where cloud and aws is very appealing to manage their infrastructure for years to be able to deploy it an aws and we see a lot of customer momentum and a lot of customers using it. You see it in every imaginable vertical business segment in transportation. You see it with stagecoach and media and entertainment. You see it with discovery communications in education, Mit and Caltech and consulting and accenture and cognizant and dxc you see in every imaginable vertical business segment and the number of customers using the offering is doubling every quarter. So people were really excited about it and I think that probably the number one use case we see so far, although there are a lot of them, is customers who are looking to migrate on premises applications to the cloud. And a good example of that is mit. We're there right now in the process of migrating. In fact, they just did migrate 3000 vms from their data centers to Vm ware cloud native us. And this would have taken years before to do in the past, but they did it in just three months. It was really spectacular and they're just a fun company to work with and the team there. But we're also seeing other use cases as well. And you're probably the second most common example is we'll say on demand capabilities for things like disaster recovery. We have great examples of customers you that one in particular, his brakes, right? Urban in those. The brings security trucks and they all armored trucks coming by and they had a critical need to retire a secondary data center that they were using, you know, for Dr. so we quickly built to Dr Protection Environment for $600. Bdms know they migrated their mission critical workloads and Wallah stable and consistent Dr and now they're eliminating that site and looking for other migrations as well. The rate of 10 to 15 percent. It was just a great deal. One of the things I believe Andy, he'll customers should never spend capital, uh, Dr ever again with this kind of capability in place. That is just that game changing, you know, and you know, obviously we've been working on expanding our reach, you know, we promised to make the service available a year ago with the global footprint of Amazon and now we've delivered on that promise and in fact today or yesterday if you're an ozzie right down under, we announced in Sydney, uh, as well. And uh, now we're in US Europe and in APJ. Yeah. It's really, I mean it's very exciting. Of course Australia is one of the most virtualized places in the world and, and it's pretty remarkable how fast European customers have started using the offering to and just the quarter that's been out there and probably have the many requests customers has had. And you've had a, probably the number one request has been that we make the offering available in all the regions. The aws has regions and I can tell you by the end of 2019 will largely be there including with golf clubs and golf clap. You guys have been, that's been huge for you guys. Yeah. It's a government only region that we have that a lot of federal government workloads live in and we are pretty close together having the offering a fedramp authority to operate, which is a big deal on a game changer for governments because then there'll be able to use the familiar tools they use and vm ware not just to run their workloads on premises but also in the cloud as well with the data privacy requirements, security requirements they need. So it's a real game changer for government too. Yeah. And this you can see by the picture here basically before the end of next year, everywhere that you are and have an availability zone. We're going to be there running on data. Yup. Yeah. Let's get with it. Okay. We're a team go faster. Okay. You'll and you know, it's not just making it available, but this pace of innovation and you know, you guys have really taught us a few things in this respect and since we went live in the Oregon region, you know, we've been on a quarterly cadence of major releases and two was really about mission critical at scale and we added our second region. We added our hybrid cloud extension with m three. We moved the global rollout and we launched in Europe with m four. We really add a lot of these mission critical governance aspects started to attack all of the industry certifications and today we're announcing and five right. And uh, you know, with that, uh, I think we have this little cool thing you know, two of the most important priorities for that we're doing with ebs and storage. Yeah, we'll take, customers, our cost and performance. And so we have a couple of things to talk about today that we're bringing to you that I think hit both of those on a storage side. We've combined the elasticity of Amazon Elastic Block store or ebs with ware is Va v San and we've provided now a storage option that you'll be able to use that as much. It's very high capacity and much more cost effective and you'll start to see this initially on the Vm ware cloud. Native us are five instances which are compute instances, their memory optimized and so this will change the cost equation. You'll be able to use ebs by default and it'll be much more cost effective for storage or memory intensive workloads. Um, it's something that you guys have asked for. It's been very frequently requested it, it hits preview today. And then the other thing is that we've worked really hard together to integrate vm ware's Nsx along with aws direct neck to have a private even higher performance conductivity between on premises and the cloud. So very, very exciting new capabilities to show deep integration between the companies. Yeah. You know, in that aspect of the deep integration. So it's really been the thing that we committed to, you know, we have large engineering teams that are working literally every day. Right on bringing together and how do we fuse these platforms together at a deep and intimate way so that we can deliver new services just like elastic drs and the c and ebs really powerful, uh, capabilities and that pace of innovation continue. So next maybe. Um, maybe six. I don't know. We'll see. All right. You know, but we're continuing this toward pace of innovation, you know, completing all of the capabilities of Nsx. You'll full integration for all of the direct connect to capabilities. Really expanding that. You're only improving licensed capabilities on the platform. We'll be adding pks on top of for expanded developer a capabilities. So just. Oh, thank you. I, I think that was formerly known as Right, and y'all were continuing this pace of storage Chad. So anyway. innovation going forward, but I think we also have a few other things to talk about today. Andy. Yeah, I think we have some news that hopefully people here will be pretty excited about. We know we have a pretty big database business and aws and it's. It's both on the relational and on the nonrelational side and the business is billions of dollars in revenue for us and on the relational side. We have a service called Amazon relational database service or Amazon rds that we have hundreds of thousands of customers using because it makes it much easier for them to set up, operate and scale their databases and so many companies now are operating in hybrid mode and will be for a while and a lot of those customers have asked us, can you give us the ease of manageability of those databases but on premises. And so we talked about it and we thought about and we work with our partners at Vm ware and I'm excited to announce today, right now Amazon rds on Vm ware and so that will bring all the capabilities of Amazon rds to vm ware's customers for their on premises environments. And so what you'll be able to do is you'll be able to provision databases. You'll be able to scale the compute or the memory or the storage for those database instances. You'll be able to patch the operating system or database engines. You'll be able to create, read replicas to scale your database reads and you can deploy this rep because either on premises or an aws, you'll be able to deploy and high high availability configuration by replicating the data to different vm ware clusters. You'll be able to create online backups that either live on premises or an aws and then you'll be able to take all those databases and if you eventually want to move them to aws, you'll be able to do so rather easily. You have a pretty smooth path. This is going to be available in a few months. It will be available on Oracle sql server, sql postgresql and Maria DB. I think it's very exciting for our customers and I think it's also a good example of where we're continuing to deepen the partnership and listen to what customers want and then innovate on their behalf. Absolutely. Thank you andy. It is thrilling to see this and as we said, when we began the partnership, it was a deep integration of our offerings and our go to market, but also building this bi-directional hybrid highway to give customers the capabilities where they wanted cloud on premise, on premise to the cloud. It really is a unique partnership that we've built, the momentum we're feeling to our customer base and the cool innovations that we're doing. Andy, thank you so much for you Jordan Young, rural 20th. You guys appreciate it. Yeah, we really have just seen incredible momentum and as you might have heard from our earnings call that we just finished this. We finished the last quarter. We just really saw customer momentum here. Accelerating. Really exciting to see how customers are starting to really do the hybrid cloud at scale and with this we're just seeing that this vm ware cloud foundation available on Amazon available on premise. Very powerful, but it's not just the partnership with Amazon. We are thrilled to see the momentum of our Vm ware cloud provider program and this idea of the vm ware cloud providers has continued to gain momentum in the industry and go over five years. Right. This program has now accumulated more than 4,200 cloud partners in over 120 countries around the globe. It gives you choice, your local provider specialty offerings, some of your local trusted partners that you would have in giving you the greatest flexibility to choose from and cloud providers that meet your unique business requirements. And we launched last year a program called Vm ware cloud verified and this was saying you're the most complete embodiment of the Vm ware Cloud Foundation offering by our cloud partners in this program and this logo you know, allows you to that this provider has achieved the highest standard for cloud infrastructure and that you can scale and deliver your hybrid cloud and partnering with them. It know a particular. We've been thrilled to see the momentum that we've had with IBM as a huge partner and our business with them has grown extraordinarily rapidly and triple digits, but not just the customer count, which is now over 1700, but also in the depth of customers moving large portions of the workload. And as you see by the picture, we're very proud of the scope of our partnerships in a global basis. The highest standard of hybrid cloud for you, the Vm ware cloud verified partners. Now when we come back to this picture, you know we, you know, we're, we're growing in our definition of what the hybrid cloud means and through Vm Ware Cloud Foundation, we've been able to unify the private and the public cloud together as never before, but we're also seeing that many of you are interested in how do I extend that infrastructure further and farther and will simply call that the edge right? And how do we move data closer to where? How do we move data center resources and capacity closer to where the data's being generated at the operations need to be performed? Simply the edge and we'll dig into that a little bit more, but as we do that, what are the things that we offer today with what we just talked about with Amazon and our VCP p partners is that they can consume as a service this full vm ware Cloud Foundation, but today we're only offering that in the public cloud until project dimension of project dimension allows us to extend delivered as a service, private, public, and to the edge. Today we're announcing the tech preview, a project dimension Vm ware cloud foundation in a hyperconverged appliance. We're partnered deeply with Dell EMC, Lenovo for the first partners to bring this to the marketplace, built on that same proven infrastructure, a hybrid cloud control plane, so literally just like we're managing the Vm ware cloud today, we're able to do that for your on premise. You're small or remote office or your edge infrastructure through that exact same as a service management and control plane, a complete vm ware operated end to end environment. This is project dimension. Taking the vcf stack, the full vm ware cloud foundation stack, making an available in the cloud to the edge and on premise as well, a powerful solution operated by BM ware. This project dimension and project dimension allows us to have a fundamental building block in our approach to making customers even more agile, flexible, scalable, and a key component of our strategy as well. So let's click into that edge a little bit more and we think about the edge in the following layers, the compute edge, how do we get the data and operations and applications closer to where they need to be. If you remember last year I talked about this pendulum swinging of centralization and decentralization edge is a decentralization force. We're also excited that we're moving the edge of the devices as well and we're doing that in two ways. One with workspace, one for human optimized devices and the second is project pulse or Vm ware pulse. And today we're announcing pulse two point zero where you can consume it now as a service as well as with integrated security. And we've now scaled pulse to support 500 million devices. Isn't that incredible, right? I mean this is getting a scale. Billions and billions and finally networking is a key component. You all that. We're stretching the networking platform, right? And evolving how that edge operates in a more cloud and that's a service white and this is where Nsx St with Velo cloud is such a key component of delivering the edge of network services as well. Taken together the device side, the compute edge and rethinking and evolving the networking layer together is the vm ware edge strategy summary. We see businesses are on this multicloud journey, right? How do we then do that for their private of public coming together, the hybrid cloud, but they're also on a journey for how they work and operate it across the public cloud and the public cloud we have this torrid innovation, you'll want Andy's here, challenges. You know, he's announcing 1500 new services or were extraordinary innovation and you'll same for azure or Google Ibm cloud, but it also creates the same complexity as we said. Businesses are using multiple public clouds and how do I operate them? How do I make them work? You know, how do I keep track of my accounts and users that creates a set of cloud operations problems as well in the complexity of doing that. How do you make it work? Right? And your for that. We'll just see that there's this idea cloud cost compliance, analytics as these common themes that of, you know, keep coming up and we're seeing in our customers that are new role is emerging. The cloud operations role. You're the person who's figuring out how to make these multicloud environments work and keep track of who's using what and which data is landing where today I'm thrilled to tell you that the, um, where is acquiring the leader in this space? Cloudhealth technologies. Thank you. Cloudhealth technologies supports today, Amazon, azure and Google. They have some 3,500 customers, some of the largest and most respected brands in the, as a service industry. And Sasa business today rapidly span expanding feature sets. We will take cloudhealth and we're going to make it a fundamental platform and branded offering from the um, where we will add many of the other vm ware components into this platform, such as our wavefront analytics, our cloud, choreo compliance, and many of the other vm ware products will become part of the cloudhealth suite of services. We will be enabling that through our enterprise channels as well as through our MSP and BCPP partners as well know. Simply put, we will make cloudhealth the cloud operations platform of choice for the industry. I'm thrilled today to have Joe Consella, the CTO and founder. Joe, please stand up. Thank you joe to your team of a couple hundred, you know, mostly in Boston. Welcome to the Vm ware family, the Vm ware community. It is a thrill to have you part of our team. Thank you joe. Thank you. We're also announcing today, and you can think of this, much like we had v realize operations and v realize automation, the compliment to the cloudhealth operations, vm ware, cloud automation, and some of you might've heard of this in the past, this project tango. Well, today we're announcing the initial availability of Vm ware, cloud automation, assemble, manage complex applications, automate their provisioning and cloud services, and manage them through a brokerage the initial availability of cloud automation services, service. Your today, the acquisition of cloudhealth as a platform, the aware of the most complete set of multicloud management tools in the industry, and we're going to do so much more so we've seen this picture of this multicloud journey that our customers are on and you know, we're working hard to say we are going to bridge across these worlds of innovation, the multicloud world. We're doing many other things. You're gonna hear a lot at the show today about this year. We're also giving the tech preview of the Vm ware cloud marketplace for our partners and customers. Also today, Dell technologies is announcing their cloud marketplace to provide a self service, a portfolio of a Dell emc technologies. We're fundamentally in a unique position to accelerate your multicloud journey. So we've built out this any cloud piece, but right in the middle of that any cloud is the network. And when we think about the network, we're just so excited about what we have done and what we're seeing in the industry. So let's click into this a little bit further. We've gotten a lot done over the last five years. Networking. Look at these numbers. 80 million switch ports have been shipped. We are now 10 x larger than number two and software defined networking. We have over 7,500 customers running on Nsx and maybe the stat that I'm most proud of is 82 percent of the fortune 100 has now adopted nsx. You have made nsx these standard and software defined networking. Thank you very much. Thank you. When we think about this journey that we're on, we started. You're saying, Hey, we've got to break the chains inside of the data center as we said. And then Nsx became the software defined networking platform. We started to do it through our cloud provider partners. Ibm made a huge commitment to partner with us and deliver this to their customers. We then said, boy, we're going to make a fundamental to all of our cloud services including aws. We built this bridge called the hybrid cloud extension. We said we're going to build it natively into what we're doing with Telcos, with Azure and Amazon as a service. We acquired the St Wagon, right, and a Velo cloud at the hottest product of Vm ware's portfolio today. The opportunity to fundamentally transform branch and wide area networking and we're extending it to the edge. You're literally, the world has become this complex network. We have seen the world go from the old defined by rigid boundaries, simply put in a distributed world. Hardware cannot possibly work. We're empowering customers to secure their applications and the data regardless of where they sit and when we think of the virtual cloud network, we say it's these three fundamental things, a cloud centric networking fabric with intrinsic security and all of it delivered in software. The world is moving from data centers to centers of data and they need to be connected and Nsx is the way that we will do that. So you'll be aware of is well known for this idea of talking but also showing. So no vm world keynote is okay without great demonstrations of it because you shouldn't believe me only what we can actually show and to do that know I'm going to have our CTL come onstage and CTL y'all. I used to be a cto and the CTO is the certified smart guy. He's also known as the chief talking officer and today he's my demo partner. Please walk, um, Vm ware, cto ray to the stage. Right morning pat. How you doing? Oh, it's great ray, and thanks so much for joining us. Know I promised that we're going to show off some pretty cool stuff here. We've covered a lot already, but are you up to the task? We're going to try and run through a lot of demos. We're going to do it fast and you're going to have to keep me on time to ask an awkward question. Slow me down. Okay. That's my fault if you run along. Okay, I got it. I got it. Let's jump right in here. So I'm a CTO. I get to meet lots of customers that. A few weeks ago I met a cio of a large distribution company and she described her it infrastructure as consisting of a number of data centers troll to us, which he also spoke of a large number of warehouses globally, and each of these had local hyperconverged compute and storage, primarily running surveillance and warehouse management applications, and she pulls me four questions. The first question she asked me, she says, how do I migrate one of these data centers to Vm ware cloud on aws? I want to get out of one of these data centers. Okay. Sounds like something andy and I were just talking exactly, exactly what you just spoke to a few moments ago. She also wanted to simplify the management of the infrastructure in the warehouse as themselves. Okay. He's age and smaller data centers that you've had out there. Her application at the warehouses that needed to run locally, butter developers wanted to develop using cloud infrastructure. Cloud API is a little bit late. The rds we spoken with her in. Her final question was looking to the future, make all this complicated management go away. I want to be able to focus on my application, so that's what my business is about. So give me some new ways of how to automate all of this infrastructure from the edge to the cloud. Sounds pretty clear. Can we do it? Yes we can. So we're going to dive right in right now into one of these demos. And the first demo we're going to look at it is vm ware cloud on aws. This is the best solution for accelerating this public cloud journey. So can we start the demo please? So what you were looking at here is one of those data centers and you should be familiar with this product. It's a familiar vsphere client. You see it's got a bunch of virtual machines running in there. These are the virtual machines that we now want to be able to migrate and move the VMC on aws. So we're going to go through that migration right now. And to do that we use a product that you've seen already atx, however it's the x has been, has got some new cool features since the last time we download it. Probably on this stage here last year, I wanted those in particular is how do we do bulk migration and there's a new cool thing, right? Whole thing we want to move the data center en mass and his concept here is cloud motion with vsphere replication. What this does is it replicates the underlying storage of the virtual machines using vsphere replication. So if and when you want to now do the final migration, it actually becomes a vmotion. So this is what you see going on right here. The replication is in place. Now when you want to touch you move those virtual machines. What you'll do is a vmotion and the key thing to think about here is this is an actual vmotion. Those the ends as room as they're moving a hustler, migrating remained life just as you would in a v motion across one particular infrastructure. Did you feel complete application or data center migration with no dying town? It's a Standard v motion kind of appearance. Wow. That is really impressive. That's correct. Wow. You. So one of the other things we want to talk about here is as we are moving these virtual machines from the on prem infrastructure to the VMC on aws infrastructure, unfortunately when we set up the cloud on VMC and aws, we only set up for hosts, uh, that might not be, that'd be enough because she is going to move the whole infrastructure of that this was something you guys, you and Andy referred to briefly data center. Now, earlier, this concept of elastic drs. what elastic drs does, it allows the VMC on aws to react to the workloads as they're being created and pulled in onto that infrastructure and automatically pull in new hosts into the VMC infrastructure along the way. So what you're seeing here is essentially the MC growing the infrastructure to meet the needs of the workloads themselves. Very cool. So overseeing that elastic drs. we also see the ebs capabilities as well. Again, you guys spoke about this too. This is the ability to be able to take the huge amount of stories that Amazon have, an ebs and then front that by visa you get the same experience of v Sign, but you get this enormous amount of storage capabilities behind it. Wow. That's incredible. That's incredible. I'm excited about this. This is going to enable customers to migrate faster and larger than ever before. Correct. Now she had a series of little questions. Okay. The second question was around what about all those data centers and those age applications that I did not move, and this is where we introduce the project which you've heard of already tonight called project dementia. What this does, it gives you the simplicity of Vm ware cloud, but bringing that out to the age, you know what's basically going on here, vmc on aws is a service which manages your infrastructure in aws. We know stretch that service out into your infrastructure, in your data center and at the age, allowing us to be able to manage that infrastructure in the same way. Once again, let's dive down into a demo and take a look at what this looks like. So what you've got here is a familiar series of services available to you, one of them, which is project dimension. When you enter project dimension, you first get a view of all of the different infrastructure that you have available to you, your data centers, your edge locations. You can then dive deeply into one of these to get a closer look at what's going on here. We're diving into one of these The problem is there's a networking problem going on in this warehouse. warehouses and we see it as a problem here. How do we know? We know because vm ware is running this as a managed service. We are directly managing or sorry, monitoring your infrastructure or we discover there's something going wrong here. We automatically create the ASR, so somebody is dealing with this. You have visibility to what's going on, but the vm ware managed service is already chasing the problem for you. Oh, very good. So now we're seeing this dispersed infrastructure with project dementia, but what's running on it so well before we get with running out, you've got another problem and the problem is of course, if you're managing a lot of infrastructure like this, you need to keep it up to date. And so once again, this is where the vm ware managed service kicks in. We manage that infrastructure in terms of patching it and updating it for you. And as an example, when we released a security patch, here's one for the recent l, one terminal fault, the Vmr managed service is already on that and making sure that your on prem and edge infrastructure is up to date. Very good. Now, what's running? Okay. So what's running, uh, so we mentioned this case of this software running at the edge infrastructure itself, and these are workloads which are running locally in those age, uh, those edge locations. This is a surveillance application. You can see it here at the bottom it says warehouse safety monitor. So this is an application which gathers images and then stores those images He said my sql database on top there, now this is where we leverage the somewhere and it puts them in a database. technology you just learned about when Andy and pat spoke about disability to take rds and run that on your on prem infrastructure. The block of virtual machines in the moment are the rds components from Amazon running in your infrastructure or in your edge location, and this gives you the ability to allow your developers to be able to leverage and operate against those Apis, but now the actual database, the infrastructure is running on prem and you might be doing just for performance reasons because of latency, you might be doing it simply because this data center is not always connected to the cloud. When you take a look into under the hood and see what's going on here, what you actually see this is vsphere, a modified version of vsphere. You see this new concept of my custom availability zone. That is the availability zone running on your infrastructure which supports or ds. What's more interesting is you flip back to the Amazon portal. This is typically what your developers are going to do. Once again, you see an availability zone in your Amazon portal. This is the availability zone running on your equipment in your data center. So we've truly taken that already as infrastructure and moved it to the edge so the developer sees what they're comfortable with and the infrastructure sees what they're comfortable with bridging those two worlds. Fabulous. Right. So the final question of course that we got here was what's next? How do I begin to look to the future and say I am going to, I want to be able to see all of my infrastructure just handled in an automated fashion. And so when you think about that, one of the questions there is how do we leverage new technologies such as ai and ml to do that? So what you've got here is, sorry we've got a little bit later. What you've got here is how do I blend ai in a male and the power of what's in the data center itself. Okay. And we could do that. We're bringing you the AI and ml, right? And fusing them together as never before to truly change how the data center operates. Correct. And it is this introduction is this merging of these things together, which is extremely powerful in my mind. This is a little bit like a self driving vehicle, so thinking about a car driving down the street is self driving vehicle, it is consuming information from all of the environment around it, other vehicles, what's happening, everything from the wetter, but it also has a lot of built in knowledge which is built up to to self learning and training along the way in the kids collecting lots of that data for decades. Exactly. And we've got all that from all the infrastructure that we have. We can now bring that to bear. So what we're focusing on here is a project called project magna and project. Magna leverage is all of this infrastructure. What it does here is it helps connect the dots across huge datasets and again a deep insight across the stack, all the way from the application hardware, the infrastructure to the public cloud, and even the age and what it does, it leverages hundreds of control points to optimize your infrastructure on Kpis of cost performance, even user specified policies. This is the use of machine language in order to fundamentally transform. I'm sorry, machine learning. I'm going back to some. Very early was here, right? This is the use of machine learning and ai, which will automatically transform. How do you actually automate these data centers? The goal is true automation of your infrastructure, so you get to focus on the applications which really served needs of your business. Yeah, and you know, maybe you could think about that as in the past we would have described the software defined data center, but in the future we're calling it the self driving data center. Here we are taking that same acronym and redefining it, right? Because the self driving data center, the steep infusion of ai and machine learning into the management and automation into the storage, into the networking, into vsphere, redefining the self driving data center and with that we believe fundamentally is to be an enormous advance and how they can take advantage of new capabilities from bm ware. Correct. And you're already seeing some of this in pieces of projects such as some of the stuff we do in wavefront and so already this is how do we take this to a new level and that's what project magnet will do. So let's summarize what we've seen in a few demos here as we work in true each of these very quickly going through these demos. First of all, you saw the n word cloud on aws. How do I migrate an entire data center to the cloud with no downtime? Check, we saw project dementia, get the simplicity of Vm ware cloud in the data center and manage it at the age as a managed service check. Amazon rds and Vm ware. Cool Demo, seamlessly deploy a cloud service to an on premises environment. In this case already. Yes, we got that one coming in are in m five. And then finally project magna. What happens when you're looking to the future? How do we leverage ai and ml to self optimize to virtual infrastructure? Well, how did ray do as our demo guy? Thank you. Thanks. Thanks. Right. Thank you. So coming back to this picture, our gps for the day, we've covered any cloud, let's click into now any application, and as we think about any application, we really view it as this breadth of the traditional cloud native and Sas Coobernetti is quickly maybe spectacularly becoming seen as the consensus way that containers will be managed and automate as the framework for how modern APP teams are looking at their next generation environment, quickly emerging as a key to how enterprises build and deploy their applications today. And containers are efficient, lightweight, portable. They have lots of values for developers, but they need to also be run and operate and have many infrastructure challenges as well. Managing automation while patch lifecycle updates, efficient move of new application services, know can be accelerated with containers. We also have these infrastructure problems and you know, one thing we want to make clear is that the best way to run a container environment is on a virtual machine. You know, in fact, every leader in public cloud runs their containers and virtual machines. Google the creator and arguably the world leader in containers. They runs them all in containers. Both their internal it and what they run as well as G K, e for external users as well. They just announced gke on premise on vm ware for their container environments. Google and all major clouds run their containers and vms and simply put it's the best way to run containers. And we have solved through what we have done collectively the infrastructure problems and as we saw earlier, cool new container apps are also typically some ugly combination of cool new and legacy and existing environments as well. How do we bridge those two worlds? And today as people are rapidly moving forward with containers and Coobernetti's, we're seeing a certain set of problems emerge. And Dan cone, right, the director of CNCF, the Coobernetti, uh, the cloud native computing foundation, the body for Coobernetti's collaboration and that, the group that sort of stewards the standardization of this capability and he points out these four challenges. How do you secure them? How do you network and you know, how do you monitor and what do you do for the storage underneath them? Simply put, vm ware is out to be, is working to be is on our way to be the dial tone for Coobernetti's. Now, some of you who were in your twenties might not know what that means, so we know over to a gray hair or come and see me afterward. We'll explain what dial tone means to you or maybe stated differently. Enterprise grade standard for Cooper netties and for that we are working together with our partners at Google as well as pivotal to deliver Vm ware, pks, Cooper netties as an enterprise capability. It builds on Bosh. The lifecycle engine that's foundational to the pivotal have offerings today, uh, builds on and is committed to stay current with the latest Coobernetti's releases. It builds on Nsx, the SDN container, networking and additional contributions that were making like harbor the Vm ware open source contribution for the container registry. It packages those together makes them available on a hybrid cloud as well as public cloud environments with pks operators can efficiently deploy, run, upgrade their coopernetties environments on SDDC or on all public clouds. While developers have the freedom to embrace and run their applications rapidly and efficiently, simply put, pks, the standard for Coobernetti's in the enterprise and underneath that Nsx you'll is emerging as the standard for software defined networking. But when we think about and we saw that quote on the challenges of Kubernetes today, we see that networking is one of the huge challenge is underneath that and in a containerized world, things are changing even more rapidly. My network environment is moving more quickly. NSX provides the environment's easily automate networking and security for rapid deployment of containerized environments that fully supports the MRP chaos, fully supports pivotal's application service, and we're also committed to fully support all of the major kubernetes distribution such as red hat, heptio and docker as well Nsx, the only platform on the planet that can address the complexity and scale of container deployments taken together Vm Ware, pks, the production grade computer for the enterprise available on hybrid cloud, available on major public clouds. Now, let's not just talk about it again. Let's see it in action and please walk up to the stage. When di Carter with Ray, the senior director of cloud native marketing for Vm ware. Thank you. Hi everybody. So we're going to talk about pks because more and more new applications are built using kubernetes and using containers with vm ware pts. We get to simplify the deploying and the operation of Kubernetes at scale. When the. You're the experts on all of this, right? So can you take as true the scenario of how pks or vm ware pts can really help a developer operating the Kubernedes environment, developed great applications, but also from an administrator point of view, I can really handle things like networking, security and those configurations. Sounds great. I love to dive into the demo here. Okay. Our Demo is. Yeah, more pks running coubernetties vsphere. Now pks has a lot of cool functions built in, one of which is Nsx. And today what I'm going to show you is how NSX will automatically bring up network objects as quick Coobernetti's name spaces are spun up. So we're going to start with the fees per client, which has been extended to Ron pks, deployed cooper clusters. We're going to go into pks instance one, and we see that there are five clusters running. We're going to select one other clusters, call application production, and we see that it is running nsx. Now a cluster typically has multiple users and users are assigned namespaces, and these namespaces are essentially a way to provide isolation and dedicated resources to the users in that cluster. So we're going to check how many namespaces are running in this cluster and more brought up the Kubernetes Ui. We're going to click on namespace and we see that this cluster currently has four namespaces running wire. We're going to do next is bringing up a new name space and show that Nsx will automatically bring up the network objects required for that name space. So to do that, we're going to upload a Yammel file and your developer may actually use Ku Kata command to do this as well. We're going to check the namespace and there it is. We have a new name space called pks rocks. Yeah. Okay. Now why is that guy now? It's great. We have a new name space and now we want to make sure it has the network elements assigned to us, so we're going to go to the NSX manager and hit refresh and there it is. PKS rocks has a logical robber and a logical switch automatically assigned to it and it's up and running. So I want to interrupt here because you made this look so easy, right? I'm not sure people realize the power of what happened here. The developer, winton using Kubernetes, is api infrastructure to familiar with added a new namespace and behind the scenes pks and tardy took care of the networking. It combination of Nsx, a combination of what we do at pks to truly automate this function. Absolutely. So this means that if you are on the infrastructure operation, you don't need to worry about your developer springing up namespaces because Nsx will take care of bringing the networking up and then bringing them back down when the namespace is not used. So rate, but that's not it. Now, I was in operations before and I know how hard it is for enterprises to roll out a new product without visibility. Right, so pks took care of those dates, you operational needs as well, so while it's running your clusters, it's also exporting Meta data so that your developers and operators can use wavefront to gain deep visibility into the health of the cluster as well as resources consumed by the cluster. So here you see the wavefront Ui and it's showing you the number of nodes running, active parts, inactive pause, et cetera. You can also dive deeper into the analytics and take a look at information site, Georgia namespace, so you see pks rocks there and you see the number of active nodes running as well as the CPU utilization and memory consumption of that nice space. So now pks rocks is ready to run containerized applications and microservices. So you just get us a very highlight of a demo here to see a little bit what pks pks says, where can we learn more? So we'd love to show you more. Please come by the booth and we have more cool functions running on pks and we'd love to have you come by. Excellent. Thank you, Lindy. Thank you. Yeah, so when we look at these types of workloads now running on vsphere containers, Kubernedes, we also see a new type of workload beginning to appear and these are workloads which are basically machine learning and ai and in many cases they leverage a new type of infrastructure, hardware accelerators, typically gps. What we're going to talk about here is how in video and Vm ware have worked together to give you flexibility to run sophisticated Vdi workloads, but also to leverage those same gpu for deep learning inference workloads also on vsphere. So let's dive right into a demo here. Again, what you're seeing here is again, you're looking at here, you're looking at your standard view realized operations product, and you see we've got two sets of applications here, a Vdi desktop workload and machine learning, and the graph is showing what's happening with the Vdi desktops. These are office workers leveraging these desktops everyday, so of course the infrastructure is super busy during the daytime when they're in the office, but the green area shows this is not been used very heavily outside of those times. So let's take a look. What happens to the machine learning application in this case, this organization leverages those available gpu to run the machine learning operations outside the normal working hours. Let's take a little bit of a deeper dive into what the application it is before we see what we can do from an infrastructure and configuration point of view. So this machine learning application processes a vast number of images and it clarify or sorry, it categorizes these images and as it's doing so, it is moving forward and putting each of these in a database and you can see it's operating here relatively fast and it's leveraging some gps to do that. So typical image processing type of machine learning problem. Now let's take a dive in and look at the infrastructure which is making this happen. First of all, we're going to look only at the Vdi employee Dvt, a Vdi infrastructure here. So I've got a bunch of these applications running Vdi applications. What I want to do is I want to move these so that I can make this image processing out a application run a lot faster. Now normally you wouldn't do this, but pot insisted that we do this demo at 10:30 in the morning when the office workers are in there, so we're going to move older Vdi workloads over to the other cluster and that's what you're seeing is going on right now. So as they move over to this other cluster, what we are now doing is freeing up all of the infrastructure. The GPU that Vdi workload was using here. We see them moving across and now you've freed up that infrastructure. So now we want to take a look at this application itself, the machine learning application and see how we can make use of that. Now freed up infrastructure we've got here is the application is running using one gpu in a vsphere cluster, but I've got three more gpu is available now because I've moved the Vdi workloads. We simply modify the application, let it know that these are available and you suddenly see an increase in the processing capabilities because of what we've done here in terms of making the flexibility of accessing those gps. So what you see here is the same gps that youth for Vdi, which you probably have in your infrastructure today, can also be used to run sophisticated machine learning and ai type of applications on your vsphere infrastructure. So let's summarize what we've seen in the various demos here in this section. First of all, we saw how the MRPS simplifies the deployment and operating operation of Kubernetes at scale. What we've also seen is that leveraging the Nvidia Gpu, we can now run the most demanding workloads on vsphere. When we think about all of these applications and these new types of workloads that people are running. I want to take one second to speak to another workload that we're seeing beginning to appear in the data center. And this is of course blockchain. We're seeing an increasing number of organizations evaluating blockchains for smart contract and digital consensus solutions. So this tech, this technology is really becoming or potentially becoming a critical role in how businesses will interact each other, how they will work together. We'd project concord, which is an open source project that we're releasing today. You get the choice, performance and scale of verifiable trust, which you can then bring to bear and run in the enterprise, but this is not just another blockchain implementation. We have focused very squarely on making sure that this is good for enterprises. It focuses on performance, it focuses on scalability. We have seen examples where running consensus algorithms have taken over 80 days on some of the most common and widely used infrastructure in blockchain and we project conquered. You can do that in two and a half hours. So I encourage you to check out this project on get hub today. You'll also see lots of activity around the whole conference. Speaking about this. Now we're going to dive into another section which is the anti device section. And for that I need to welcome pat back up there. Thank you pat. Thanks right. So diving into any device piece of the puzzle, you and as we think about the superpowers that we have, maybe there are no more area that they are more visible than in the any device aspect of our picture. You know, and as we think about this, the superpowers, you know, think about mobility, right? You know, and how it's enabling new things like desktop as a service in the mobile area, these breadth of smartphones and devices, ai and machine learning allow us to manage them, secure them and this expanding envelope of devices in the edge that need to be connected and wearables and three d printers and so on. We've also seen increasing research that says engaged employees are at the center of business success. Engaged employees are the critical ingredient for digital transformation. And frankly this is how I run vm ware, right? You know, I have my device and my work, all my applications, every one of my 23,000 employees is running on our transformed workspace one environment. Research shows that companies that, that give employees ready anytime access are nearly three x more likely to be leaders in digital transformation. That employees spend 20 percent of their time today on manual processes that can be automated. The way team collaboration and speed of division decisions increases by 16 percent with engaged employees with modern devices. Simply put this as a critical aspect to enabling your business, but you remember this picture from the silos that we started with and each of these environments has their own tribal communities of management, security automation associated with them, and the complexity associated with these is mind boggling and we start to think about these. Remember the I'm a pc and I'm a Mac. Well now you have. I'm an Ios. I'm a droid and other bdi and I'm now a connected printer and I'm a connected watch. You remember citrix manager and good is now bad and sccm a failed model and vpns and Xanax. The chaos is now over at the center of that is vm ware, workspace one, get it out of the business of managing devices, automate them from the cloud, but still have the mentor price. Secure cloud based analytics that brings new capabilities to this critical topic. You'll focus your energy on creating employee and customer experiences. You know, new capabilities to allow like our airlift, the new capability to help customers migrate from their sccm environment to a modern management, expanding the use of workspace intelligence. Last year we announced the chromebook and a partnership with HP and today I'm happy to announce the next step in our partnerships with Dell. And uh, today we're announcing that Dell provisioning for Vm ware, workspace one as part of Dell's ready to work solutions Dallas, taking the next leap and bringing workspace one into the core of their client to offerings. And the way you can think about this as Literally a dell drop ship, lap pops showing up to new employee. day one, productivity. You give them their credential and everything else is delivered by workspace one, your image, your software, everything patched and upgraded, transforming your business, right beginning at that device experience that you give to your customer. And again, we don't want to talk about it. We want to show you how this works. Please walk to the stage with re renew the head of our desktop products marketing. Thank you. So we just heard from pat about how workspace one integrated with Dell laptops is really set up to manage windows devices. What we're broadly focused on here is how do we get a truly modern management system for these devices, but one that has an intelligence behind it to make sure that we're kept with a good understanding of how to keep these devices always up to date and secure. Can we start the demo please? So what we're seeing here is to be the the front screen that you see of workspace one and you see you've got multiple devices a little bit like that demo that patch assured. I've got Ios, android, and of course I've got windows renewal. Can you please take us through how workspace one really changes the ability of somebody an it administrator to update and manage windows into our environment? Absolutely. With windows 10, Microsoft has finally joined the modern management body and we are really excited about that. Now. The good news about modern management is the frequency of ostp updates and how quickly they come out because you can address all those security issues that are hitting our radar on a daily basis, but the bad news about modern management is the frequency of those updates because all of us in it admins, we have to test each and every one of our applications would that latest version because we don't want to roll out that update in case of causes any problems with workspace one, we saw that we simply automate and provide you with the APP compatibility information right out of the box so you can now automate that update process. Let's take a quick look. Let's drill down here further into the windows devices. What we'll see is that only a small percentage of those devices are on that latest version of operating system. Now, that's not a good thing because it might have an important security fix. Let's scroll down further and see what the issue is. We find that it's related to app compatibility. In fact, 38 percent of our devices are blocked from being upgraded and the issue is app compatibility. Now we were able to find that not by asking the admins to test each and every one of those, but we combined windows analytics data with APP intelligent out of the box and be provided that information right here inside of the console. Let's dig down further and see what those devices and apps look like. So knew this is the part that I find most interesting. If I am a system administrator at this point I'm looking at workspace one is giving me a key piece of information. It says if you proceed with this update, it's going to fail 84, 85 percent at a time. So that's an important piece of information here, but not alone. Is it telling me that? It is telling me roughly speaking why it thinks it's going to fail. We've got a number of apps which are not ready to work with this new version, particularly the Mondo card sales lead tracker APP. So what we need to do is get engineering to tackle the problems with this app and make sure that it's updated. So let's get fixing it in order to fix it. What we'll do is create an automation and we can do this right out of the box in this automation will open up a Jira ticket right from within the console to inform the engineers about the problem, not just that we can also flag and send a notification to that engineering manager so that it's top of mine and they can get working on this fixed right away. Let's go ahead and save that automation right here, ray UC. There's the automation that we just So what's happening here is essentially this update is now scheduled meeting. saved. We can go and update oldest windows devices, but workspace one is holding the process of proceeding with that update, waiting for the engineers to update the APP, which is going to cause the problem. That's going to take them some time, right? So the engineers have been working on this, they have a fixed and let's go back and see what's happened to our devices. So going back into the ios updates, what we'll find is now we've unblocked those devices from being upgraded. The 38 percent has drastically dropped down. It can rest in peace that all of the devices are compliant and on that latest version of operating system. And again, this is just a snapshot of the power of workspace one to learn more and see more. I invite you all to join our EOC showcase keynote later this evening. Okay. So we've spoken about the presence of these new devices that it needs to be able to manage and operate across everything that they do. But what we're also seeing is the emergence of a whole new class of computing device. And these are devices which are we commonly speak to have been at the age or embedded devices or Iot. And in many cases these will be in factories. They'll be in your automobiles, there'll be in the building, controlling, controlling, uh, the building itself, air conditioning, etc. Are quite often in some form of industrial environment. There's something like this where you've got A wind farm under embedded in each of these turbines. This is a new class of computing which needs to be managed, secured, or we think virtualization can do a pretty good job of that in new virtualization frontier, right at the edge for iot and iot gateways, and that's gonna. That's gonna, open up a whole new realm of innovation in that space. Let's dive down and taking the demo. This spaces. Well, let's do that. What we're seeing here is a wind turbine farm, a very different than a data center than what we're used to and all the compute infrastructure is being managed by v center and we see to edge gateway hose and they're running a very mission critical safety watchdog vm right on there. Now the safety watchdog vm is an fte mode because it's collecting a lot of the important sensor data and running the mission critical operations for the turbine, so fte mode or full tolerance mode, that's a pretty sophisticated virtualization feature allowing to applications to essentially run in lockstep. So if there's a failure, wouldn't that gets to take over immediately? So this no sophisticated virtualization feature can be brought out all the way to the edge. Exactly. So just like in the data center, we want to perform an update, so as we performed that update, the first thing we'll do is we'll suspend ft on that safety watchdog. Next, we'll put two. Oh, five into maintenance mode. Once that's done, we'll see the power of emotion that we're all familiar with. We'll start to see all the virtual machines vmotion over to the second backup host. Again, all the maintenance, all the update without skipping a heartbeat without taking down any daily operations. So what we're seeing here is the basic power of virtualization being brought out to the age v motion maintenance mode, et cetera. Great. What's the big deal? We've been doing that for years. What's the, you know, come on. What's the big deal? So what you're on the edge. So when you get to the age pack, you're dealing with a whole new class of infrastructure. You're dealing with embedded systems and new types of cpu hours and process. This whole demo has been done on an arm 64. Virtualization brought to arm 64 for embedded devices. So we're doing this on arm on the edge, correct. Specifically focused for embedded for age oems. Okay. Now that's good. Okay. Thank you ray. Actually, we've got a summary here. Pat, just a second before you disappear. A lot to rattle off what we've just seen, right? We've seen workspace one cross platform management. What we've also seen, of course esx for arm to bring the power of vfx to edge on 64, but are in platforms will go no. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Thanks. Now we've seen a look at a customer who is taking advantage of everything that we just saw and again, a story of a customer that is just changing lives in a fundamental way. Let's see. Make a wish. So when a family gets the news that a child is sick and it's a critical illness, it could be a life threatening illness. The whole family has turned upside down. Imagine somebody comes to you and they say, what's the one thing you want that's in your heart? You tell us and then we make that happen. So I was just calling to give you the good news that we're going to be able to grant jackson a wish make, which is the largest wish granting organizations in the United States. English was featured in the cbs 60 minutes episode. Interestingly, it got a lot of hits, but uh, unfortunately for the it team, the whole website crashed make a wish is going through a program right now where we're centralizing technology and putting certain security standards in place at our chapters. So what you're seeing here, we're configuring certain cloud services to make sure that they always are able to deliver on the mission whether they have a local problem or not is we continue to grow the partnership and work with vm ware. It's enabling us to become more efficient in our processes and allows us to grant more wishes. It was a little girl. She had a two year old brother. She just wanted a puppy and she was forthright and I want to name the puppy in my name so my brother would always have me to list them off a five year old. It's something we can't change their medical outcome, but we can change their spiritual outcome and we can transform their lives. Thank you. Working together with you truly making wishes come true. The last topic I want to touch on today, and maybe the most important to me personally is security. You got to fundamentally, when we think about this topic of security, I'll say it's broken today and you know, we would just say that the industry got it wrong that we're trying to bolt on or chasing bad, and when we think about our security spend, we're spending more and we're losing more, right? Every day we're investing more in this aspect of our infrastructure and we're falling more behind. We believe that we have to have much less security products and much more security. You know, fundamentally, you know, if you think about the problem, we build infrastructure, right? Generic infrastructure, we then deploy applications, all kinds of applications, and we're seeing all sorts of threats launched that as daily tens of millions. You're simple virus scanner, right? Is having tens of millions of rules running and changing many times a day. We simply believe the security model needs to change. We need to move from bolted on and chasing bad to an environment that has intrinsic security and is built to ensure good. This idea of built in security. We are taking every one of the core vm ware products and we are building security directly into it. We believe with this, we can eliminate much of the complexity. Many of the sensors and agents and boxes. Instead, they'll directly leverage the mechanisms in the infrastructure and we're using that infrastructure to lock it down to behave as we intended it to ensure good, right on the user side with workspace one on the network side with nsx and microsegmentation and storage with native encryption and on the compute with app defense, we are building in security. We're not chasing threats or adding on, but radically reducing the attack surface. When we look at our applications in the data center, you see this collection of machines running inside of it, right? You know, typically running on vsphere and those machines are increasingly connected. Through nsx and last year we introduced the breakthrough security solution called app defense and app defense. Leverages the unique insight we get into the application so that we can understand the application and map it into the infrastructure and then you can lock down, you could take that understanding, that manifest of its behavior and then lock those vms to that intended behavior and we do that without the operational and performance burden of agents and other rear looking use of attack detection. We're shrinking the attack surface, not chasing the latest attack vector, you know, and this idea of bolt on versus chasing bad. You sort of see it right in the network. Machines have lots of conductivity, lots of applications running and something bad happens. It basically has unfettered access to move horizontally through the data center and most of our security is north, south. MosT of the attacks are eastwest. We introduced this idea of microsegmentation five years ago, and by it we're enabling organizations to secure some networks and separate sensitive applications and services as never before. This idea isn't new, that just was never practical before nsx, but we're not standing still. Our teams are innovating to leap beyond 12. What's next beyond microsegmentation, and we see this in three simple words, learn, imagine a system that can look into the applications and understand their behavior and how they should operate. we're using machine learning and ai instead of chasing were to be able to ensure good where that that system can then locked down its behavior so the system consistently operates that way, but finally we know we have a world of increasing dynamic applications and as we move to more containerize the microservices, we know this world is changing, so we need to adapt. We need to have more automation to adapt to the current behavior. Today I'm very excited to have two major announcements that are delivering on this vision. The first of those vsphere platinum, our flagship vm ware vsphere product now has app defense built right in platinum will enable virtualization teams. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, let's use it. Platinum will enable virtualization teams you to give an enormous contribution to the security profile of your enterprise. You could see whatever vm is for its purpose, its behavior until the system. That's what it's allowed to do. Dramatically reducing the attack surface without impact. On operations or performance, the capability is so powerful, so profound. We want you to be able to leverage it everywhere, and that's why we're building it directly into vsphere, vsphere platinum. I call it the burger and fries. You know, nobody leaves the restaurant without the fries who would possibly run a vm in the future without turning security on. That's how we want this to work going forward. Vsphere platinum and as powerful as microsegmentation has been as an idea. We're taking the next step with what we call adaptive microsegmentation. We are fusing Together app defense and vsphere with nsx to allow us to align the policies of the application through vsphere and the network. We can then lock down the network and the compute and enable this automation of the microsegment formation taken together adaptive microsegmentation. But again, we don't want to just tell you about it. We want to show you. Please welcome to the stage vj dante, who heads our machine learning team for app dispense. Vj a very good vj. Thanks for joining us. So, you know, I talked about this idea right, of being able to learn, lock and adapt. Uh, can you show it to us? Great. Yeah. Thank you. With vc a platinum, what we have done is we have put in everything you need to learn, lock and adapt, right with the infrastructure. The next time you bring up your wifi at line, you'll actually see a difference right in there. Let's go with that demo. There you go. And when you look at our defense there, what you see is that all your guests, virtual machines and all your host, hundreds of them and thousands of virtual machines enabling for that difference. It's in there. And what that does is immediately gets you visibility into the processes running on those virtual machines and the risk for the first time. Think about it for the first time. You're looking at the infrastructure through the lens of an application. Here, for example, the ecommerce application, you can see the components that make up that application, how they interact with each other, the specific process, a specific ip address on a specific board. That's what you get, but so we're learning the behavior. Yes. Yeah, that's very good. But how do you make sure you only learn good behavior? Exactly. How do we make sure that it's not bad? We actually verify me insured. It's all good. We ensured that everybody these reputation is verified. We ensured that the haven is verified. Let's go to svc host, for example. This process can exhibit hundreds of behaviors across numerous. Realize what we do here is we actually verify that failure saw us. It's actually a machine learning models that had been trained on millions of instances of good, bad at you said, and then automatically verify that for okay, so we said, you. We learned simply, learn now, lock. How does that work? Well, once you learned the application, locking it is as simple as clicking on that verify and protect button and then you can lock both the compute and network and it's done. So we've pushed those policies into nsx and microsegmentation has been established actually locked down the compute. What is the operating system is exactly. Let's first look at compute, protected the processes and the behaviors are locked down to exactly what is allowed for that application. And we have bacon policies and program your firewall. This is nsx being configured automatically for you, laurie, with one single click. Very good. So we said learn lock. Now, how does this adapt thing work? Well, a bad change is the only constant, but modern applications applications change on a continuous basis. What we do is actually pretty simple. We look at every change as it comes in determinant is good or bad. If it's good, we say allow it, update the policies. That's bad. We denied. Let's look at an example as asco dxc. It's exhibiting a behavior that they've not seen getting the learning period. Okay? So this machine has never behave this This hasn't been that way. But. way. But again, our machine learning models had seen thousands of instances of this process. They know this is normal. It talks on three 89 all the time. So what it's done to the few things, it's lowered the criticality of the alarm. Okay, so false positive. Exactly. The bane of security operations, false positives, and it has gone and updated. Jane does locks on compute and network to allow for that behavior. Applications continues to work on this project. Okay, so we can learn and adapt and action right through the compute and the network. What about the client? Well, we do with workplace one, intelligence protect and manage end user endpoint, but what's one intelligence? Nsx and actually work together to protect your entire data center infrastructure, but don't believe me. You can watch it for yourself tomorrow tom cornu keynote. You want to be there, at 1:00 PM, be there or be nowhere. I love you. Thank you veejay. Great job. Thank you so much. So the idea of intrinsic security and ensuring good, we believe fundamentally changing how security will be delivered in the enterprise in the future and changing the entire security industry. We've covered a lot today. I'm thrilled as I stand on stage to stand before this community that truly has been at the center of changing the world of technology over the last couple of decades. In it. We've talked about this idea of the super powers of technology and as they accelerate the huge demand for what you do, you know in the same way we together created this idea of the virtual infrastructure admin. You'll think about all the jobs that we are spawning in the discussion that we had today, the new skills, the new opportunities for each one of us in this room today, quantum program, machine learning engineer, iot and edge expert. We're on the cusp of so many new capabilities and we need you and your skills to do that. The skills that you possess, the abilities that you have to work across these silos of technology and enabled tomorrow. I'll tell you, I am now 38 years in the industry and I've never been more excited because together we have the opportunity to build on the things that collective we have done over the last four decades and truly have a positive global impact. These are hard problems, but I believe together we can successfully extend the lifespan of every human being. I believe together we can eradicate chronic diseases that have plagued mankind for centuries. I believe we can lift the remaining 10 percent of humanity out of extreme poverty. I believe that we can reschedule every worker in the age of the superpowers. I believe that we can give modern ever education to every child on the planet, even in the of slums. I believe that together we could reverse the impact of climate change. I believe that together we have the opportunity to make these a reality. I believe this possibility is only possible together with you. I asked you have a please have a wonderful vm world. Thanks for listening. Happy 20th birthday. Have a great topic.

[Music] [Applause] [Music] welcome to the special cube conversations here in Palo Alto cube studios I'm John Ferrier the founder of Silicon angle in the cube we're here with divest cargoes the founder and CEO of arcus Inc our curse com ar-are see us calm and Steve Herod General Partner at at General Catalyst VCU's funded him congratulations on your launch these guys launched on Monday a hot new product software OS for networking powering white boxes in a whole new generation of potentially cloud computing welcome to this cube conversation congratulations on your >> launch thank you John >> so today I should talk about this this >> startup when do you guys were founded let's get to the specifics date you were founded some of the people on the team and the funding and we were formally incorporated in February of 2016 we really got going in earnest in August of 2016 and have you know chosen to stay in stealth the the founding team consists of myself a gentleman by the name of Kop tell he's our CTO we also have a gentleman by the name of Derek Young he's our chief architect and our backgrounds are a combination of the semiconductor industry I spent a lot of time in the semiconductor industry most recently I was president of easy chip and we sold that company to Mellanox and Kher and Derek our networking protocol experts spent 20 plus years at places like Cisco and arguably some of the best protocol guys in the world so the three of us got together and basically saw an opportunity to to bring some of the insights and and architectural innovation you know we had in mind to the Mobius a pedigree in there some some top talent absolutely some of the things that they've done in the past from some notable yeah I mean you know some if you if you'd like some just high-level numbers we have 600 plus years of experience of deep networking expertise within the company our collective team has shipped over 400 products to production we have over 200 IETF RFC papers that have been filed by the team as well as 150 plus patents so we really can do something on the pedigree for sure yeah we absolutely focused on getting the best talent in the world because we felt that it would be a significant differentiation to be able to start from a clean sheet of paper and so really having people who have that expertise allowed us to kind of take a step back and you know reimagine what could be possible with an operating system and gave us the benefit of being able to you know choose >> best-in-class approaches so what's the >> cap the point that this all came >> together what was the guiding vision was it network os's are going to be cloud-based was it going to be more I owe t what was the some of the founding principles that really got this going because clearly we see a trend where you know Intel's been dominating we see what NVIDIA is doing competitively certainly on the GPU side you're seeing the white box has become a trend Google makes their own stuff apples big making their own silicon seeking the that's kind of a whole big scale world out there that has got a lot of hardware experience what was the catalyst for you guys when you found this kinda was the guiding principle yeah I would say there were three John and you hit you hit on a couple of them in your reference to Intel and NVIDIA with some of the innovation but if I start at the top level the market the networking market is a large market and it's also very strategic and foundational in a hyper-connected world that market is also dominated by a few people and there's essentially three vertically integrated OEM so that dominate that market and when you have that type of dominance it leads to ultimately high prices and muted innovations so we felt number one the market was going through tremendous change but at the same time it had been tightly controlled by a few people the other part of it was that there was a tremendous amount of innovation that was happening at the silicon component level coming from the semiconductor industry I was early at Broadcom very you know involved in some of the networking things that happened in the early stages of the company we saw tremendous amounts of innovation feature velocity that was happening at the silicon component level that in turn led to a lot of system hardware people coming into the market and producing systems based on this wide variety of choices for you know for the silicon but the missing link was really an operating system that would unleash all that innovation so Silicon Valley is back Steve you you know you're a VC now but you were the CTO at VMware one of the companies that actually changed how data centers operate certainly as it certainly as a pretext and cloud computing was seeing with micro services and the growth of cloud silicon's hot IT operations is certainly being decimated as we old knew it in the past everything's being automated away you need more function now there's a demand this is this penny how you see I mean you always see things are a little early as of technologist now VC what got you excited about these guys what's the what's the bottom line yeah maybe two points on that which so one silicon is is definitely become interesting again if you will in the in the Silicon Valley area and I think that's partly because cloud scale and web scale allows these environments where you can afford to put in new hardware and really take advantage of it I was a semiconductor I first austerity too so it's exciting for me to see that but um you know is the fish that it's kind of a straightforward story you know especially in a world of whether it's cloud or IOT or everything networking is you know like literally the core to all of us working going forward and the opportunity to rethink it in a new design and in software first mentality felt kind of perfect right now I think I I think device even sell the team a little short even is with all the numbers that are there kr for instance this co-founder was sort of everyone you talk to will call him mister BGP which is one of the main routing protocols in the internet so just a ridiculously deep team trying to take this on and there been a few companies trying to do something kind of like this and I think what do they say that the second Mouse gets the cheese and I think I think we've seen some things that didn't work the first time around and we can really I think improve on them and have a >> chance to make a major impact on the networking market you know just to kind of go on a tangent here for a second >> because you know as you're talking kind of my brain is kind of firing away because you know one of things I've been talking about on the cube a lot is ageism and if you look at the movement of the cloud that's brought us systems mindset back you look at all the best successes out there right now it's almost a old guys and gals but it's really systems people people who understand networking and systems because the cloud is an operating system you have an operating system for networking so you're seeing that trend certainly happened that's awesome the question I have for you device is what is the difference what's the impact of this new network OS because I'm almost envisioning if I think through my mind's eye you got servers and server list certainly big train seeing and cloud it's one resource pools one operating system and that needs to have cohesiveness and connectedness through services so is this how you guys are thinking about how are you guys think about the network os what's different about what you guys are doing with ARC OS versus what's out there today now that's a great question John so in terms of in terms of what we've done the the third piece you know of the puzzle so to speak when we were talking about our team I talked a little bit about the market opportunity I talked a little bit about the innovation that was happening at the semiconductor and systems level and said the missing link was on the OS and so as I said at the onset we had the benefit of hiring some of the best people in the world and what that gave us the opportunity was to look at the twenty plus years of development that had happened on the operating system side for networking and basically identify those things that really made sense so we had the benefit of being able to adopt what worked and then augment that with those things that were needed for a modern day networking infrastructure environment and so we set about producing a product we call it our Co s and the the characteristics of it that are unique are that its first of all its best-in-class protocols we have minimal dependency on open source protocols and the reason for that is that no serious network operator is going to put an open source networking protocol in the core of their network they're just not going to risk their business and the efficacy and performance of their network for something like that so we start with best-in-class protocols and then we captured them in a very open modular Services microservices based architecture and that allows us the flexibility and the extensibility to be able to compose it in a manner that's consistent with what the end-use case is going to be so it's designed from the onset to be very scalable and very versatile in terms of where it can be deployed we can deploy it you know in a physical environment we can deploy it visa via a container or we could deploy it in the cloud so we're agnostic to all of those use case scenarios and then in addition to that we knew that we had to make it usable it makes no sense to have the best-in-class protocols if our end customers can't use them so what we've done is we've adopted open config yang based models and we have programmable api's so in any environment people can leverage their existing tools their existing applications and they can relatively easily and efficiently integrate our Co s into their networking environment and then similarly we did the same thing on the hardware side we have something that we call D pal it's a data plane adaptation layer it's an intelligent how and what that allows us to do is be Hardware agnostic so we're indifferent to what the underlying hardware is and what we want to do is be able to take advantage of the advancements in the silicon component level as well as at the system level and be able to deploy our go S anywhere it's let's take a step back so you guys so the protocols that's awesome what's the value proposition for our Co S and who's the target audience you mentioned data centers in the past is a data center operators is it developers is it service providers who was your target customer yeah so so the the piece of the puzzle that wraps everything together is we wanted to do it at massive scale and so we have the ability to support internet scale with deep routing capabilities within our Co s and as a byproduct of that and all the other things that we've done architectural II were the world's first operating system that's been ported to the high-end Broadcom strata DNX family that product is called jericho plus in the marketplace and as a byproduct of that we can ingest a full internet routing table and as a byproduct of that we can be used in the highest end applications for network operators so performance is a key value public performance as measured by internet scale as measured by convergence times as measured by the amount of control visibility and access that we provide and by virtue of being able to solve that high-end problem it's very easy for us to come down so in terms of your specific question about what are the use cases we have active discussions in data center centric applications for the leaf and spine we have active discussions for edge applications we have active discussions going on for cloud centric applications arcus can be used anywhere who's the buyer those network operator so since we can go look a variety of personas network operator large telco that's right inner person running a killer app that's you know high mission-critical high scale is that Mike right yeah you're getting you're absolutely getting it right basically anybody that has a network and has a networking infrastructure that is consuming networking equipment is a potential customer for ours now the product has the extensibility to be used anywhere in the data center at the edge or in the cloud we're very focused on some of the use cases that are in the CDN peering and IP you know route reflector IP peering use cases great Steve I want to get your thoughts because I say I know how you invest you guys a great great firm over there you're pretty finicky on investments certainly team check pedigrees they're on the team so that's a good inside market tamp big markets what's the market here for you but how do you see this market what's the bet for you guys on the market side yeah it's pretty pretty straightforward as you look at the size of the networking market with you know three major players around here and you know a longer tail owning a small piece of Haitian giant market is a great way to get started and if you believe in the and the secular trends that are going on with innovation and hardware and the ability to take advantage of them I think we have identified a few really interesting starting use cases and web-scale companies that have a lot of cost and needs in the networking side but what I would love about the software architecture it reminds me a lot of things do have kind of just even the early virtualization pieces if you if you can take advantage of movement in advantages and hardware as they improve and really bring them into a company more quickly than before then those companies are gonna be able to have you know better economics on their networking early on so get a great layer in solve a particular use case but then the trends of being able to take advantage of new hardware and to be able to provide the data and the API is to programmatic and to manage it who one would that it's creative limp limitless opportunity because with custom silicon that has you know purpose-built protocols it's easy to put a box together and in a large data center or even boxes yeah you can imagine the vendors of the advances and the chips really love that there's a good company that can take advantage of them more quickly than others can so cloud cloud service refined certainly as a target audience here large the large clouds would love it there's an app coming in Broadcom as a customer they a partner of you guys in two parts first comes a partner so we we've ported arc OS onto multiple members of the Broadcom switching family so we have five or six of their components their networking system on chip components that we've ported to including the two highest end which is the jericho plus and you got a letter in the Broadcom buying CA and that's gonna open up IT operations to you guys and volge instead of applications and me to talk about what you just said extensibility of taking what you just said about boxes and tying applique and application performance you know what's going to see that vertically integrated and i think i think eloping yeah from from a semiconductor perspective since i spent a lot of time in the industry you know one of the challenges i had founded a high court count multi processor company and one of the challenges we always had was the software and at easy chip we had the world's highest and network processor challenge with software and i think if you take all the innovation in the silicon industry and couple it with the right software the combination of those two things opens up a vast number of opportunities and we feel that with our Co s we provide you know that software piece that's going to help people take advantage of all the great innovation that's happening you mentioned earlier open source people don't want to bring open source at the core the network yet the open source communities are growing really at an exponential rate you starting to see open source be the lingua franca for all developers especially the modern software developers wine not open sourcing the core the amino acids gotta be bulletproof you need security obviously answers there but that seems difficult to the trend on open source what's the what's the answer there on why not open source in the core yeah so we we take advantage of open source where it makes sense so we take advantage of open and onl open network Linux and we have developed our protocols that run on that environment the reason we feel that the protocols being developed in-house as opposed to leveraging things from the open source community are the internet scale multi-threading of bgp integrating things like open config yang based models into that environment right well it's not only proven but our the the the capabilities that we're able to innovate on and bring unique differentiation weren't really going back to a clean sheet of paper and so we designed it ground-up to really be optimized for the needs of today Steve your old boss Palmer rich used to talk about the harden top mmm-hmm similar here right you know one really no one's really gonna care if it works great it's under the under the harden top where you use open source as a connection point for services and opportunities to grow that similar concept yes I mean at the end of the day open source is great for certain things and for community and extensibility and for visibility and then on the flip side they look to a company that's accountable and for making sure it performs and as high quality and so I think I think that modern way for especially for the mission critical infrastructure is to have a mix of both and to give back to community where it makes sense to be responsible for hardening things are building them when they don't expense so how'd you how'd you how'd you land these guys you get him early and don't sit don't talk to any other VCS how did it all come together between you guys we've actually been friends for a while which has been great in it at one point we actually decided to ask hey what do you actually do I found that I was a venture investor and he is a network engineer but now I actually have actually really liked the networking space as a whole as much as people talk about the cloud or open source or storage being tough networking is literally everywhere and will be everywhere and whatever our world looks like so I always been looking for the most interesting companies in that space and we always joke like the investment world kind of San Francisco's applications mid here's sort of operating systems and the lower you get the more technical it gets and so well there's a vaccine I mean we're a media company I think we're doing things different we're team before we came on camera but I think media is undervalued I wrote just wrote a tweet on that got some traction on that but it's shifting back to silicon you're seeing systems if you look at some of the hottest areas IT operations is being automated away AI ops you know Auto machine learning starting to see some of these high-end like home systems like that's exactly where I was gonna go it's like the vid I I especially just love very deep intellectual property that is hard to replicate and that you can you know ultimately you can charge a premium for something that is that hard to do and so that's that's really something I get drugs in the deal with in you guys you have any other syndicates in the video about soda sure you know so our initial seed investor was clear ventures gentleman by the name of Chris rust is on our board and then Steve came in and led our most recent round of funding and he also was on the board what we've done beyond that institutional money is we have a group of very strategic individual investors two people I would maybe highlight amongst the vast number of advisers we have our gentleman by the name of Pankaj Patel punka JH was the chief development officer at Cisco he was basically number two at Cisco for a number of years deep operating experience across all facets of what we would need and then there's another gentleman by the name of Amarjeet Gill I've been friends with armored teeth for 30 years he's probably one of the single most successful entrepreneurs in the he's incubated companies that have been purchased by Broadcom by Apple by Google by Facebook by Intel by EMC so we were fortunate enough to get him involved and keep him busy great pedigree great investors with that kind of electoral property and those smart mines they're a lot of pressure on you as the CEO not to screw it up right I mean come on now get all those smart man come on okay you got it look at really good you know I I welcome it actually I enjoy it you know we look when you have a great team and you have as many capable people surrounding you it really comes together and so I don't think it's about me I actually think number one it's about I was just kidding by the way I think it's about the team and I'm merely a spokesperson to represent all the great work that our team has done so I'm really proud of the guys we have and frankly it makes my job easier you've got a lot of people to tap for for advice certainly the shared experiences electively in the different areas make a lot of sense in the investors certainly yeah up to you absolutely absolutely and it's not it's not just at the at the board it's just not at the investor level it's at the adviser level and also at you know at our individual team members when we have a team that executes as well as we have you know everything falls into place well we think the software worlds change we think the economics are changing certainly when you look at cloud whether it's cloud computing or token economics with blockchain and new emerging tech around AI we think the world is certainly going to change so you guys got a great team to kind of figure it out I mean you got a-you know execute in real time you got a real technology play with IP question is what's the next step what is your priorities now that you're out there congratulations on your launch thank you in stealth mode you got some customers you've got Broadcom relationships and looking out in the landscape what's your what's your plan for the next year what's your goals really to take every facet of what you said and just scale the business you know we're actively hiring we have a lot of customer activity this week happens to be the most recent IETF conference that happened in Montreal given our company launch on Monday there's been a tremendous amount of interest in everything that we're doing so that coupled with the existing customer discussions we have is only going to expand and then we have a very robust roadmap to continue to augment and add capabilities to the baseline capabilities that we brought to the market so I I really view the next year as scaling the business in all aspects and increasingly my time is going to be focused on commercially centric activities right well congratulations got a great team we receive great investment cube conversation here I'm John furry here the hot startup here launching this week here in California in Silicon Valley where silicon is back and software is back it's the cube bringing you all the action I'm John Fourier thanks for watching [Music]

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. (bright music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, joined by Justin Warren, and you're watching SiliconANGLE's production of the Cube here at VMworld 2017. Three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Sometimes people ask me, "Stu, you guys are doing so many interviews, isn't it tiring?" I say well, but I get really good guests, and that makes my job really easy. We've had lots of customers on, I've been enjoying just as many others. One of the people that I've gotten to get to know through the VMware community, I'm thrilled to be able to bring back on the program, is Steve Herrod, who's now the managing director of General Catalyst. Steve, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, I feel like a veteran of this program, I love being on it. >> Yeah, I remember back when we created one of our first what we called Sizzle Videos, we had B roll from you, and Pat Gelsinger before he was on the VMware side, so you are always welcome on our program. We're glad that we could find time that fit on both of our schedules. You made a guest appearance, a younger Steve Herrod maybe, in the keynote had a lot of us laughing, so. >> Yeah, that was fun to be back. I think the story's kind of interesting. I don't know if it got lost in the dialogue a little bit, but the idea was something seemed super novel at the time, and then it becomes kind of the new normal, right, and I think that was the point he was trying to make. And it was, it was truly the case back in the early years of VMware, trying to convince people to do these virtual machines was ridiculous. Now it's about all these other topics. >> I think back, you know, I've worked with VMware for 15 years, I think back to how many people I explained what is virtualization. When vMotion first came out, the awe and excitement on everybody's, but it's 2017, come on. Virtualization's like the legacy. Now it's cloud, and developers, and blockchain, and everything. >> Steve: Containers and serverless! >> Stu: Serverless. >> That's right. >> Well, I guess they brought up serverless before I did, so that's great. Steve, what's happening in your world these days, what are some of the big conversations? >> Yeah, this's obviously one of my favorite conferences to come back to also, just to really see what's going on at a top level. Mostly because of the customers that are here, and then, obviously the infrastructure vendors. But I don't know, I feel like as I get older and go through this industry longer, you see a lot of the new things that are popping up, and for me it's always been about heterogeneity. And when we started VMware, what actually mattered was you had different vendors of servers, and like, it caused chaos by having different server vendors. That's kind of tamed, yeah exactly, there's like the BIOS or the HAL, and Windows had to change, or something. And like, no one talks about that whatsoever now, but if you just kind of squint your eyes a little bit, the heterogeneity is now am I in a public cloud, or private cloud? Or maybe, do I put my software into a container versus a VM? So I just, I always like looking at what is the heterogeneity, and then what are the real customers supposed to do with it? How do they navigate it and what companies can be built to help you sort of smooth it out and use the different things. I've been doing that all my life, and continue to look for companies that do that. >> Yeah, that mix of different things in customers, particularly Enterprise customers, who have like nine of everything. It seems like with VMware and the AWS now being more, well, we're friends now. Whereas previously it was like, oh no, you have to pick one or the other. It's like the heterogeneous nature of things, is that well, actually no, we need to work with multiple of, you all need to play nicely with each other, otherwise we can't use you. Because even if I, you know, MNA, for example, I go and buy someone, they might have something different. And that seems to get lost a bit. The vendors seem to focus a lot on greenfields. So do you think that this kind of, we're friends and yes, you can use both of us, and it's all good, do you think that's the way it should always have been and that's going to be good for customers, they're going to adopt this and want more than they might have with something that was like, no, no, you have to choose. >> I think that's absolutely right. The way I've seen people doing things, the customer always wins. That's kind of, every time I have a startup who's gotten created and they have a great customer, and they say, you know, blank vendor won't work with us, I have them call the customer and tell them to tell their other vendor, work with this startup. And the good news is any company that's successful is super customer-centric and they do listen. I think in this case, it's really fascinating. If you think about it, it used to be, like, you've been covering this forever, it used to be VMware was about server consolidation. And that's like the furthest thing from anyone's mind now, right, now it's, the real limiter to doing these new things tends to be people and operational skills. And so the idea that you can use the same way you're used to working with infrastructure, the same way that you grade storage, and the same way you think about it, and then apply to a world that just kind of outsources all of the underlying goo that they used to do on the servers, it makes a ton of sense from a VMware customer standpoint. And yeah, obviously as you look at the relationships you have with Google or with Amazon, you know, they're very incented to have new cloud services that people are able to consume, and the number one problem for them is how do you get, like, real important apps to leverage these new services. So it's symbiotic in the sense that maybe some of these existing apps, as you start to morph them, they can leverage a Amazon or a Google service. And so it's helpful on the needs of the public clouds as well. >> One of the areas where the heterogeneity of the environment causes even more complexity is security. So I know that that's something you've looked at awhile, we've talked to some of the companies that you work with. Heck, I think, you know, IoT, the surface area, is just changing by orders of magnitude. Security, top issue being discussed here. You know, Pat Gelsinger got up on stage and says, hey, I need to apologize for the industry because we failed you. (laughing) So you know, Steve, why haven't your portfolio companies fixed all of this yet? (laughing) >> Why do you still have security issues? >> Stu: What's your take on what VMware is doing, and yeah. >> I mean, it's obviously something people, if there was the Cube in 1981, it would have been talking about security (laughing) as a challenge. But I do think, you know, things have changed quite a bit as of late. I think the number of really advanced attackers, you know, truly nation states or organized crime going after it, it's the same reason that robbers rob banks, cause it's where the money is. And so I think the sophistication has gone up. At the same time, when the complexity of the environment has gone up a ton as well. And so I would say if we were in the good old days of less sophisticated attackers and like, a closed-in data center with no roaming mobile phones or SaaS, like, we'd probably be in pretty good shape. But a combination of those has really made it take to the next level. I think, you know, I think you have to really look at the complexity of those changes right now. I think the fact that there is a public cloud and a private cloud and that you have a device that has certain characteristics and then you have your server, it leads to the heterogeneity that we were talking about before. And so I really obsess over companies that can come in, like VMware is certainly trying to do as well, but that really try and come in and make something where a single way of thinking about security applies wherever stuff is running. And I think it's just too complex to have to have different admins, different policies, different everything. And certainly, if nothing else, it'll keep you from moving faster and leveraging the full cloud models. >> Yeah, given that security is, has been, it's been an issue for forever. It seems like that's something that just doesn't change. Is that due to the fact that we haven't actually done anything about it the right way, or do you think that it's just an inherent situation that is not going away because the problem is humans? And the problem is always humans, everything is a people problem. But in this case, is security, is it just going to be something that we have to manage rather than solve? >> I personally think that, I'm pretty optimistic we can do so, so much better than we have. I think it's always been- >> Justin: We are coming off a pretty low bar, so. (laughing) >> I thrive under low expectations. (laughing) So it's really good. But on a serious note, I think that a lot of the way that people looked at security has always been the cat and mouse game, where it's, I'm trying to stay ahead of the other guy, whether it's zero days, or whether it's, I mean, now we're getting malware infected through ad networks that show up on your favorite websites and through emails, like, the sophistication of spam attacks, or phishing attacks, are just ridiculous now. I mean, it looks so realistic. So I'm just a big advocate of let's totally think a different way about how we do security. And one thing I talk about often and I'm really obsessed with is the notion of, okay, we're always going to try and stop the bad stuff from hitting, but now we actually have to stop it from doing damage once it's in. And that's whether it's the segmentation that goes on in the network or whether it's, I have companies that are really focused on doing it in web browsers, the notion that you really have to sandbox and keep things in place is something I think is going to be a big step forward. Even like a database level right now, whenever you hear, I broke into Anthem Health and stole like six million records, like maybe we have row by row encryption, or maybe we have ways that, again, try your best not to have them happen, but when they do, let's just stop the damage from being as big as it is. So a model like that I think will be a really important part of the security posture going forward, which just people haven't put enough effort into. >> Okay. >> Steve, we've talked to you the last few years about developers. This year, I know they've got a hackathon, but I don't see as many hoodies, there's no longer a developer track, even, Pivotal made an announcement this morning, I'm like, come on, they didn't bring James Waters out? Rob Mees like all dressed up, looking proper, with the blue shirt and you know, the blazer and everything, so, where are the developers for the community here? >> Well, I do know, like when we were first starting to introduce a developer track, the day we announced the spring acquisition, for those that were around for that, there was complete stares and just like, this audience is a great, great audience, mostly focused on infrastructure, and thus, you know, it really wasn't a good fit there. So I think part of it is just knowing your audience, knowing that the goal of this particular conference is to make IT-enabled development of apps in a new way. So I think it's very smart that it's changed the focus quite a bit. But I do think, you know, when you have this type of solution, you're trying to solve all the problems in the hypervisor layer or in the management tools layers that you have, I think, as you go and think, like, take the security model a little bit further, some interesting announcements and good things going on here, but I'm kind of obsessed also with how do we make developers do a better job of having the applications being protected in the first place? And so there's a lot of research and interesting startups that are around self-protecting software. And it's like really putting it at an even higher level in the stack. And that's something that you would do at an infrastructure layer. It's something you would actually do at a developer conference or a developer focus. So I think you got to just be careful that you know your audience, you're certainly talking about the right solutions, but you're aware of the different approaches to doing this. Especially for things like dev ops, you really need to really immerse yourself with how people are developing and shipping their software to get the solutions in place. >> Yeah, it does feel like VMware has stopped apologizing for existing, so, you know, sort of bringing developers and saying, you know, we have a developer track, it's sort of like, oh wait, no, no, no, we're cool, really, we're cool. Whereas letting that go feels more like, no, no, we know who we are, and this is our audience. We will be the best us we can be rather than trying to be someone else. >> I think the buzz I've gotten just from walking around as you all said as well, this has been a very positive VMworld, and again, it's not only not being apologetic, but it's also like real announcements and real partnerships that are shipping. You know, obviously the Amazon and Google being big ones, but just across the board. Yeah, there's a lot of positive, if you even look at like the top tracks that are going on, it's VMware on AWS. So there's like real progress, and I think there's real interest in that side of things that makes you not have to focus on some of the developer stuff that might have been focused on in the past. >> Yeah, well certainly they're doing well on things like NSX and VSAN, which just seem to be selling like hotcakes. >> Yeah, those are- >> So that helps. And customers love it. >> Very interesting, yeah. >> Yeah Steve, speaking of the public clouds, I mean, this year we're finally starting to see some of these things come together. For a few years, we were almost like, oh, you know, messaging was like, they don't exist, or they're book sellers, or you know, if they win, we all lose, and everything. I was at the AWS summit in New York City a couple of weeks ago, and there's a couple of sessions done by VMware, Amazon's in the booth, Andy Jassy gets a big applause here. Last year, I've been at re:Invent for a number of years, that big AWS show. I know you've been there for years, starting to see some of the people that, you know, were early in this community playing there, how do you see those worlds colliding, the landscape, the competition, the coopetition, you know, what interests you there these days? >> I think it's pretty clear, and people have been talking about this for a while, but it's more clear to me than ever that, you know, there's always a swing back and forth of decentralized, centralized, I think, I think what we're really trying to find out is what are the boundaries going to be between applications that live in the public cloud and applications that stay on premises. And it's usually tracking some level of certifications, some level of data movement, all the things that you all have talked about before. But I think, you know, whether it's 50% is in the public cloud or 80% or 20%, I think that's where these lines are being drawn now. And it's very obvious that customers who want some of the benefits of the public cloud are going to be using more, and VMware needs to be the guider to help them get there. And likewise, Amazon and Google, they'd love to have more of the on-premises workloads and have a way to really speak to those more valuable, in many cases, applications. So it makes perfect sense, this is like this, I guess, battle that'll be going on forever. And I don't want to forget this either. What I think is also fascinating is, we also have these, you know, people talk about edge computing, but whatever it is, there's increasingly powerful devices, network connected, even further from the data centers. So I think we're going to have, in the end we're going to have like these edge device things, you're going to have your own data center, and then you're going to have a plethora of public clouds and SaaS offerings. And I think, again, just getting back to the master theme, how do you tame and let people effectively use these different layers and protect them? That's going to be where I think a lot of interesting companies are born. >> Yeah, great point. Cause sometimes people conflate some of these things. Cause for me it was, the public cloud kind of pulled from the data center, and now you've got the edge kind of pulling, >> Steve: Yeah, the other way. >> You know, that relation from the public cloud and that interesting dynamic and, you know, where a customer lives. What's the role of IT in the future? What's the role of the CIO? Is there some of the things, did you look at those pieces? >> I try to, you know, I actually tried to create this, I tried to make this nerdy formula, like, the number one question for IT has traditionally been like, where should I run stuff to be most cost effective, most responsive from a time standpoint to my customers, that I can secure it, based on the type of data, that I can pass certain certifications. So in many ways, when we got started with VMware, it was all about, let's take inventory of all my applications and bucket them and choose which bucket could be virtualized, which had to stay native. Now they're bucketizing them and saying, which ones could run in the public cloud, which ones need to be rewritten? And I think at the end of the day, an IT, a good IT team will know the business value and the, like, the goal of these applications and then help provide the easiest way to run them and the right place for what they're trying to do. Again, whether it's these end devices or whether it is their own data centers or elsewhere, I think the idea that they're a broker of services, some of which they provide themselves and some of which they outsource, I think that's the modern IT role. >> Yeah, that's quite a substantial change from what IT has traditionally done. And there has been, talking to customers and service providers and vendors, there has been a shift in ability, I think. But it feels like it's still only just getting started, rather than it being, you know, well advanced. Is that what you're seeing as well? >> It's a real shift, like you're saying, I think it's, we used to say it's like moving from the builder of services to the broker or services. So I do think that's a good analogy, where it used to be, if I don't build it myself, I can't offer support for it, I can't do cost controls, I can't offer it quickly. And so now I think they're just realizing their job is to get you the best thing for what you need to do. And again, some percentage of that time, it is by building it themselves. >> Justin: Yeah, okay. >> Steve, I'll give the final word with a wildcard, you know, VR, AR, AI, ML, blockchain, Ethereum, you know, what's exciting you these days? What things are you looking, yeah, John Furrier's going to run up here and tell you about the ICO soon I think. (laughing) But you know, you're down from the Valley, what's real, what's interesting, especially from your technology standpoint? >> I have an awesome job, much like you, I get to meet interesting people all day long. And all of them have interesting ideas of where the world is going. All of them are optimists, they think they're going to be the one to deliver it, so I love that part of it. But cutting through what's real and what's hype versus not is really the core job. I guess for you as well. (laughing) So I would just say, as with the traditional Gartner cycle, things get so overblown, and then reality settles in, and then they go forward. I probably get five pitches a week on this is machine learning for blah, and if you even knew a little bit about AI and ML, you realize, no, you're using stats. Like, it's just being used to so many ways. And we used to do it with the cloud, cloud washing it was called at the time. So anyway, I do think there's a lot of really substantive things going on. I love the blockchain work. I think it's also been a little overinflated, but the idea that you can do distributive brokering and keep consistency is going to play out in all sorts of areas. Maybe John's ICO will be a sign of the future for the core piece there. But I'm a big fan of what's going on with the combination of proper machine learning that's successful by near-humans and that has cloud resources to back it. I think it's those two things, you have to have both of them to really just start attacking a lot of problems. And we look at, certainly I look at the ones as they apply to security and to things like that, but they apply across everything from medical to almost every other part of our life. So I see a lot of those right now, and I think it's going to be a pretty big change as we head forward. >> Awesome, well Steve Herrod, always a pleasure to have you on the program. Thanks so much for joining us. For Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman. The Cube will be back with lots more coverage from VMworld 2017. Thanks for watching the Cube. (bright music)