(intro music) >> Narrator: "theCUBE's" live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (gentle music) >> Hey everyone, welcome back to "theCUBE," the leader in live and emerging tech coverage. As you well know, we are live at MWC23 in Barcelona, Spain. Lisa Martin with Dave Nicholson. Day three of our coverage, as you know, 'cause you've been watching the first two days. A lot of conversations about ecosystem, a lot about disruption in the telco industry. We're going to be talking about Open RAN. You've heard some of those great conversations, the complexities, the opportunities. Two guests join Dave and me. Abdullah Abuzaid, Technical Product Manager at Dell, and Gil Hellmann, VP Telecom Solutions Engineering and Architecture at Wind River. Welcome to the program guys. >> Thank you. >> Nice to be here. >> Let's talk a little bit about Dell and Wind River. We'll each ask you both the same question, and talk to us about how you're working together to really address the complexities that organizations are having when they're considering moving from a closed environment to an open environment. >> Definitely. Thank you for hosting us. By end of the day, the relationship between Dell and Wind River is not a new. We've been collaborating in the open ecosystem for long a time enough. And that's one of the, our partnership is a result of this collaboration where we've been trying to make more efficient operation in the ecosystem. The open environment ecosystem, it has the plus and a concern. The plus of simplicity, choice of multiple vendors, and then the concern of complexity managing these vendors. Especially if we look at examples for the Open RAN ecosystem, dealing with multiple vendors, trying to align them. It bring a lot of operational complexity and TCO challenges for our customers, from this outcome where we build our partnership with Wind River in order to help our customer to simplify, or run deployment, operation, and lifecycle management and sustain it. >> And who are the customers, by the way? >> Mainly the CSP customers who are targeting Open RAN and Virtual RAN deployments. That digital transformation moving towards unified cloud environment, or a seamless cloud experience from Core to RAN, these are the customers we are working with them. >> You'll give us your perspective, your thoughts on the partnership, and the capabilities that you're enabling, the CSPs with that. >> Sure. It's actually started last year here in Barcelona, when we set together, and started to look at the, you know, the industry, the adoption of Open RAN, and the challenges. And Open RAN brings a lot of possibilities and benefit, but it does bring a lot of challenges of reintegrating what you desegregate. In the past, you purchase everything from one vendor, they provide the whole solution. Now you open it, you have different layers. So if you're looking at Open RAN, you have, I like to look at it as three major layers, the management, application, and the infrastructure. And we're starting to look what are the challenges. And the challenges of integration, of complexity, knowledge that operator has with cloud infrastructure. And this is where we basically, Dell and Winder River set together and say, "How can we ease this? "How we can make it simpler?" And we decided to partner and bring a joint infrastructure solution to market, that's not only integrated at a lab at the factory level, but it basically comes with complete lifecycle management from the day zero deployment, through the day two operation, everything done through location, through Dell supported, working out of the box. So basically taking this whole infrastructure layer integration pain out, de-risking everything, and then continuing from there to work with the ecosystem vendor to reintegrate, validate the application, on top of this infrastructure. >> So what is the, what is the Wind River secret sauce in this, in this mix, for folks who aren't familiar with what Wind River does? >> Yes, absolutely. So Wind River, for many, many don't know, we're in business since 1981. So over 40 years. We specialize high performance, high reliability infrastructure. We touch every aspect of your day and your life. From the airplane that you fly, the cars, the medical equipment. And if we go into the telco, most of the telco equipment that it's not virtualized, not throughout the fight today, using our operating system. So from all the leading equipment manufacturers and even the smaller one. And as the world started to go into desegregation in cloud, Wind River started to look at this and say, "Okay, everything is evolving. Instead of a device that included the application, the hardware, everything fused together, it's now being decomposed. So instead of providing the operating environment to develop and deploy the application to the device manufacturer, now we're providing it basically to build the cloud. So to oversimplify, I call it a cloud OS, okay. It's a lot more than OS, it's an operating environment. But we took basically our experience, the same experience that, you know, we used in all those years with the telco equipment manufacturer, and brought it into the cloud. So we're basically providing solution to build an on-premises scalable cloud from the core all the way to the far edge, that doesn't compromise reliability, doesn't compromise performance, and address all the telco needs. >> So I, Abdullah, maybe you can a answer this. >> Yeah. >> What is the, what does the go-to-market motion look like, considering that you have two separate companies that can address customers directly, separately. What does that, what does that look like if you're approaching a possible customer who is, who's knocking on the door? >> How does that work? >> Exactly. And this effort is a Dell turnkey sales service offering, or solution offering to our customers. Where Dell, in collaboration with Wind River, we proactively validate, integrate, and productize the solution as engineered system, knock door on our customer who are trying to transform to Open RAN or open ecosystem. We can help you to go through that seamless experience, by pre-validating with whatever workload you want to introduce, enable zero touch provisioning, and during the day one deployment, and ensure we have sustainable lifecycle management throughout the lifecycle of the product in, in operate, in operational network, as well as having a unified single call of support from Dell side. >> Okay. So I was just going to ask you about support. So I'm a CSP, I have the solution, I go to Dell for support. >> Exactly. >> Okay. So start with Dell, and level one, level two. And if there are complex issues related to the cloud core itself, then Wind River will be on our back supporting us. >> Talk a little bit about a cust, a CSP example that is, is using the technology, and some of the outcomes that they're able to achieve. I'd love to get both of your perspectives on that. >> Vodafone is a great example. We're here in Barcelona. Vodafone is the first ora network in Europe, and it's using our joint solution. >> What are some of the, the outcomes that it's helping them to achieve? >> Faster time to market. As you see, they already started to deploy the ORAN in commercial network, and very successful in the trials that they did last year. We're also not stopping there. We're evolving, working with them together to improve like stuff around energy efficiency. So continue to optimize. So the outcome, it's just simplifying it, and you know, ready to go. Using experience that we have, Wind River is powering the first basically virtualized RAN 5G network in the world. This is with Verizon. We're at the very large scale. We started this deployment in late '20 and '19, the first site. And then through 2020 to 2022, we basically rolled in large scale. We have a lot of experience learning from it, which what we brought into the table when we partnered with Dell. A lot of experience from how you deploy at scale. Many sites from a central location, updates, upgrade. So the whole day two operation, and this is coming to bearing the solution that basically Vodafone is deploying now, and which allowed them... If I, if I look at my engagement with Verizon, started years before we started. And it took quite some time until we got stuff running. And if you look at the Vodafone time schedule, was significantly compressed compared to the Verizon first deployment. And I can tell you that there are other service providers that were announced here by KDI, for example. It's another one moving even faster. So it's accelerating the whole movement to Ora. >> We've heard a lot of acceleration talk this week. I'd love to get your perspective, Abdullah, talking about, you know, you, you just mentioned two huge names in Telco, Vodafone and Verizon. >> Yep. >> Talk a little bit about Dell's commitment to helping telecommunications companies really advance, accelerate innovation so that all of us on the other end have this thing that just works wherever we are 24 by 7. >> Not exactly. And this, we go back to the challenges in Open ecosystem. Managing multiple vendors at the same time, is a challenge for our customers. And that's why we are trying to simplify their life cycle by have, by being a trusted partner, working with our customer through all the journey. We started with Dish in their 5G deployment. Also with Vodafone. We're finding the right partners working with them proactively before getting into, in front of the customer to, we've done our homework, we are ready to simplify the process for you to go for it. If you look at the RAN in particular, we are talking with the 5g. We have ran the simplification, but they still have on the other side, limited resources and skillset can support it. So, bringing a pro, ahead of time engineer system, with a zero touch of provisioning enablement, and sustainable life cycle management, it lead to the faster time to market deployment, TCO savings, improved margins for our customers, and faster business revenue for their end users. >> Solid outcomes. >> And, and what you just just described, justifies the pain associated with disaggregating and reintegrating, which is the way that Gill referenced it, which I think is great because you're not, you're not, you're not re-aggregating, (laughs) you're reintegrating, and you're creating something that's better. >> Exactly. >> Moving forward. Otherwise, why would you do it? >> Exactly. And if you look at it, the player in the ecosystem, you have the vendors, you have the service integrators, you have the automation enablers, but kind of they are talking in silos. Everyone, this is my raci, this is what I'm responsible for. I, I'm not able, I don't want to get into something else while we are going the extra mile by working proactively in that ecosystem to... Let's bring brains together, find out what's one plus one can bring three for our customers, so we make it end-to-end seamless experience, not only on the technical part, but also on the business aspect side of it. >> So, so the partnership, it's about reducing the pen. I will say eliminating it. So this is the, the core of it. And you mentioned getting better coverage for your phone. I do want to point out that the phones are great, but if you look at the premises of a 5G network, it's to enable a lot more things that will touch your life that are beyond the consumer and the phone. Stuff like connected vehicles. So for example, something as simple as collision avoidance, the ability for the car that goes in front of you to be able to see what's happening and broadcast this information to the car behind that have no ability to see it. And basically affect our life in a way that makes our driving safer. And for this, you need a ultra low, reliable low latency communication. You need a 5G network. >> I'm glad you brought that up, because you know, we think about, "Well we just have to be connected all the time." But those are some of the emerging technologies that are going to be potentially lifesaving, and, and really life transforming that you guys are helping to enable. So, really great stuff there, but so much promise coming down the road. What's next for Dell and Wind River? And, and when you're in conversations with prospective CSP's, what is the superpower that you deliver together? I'd love to get both of your perspectives. >> So, if you look at it, number one, customers look at it, last savings and their day-to-day operation. In 5G nature, we are talking the introduction of ORAN. This is still picking up. But there is a mutualization and densification of ORAN. And this is where we're talking on monetizing my deployment. Then the third phase, we're talking sustainability and advanced service introduction. Where I want to move not only ORAN, I want to bring the edge at the same side, I want to define the advanced use cases of edge, where it enables me with this pre-work being done to deliver more services and better SLA services. By end of the day, 5G as a girl mentioned earlier, is not about a good better phone coverage, or a better speed robot, but what customized SLA's I can deliver. So it enables me to deliver different business streams to my end users. >> Yeah. >> So yeah. I will say there are two pens. One, it's the technology side. So for an example, energy efficiency. It's a very big pin point. And sustainability. So we work a lot around this, and basically to advance this. So if you look at the integrated solution today, it's very highly optimized for resource consumption. But to be able to more dynamically be able to change your power profile without compromising the SLA. So this is one side. The other side, it's about all those applications that will come to the 5G network to make our life better. It's about integrating, validating, certifying those applications. So, it's not just easy to deploy an ORAN network, but it's easy to deploy those applications. >> I'd be curious to get your perspective on the question of ROI in this, in this space. Specifically with the sort of the macro headwinds (clears throat) the economies of the world are facing right now, if you accept that. What does the ROI timeline look like when you're talking about moving towards ORAN, adopting VRAN, an amazing, you know, a plethora of new services that can be delivered, but will these operators have the appetite to take that, make that investment and take on that risk based upon the ROI time horizon? Any thoughts on that? >> Yeah. So if you look at the early days or ORAN introduction in particular, most of the entrepreneurs of ORAN and Virtual RAN ran into the challenges of not only the complexity of open ecosystem, but the integration, is like the redos of the work. And that's where we are trying to address it via pre-engineered system or building an engineer system proactively before getting it to the customers. Per our result or outcomes we get, we are talking about 30 to 50% savings on the optics. We are talking 110 ROI for our customers, simply because we are reducing the redos, the time spent to discover and explore. Because we've done that rework ahead of time, we found the optimization issues. Just for example, any customer can buy the same components from any multiple vendors, but how I can bring them together and give, deliver for me the best performance that I can fully utilize, that's, that's where it brings the value for our customer, and accelerate the deployment and the operation of the network. >> Do you have anything to add before we close in the next 30 seconds? >> Yeah. Yeah. (laughs) >> Absolutely. I would say, we start to see the data coming from two years of operation at scale. And the data supports performance. It's the same or better than traditional system. And the cost of operation, it's as good or better than traditional. Unfortunately, I can't provide more specific data. But the point is, when something is unknown in the beginning, of course you're more afraid, you take more conservative approach. Now the data starts to flow. And from here, the intention needs to go even better. So more efficiency, so cost less than traditional system, both to operate as well as to build up. But it's definitely the data that we have today says, the, ORAN system is at part, at the minimum. >> So, definite ROI there. Guys, thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about how you're helping organizations not just address the complexities of moving from close to open, but to your point, eliminating them. We appreciate your time and, and your insights. >> Thank you. >> All right. For our guests and for Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching "theCUBE," the leader in live and emerging tech coverage. Live from MWC23. We'll be back after a short break. (outro music)

>>The cube presents. Dell technologies world brought to you by Dell. >>Welcome to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin, with Dave Volante. The cube is live at Dell technologies world 2022. Dave, hope you say live, live <laugh>. We are live. We are in person. We are three-D. We are also here on the first day of our coverage with an eight time, right? Eight time cube alum, GA Norris joins us the senior vice president of edge portfolio solutions at Dell technologies. Welcome back our friend. >>Thank you. It's great to be here in this forum with live people, you know, and 3d, >>Isn't it. We're amazing. We're not, we're not via a screen. This is actually real. So Gill a a lot, a lot of buzz, great attendance at this first event, since 20, lot's been going on since then, we're talking a lot about edge. It's not new, but there's a lot changing what's going on there. >>Well, you know, edge has been around for a while. Um, actually since, you know, the beginning of time people were doing, you know, compute and, and applications, they in the, um, in the physical space where data it, but more and more, um, data is based on sensors in cameras and machine vision. And if you wanna make real time decisions, there's a few reasons why you can't just send everything back to a data center or a cloud. Maybe you don't have the right latency, maybe, um, you it's too costly. Maybe you don't have the right end with maybe you have security challenges, maybe have compliance challenges. So the world's moving more and more resources towards where the data is created and to make real time decisions and to generate new business values, things are changing and they're becoming much more, um, um, involved than before, much more. Um, so basically that that's, what's changing. You know, we need to deal with distributed architectures much more than we needed before. >>I think one of the things we've learned in the last very dynamic two years is that access to realtime data is no longer a nice to have it's table stakes for whether we're talking about retail, healthcare, et cetera. So that the, the realtime data access is critical for everybody to these days. >>Right? And it, it could be a real time decision, or it could even be data collection either way. You need to place some device, some comput next to the source. And then, you know, you have a lot of them and you just multiply by multiple use cases and you be, you basically, you have a very complex problem to solve. And if you ask me what's new is that complexity is big coming more and more, um, critical to solve >>Critical. >>Oh, go ahead, please. >>I was just gonna say, talk to me about some of the, from a, from a complexity resolution perspective, what are some of the things that Dell is doing to help organizations as they spread out to the edge more to meet that consumer demand, but reduce that complexity from an infrastructure standpoint. >>So we focus on simplifying. I think that's what people need right now. So there are two things we do. We, we optimize our products, um, whether they need regularization or different temperature envelopes or, uh, management capability, remote management capability, and we create solutions. And so we develop, um, solutions that look at specific, um, outcomes and we size it and we create deployment guides. Um, we do everything we can, um, to simplify the, uh, the edge uses for our customers. >>You know, you guys is talking about, it's not new. I, and I know you do a lot in retail. I think of like the NCR cash register as the, the original edge, you know, but there's other use cases. Uh there's you Gil, you and I have talked about AI inferencing in, in real time, there was a question today in the analyst forum, uh, I think it went to Jeff or nobody wanted to take it. No, maybe it was Michael, but the metaverse, but that there's edge space is the edge industrial I OT. So how do you, I mean, the Tam is enormous. How do you think about the use cases? Are there ones that, that aren't necessarily sort of horizontal for you that you don't go after, like EVs and TA the cars? Or how are you thinking about >>It? Depends. I agree that the, uh, edge business is very verticalized. Um, at the same time, there are very, uh, there is, there are themes that emerge across every industry. Um, so we're trying to solve things horizontally being Dell, we need to solve for, um, repeatability and scale, but we do package, you know, vertical solutions on top of them because that's what people need. Um, so for example, you know, you said, um, NCR being the, uh, the original edge. If I asked you today, name how many applications are, are running in a retail store to enable your experience? You'd say, well, there's self checkout. Maybe there is a, um, fraud detection, >>Let's say a handful >>It's handful. The fact is it's not, it's about 30 different applications, 30 that are running. So you have, you know, digital labels and you have, you know, a curbside delivery and you have inventory management and you have crowd management and you have safety and security. And what happens today is that every one of those solar is purchased separately and deployed separately and connected to the network separately and secured separately. Hence you see the problem, right? And so I know what we do, and we create a solution. For example, we see, okay, infrastructure, what can we consolidate onto an infrastructure that could scale over time? And then we look at it in the context of a solution. So, you know, the solution we're announcing, or we announced last week does just that on the left side, it looks at a consolidated infrastructure based on VxRail and VMware stack. So you can run multiple applications on the right side, it working with a company called deep north for Inso analytics and actually people that, um, and the show they can go and see this in action, um, in our, um, you know, fake retail store, uh, back at the edge booth. Um, but the point is those elements of siloed applications and the need to consolidate their true for every industry. And that's what we're trying to solve for. >>I was just wondering, you said they're true for every industry. Every industry is facing the same challenges there. What, what makes retail so prime for transformation right now? >>That's a great question. So, you know, using my example from before, if you are faced with this set, have a shopper that buys online and they now are coming back to the stores and they need to, they want the same experience. They want the stuff that they search for. They want it available to them. Um, and in fact, we research that 80% of people say, if they have a bad experience will not come back to a retail store. So you've got all of those use cases that you need to put to, you've got this savvy shopping that comes in, you've got heightened labor costs. You've got a supply chain problem in most of those markets, labor >>Shortages as >>Well. It's a perfect storm. And you wanna give an experience, right? So CIOs are looking at this and they go, how do I do all of that? Um, and they, they, as I said before, the key management, the key problem is management of all of those things is why they can innovate faster. And so retail is in this perfect storm where they need to innovate and they want to innovate. And now they're looking for options and we're here to help them. >>You know, a lot of times we talk about the in industrial IOT, we talk about the it and the OT schism. Is there a similar sort of dissonance between it, your peeps, Dell's traditional market, and what's happening, you know, at the near edge, the retail infrastructure sort of different requirements. How are you thinking about that and managing that >>About, um, 50% of edge projects today are, are somehow involving it. Um, usually every project will involve it for networking and security, so they have to manage it either way. And today there's a lot of what we used to call shadow it. When we talked about cloud, this has happens at the edge as well. Now this happened for a good reason because the expertise are the OT people expertise on the, the specific use case. It's true for manufacturing. It's also for true for, for retail. Um, our traditional audience is the it audience and, and we will never be able to merger two worlds unless it was better able to service the OT buyers. And even in the show, I I've had multiple conversations today. We, with people to talk about the divide, how to bring it together, it will come together when it can deliver a better service to the OT, um, constituents. And that's definitely a job for Dell, right? This is what we do. If we enable our it buyer to do a better job in servicing the OT crowd or their business crowd in retail, um, more innovation will happen, you know, across the, those different dimensions. So I'm happy you asked that because that's actually part of the mission we're taking on. >>Where is one of the things I think about when you, you talk about that consumer experience and we're very demanding as consumers. We wanna ha as you described, we wanna have the same experience we expect to have that regardless of where we are. And if that doesn't happen, you, you mentioned that number of 80% of people's survey said, if I have a bad experience with a merchant, I'm out, I'm going somewhere else. Right. So where is the rest of the Csuite in the conversation? I can think of, um, a COO the chief marketing officer from brand value, brand reputation perspective. Are you talking with those folks as well to help make the connective so reality? >>Um, I, I, I don't know that we're having those conversation with those business owners. We we're a, um, a system, an infrastructure company. So, you know, we get involved once they understand, you know, what they want to do. We just look at it in. And so if you solve it one way, it's gonna be one outcome. Maybe there is a better way to look at it. Maybe there's an architecture, maybe there's a more, you know, thoughtful way to think about, you know, the problems before they happen. And, um, but the fact that they're all looking shows you, that their business owners are very, very concerned with, with this reality, their >>Key stakeholders. Can >>We come back to your announcement? Can you, can we unpack that a little bit, uh, for those who might not be familiar with it? What, what, what is it called again? And give us a peel, the onion a little bit Gil. Yeah. >>So, so we call it a Dell technologies validated design. Um, it is essentially reference architecture. Um, we take a use case, we size it. So we, you know, we, um, we save customers, the effort of, of testing and sizing. We document the deployment step by step. We just make it simpler. And as says, before we look for consolidation, so we took a VXL, which is our leading ACI product based on VMware technology with a VMware application management stack with Tansu. Um, and then we, we, we look at that as the infrastructure, and then we test it with a company called deep north and deep north, um, are, um, store analytics. So through machine vision, they can tell you where people are queuing up. If there is somebody in the store that needs help and nobody's approaching, if there is a water spill and somebody might, you know, slip and hurt themselves, if a fridge is open and something may get spot. >>And so all of those things together through machine vision and realtime decisions can have this much better experience. So we put all of this together, we created a design and now it's out there in the market for our partners to use for our customers to use. Um, this is an extension of our manufacturing solutions, where we did the same thing. We partner with a company called PTC. I know of obviously in a company called Litmos, um, to create, um, industrial and the leading solution. So this whole word of solutioning is supposed to look at the infrastructure and a use case and bring them together and document in a way that simplifies things for >>Customers. Do you ever see that becoming a Aku at some point in time or, >>Um, personal, if you ask me? I don't think so. And the reason is there's still a lot of variability in those and skewing, but that's a very formal, you know, internal discussion. Yeah. Um, the point is we are, we want people to buy as much of it as they need to, and, and we really want to help them if Aku could help them, we will get there, but we need to see repeatability before creating skews. >>Can you give us an example of a, of a retail or a manufacturing customer that's using this Dell validated design, this DVD, and that really has reduced or eliminated that complexity that was there before. >>So this solution is new. I mean, it's brand new, we just announced it. So, no, but, um, I don't know what names I can call out, cuz referenceability is probably examples though about generic, but I will tell you that most of the large retailers in the us are based in their stores on Dell technologies. Um, a lot of the trail is in, in those stores and you're talking about thousands of locations with remote management. Um, what we're doing here is we're taking it to the next step by looking at new use cases that they have not been implementing before and saying, look, same infrastructure is valid. You know, scalable is it's scalable. And here are the new use cases with machine vision and other things that here is how you do that. But we're seeing a lot of success in retail in the last few years. >>So what should we expect looking forward, you know, any gaps that customers are asking for trying to fill? What, what two to three years out, what should we expect? >>Um, I think we're gonna stay very true to our simplification message. We want to help people simplify. So if it's simplifying, um, maintenance, if it's simplifying management, if it's simplifying through solutioning, you're gonna see us more and more and more, um, investing in simplification of edge. Um, and that's through our own IP, through our partnerships. Um, there, there is a lot more coming if, if I may say it myself, but, but it's, it's a little too early to, uh, to talk about it. >>So for those folks that are here at the show that get to see it and play with it and touch it and feel it, what would you say some of the biggest impacts are that this technology can deliver tomorrow? >>Well, first of all, it's enabling to do what they want. See, we don't have to go and, and tell people, oh, you probably really need to move things through the edge. They know they need to do it. Our job is to tell them how to do it in a secure way, in a simplified way. So that's, that's a nice thing about this, this market it's happening, whether we want it or not. Um, people in this show can go see some things in action. They can see the solution in action. They can see the manufacturing solution in action and even more so. And I forgot to say part of our announcement was a set of solution centers in Limerick island and in Singapore, that was just open. And soon enough in Austin, Texas saw that, and we will have people come in and have the full experience of IOT OT and edge device devices in action. So AR and VR, I T IEN technology and scanning technology. So they could be, um, thinking about the art of the possible, right? Thinking about this immersive experience that will help them invent with us. And so we're expecting a lot of innovation to come out of those conversations for us and for them. >>So doing a lot of testing before deployment and really gleaning that testing >>Before deployment solution architecture, just ideation, if they're not there yet. So, and I've just been to Singapore in one of those, um, they asked me to, um, pretend I was a, um, retail ski enter in a distribution center and I didn't do so well, but I was still impressed with the technology. So, >>Well, eight time Q alumni. Now you have a career to fall back on if you need to. Exactly. >><laugh> >>GA it's been great to have you. Thank you so much for coming back, talking to us about what's new on day one of Dell technologies world 22. Thank >>You for having me again, >>Our pleasure for Dave Volante. I'm Lisa Martin, coming to you live from the Venetian in Las Vegas at Dell technologies world 2022. This is day one of our coverage stick around Dave and I will be right back with our next guest.

(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)

(upbeat electronic music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase. The Next Big Thing in AI, Security, and Life Sciences. In this segment, we feature Orca Security as a notable trend setter within, of course, the security track. I'm your host, Dave Vellante. And today we're joined by Gil Geron. Who's the co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Orca Security. And we're going to discuss how to eliminate cloud security blind spots. Orca has a really novel approach to cybersecurity problems, without using agents. So welcome Gil to today's sessions. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you for having me. >> You're very welcome. So Gil, you're a disruptor in security and cloud security specifically and you've created an agentless way of securing cloud assets. You call this side scanning. We're going to get into that and probe that a little bit into the how and the why agentless is the future of cloud security. But I want to start at the beginning. What were the main gaps that you saw in cloud security that spawned Orca Security? >> I think that the main gaps that we saw when we started Orca were pretty similar in nature to gaps that we saw in legacy, infrastructures, in more traditional data centers. But when you look at the cloud when you look at the nature of the cloud the ephemeral nature, the technical possibilities and disruptive way of working with a data center, we saw that the usage of traditional approaches like agents in these environments is lacking, it actually not only working as well as it was in the legacy world, it's also, it's providing less value. And in addition, we saw that the friction between the security team and the IT, the engineering, the DevOps in the cloud is much worse or how does that it was, and we wanted to find a way, we want for them to work together to bridge that gap and to actually allow them to leverage the cloud technology as it was intended to gain superior security than what was possible in the on-prem world. >> Excellent, let's talk a little bit more about agentless. I mean, maybe we could talk a little bit about why agentless is so compelling. I mean, it's kind of obvious it's less intrusive. You've got fewer processes to manage, but how did you create your agentless approach to cloud security? >> Yes, so I think the basis of it all is around our mission and what we try to provide. We want to provide seamless security because we believe it will allow the business to grow faster. It will allow the business to adopt technology faster and to be more dynamic and achieve goals faster. And so we've looked on what are the problems or what are the issues that slow you down? And one of them, of course, is the fact that you need to install agents that they cause performance impact, that they are technically segregated from one another, meaning you need to install multiple agents and they need to somehow not interfere with one another. And we saw this friction causes organization to slow down their move to the cloud or slow down the adoption of technology. In the cloud, it's not only having servers, right? You have containers, you have manage services, you have so many different options and opportunities. And so you need a different approach on how to secure that. And so when we understood that this is the challenge, we decided to attack it in three, using three periods; one, trying to provide complete security and complete coverage with no friction, trying to provide comprehensive security, which is taking an holistic approach, a platform approach and combining the data in order to provide you visibility into all of your security assets, and last but not least of course, is context awareness, meaning being able to understand and find these the 1% that matter in the environment. So you can actually improve your security posture and improve your security overall. And to do so, you had to have a technique that does not involve agents. And so what we've done, we've find a way that utilizes the cloud architecture in order to scan the cloud itself, basically when you integrate Orca, you are able within minutes to understand, to read, and to view all of the risks. We are leveraging a technique that we are calling side scanning that uses the API. So it uses the infrastructure of the cloud itself to read the block storage device of every compute instance and every instance, in the environment, and then we can deduce the actual risk of every asset. >> So that's a clever name, side scanning. Tell us a little bit more about that. Maybe you could double click on, on how it works. You've mentioned it's looking into block storage and leveraging the API is a very, very clever actually quite innovative. But help us understand in more detail how it works and why it's better than traditional tools that we might find in this space. >> Yes, so the way that it works is that by reading the block storage device, we are able to actually deduce what is running on your computer, meaning what kind of waste packages applications are running. And then by con combining the context, meaning understanding that what kind of services you have connected to the internet, what is the attack surface for these services? What will be the business impact? Will there be any access to PII or any access to the crown jewels of the organization? You can not only understand the risks. You can also understand the impact and then understand what should be our focus in terms of security of the environment. Different factories, the fact that we are doing it using the infrastructure itself, we are not installing any agents, we are not running any packet. You do not need to change anything in your architecture or design of how you use the cloud in order to utilize Orca Orca is working in a pure SaaS way. And so it means that there is no impact, not on cost and not on performance of your environment while using Orca. And so it reduces any friction that might happen with other parties of the organization when you enjoy the security or improve your security in the cloud. >> Yeah, and no process management intrusion. Now, I presume Gil that you eat your own cooking, meaning you're using your own product. First of all, is that true? And if so, how has your use of Orca as a chief product officer help you scale Orca as a company? >> So it's a great question. I think that something that we understood early on is that there is a, quite a significant difference between the way you architect your security in cloud and also the way that things reach production, meaning there's a difference, that there's a gap between how you imagined, like in everything in life how you imagine things will be and how they are in real life in production. And so, even though we have amazing customers that are extremely proficient in security and have thought of a lot of ways of how to secure the environment. Ans so, we of course, we are trying to secure environment as much as possible. We are using Orca because we understand that no one is perfect. We are not perfect. We might, the engineers might, my engineers might make mistakes like every organization. And so we are using Orca because we want to have complete coverage. We want to understand if we are doing any mistake. And sometimes the gap between the architecture and the hole in the security or the gap that you have in your security could take years to happen. And you need a tool that will constantly monitor your environment. And so that's why we are using Orca all around from day one not to find bugs or to do QA, we're doing it because we need security to our cloud environment that will provide these values. And so we've also passed the compliance auditing like SOC 2 and ISO using Orca and it expedited and allowed us to do these processes extremely fast because of having all of these guardrails and metrics has. >> Yeah, so, okay. So you recognized that you potentially had and did have that same problem as your customer has been. Has it helped you scale as a company obviously but how has it helped you scale as a company? >> So it helped us scale as a company by increasing the trust, the level of trust customer having Orca. It allowed us to adopt technology faster, meaning we need much less diligence or exploration of how to use technology because we have these guardrails. So we can use the richness of the technology that we have in the cloud without the need to stop, to install agents, to try to re architecture the way that we are using the technology. And we simply use it. We simply use the technology that the cloud offer as it is. And so it allows you a rapid scalability. >> Allows you allows you to move at the speed of cloud. Now, so I'm going to ask you as a co-founder, you got to wear many hats first of a co-founder and the leadership component there. And also the chief product officer, you got to go out, you got to get early customers, but but even more importantly you have to keep those customers retention. So maybe you can describe how customers have been using Orca. Did they, what was their aha moment that you've seen customers react to when you showcase the new product? And then how have you been able to keep them as loyal partners? >> So I think that we are very fortunate, we have a lot of, we are blessed with our customers. Many of our customers are vocal customers about what they like about Orca. And I think that something that comes along a lot of times is that this is a solution they have been waiting for. I can't express how many times I hear that I could go on a call and a customer says, "I must say, I must share. "This is a solution I've been looking for." And I think that in that respect, Orca is creating a new standard of what is expected from a security solution because we are transforming the security all in the company from an inhibitor to an enabler. You can use the technology. You can use new tools. You can use the cloud as it was intended. And so (coughs) we have customers like one of these cases is a customer that they have a lot of data and they're all super scared about using S3 buckets. We call over all of these incidents of these three buckets being breached or people connecting to an s3 bucket and downloading the data. So they had a policy saying, "S3 bucket should not be used. "We do not allow any use of S3 bucket." And obviously you do need to use S3 bucket. It's a powerful technology. And so the engineering team in that customer environment, simply installed a VM, installed an FTP server, and very easy to use password to that FTP server. And obviously two years later, someone also put all of the customer databases on that FTP server, open to the internet, open to everyone. And so I think it was for him and for us as well. It was a hard moment. First of all, he planned that no data will be leaked but actually what happened is way worse. The data was open to the to do to the world in a technology that exists for a very long time. And it's probably being scanned by attackers all the time. But after that, he not only allowed them to use S3 bucket because he knew that now he can monitor. Now, you can understand that they are using the technology as intended, now that they are using it securely. It's not open to everyone it's open in the right way. And there was no PII on that S3 bucket. And so I think the way he described it is that, now when he's coming to a meeting about things that needs to be improved, people are waiting for this meeting because he actually knows more than what they know, what they know about the environment. And I see it really so many times where a simple mistake or something that looks benign when you look at the environment in a holistic way, when you are looking on the context, you understand that there is a huge gap. That should be the breech. And another cool example was a case where a customer allowed an access from a third party service that everyone trusts to the crown jewels of the environment. And he did it in a very traditional way. He allowed a certain IP to be open to that environment. So overall it sounds like the correct way to go. You allow only a specific IP to access the environment but what he failed to to notice is that everyone in the world can register for free for this third-party service and access the environment from this IP. And so, even though it looks like you have access from a trusted service, a trusted third party service, when it's a Saas service, it's actually, it can mean that everyone can use it in order to access the environment and using Orca, you saw immediately the access, you saw immediately the risk. And I see it time after time that people are simply using Orca to monitor, to guardrail, to make sure that the environment stays safe throughout time and to communicate better in the organization to explain the risk in a very easy way. And the, I would say the statistics show that within few weeks, more than 85% of the different alerts and risks are being fixed, and think it comes to show how effective it is and how effective it is in improving your posture, because people are taking action. >> Those are two great examples, and of course they have often said that the shared responsibility model is often misunderstood. And those two examples underscore thinking that, "oh I hear all this, see all this press about S3, but it's up to the customer to secure the endpoint components et cetera. Configure it properly is what I'm saying. So what an unintended consequence, but but Orca plays a role in helping the customer with their portion of that shared responsibility. Obviously AWS is taking care of this. Now, as part of this program we ask a little bit of a challenging question to everybody because look it as a startup, you want to do well you want to grow a company. You want to have your employees, you know grow and help your customers. And that's great and grow revenues, et cetera but we feel like there's more. And so we're going to ask you because the theme here is all about cloud scale. What is your defining contribution to the future of cloud at scale, Gil? >> So I think that cloud is allowed the revolution to the data centers, okay? The way that you are building services, the way that you are allowing technology to be more adaptive, dynamic, ephemeral, accurate, and you see that it is being adopted across all vendors all type of industries across the world. I think that Orca is the first company that allows you to use this technology to secure your infrastructure in a way that was not possible in the on-prem world, meaning that when you're using the cloud technology and you're using technologies like Orca, you're actually gaining superior security that what was possible in the pre cloud world. And I think that, to that respect, Orca is going hand in hand with the evolution and actually revolutionizes the way that you expect to consume security, the way that you expect to get value, from security solutions across the world. >> Thank You for that Gil. And so we're at the end of our time, but we'll give you a chance for final wrap up. Bring us home with your summary, please. >> So I think that Orca is building the cloud security solution that actually works with its innovative aid agentless approach to cyber security to gain complete coverage, comprehensive solution and to gain, to understand the complete context of the 1% that matters in your security challenges across your data centers in the cloud. We are bridging the gap between the security teams, the business needs to grow and to do so in the paste of the cloud, I think the approach of being able to install within minutes, a security solution in getting complete understanding of your risk which is goes hand in hand in the way you expect and adopt cloud technology. >> That's great Gil. Thanks so much for coming on. You guys doing awesome work. Really appreciate you participating in the program. >> Thank you very much. >> And thank you for watching this AWS Startup Showcase. We're covering the next big thing in AI, Security, and Life Science on theCUBE. Keep it right there for more great content. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome everybody to VeeamON 2021 you're watching theCUBE. My name is Dave Villante. You know in 2020 cyber adversaries they seize the opportunity to really up their game and target workers from home and digital supply chains. It's become increasingly clear to observers that we're entering a new era of cyber threats where infiltrating companies via so-called Island Hopping and stealthily living off the land meaning they're using your own tools and infrastructure to steal your data. So they're not signaling with new tools that they're in there. It's becoming the norm for sophisticated hacks. Moreover, these well-funded and really sophisticated criminals and nation States are aggressively retaliating against incident responses. In other words, when you go to fix the problem they're not leaving the premises they're rather they're tightening the vice on victims by holding your data ransom and threatening to release previously ex filtrated and brand damaging information to the public. What a climate in which we live today. And with me to talk about these concerning trends and what you can do about it as Gil Vega, the CISO of Veeam Gil great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Great to see you, Dave. Thanks for having me. >> Yeah. So, you know, you're hearing my intro. It's probably understating the threat. You are a Veeam's first CISO. So how do you see the landscape right now? >> That's right. Yeah. And I've been with the company for just over a year now, but my background is in financial services and spent a lot of time managing cybersecurity programs at the classified level in Washington DC. So I've gleaned a lot of scar tissue from lots of sophisticated attacks and responses. But today I think what we're seeing is really a one-upmanship by a sophisticated potentially nation state sponsored adversaries, this idea of imprisoning your data and charging you to release it is it's quite frightening. And as we've seen in the news recently it can have devastating impacts not only for the economy, but for businesses. Look at the gas lines in the Northeast right now because of the quality of a pipeline, a ransomware attack. I just, the government just released an executive order this morning, that hopes to address some of the some of the nation's unpreparedness for these sophisticated attacks. And I think it's time. And I think everyone's excited about the opportunity to really apply a whole of government approach, to helping critical infrastructure to helping and partnering with private sector and imposing some risks, frankly, on some of the folks that are engaged in attacking our country. >> A number of years ago, I often tell this story. I had the pleasure of interviewing Robert Gates the former Defense Secretary. And it was a while ago we were talking about cyber and he sits on a number of boards. And we were talking about how it's a board level issue. And, and we're talking about cyber crime and the like and nation States. And I said, well, wait, cyber warfare, even. And I said, "But don't we have the best cyber tech. I mean, can't we go on the offense?" And he goes, "Yeah, we do. And we can, but we have more to lose." And to your point about critical infrastructure, it's not just like, okay, we have the most powerful weapons. It's really we have the most valuable infrastructure and a lot to lose. So it's really a tricky game. And this notion of having to be stealthy in your incident response is relatively new. Isn't it? >> It is. It is. And you know, there are, you mentioned that and I was surprised you mentioned because a lot of people really don't talk about it as you're going into your response your adversaries are watching or watching your every move. You have to assume in these days of perpetual state of compromise in your environments, which means that your adversaries have access to your environment to the point that they're watching your incident responders communicate with one another and they're countering your moves. So it's sort of a perverse spin on the old mutually assured destruction paradigm that you mentioned the United States has the world's largest economy. And quite frankly the world's most vulnerable, critical infrastructure. And I would concur with Director Gates or Secretary Gates rather it is assessment that we've got to be awfully careful and measured in our approach to imposing risks. I think the government has worked for many years on defining red lines. And I think this latest attack on the colonial pipeline affecting the economy and people's lives and potentially putting people's lives at risk is towing also the close to that red line. And I'm interested to see where this goes. I'm interested to see if this triggers even a, you know a new phase of cyber warfare, retaliation, you know proactive defense by the National Security Community of the United States government. Be interesting to see how this plays out. >> Yeah, you're absolutely right though. You've got this sort of asymmetric dynamic now which is unique for the United States as soon as strongest defense in the world. And I wanted to get it to ransomware a bit. And specifically this notion of ransomware as a service it's really concerning where criminals can actually outsource the hack as a service and the bad guys will set up, you know, on the dark web they'll have, you know, help desks and phone lines. They'll do the negotiations. I mean, this is a really concerning trend. And obviously Veeam plays a role here. I'm wondering as a, as a SecOps pro what should we be doing about this? >> Yeah, you mentioned ransomware as a service, whereas RWS it's an incredibly pernicious problem perpetrated by sophisticated folks who may or may not have nation state support or alliances. I think at a minimum certain governments are looking the other way as it relates to these criminal activities. But with ransomware as a service, you're essentially having very sophisticated folks create very complex ransomware code and distributed to people who are willing to pay for it. And oftentimes take a part of the ransom as their payment. The, issue with obviously ransomware is you know the age old question, are you going to pay a ransom or are you not going to pay a ransom? The FBI says, don't do it. It only encourages additional attacks. The Treasury Department put out some guidance earlier earlier in the year, advising companies that they could be subject to civil or criminal penalties. If they pay a ransom and the ransom goes to a sanction density. So there's danger on all sides. >> Wow okay. But so, and then the other thing is this infiltrating via digital supply chains I call it Island Hopping and the like, we saw that with the solar winds hack and the scary part is, you know different malware is coming in and self forming and creating different signatures. Not only is it very difficult to detect, but remediating, you know, one, you know combined self formed malware it doesn't necessarily take care of the others. And so, you know, you've got this sort of organic virus, like thing, you know, create mutating and that's something that's certainly relatively new to me in terms of its prevalence your thoughts on that and how to do it. >> Yeah, exactly right. You know, the advent of the polymorphic code that changes the implementation of advanced artificial intelligence and some of this malware is making our job increasingly difficult which is why I believe firmly. You've got to focus on the fundamentals and I think the best answers for protecting against sophisticated polymorphic code is,are found in the NIST cybersecurity framework. And I encourage everyone to really take a close look at implementing that cybersecurity framework across their environments, much like we've done here, here at Veeam implementing technologies around Zero Trust again assuming a perpetual state of compromise and not trusting any transaction in your environment is the key to combating this kind of attack. >> Well, and you know, as you mentioned, Zero Trust Zero Trust used to be a buzzword. Now it's like become a mandate. And you know, it's funny. I mean, in a way I feel like the crypto guys I know there's a lot of fraud in crypto, but but anybody who's ever traded crypto it's like getting into Fort Knox. I mean, you got to know your customer and you've got to do a little transaction. I mean, it's really quite sophisticated in terms of the how they are applying cybersecurity and you know, most even your bank isn't that intense. And so those kinds of practices, even though they're a bit of a pain in the neck, I mean it's worth the extra effort. I wonder if you could talk about some of the best practices that you're seeing how you're advising your clients in your ecosystem and the role that Veeam can play in helping here. >> Yeah, absolutely. As I mentioned so many recommendations and I think the thing to remember here so we don't overwhelm our small and medium sized businesses that have limited resources in this area is to remind them that it's a journey, right? It's not a destination that they can continually improve and focus on the fundamentals. As I mentioned, things like multi-factor authentication you know, a higher level topic might be micro-segmentation breaking up your environment into manageable components that you can monitor a real time. Real time monitoring is one of the key components to implementing Zero Trust architecture and knowing exactly what good looks like in your environment in a situation where you've got real-time monitoring you can detect the anomalies, the things that shouldn't be happening in your environment and to spin up your response teams, to focus and better understand what that is. I've always been a proponent of identity and access management controls and a key focus. We've heard it in this industry for 25 years is enforcing the concept of least privilege, making sure that your privileged users have access to the things they need and only the things that they need. And then of course, data immutability making sure that your data is stored in backups that verifiably has not been changed. And I think this is where Veeam comes into the equation where our products provide a lot of these very easily configured ransomware protections around data and your ability to the ability to instantly back up things like Office 365 emails, you know support for AWS and Azure. Your data can be quickly restored in the event that an attacker is able to in prison that with encryption and ransom demands. >> Well, and so you've certainly seen in the CISOs that I've talked to that they've had to obviously shift their priorities, thanks to the force march to digital, thanks to COVID, but Identity access management, end point security cloud security kind of overnight, you know, Zero Trust. We talked about that and you could see that in some of these, you know, high flying security stocks, Okta Zscaler, CrowdStrike, they exploded. And so what's in these many of these changes seem to be permanent sort of you're I guess, deeper down in the stack if you will, but you, you compliment these toolings with obviously the data protection approach the ransomware, the cloud data protection, air gaps, immutability. Maybe you could talk about how you fit in with the broader, you know, spate of tools. I mean, your, my eyes bleed when you look at all the security companies that are out there. >> Yeah for sure. You know, I'm just going to take it right back to the NIST cybersecurity framework and the five domains that you really need to focus on. Identify, protect, detect, respond, and recover, you know and until recently security practitioners and companies have really focused on on the protect, identify and protect, right and defend rather where they're focused on building, you know, moats and castles and making sure that they've got this, you know hard exterior to defend against attacks. I think there's been a shift over the past couple of years where companies have recognized that the focus needs to be on and respond and recover activities, right? Assuming that people are going to breach or near breach, your entities is a safe way to think about this and building up capabilities to detect those breaches and respond effectively to those breaches are what's key in implementing a successful cybersecurity program where Veeam fits into this since with our suite of products that that can help you through the recovery process, right? That last domain of the NIST cybersecurity framework it'll allow you to instantaneously. As I mentioned before, restore data in the event of a catastrophic breach. And I think it provides companies with the assurances that while they're protecting and building those Zero Trust components into their environments to protect against these pernicious and well-resourced adversaries there's the opportunity for them to recover very quickly using the VM suite of tools? >> Well, I see, I think there's an interesting dynamic here. You're pointing out Gil. There's not no longer is it that, you know, build a moat the Queen's leaving her castle. I always say, you know there is no hardened perimeter anymore. And so you've seen, you know, the shift obviously from hardware based firewalls and you I mentioned those other companies that are doing great but to me, it's all about these layers and response is a big in recovery is a huge part of that. So I'm seeing increasingly companies like Veeam is a critical part of that, that security cyber data protection, you know, ecosystem. I mean, to me it's just as important as the frontline pieces of even identity. And so you see those markets exploding. I think it's, there's a latent value that's building in companies like Veeam that are a key part of those that data protection layer you think about you know, defense strategies. It's not just you, the frontline it's maybe it's airstrikes, maybe it's, you know, C etcetera. And I see that this market is actually a huge opportunity for for organizations like yours. >> I think you're right. And I think the proof is in, you know in the pudding, in terms of how this company has grown and what we've delivered in version 11 of our suite, including, you know features like continuous data protection, we talked about that reliable ransomware protection support for AWS S3 Glacier and Azure archive the expanded incident recovery, and then support for disaster recovery and backup as a service. You know, what I found most interesting in my year here at Veeam is just how much our administrators the administrators in our company and our customers companies that are managing backups absolutely love our products that ease of use the instant backup capabilities and the support they receive from Veeam. It's almost cultish in terms of how our customers are using these products to defend themselves in today's pretty intense cyber threat environment. >> Well, and you talked about the NIST framework, and again big part of that is recovery, because we talked about earlier about, do you pay the ransom or not? Well, to the extent that I can actually recover from having all my data encrypted then I've got obviously a lot more leverage and in many ways, I mean, let's face it. We all know that it's not a matter of if it's, when you get infiltrated. And so to the extent that I can actually have systems that allow me to recover, I'm now in a much much stronger position in many respects, you know and CISOs again, will tell you this that's where we're shifting our investments >> Right. And you've got to do all of them. It's not just there's no silver bullet, but but that seems to me to be just a a misunderstood and undervalued part of the equation. And I think there's tremendous upside there for companies like yours. >> I think you're right. I think what I'll just add to that is the power of immutability, right? Just verifiably ensuring that your data has not changed because oftentimes you'll have attackers in these low and slow live off the land types of attacks change your data and affect its integrity with the Veeam suite of tools. You're able to provide for immutable or unchanged verifiable data and your backup strategy which is really the first step to recovery after a significant event. >> And that's key because a lot of times the hackers would go right after the backup Corpus you know, they'll sometimes start there is that all the data, you know, but if you can make that immutable and again, it, you know there's best practices there too, because, you know if you're not paying the cloud service for that immutability, if you stop paying then you lose that. So you have to be very careful about, you know how you know, who has access to that and you know what the policies are there, but again, you know you can put in, you know so a lot of this, as you know, is people in process. It's not just tech, so I'll give you the last word. I know you got to jump, but really appreciate.. >> Yeah, sure. >> You know, the only, the only thing that we didn't mention is user awareness and education. I think that is sort of the umbrella key focus principle for any successful cybersecurity program making sure your people understand, you know how to deal with phishing emails. You know, ransomware is a huge threat of our time at 90% of ransomware malware is delivered by phishing. So prepare your workforce to deal with phishing emails. And I think you'll save yourself quite a few headaches. >> It's great advice. I'm glad you mentioned that because because bad user behavior or maybe uninformed user behaviors is the more fair way to say it. It will trump good security every time. Gil, thanks so much for coming to the CUBE and and keep fighting the fight. Best of luck going forward. >> Great. Thank you, Dave. >> All right. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Villante for the CUBEs continuous coverage VeeamON 2021, the virtual edition. We will be right back. (upbeat music)

(bright upbeat melody) >> Welcome back to Dell Technology World 2021. Dell Tech World, the virtual edition. My name is Dave Vellante. We're going to talk about the Edge. I'm very excited to invite Pierluca Chiodelli, who's the Vice President of Product Management for the Edge portfolio at Dell. And Gil Shneorson, who's the Senior Vice President, Edge portfolio also at Dell Technologies. Gentlemen, great to see you welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Thank you, great to see you. >> Yeah, great to see you guys too. Wish we were face to face but maybe in '22. Gil, let's start with you. The Edge is very exciting, it's not really defined. It's very fragmented, but it's there. It's kind of, you know it, when you see it. What do you get excited about when you think about the Edge? >> I think of there's two elements. The first one, is that we all live at the Edge. In other words, the areas we deal with are around us everyday. When we shop, when we consume, when we drive. So it's a very physical type of activity, we know it's there. What's really exciting mostly to me is that, and you started with talking about fragmentation right off the bat. It is a great opportunity for Dell Technologies to add value. Because it's so fragmented, because it's so new, because it has developed and evolved the way it is. We see an amazing opportunity for us to add much more value than we do today and solve problems that have yet to be solved in the industry. >> And Pierluca, it's an exciting, it's almost like an infinite playground for a technologist. I mean. >> Yeah, Dave, I think that's exactly what we find out. The Edge is very exciting, there is a lot of motion especially due to the pandemic and other things. Big factor that is accelerating the innovation at the Edge but this is an inorganic acceleration and what it cause for most of our customers is also confusion, right? They need to apply multiple solutions but not very organized. So you try to solve the outcome like having the right production on your line because demand is surging. But you don't have an organic things to do that and solve the problem. So you see a lot of silos coming in for each one of the solution, and that's what Gil was referring. That's a great opportunity for us as Dell with the breadth of the portfolio we have and what our team that is a new team is focusing doing is to bring that idea to be able to consolidate multiple things at the Edge and process things at the Edge. >> We did an event. CUBE had an event called the CUBE on Cloud and Q1, we had John Rose on and the title of the segment was something like gaining the technology Edge. And we were kind of geeking out on the tech at the Edge. And my takeaway there was... We were trying to like what is Edge? It's like, well, it's the place where it makes most sense to process the data. And so that brings up a lot of challenges. There are technical challenges and there are business challenges. I wonder if we could sort of dig into those a little bit. How do you guys look at that? Maybe Gil, you want to start maybe. Maybe on the business side and then we can dig into that. >> Sure. The way things evolved. If you think about it, at the Edge is very verticalized. And because of that, they're very use case driven. And so in every industry possible, you start with some business person making a decision whether they have a need or they want to grow their business. And so for example, they will buy an applying to do fraud protection in retail or detection retail. Or they will apply an application to merit robotics and the factory need would come with its own gateway, implant, compute, and a cloud portal. And then you do it again and again, and again, every time you have a business opportunity. All of the sudden you have this proliferation of IT type equipment. At the end where it's the worst place to have it really because you don't have the right IT resources and you are in the need to protect it in a much more... In a different way that you can do in a data center. And so all of that, bring us to a point that we see an opportunity to simplify. And so not only simplification. And this is, you know, simplification or simplicity is the most important driver for any IP purchase. Things that are simple or the easiest and the most economical to operate. The next demand that we see from a customer is security. Because things are at the edge, they have a much more extended attack surface. They need to be connected to networks. They need to be connected without IT staff. So if you can simplify insecure, you can really unlock amazing value by processing data close to where it's created. Without it, we're seeing this opportunity as businesses but we can't really get to it because there are those two hurdles in front of us. >> So Pierluca. We need to you thank you for that, Gill. When you hear a lot about AI inferencing at the Edge. And if you think about AI today, much of the work is modeling. It's done in the cloud. But you're not going to be doing AI inferencing in real time in the cloud. Take the autonomous vehicle example. So that brings some technical challenges. There's obviously data challenges. I'm curious as to how you think about that. I mean, we always talk about how much data is going to be persisted. I think Tesla persists like five minutes of data, right? But some of it is going to go back. That's true. But a lot of it is going to be processed real time. And that's just really different than the way we typically think about IT. >> Yeah, absolutely. So at the Edge, especially in manufacturing, we see right now, or in other use case, it's very important to get the outcome very quickly. Now, you don't use that a deep learning model for that. You need to just understand. For example, in the computer vision use case where you take image of your production line. To your point, Dave, you not keep those image, you keep the image where you have the defect. But you need to process that AIML needs to be intelligent enough to understand that you have a defect, and send that image then to the club. So the search of the data at the Edge is a very important factor. And why you need to process data at the Edge, because as your point, you can't wait to send to the cloud and then wait, right? Tesla is a clear example of that. All the autonomous car where you need to react instantaneously to a change. But in manufacturing, for example, that is our focus for now, is for example, the robots. That if you need to optimize the robot, you need to have a immediate understanding of where the pieces are and when they need to put. And the tolerance need to be act immediately. Otherwise, you come out with the thousand of pieces that they are not in the right tolerance. So, and at the end of the day, what we see is not only the search of the need of processing AIML to the Edge, but also the need to have a new type of compute at the Edge. So in the past, was just gateway and you'd get the gateway and you send the data to the cloud. Now, it's a form of a new compute that has also GPU capability and other things to process this data. So very important. And I think that Dell, especially, we are very focused on that because is really where the customer need to extract the value. >> Thank you. And Gil, I want to get Gil to the unique value proposition to Dell and what makes you distinct. If I infer from your comments, your strategy, you said it's to simplify. And so I see two vectors there. One is to simplify at the Edge. The other is where needed connect that Edge, whether it's on prem, a public cloud, cross-cloud, that kind of simplification layer that abstracts the complex the underlying complexity. Maybe you could talk about your strategy and what makes you guys different? >> Sure. We've been talking to our... Well, we always talk to our customers. And we've been doing business at the Edge for many, many years. Let's call it coincidence that we're a very large company. We have reached, we serve our customers. So when they decide to buy something for their Edge, you know, environments, they come to us as well as other vendors. When the percentage of the time based on our market share. But when we decided to take another look at how can we be even more relevant, we started talking to a lot of them great depth. And what we discovered was the problem I talked about before. The problem of complexity, the problem of security and the problem of choice. And so our focus is to do what we do best. At the end of the day, we're an IT company and our customers for the most part are IT people. And we see them dragged more and more into Edge projects because customers need to connect Edge to the network. And they need to security, and that's how it starts. And so those worlds of IT and OT are coming together and they're coming together, applying IT best practices, which is exactly what we know how to do. And so, because of that, we think that they need to think about architecture versus unique silence solutions. Architecture that can support multiple use cases that can grow with time, consolidate more and more use cases as they grow, simplify what they do by applying tried and true or tried and true IT best practices in a secure manner. So the dealer approach would be doing that, taking a more architectural approach to the adverse as a use case. And then just like you predicted, meet the customers where they are from an application standpoint. And so we know that a lot of applications are growing and be developing on a hyper scale or public clouds. We would like to connect to those. We would like to allow them to keep working as they have, except, when they run it at the Edge. Think about environments, if can consolidate multiple workloads and not solve it for each one at the same time. And so that will be our overall approach. That's what we're working on. >> Yeah. So, okay. So in that horizontal layer, if you will, to serve many, many use cases, not just... You're not going to go a mile deep into one and be the expert at some narrow use case. You want to be that horizontal platform. Here, look, I wonder, does that call for more programmability over time of the products to really allow people to kind of design in that flexibility, if you will, build my own. Is that something that we can expect? >> Yeah, absolutely. So we spoke a little bit about this before the interview. And the things that is very important is composability, starting from a very small form factor to the cluster, and then expand to the cloud is the fundamental things. And the trend that we see. The fact that you can compose the infrastructure, starting from a small gateway that is changing in this market right up to the cloud, and be able to use the same layer that allow you to run the same application is a fundamental things. And we are working on that. We are working on this vision and our strategy is really to be able to be transparent but provide the right building block to do all the use cases that they are required. Where the data. So we, again, not only meeting the customer but meeting where the data are, what the customer wants out of those data. So that's a fundamental things. And we have project Apex. So obviously we are plugging in the project Apex. From a Edge point of view, will allow the customer to have these unique experience to go in Apex and also deploy the Edge infrastructure that is needed. We're starting right now with that. So we will touch later, but that's the first building block of that journey. >> Excellent. Let's touch now. You've got some news around Apex and what are you announcing? >> So we are very excited because as I said our team it's pretty new and it's a very important investment that Dell makes. Not only in us as a team, but as a motion. So we are announcing a reference architecture with PTC. PTC is one of the biggest company for... Actually based here in Boston for manufacturing. And reference architecture will be run on base on Apex private cloud. So the customer can go to the portal, order Apex private cloud and deploy PTC on top of that. So very important things is the first step in this journey. But it's very important steps so we want to thank you also PTC to allow us to work with them. We have other stuff as well that we are announcing. I don't know if you are familiar but we have a very unique streaming data platform. Streaming data platform that can stream multiple data collected from gateway, from every place. And that it's a need. Obviously, when you need to process data in real time, whatever is streaming. What are we doing with the new streaming data platform approach is the ability to deploy single node. So it can be very appealing for the Edge and up to three nodes. >>Awesome. That's great. So a couple of comments on that. So it was funny. We did the LiveWorx show in theCUBE a couple of years ago. PTC is a big event and it was the Edge. And I remember looking around and saying "Where's all the IT vendors?". And so that's great to see you guys leaning in like that. Pierluca, the streaming platform. Tell me more about that. What's the tech behind it? >> So the streaming data platform is a project, that we start couple of year ago, is actually start from open source Pravega. It's a very interesting technology where you can stream multiple data. It's not a traditional storage. Use a technology that can really collect thousands of different streams. And that's very important when you need to mind the data. Bring the data, the structured data in efficient that you can process them at the real time. It's very important. So there are very cool use case of that. But now, that we look at the Edge, this is make more and more tangible sense because we have a lot of partners that they're working with us, especially to extend. When you have all these sensor, you bring the data to the gateways and from the gateways, then you can use data streaming platform to collect all these streams. And then you can easily process them. So it's a very fundamental technology. We are very proud of that. As I said, our enterprise version, it's getting more and more. And now we can land these on different architecture. So it can be backed up by an unison. It can be also on different storage type now. And as I said, we looking now to bring from a what was it data center kind of structure, down to the Edge because now we can put it in a single node up to three nodes. >> It makes a lot of sense. Is this like a Kafka based thing or open source or is it something you guys built or a combination? >> It's a combination. The project is an open source project but we did that. We start this many years ago. And it works with Kafka but it's not Kafka. So it has plugging that can work with Kafka and all the other things. And it's very easy to deploy. So it's a very, very important. And the other things is the scalability of this platform. >> Yeah, so I mean, that sounds like the kind of thing you had in the labs. And you said, "Okay, this is going to be important". And then boom, all of a sudden, the market comes to you. As if you pop it right in. And then of course, the Accenture relationship. Deep, deep industry expertise. So that makes a of sense. 5G's happening. A different world the next 10 years than the last 10 years. Isn't it? >> Yep. >> What is it about manufacturing? Why did you start there? >> I can take this. We looked at where the opportunity was from two perspective. One is whether what are the opportunities to sell, Dave. And the other one obviously comes with it because there's an opportunity to have. And manufacturing today at the Edge is about 30% of the opportunity in sales. According to IDC. But more so, it's been around for the longer time. And so it's maturing, it's the most demanding. And you know, it's got very long horizons of investment. And what we did was, we figured that if we can solve problems for industry, we can then extend that and solve it for everybody else. Because this would be the toughest one to solve. And we like challenge. And then, so we decided to focus and go deep. And you said it before, well, our approach is definitely horizontal approach. We cannot take an horizontal approach without verticalizing and understanding specific needs. So nobody can avoid doing both at the same time. You need to understand. But you also want to solve it in a way that doesn't proliferate the silos. So that's our role. We will understand, but we will make it more generic. So other people can never (indistinct). >> Yeah. And David, if I can add, I think the manufacturing is also very exciting for us as a technologist, right? And Dell technology, as in the name, the technology. So it's very exciting because if I look at manufacturing, we are really in the middle of a industrial transformation. I mean, it's a new era. If you think about, nobody care in the past to connect their machinery with... That they have PLC to the network. All of these is changing because the life where we live right now, with the pandemic, with the remote working, with the fact that you need to have a much more control and be able to have predictive matter. So you're not stopping your manufacturing. Is pushing the entire manufacturing institute industry to connect these machines. And with the connectivity of these machinery, you get a lot of data. You get also a lot of challenge. For example, security. So now, that's the place where connectivity brings the IT aspect in. And the OT guys, now they starting to speak (indistinct) because now it's a more complex things, right? It's not any more computerized only to one machinery. Specifically, is the entire floor. So it's a very interesting dynamics. >> Is the connection between that programmable logic controller and the Dell solution, you mentioned to secure, better security. And I presume it's also to connect back to whatever the core or the cloud, et cetera. Is it also to do something locally? Does it improve? Is there value add that you can provide locally? And what is that value add? >> Yeah, absolutely. So the value add, as I said, if you think right in the past, right? You have a machine that probably stay in the manufacturing for 20, 25 years then you have an hardware attached to that machine that they used the POC about 11 year. The guy that he knows better about that machine, is actually not the software component of it. But he's the guy that he's been working on that machine for 15 years. Now, how you translate that knowledge to a learning algorithm that actually can do that for thousand of machine. And that's really the key, right? You need to centralize information, process those information, but not in the cloud, not in a central data center, but on the manufacturing floor. And you need to have a way to represent these things in a very simple way. So the plant manager can take action, or the guy that is responsible for the entire line, can take action immediately. And that's where the change is. It's not anymore to... Is trying to extend that knowledge to multiple machine, multiple floor, and try to get these change immediately. So that's very important. >> So the PLC doesn't become a general purpose computer, or even necessarily an Uber computer. It connects to that capability because that enables data sharing across clouds. >> That's enable the entire things. You can't do a model just with one source. You need to have multiple sources. And also think about the manufacturing is changing not only for the machinery, but people that they build new manufacturing, right? They need to be smart building. They need to have a technology for being more green, solar energy consumption. So the manufacturing itself is mean five or six different things that you need to solve. It's not just the machine. So this idea of this silos environment is starting to collapse in one. And that's why it's important for us to start from a vertical, but also in the manufacturer, you already see this will expand to multiple things. Also, smart building another thing because they need it. >> Yeah. The red guilt to your point of view. Manufacturing is like the Big Apple. If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. And you've got adjacencies that you can take the learnings, and manufacturing, and apply them to those adjacent industries. Gil, give us the last word. >> No, usually when we talk at Dell technologies world, we talk to an ideal audience. And we're thinking this year that the way to talk about Edge, at least with the people who traditionally buy from us is expose them to the fact that they are more and more going to be responsible for every projects. And so our advice would be, our hope that they would partner with us to think ahead. Just like they do with data center with our cloud strategy. Thinking ahead as they think about their Edge and try to set up some architectural guidelines. So when they do get the request, they're ready for it. And think about what they know, think about the IP best practices that they applied. All of that is coming to them. They need to be prepared as well. And so we would like to partner with all of our customers to make them ready. And obviously help them simplify, secure, consolidated as they grow. >> Well, guys, thank you. I learned a lot today. We've made a lot of progress. You know, this is the hallmark of Dell, right? It's a very high, let me make sure I get this right. Very high do to say ratio, right? As you guys talked about doing this, a couple of couple of years ago. And you've made a lot of progress and I really appreciate you coming on theCUBE to explain this strategy. It makes a lot of sense. And so congratulations and good luck in the future. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, Dave. >> All right. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE's ongoing coverage of Dell Tech World 2021, the virtual edition. Keep it right there, I'll be right back. (closing music)

>>Welcome back to Dell Technology World. 2021. Del Tech World. The virtual edition. My name is Dave Volonte. We're gonna talk about the Edge. Very excited to invite Pierluigi Deli, who's the Vice President, Product management for the Edge portfolio. Adele and Gil Schwarzman, who is the Senior Vice President. Edge portfolio, also with Dell Technologies Gentlemen. Great to see you. Welcome to the cube. >>Thank you. Thank >>you. You see you, >>Yeah, great to see you guys to which we were face to face, but maybe maybe in 22 Gil, let's start with you. The edge is very exciting. Uh, it's, you know, not really defined, it's very fragmented, but it's there, you know, it's kind of, you know, it when you see it, what do you get excited about when you think about the edge? >>Yeah, I think uh there's two elements. The first one is that we all live at the edge. In other words, the areas we deal with our around us every day will show up um when we uh, you know, when we consume when we drive. So it's a, it's a very physical type of activity. We know it's there. What's really exciting motive to me is that you started with talking about fragmentation right on the bet. Um, it is a great opportunity for the technology is to add value um because it's so fragmented because it's so new because it has developed and evolved the way it is. We see an amazing opportunity for us to add much more value than we do today and solve problems that have yet to be solved in the industry. >>And it's an exciting, it's almost like an infinite playground for a technologist. You >>dave, I think that's exactly what we find out. The Edge is very exciting. There is a lot of motion, especially due to the pandemic and other things. Big factor that accelerate innovation at the edge but this is an inorganic acceleration and what it kills for one of the most of our customer is also confusion, right? They need to apply multiple solution but not very organized. So you try to solve the outcome like having the right production on the, on your line because demand is surging but you don't have an organic things to do that and solve the problem. So you see a lot of silence coming in for each one of the solution and that's what Gil was referring. That's a great opportunity for us as dealt with the breath of the portfolio we have and what our team that is a new team is focusing doing is to bring that idea to be able to consolidate multiple things at the edge and process things at the edge. >>We did a an event cube, had an event called the Cuban cloud and Q one and we had john Rosen and the title of segment was something like gaining the technology edge And we were kind of freaking out on, on the tech at the edge. Uh it might take away there was trying to like what is the edge? It's like, well it's the place where it makes most sense to process the data and so that brings up a lot of challenges. There are technical challenges and there are business challenges. I wonder if we could sort of dig into those a little bit. How do you guys look at that? Maybe gil you want to start maybe on the business side and then we can dig a short, right >>the way things evolved if you think about it, um, at the edge of very vertical lesson because of that they're very use case driven And so in every industry possible you start with some business person making a decision whether they have a need or they want to grow their business. And so for example they would buy an applying to do fraud protection in retail or detection retail or they will apply an application to medical robotics in the factory. And it would come with its own gateway in plant compute in a cloud portal and then you do it again and again and again every time you have a business opportunity all of the sudden you have this proliferation of I. T. Type equipment at the end where it's it's the worst place to have it really because you don't have the right I. T. Resources and you are um in the need to protect it in a much more um in a different way than you do in a data center. And so all of that brings to bring us to a point that you know we see an opportunity to simplify. Um And so not only simplification and this is you know simplification or simplicity is the most important driver for any I. T. Purchase. Um Things that are simple are the easiest that the most economical to operate the next demand that we see from a customary security because things are at the they have a much more um you know extended attack surface um they need to be connected to networks, they need to be connected without I. T. Staff. So if you can simplify insecure you can really unlock amazing value by processing data where closely to where it's created without it. You know we were seeing this opportunity as businesses but we can we get to it because there are so those two hurdles in front of us. >>So when you say thank you for that bill, when you think about, when you hear you hear a lot about AI influencing at the edge and and if you think about AI today much of the work is modeling, it's done in the cloud, but you're not going to be doing A i influencing in real time in the cloud, you know, take the autonomous vehicle example, so that brings some some technical challenges. Um, there's obviously data challenges. I'm curious as to how you think about that. I mean we always talk about how much data is going to be persisted, I think Tesla persists like five minutes of data, right? But some of it is gonna go back, that's true, but a lot of it is going to be processed real time and that's just really different than the way we typically think about. Yeah, >>absolutely. So at the Edge, especially in manufacturing, we see right now or in a uh, another use case, it's very important to get the outcome very quickly. Now. You don't use that a deep learning model for that. You need to just understand, for example, in a computer vision use case where you take the image of your production line, you actually to your point dave you not keep those image when you keep the image where you have the defect. But you need to process that. Ai Ml needs to be intelligent enough to understand that you have a defect and send that image them to the club. So the search of the data at the edge is a very important factor and why you need to process data, the Edge because your point, you can't wait to send to the cloud and I'm waiting right? Um, Tesla is a clear example of that all the autonomous car where you need to react instantaneously to change. But in manufacturing for example that is our focus for now is for example the robots that if you need to optimize the robot, you need to have a immediate understanding of where the pieces are and when they need to put in the tolerance need to be act immediately. Otherwise you come out with the thousands of pieces that they are not in the right tolerance. So at the end of the day, what we see is not only the search of the need of processing ai ml to the edge but also the need of a new type of compute at the edge. So in the past was just Gateway and you get the gate when you send the data to the cloud. Now it's a form of a new computer that come as also GPU capability and other things to process the data. So very important. And I think the Dell especially we are very focused on that because is uh is really where the customer need to extract the value. >>Thank you. And Gil I want to get into the unique value proposition to tell what makes you distinct. And it's uh I infer from your comments, your strategy you said is to simplify and so I see two vectors. There. One is to simplify at the edge. The other is to where we're needed, connect that edge, whether it's on prem public cloud across cloud, that kind of simplification layer that abstracts the complex, the underlying complexity. Uh Maybe you could talk about your strategy and what makes you guys different. >>Sure. Um We've been talking to a, well we always talk to our customers and we've been doing business at the edge for many many years. Um You know let's call it coincidental were very large company we have reached, we serve our customers so when they decide to buy something for their you know environment, they come to us as well as other vendors and we win a percentage of the time based on our market share. Um But when we decided to take another look at how can we be even more relevant? We started talking to a lot of them great depth. And what would we do we discovered was the problem I talked about before, the problem of complexity, the problem of security and the problem of you know choice. And so our focus is to do what we do best. We at the end of the day we're an I. T. Company. Um and our our customers for the most part our I. T. People and we see them dragged more and more into edge projects because customers need to connect edge to the network and they need to security and that's how it starts. And so those worlds of I. T. And OTR coming together and their coming together applying best practices which is exactly what we know how to do. And so because of that we think that they need to think about architecture versus unique silent solutions architecture can support multiple use cases that can grow with time, consolidate more and more use cases as they grow. Simplify what they do by applying you know tried and true or tried and true best practices in a secure manner. So the deal approach would be doing that taking a more architectural approach to the adverse as a use case and then just like you predicted um meet the customers where they are from an application stand book. And so we we know that a lot of applications are growing and development on a hyper scale or public clouds. We would like to connect to those. We would like to allow them to keep working as they have except when they run into the edge. Think about environments that could consolidate multiple workloads and not solve it for each one at the same time. And so that would be our overall approach. That's what we're working on. >>Yeah. Okay. So that horizontal layer, if you will uh to to to serve many many use cases, not just you're not gonna go a mile deep into one and be the expert at some narrow use case. You want to be that horizontal platform. But at the same time, look, I wonder does does that call for more program ability as we over time of the of the products to to really allow people to kind of design in that flexibility if you will build my own. Uh is that something that we can expect? >>Yeah, absolutely. So uh we spoke a little bit about this before the interview and the things that is very important is compose ability starting from a very small from factor to the cluster and then expand to the cloud is a fundamental things and a trend that we see. The fact that you can compose the infrastructure um starting from a small gateway that is changing in this market, right up to the cloud and be able to use the same layer that allow you to run the same application is the fundamental things and we are working on that. Um we are working on this vision and our strategy is really to be able to be transparent but provide the right building block to do all the use case that they are required where the data are. So we again, not only meeting the customer but meeting where the data are, what the customer wants out of those data. So that's a fundamental things. And you know, we we have project Apex. So obviously we are plugging into the project apex from an edge point of view, will allow the customer to have this unique experience to go in Apex and also deploy the edge infrastructure that is needed. So that's that's we started right now with that. So we will touch later, but that's the first building block of that journey. >>Actually, let's touch now you've got some news around Apex and and and and talking what are you announcing? So >>we are very exciting because as I said, our team is, it's pretty new and um, it's a very important investment that Dell makes uh not only in us as a team but as a motion. Um, so we are announcing a reference architecture with PTC. PTC is the one of the biggest company for actually based here in boston uh for manufacturing and reference architecture will be run on based on apex private cloud so the customer can go to the portal, order, order apex private cloud and deploy deploy PTC on top of that. So, very important things is that the first step in this journey and but it's an important, very, very important steps. So we want to thank you also PTC to allow us to work with them. Um, we have other stuff as well that we are announcing. Um, I don't know if you are familiar but we have a very unique streaming data platform, um, streaming data platform that can stream multiple data collected from Gateway from every place. And uh it's a need obviously when you need to process data in real time, very important to have a streaming, what we're doing with the new streaming data platform approach is the ability to deploy single note. So it can be very appealing for the edge and up to free notes and last but not least gil if you want to speak about our other partnership is very important. >>Sure. Um once we started looking more in depth into manufacturing, we discover that this market is today served by combinations of um oT vendors, people who make equipment? S eyes, people who consult on integration and um and you know, a lot of SVS that make up this ecosystem and people like ourselves. And so one of the things that we decided to do is partner with accenture, accenture Industry X practice to bring our joint value to customers. We started by investing in in a five G lab. They have four industry act. So you know the usage of five G. Manufacturing industry and we will still we will expand that and work on that as a as a joint offer for our joint customers going forward. So we're really excited about this because we feel that consolidation needs to happen not only technology but also in the partnerships, we need to partner if you want to bring true value to our customers and that's the first step, >>awesome. That's great. So a couple of comments on that. So it's funny, we did the live work show in the cube a couple years ago. PTC is a big, big event and it was like it was the edge and I remember looking around saying where's all the vendors? So that's great to see you guys leaning in like that parallel to the streaming platform. Tell me more about that. What's the tech behind it? >>Uh So the streaming data platform is a project that we start a couple of years ago is actually uh start from open source Provida. Um it's uh it's a very interesting technology where you can stream multiple data, it is not a traditional storage, ah use a technology that can ah really collect thousands of different streams and that's very important when you need to mind the data, bring the data um in the structure data in a inefficient that you, you can process them at the real time. It's very important. So um there are very cool use case of that. But now that we look at the edge, this is make more and more tangible sense because we have a lot of partners that they're working with us, especially to extend when you have all this sensor, you bring the data to the gateways and from the gateways then you can use data streaming platform to collect all these dreams and then you can easily process them. So it's a very fundamental technology, we are very proud of that. Um as I said, our enterprise version uh is getting more and more and now we can land this on different architecture, so it is, it can be backed up by an Iceland. Uh it can be also on different storage type now and as I said, we're looking now to bring from a what was a data center kind of structure down to the edge because now we can put a single node up to three notes, >>it makes a lot of sense. Is this like a Kafka based thing or open source or is it something you guys built or a combination? >>It's a combination. We actually project. The project is an open source project, but we did that, we start this many years ago and um he works with Kafka, but he's not Kafka. So it's, it's a he has plugging that can work with Kafka and all the other things and, and it's very easy to deploy. So it's a very, very, very important. And the other things is the scalability of this platform. >>I mean, it sounds like the kind of thing you had in the labs and you said, OK, this is going to be important. That boom all of a sudden the market comes to you as if you pop it right in. And then of course, the accenture of relationship deep, deep industry expertise, so that makes a lot of sense. 55 Gs happening a different world the next 10 years in the last 10 years isn't it? What is it about manufacturing? Why why did you start there? >>I can take this. Um We looked at where the opportunity was from two perspectives. One is where the opportunity, what the opportunities to sell, even the other one obviously comes with it because there is an opportunity to have and manufacturing today at the edges about 30 of the opportunity in sales according to NBC but more so it's been around for the longer time and so they it's very it's maturing um it's the most demanding. Um and you know, it's got very long horizons of investment and what we did was we figured that if we can solve problems for industry we can then extend that and solving for everyone years. Because this would be the toughest one to solve and we like challenge. And so we decided to focus and go deep. You said it before? Well, our approach is definitely horizontal approach. We cannot take a horizontal approach without vertical izing and understand specific needs. So nobody can avoid doing both at the same time. You need to understand. But you also want to solve it in a way that doesn't proliferate the silos. So that's our role. We will understand what we will make it more generic so other people can never get later on >>and David, if I cannot. Uh I think the manufacturing is also very exciting for us as a technologist, right? Uh and uh Dell technology as in the name the technology. So it's very exciting because if I look at manufacturing, we we are really in the middle of a industrial transformation. I mean it's a new era. Um If you think about um nobody care in the past to connect their machinery with that the F. P. L. C. To the network. All of this is changing because the life that where we live right now with the pandemic with the remote working with the fact that you need to have a much more control and be able to have predictive matters. So you're not stopping your manufacturing is pushing the entire manufacturing instrument industry to connect this machine and with the connectivity of this machinery you get a lot of data. You get also a lot of challenge. For example security. So now that's the place where connectivity brings the I. T. Aspect in and U. T. Guys now they're starting to speak with because now it's a more complex things right? It's not any more computerized competitor eyes only to one machinery specific is the entire floor. So it's a very interesting dynamics >>is the connection between that programmable logic controller and the Dell solution is you mentioned to secure better security and I presume it's also to connect back to whatever the core or the cloud etcetera. Is it also to do you know, something locally? Does it improve? Is their value add that you can provide locally? And what is that value add? >>Absolutely. So the value, as I said, um if you think right in the past right, you have a machine that uh, probably stay in the manufacturing for 2025 years, then you have an artwork attached to that machine that it is the P. L. C. About 11 years. The guy that he knows better about that machine is actually not the software component on. But he's the guy that has been working on that machine for 15 years now. How you translate that knowledge To a learning algorithm that actually can do that 4000 of machine. And and that's really the key right. You need to centralize information, process those information but not in the cloud, not in the central data center, but on the manufacturing floor. And you need to have a way to represent these things in a very simple way. So the plant manager can take action or the or the guy that is responsible for the entire line can take action immediately. And that's where the changes is not anymore to is trying to extend that knowledge to multiple machine multiple floor and try to get this change immediately. So that's really >>so the PLC doesn't become a general purpose computer or even necessarily the Uber computer. It connects to that capability because that enables data sharing across clouds and that's >>enabled the entire things. You know, you you can't do a model just with one source. You need to have multiple sources. Um, and also think about the manufacturing is changing not only for the machinery, but people that they build new manufacturing right? They need to be smart building. They need to have a technology for being more green solar energy consumption. So the manufacturing itself is mean five or six different things that you need to solve. It's not just the machine. So this idea of the silence environment is started to collapse in one and that's why it's important for us to start from a vertical, but also in the manufacturing, you already see this will expand to multiple things. Also like smart building another thing because they need it. >>Yeah. The red guilt to your point manufacturers like the Big Apple. If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere and you've got adjacent seas, you can, you know, you can take the learnings from manufacturing and apply them to those adjacent industries. Uh, give us the last word. >>Um, look, usually when we talk at the technologies world, we talked to an I. D. Audience and we were, we're thinking this year that the way to talk about edge, at least with the people who traditionally buy from us is exposed them to the fact that they are more and more are going to be responsible for projects. And so our advice would be our hope that they would partner with us to think ahead. Just like they do with data center with their cloud strategy, think ahead as they think about their edge and try to set up some architectural guidelines. So when they do get the request, they're ready for it and think about what they think about the best practices that they applied, all of that is coming to them. They need to be prepared as well. And so we would like to partner with all of our customers to make them ready and obviously help them simplify secure, consolidate as they grow. >>Well guys, thank you, I learned a lot today. I you made a lot of progress. You know, this is the hallmark of Dell, right? It's a very high, let me make sure I get this right, very high due to say ratio right. You guys talked about doing this, you know, a couple a couple of years ago, uh, and you've made a lot of progress and I really appreciate you coming in the cube to explain the strategy. It makes a lot of sense. And so congratulations and uh, good luck in the future. >>Thank you. >>All right. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volonte for the cubes, ongoing coverage of Del Tech World 2021. The virtual edition. Keep it right there, right back, >>mm.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital Experience Brought to You by Dell Technologies. >>Welcome to the Cubes coverage of Dell Technologies World. The Digital Experience in 2020 I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm pleased to welcome back one of our alumni on the Cube. Joining me is Gil Shorts in the SPP and the Edge Portfolio Strategy at Execution for Dell Technologies. Gil, it's great to see you, even virtually. >>It's great to see you again, Lisa. >>It wouldn't be a Dell Technologies world if I didn't get a chance to talk to you. We didn't have you on the Cube, so we appreciate it. And you are very socially distant from me. I am in California. You're in Israel, so we're following guidelines. But one of the one of the other things that's changed since I've lasting you is you're now in this new role with respect to edge. Tell me a little bit about that. >>Well, a few months ago, the Dell Technologies Management asked me to look after our, um, its strategy and execution. Um, they put me in this role to execute on a strategy that has been developed for a while. Look at the market looking, looking at the opportunity. Onda also, you know, based on where I came from with VX rail looking at similar concept, that would be implemented across the board. And so here I am today in the process of setting up 18 that would help the company to capture that future opportunity. >>Well, congratulations on that. So we've been talking about the edge for a while. It isn't anything new, but talk to us about what's going on from Dell Technologies Perspective. What are some of the things that you're seeing with respect to the value that the Edge will provide two businesses in any industry? >>Um, you're right and he's not new. We have bean at the edge, all of us, the industry, definitely Dell Technologies forever. What's different is that for the last few years, a lot of the applications that are there to capture information and make real time decisions have bean in data centers or in the cloud, and we used to connect all sorts of sensors directly to those of data centers or clouds. Well, now we have too much information. That information is very costly. to move. It takes time to move it. I'm sometimes you don't want to move into a cloud or even your own data center. And so the industry is starting to move more and more. Compute storage, networking towards the edge. Eso It's nothing new, but you know there's use cases. Some of them are all use cases that need to migrate towards where the data is created to be a manufacturing plant or a retail store or or a minor or utility company. And there are a new use cases that are just being enabled by technology by, uh, better connectivity. Um, computer vision. You know, it used to be there in a store. There was a point of sale. Well, now there's a self check out, sometimes with the front detection capability. So all of those presents a fairly drastic change, where some expectation as 75% of the world's data, is created outside of the traditional data center cloud by 2025. And that's why we need to be working towards being the best choice for our customers for the edge applications. >>So, yeah, you quoted Gartner saying that 75% of that cloud enterprised it or the enterprise data is going to be processed outside formal data center or the cloud by 2025 is, you said That's in five short years, hopefully short years when we return to normal, so tremendous amount of change going on. But you also talk about some new use cases. I'm just curious, since the world has so dramatically changed our since we last saw you in person, are any of those use cases driven by the pandemic and how many businesses have had to Tibbett so quickly and change their way of operating? >>Well, that that's a very good example of how edge applications are being being leveraged. Obviously, computer vision, thermal imaging. Um, in some places, though, that's, you know, a very loaded term. You know, some social distancing applications are being created around the world. The the the world is a new way to respond to this, uh, this pandemic. But this pandemic, you know, will come will hopefully go soon. Go away soon when we get the vaccine. Um, but even day to day has changed the we doom or in a digital manner, we leverage more sensors and all sorts of electronic feelers out there. Um, you know, I talked to in agriculture Company recently that they have a robot that looks at their plans every day and decides which one are healthy and which one are sick and what to do about it. Um, they have a robot that follows that one and take section, and I suggested that they should have another robot to just eat the fruits. And, you know, none of us will be required anymore. But the point is, on a mission e no applications are being created because we can, and that that requires real time decision making. And that's why compute and storage and networking are moving towards where the data is created, and hence the growth in edge applications as we see them, >>that really time implication is absolutely critical. And that's something that businesses, whether it's agricultural or construction or retail, for example, or manufacturing that needs that real time insight. We talk about that all the time. We also talk about the term, you know, businesses need to get actionable insights from data, and that's one of those terms, like data driven. That could mean multiple different things. What from Dell technologies perspective, enabling a business to get actionable insights from data. What does that mean from Dell? Text perspective. And how is the edge of facilitator of that? >>Well, I think we need to look at, you know, our value, it our focus, which is in the infrastructure. I'm there. And so if somebody has information created at the edge, they would have their own way to analyze that data. Sometimes it's gonna be people data scientists with another latest application. Many times more and more, it's gonna be machines through machine learning that will analyze the situation and make recommendations. Either way, this environment needs to be up and running. It needs to be resilient. It needs to be outside of the data center, which presents a lot of challenges. Um, it's, you know, fragmented technology that is moving from different places to the edge in multiple multiple physical and environmental constraints. Um, those environments are remote and distributed. It's not in your data center, which means that you need to make sure that you have reliable service and support. You also need to secure it better. Suddenly, there is more entry points of things that people could touch and on great problems for the organization. So our job, in my opinion, is to solve those problems is to say, Look, you know, you need to move towards the edge to analyze your data, to make decisions. We're here to solve that problem and and allow you to do this without making a significant significant trade off, you know, versus doing it in your own data center or in the cloud. >>Yeah, I was talking to one of Dell Technologies customers the other day who has tens of thousands of sensors and cameras all over the world, or maybe great work there. And I'm thinking all of the challenges with respect to the environmental implications or right physical implications. And I was thinking, you know, the business is doing edge in California. The last month would have been very challenged with things like the smoke. How do you help organizations to enable that infrastructure to be reliable under different physical and environmental conditions? >>That's a great question, and I will just say before before I have said specifically that while the physical constraints are something that we usually talk about when we talk about EJ, I actually think that the bigger problem is management. Um, but we're not unaware for the physical requirements. So we are busy delivering recognized short depth. You know, servers we just launched recently. The extra to a platform, Highly ragged eyes, short depth will speak server that can go from minus, you know, sells you some to 55 cents you saw in temperature. Um, or you know, the ability to connect those through, you know, software defined networking. Or if I talk about a little bit of my heritage taking the same extra, too, with the VM or Visa V X range stack and said, you know, putting it out there as a ruggedized but also remotely managed in full stack solution. Um, So you will see us putting out and have bean different form factors front and serviceability, different temperature ranges, a different kind of CPS, all of those. But I will also tell you that we're gonna focus heavily on the way to manage those and secure them and update them because I think that's where the simplification comes, not just from the form factor of themselves. >>Yeah, that has been the heterogeneous and and very widely distributed nature of the H has been a barrier for businesses for quite a while. Can you unpack that a little bit? Mawr In terms of the simplification of the management, How is Dele? Technology is going to enable a business to achieve that. >>Well, let's start with what? What? What we have out there in the market today. Somebody could have a cloud native application developed, you know, maybe even all containerized. And they could run it on tansy t k g on the VX rail, and they could run it in thousands of locations around the world. I'm centrally managing all of those Andre the phone factors being, you know, regular server or ragged, A server. Um, the ability to run your edge application as an extension off your cloud model is also very important getting to consistent operation. So, for example, somebody is using VM, or Cloud Foundation in their data center. Could leverage that recently large capability off multiple multi classroom manager. So now you have a central VM or club foundation managing multiple classes out there on DSO, we bring together the physical attributes and the management attributes on at the same time. Um, if you expand on it I also think the Dell will have to meet customers where they are with, you know, the the ability to get simplifying and automate solutions for their choice off applications where they are today. And so that's what we're going to be working towards. >>So when you're talking with customers who are either looking to expand their edge operations, simplify them like you were just talking about, or even those businesses that are looking to explore and exploit the edge for operational improvement and maybe being able to deliver a better customer experience. I'd love to know how you approach those different customers. For example, I know that Dell says Don't consider the edge of separate problem. >>That's true the and I don't think customers look at the edges a separate problem either. In other words, the most conversations today would would look at in architecture that has some cloud and some edge. That cloud could be in their own hybrid cloud solution in the data center or a hyper scaler solution that they're running on. Um, if you think about the most generic problem at the edge, it's an analytics problem, right? So we know. So we know the data is created at the edge, it's going to be analyzed by definition. If you talk about machine learning, for example, parts would happen at the edge. What would happen in the data center or in the cloud? Um, if you look at any other type of analytics, you'll make some real time decisions. But save some of the information back in the cloud. So it's not a separate decision anymore. It's got to be somehow connected to your infrastructure. And I think that also learns toe. More and more organizations are putting together the O. T. What we call it operational technology in the i t. Um, when they're trying to leverage I t best practices in the OT space, and I think that's how they're coming together, right, you have to transform. You need to do something with the data. You look at a new architectures. I t brings that cloud or hybrid cloud or distributed computer architectures er into those more traditional environments. >>A little bit about that we've tried and we've talked about the I T. O T. Convergence and relationships in the past many times on the queue. But that's an essential component here, so that not only can a business really face those barriers, confront them and eliminate them, but it's also sometimes a bit culturally challenging. What do you see when you talk with customers and you recognize that's one of the things that they need to do with the line? I t n ot what? Your recommendations there, >>Um, first of all is I always wonder if ot people now we're calling them ot people. I certainly know that I t people are identified as I d. I think multi people are head of engineering head of production. You know, they run their businesses and and they've been doing things they you know, it's not like they haven't been doing even the analysis. Even nothing really is New Year. But they would use the, you know, the machine manufacturer on prem solution or a cloud solution to many specific so solutions worm or bespoke or specific specific machine specific problems. Oh, the advent off edge computing and those environments moving closer to the edge and the architecture unable to consolidate, by the way one of the strength until technology has. And so instead of just solving a you know, a A I don't know. Machine maintenance schedule or improvement in a plan. We can have an environment that's all that and possibly the video surveillance and maybe the plan. TRP. There is no need anymore to solve any problems specifically with a specific solution. That's where I t comes in, because that's what I T has been doing for a long time. So that conversation that bridge between solving specific problem and putting together an architectural ER that could consolidate multiple use cases and be part of an overall cloud our data center to its strategy. It's very, very helpful for both sides because because it's it's very effective. Um, I think more and more customers are realizing that that was conversations are happening and I t is being put into recommend a solution. So Andi, I think in fact, there's some research that shows that that is happening, Andi, that sets us up to have the right conversation with right, um, owners in those accounts. >>That's excellent. That brings up another question. I had you mentioned the word bespoke a minute or so ago, and I thought, you know so many of the of the edge deployments. There's complexity there. There might be unique requirements depending on business, depending on vertical. What's Dell Technologies approach to tackling the edge? Consistently like like the top three things that you go to with every opportunity every day appointment that you know, these three things fundamentally must be and part of the foundation. >>I think we touched on those. I think the recognition that it's part of a larger strategy is one. And so it's gonna be playing along in that you know that strategy, that data center to edge or cloud strategy. Um, the other one is the management that you put in place. And so, by the way, even even a few things that we we are gap today, which is why we are investing in the edge. Um, like the ability to provision with zero touch simplifying that experience, though we are very good at life cycle management, for example, which is the next thing. So it's that consistent operation between core and edge, which is very important. It's the physical constraints that have to be addressed in, I think, more important than anything is the ability to get support because you can't be everywhere that is considered for us and that you need somebody to be there in Tel. Um, you know, his people almost everywhere around the world that can be there on on a short notice to take care of problems. Moreover, many of our technologies dial home, and so we know when things happen even before they do. Um so I think sometimes people mention enterprise. Great. You know, it's It's a very important consideration to look at those edge. Sometimes people think that edge is small and possibly not as, um um, requiring as a Davis and replication. In my opinion, the workloads that are now going to the head require enterprise grade treatment and to end. And so you know, it's it's the management. It's the physical environment in the support that you may require that are very common. >>Excellent. Thank you. So last question for you. Since we don't get to do a physical Dell Technologies world this year, hopefully we will again one day soon. I want to know in this new role what are you you're excited about with respect to edge when you're engaging with customers, presumably over video conferencing. What are some of the things that you see that you're really excited about safe for the next sector. 12 months? >>Well, look, from a business perspective. Clearly, um, the the pendulum is swinging our way in a sense of customer need. What we have, which is very nice, because you can solve customer problems with a lot of experience and a amazing portfolio, though it has some gaps that we're gonna work on, Which is why you know what we're investing from a personal standpoint, it's It's kind of a rare opportunity to touch real life things. If that makes any sense, Every conversation is about tangible things that people do. They manufacturer, they save lives. They are growing plants. Um, it is. It has a very physical element that makes makes it so much more interesting. It also the edges. You know, it's the one area that we deal with. It has a paan almost in every sentence, so you can go for a conversation without anybody or anybody can >>Ugo. Now let's let's end it with a great panel for the edge. >>I know So what? No, I'm just saying, maybe I'm living on the edge. Who knows? >>Oh, nice living on the edge. I think that's what we're all doing during this coven. 19. Well, Gil, it's been so great to have you back on the Cube. Thank you for your time. I look forward to seeing you. Hopefully the next event in person. >>I hope so too. Lisa. Good to see you. >>Likewise. Bar Guillotine Arnson. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes. Coverage of Dell Technologies, World 2020. A digital experience.

>>From around the globe with digital coverage of the 2020. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is the Cube's coverage of 2020 online. I'm really happy to welcome first time guests and he is the chief information. You're the officer at Veeam. Thank you so much for joining us. Always loved it. That was a CSO. >>Awesome. Thanks for having me Stu. >>All right, so, so guilt, give us a little bit of your background and you're relatively new than beam, obviously, you know, when you took the job, uh, that the current, you know, global, uh, pandemic, uh, wasn't uh, you know, necessarily right center, but, uh, yeah. Give, give our audience a little bit of who you are. >>Yeah. Yeah. Timing is everything I, um, I have, I bet named for 90 plus days, uh, joined the company just before the global pandemic, uh, broke loose and sort of disrupted our entire, uh, our entire planet. Uh, before that I was, uh, I was the CSO for five years of, uh, uh, systemically important financial services, >>Market utility. >>Uh, but most of my experiences, um, is in government. I was a, I was a federal executive for almost 20 years in Washington, D C where I was a CSO at the department of energy, a Homeland security, Naval intelligence, and a few other places. >>Excellent. Well, that's a great pedigree. We've loved talking to them, public people. Uh, obviously you're already front and center. Uh, they're always okay. Really? I mean, it's a board level. Got, okay. Nope. Uh, dirty, so much of what's going on. Yeah. I have to ask you though with the global pandemic hitting, uh, obviously, you know, work from home is, is, is a big piece of what's going on. Mmm. Give us, you know, kind of your first reaction then they are being new to the role. How do you make it for that? You know, Veeam itself is safe and that you're customers, uh, as they're, you know, dealing with things that, you know, they stay secure. >>That's a, that's a great question. I don't think anyone can say they were a hundred percent prepared for a global pandemic, the likes of which no one's ever really experienced before, at least in the modern age, but, you know, Veeam is largely a, even though we're 5,000 strong and global is largely a virtual a workforce. So a large majority of our, um, our teammates work from home and mobile situation. So, uh, the company has a long track record of providing really innovative and secure tools so that we can conduct our business, both, you know, with our customers, with our sales teams, generating leads, our technical teams, developing product. Um, the technology here is, uh, is, is pretty impressive. I, I will say, um, >>Uh, the impact to our workforce, at least from a virtual perspective, hasn't, uh, ha hasn't been as significant as some more traditional companies, um, being the new CSO here at beam. It's a first time position for the company. Uh, who's taken this topic very seriously. It's a, it has been for me personally, a bit of, a bit of a challenge in building my team, obviously, uh, the InfoSec, uh, space, cyber security space is very competitive when you're trying to hire folks. Uh, and the, uh, the pandemic obviously has made, uh, has made folks think twice about transitioning or starting careers or changing companies. So it's put a little bit, a little bit of a hitch in my step in terms of, uh, overall planning. Uh, but we're moving on to some different strategies and building a team a little, little slower than we had anticipated. >>Yeah, well, it's definitely understandable, but put a free for most people were that awesome a little bit these days and, you know, organizationally, this is a new role. Okay. I worked for the CIO. Are you okay? Yeah. What's been your with some of those organizations, well, dynamic, you know, with CSO lives, sports in the org. Yeah. I think it really depends upon the company's culture, right. That drives where this role sits at my, at my previous company, I've worked four, uh, the CIO who was a corporate officer, uh, here at Veeam, uh, it is a new position, uh, and there's such a significance placed on, uh, cybersecurity because of the expectations around this topic. Not only from our board Mmm. Uh, our customers, uh, uh, are the government regulators and everyone else, uh, this role, my role reports directly into bill large and our CEO, which, you know, fully empowers me as a, as a member of the, of the management team of the entire company to drive the, the, the initiatives that need to be driven so that, uh, we can meet those expectations, which know, I tend to write a rise every year from, uh, expectations of our customers, product features in our, in our products, uh, regulatory requirements and so forth. >>So yeah, um, this space tends to get, uh, more difficult, more complex as time goes on. And I think, uh, that the team has, uh, constructed this role in an operating model that, um, that is going to make it highly successful. Yeah. Well, you know, data security, absolutely critical today's landscape, but, you know, give us your thoughts about, you know, data security and really modernized. Yeah. And you know, what, what is your charter? Okay. Right. Hmm. They know fits in there. Yeah. Yeah. You know, deem is now a us company. Right. And the idea here is to direct, continue to drive growth in, in North America. And one of the key components of that growth, it has to be the U S government. I have a pedigree with U S government. I understand what the requirements are to do business there. So again, back to those expectations, uh, my charge here is to deliver us not only an internal cyber security program that continues to meet and exceed those expectations, but to be able to position our products in a way that not only solves some of the data resiliency issues that the government faces and that are global customers face, but also helped us solve some of these significant cyber security issues that they're trying to manage, you know, in the boardroom cybersecurity is, is, is essentially the number one operational risk now with a lot of focus, uh, across, uh, not only the boards, but all the functional areas of the company, whether it's finance, sales, technology, and security, it's, it's just, it seems to be the topic that everyone's most concerned about. >>And we just want to make sure that we're positioned in a way, um, that, uh, that drives what we're delivering here as a competitive advantage. Yeah. So what, what are some keys to consideration for data security on modern business? >>I'm sorry, you broke up. Could you repeat that question, Stu? Are there any considerations for modern business? Yeah. You know, um, there are, uh, there there's, there's so many, right. I tend to focus on, uh, the simple things for most companies, right? The, uh, the priorities that every CSO ought to have, uh, are around, um, you know, the, the, the blocking and tackling of a risk based vulnerability management program, making sure that your identity of your managing identities so that the right people have the right access to the right resources at the right time. Um, you, you got to have those strong and fast cyber ops because you will have incidents. Right. We all know that, uh, if you're a CSO in a company that's, uh, you're not managing incidents, chances are, you're not seeing incidents, which is probably worse than, um, then not having them. >>Um, the other thing that I've learned, uh, as a key consideration for protecting your company, coming from government is this concept of information sharing and making sure that you're, uh, that you're, that you're not only speaking with your peer companies, but your competitors as well, because they're seeing an awful lot of the same issues that you will see or have seen. And there's really no, the competitive advantage in information sharing amongst the CSOs in, in, in, uh, various industry communities and financial services. I feel like they've optimized that where I came from, uh, I would talk with, uh, CSOs at my competing firms on a, on a weekly basis, uh, comparing notes, talking about threats, understanding threat actors, talking about technology and so forth, just trying to provide for, uh, this sense of collective defense that those in the financial services industry has together. Um, and then, you know, obviously for the last several years, there's gotta be a deep understanding of the differences and managing cyber security in the cloud and what that entails and, you know, holding those vendors, uh, accountable for your security requirements, you can outsource the technology, but you can't outsource the tech, uh, the risk. >>So you, you have to be able to understand how the cloud changes, uh, the risks that you're facing, um, from the internet. Yeah. No, I'm, I'm, I'm so glad you brought up, uh, you know, early in my career. Yeah, yeah. 20 years ago. And, you know, could it be a differentiator and therefore there wasn't necessarily that sharing among your group, or they were very careful how they did things because, Oh, wait, I tried this project. I might have some advantages, you know, as you said, security is something we need to, as a community, get involved with you also brought up. Wow. So if we look at cloud models today, we really, yeah. Okay. Facility model. Mmm. So know how should people be thinking about cloud, uh, how should they be, uh, you know, moving forward, you know, really these multitudes of environments that they need yeah, yeah. >>You know, we could, we could probably have an hour show and talk about some of the scar tissue that I've gained over the years in managing cloud programs. The number one, uh, the number one thing I would talk about, I think it's probably the most important thing is making sure you understand exactly what security services your cloud provider is providing. And don't assume, um, that they're going to meet your requirements. You need to understand what those requirements are, whether or not they fit your business, an operations model and whether or not they're, um, Mmm they're they're capable of meeting the risk appetite that you've set for yourself and communicated to your board. Uh, in, in, in certain, some in certain cases, the default clouds, uh, security services, won't meet those, uh, expectations and you'll have to work with the cloud vendors to augment those in a way that makes, uh, that makes it Mmm, more, uh, acceptable for your, uh, for your risk profile and for your business. >>Um, I've often I talk with peers who, Mmm. Uh, at companies, smaller companies who just assume that the large cloud providers are going to take care of everything that you used to take care of on prem. Uh, and in fact, there are just certain things, uh, that are happening in the cloud that are completely different than on prem situation, as it relates to cyber. And you've got to have a really good understanding of, of, of how those are differentiated, uh, because if, uh, if, if you're making assumptions about the level of cybersecurity services that you're procuring in the cloud, uh, it's probably gonna turn around and bite you at some point. Yeah. It, I, I laugh a little bit. I think please free cloud era. No, yeah. Force let's get somebody that is okay. Lazy or, you know, being a little bit malicious. Okay. Yeah. >>Go against dirty things that you said, well, if you go to the cloud, you know, something's angel, I haven't, I need to make sure, sure. That I've adjusted those settings. Oh, wait. Yeah. There's something I should have looked do too. Let me make sure I adjust those. I think at least, I think cloud providers are, you know, a little bit more engaged after some yeah. You know, uh, kinks in the armor, uh, that, that we're seeing. So, uh, the, the, there have been a little bit more awareness of what's going on. Everybody is engaging a little bit more Mmm. Gil, uh, governance and ransomware things hockey for many years. How does that yeah. Uh, your, your overall discussion, um, you know, governance is probably one of the most overlooked that most important components of a cybersecurity program that's effective. Um, we don't do cyber security just to do cyber security. >>We're trying to meet key business objectives. We're trying to meet customer expectations. We're trying to support technology integration programs and having all of the efforts of the CSO and his Oregon, his or her organization governed, uh, correctly within the corporate structure is just absolutely critical here at Veeam. Uh, the, um, uh, my function has governed, uh, by the border, by the board of directors, as it is in most large companies. So they're interested obviously in the health status of the projects that I'm, uh, that I'm leading the initiatives that I'm driving, the transformations that are occurring across the globe. They're interested in, uh, understanding exactly how the product feature sets and are in our Mmm. And our products are being informed by the experiences of our, of our internal team and what our customers need. Uh, for us, it's very important to provide that oversight and insight into everything that we're doing, uh, at the highest levels, so that, uh, so that our board of directors can have a really good understanding of, um, of overall risk of the, uh, of the organization and what we're facing. >>Final question I have for you, key priorities forward, what should we be looking for work? And yes, that's particularly. Yeah, sure. So we've, uh, we've gone and we've adopted a new security framework. We've adopted the NIST cybersecurity framework version one.one. We're leading ourselves through a maturity assessment based on that framework, we're setting a objective Mmm Mmm. Maturity measures for each of the components of our cyber security program based on the NIST cybersecurity framework. And we're driving some transformation across the globe to make sure that, uh, we're doing everything we can to protect, uh, not only the company, but our customer's data, our products, and so forth. We're also positioning ourselves in a way to, uh, as I said earlier, enhance our business opportunities with, with the U S government and adopting the new cyber security framework is probably right the first step in a long program to, um, to be able to do much more, much more business with, uh, with our government counterparts. All right. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Really pleasure to talk. Very good. Thanks too. Alright. Be back with lots more coverage from online. Thank you for walking. Thank you.

>>Locke from Las Vegas. It's the cube hovering AWS reinvent 2019 brought to you by Amazon web services and along with its ecosystem partners. >>Welcome back to the cube Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman and we are alive on the show floor at AWS reinvent 19 with thousands of people. Stu and I have one of our cube Olam back. Joining us, we've got Gail Habermann, senior director of cloud services from new chats. Welcome back. Thank you for having me. And you're on brand with your Nutanix pin for president though. Nutanix right here. All right, so here we are, day three of re-invent 65,000 or so folks here. This is show floor has been nonstop for days. Big theme as been about outpost and what outposts and what AWS is doing there. But Newtanics you guys have been talking about hybrid cloud for years. What does all of the buzz about outpost? What does that mean for you guys? >>Yeah, I think, uh, this GA really validates our strategy and what we've been hearing from customers for many years around the need for hybrid and more broadly, I think consistency, consistency across the environments as a way or means to actually adopt hybrid, uh, ineffective manner is a longterm strategy. And I think, uh, AWS now realizing that and working in this direction, we see that with outpost and with a weather announcing with local as well. The idea is that you really need to have a consistent way to manage across different environments and ideally same construct as well. And that's what they're doing specifically with outpost. Uh, the direction we're being taking is the same where our software can run both on-prem but also in public cloud and edge so that the same applications, whether traditional or modern can run in the same way. So that not only mobility is easy, but people can use the same skill sets that they've developed over the many years, uh, across different environments. >>Yeah. Kelly, it's been fascinating for me to watch the maturation of the market. Of course. Newtanics his original design was, let's take these hyperscale type of architectures and bring it to the enterprise. Now we're seeing the intersection of what's happening at the enterprise and the public cloud and the environment. But you know, tile back a few years. The first time Newtanics came to this show, it was right after the acquisition of a small company called XY on and it was like, okay, it was exciting, but the Newtanics and Amazon connection was, we're trying to all figure out how the dots go together. Fast forward to today, uh, you know, bring us up to, you know, how Amazon, Nutanix and those solutions work together for your customers. >>Sure. So the latest initiative that we've announced as early access is Nutanix clusters where we use our software not only on prem now, but also on AWS bare metal instances. So for those who know, our software for many years have collapsed storage and compute into a single pool of resources that customers can deploy very easily and scale out as needed on a variety of hardware platforms. Traditionally in their data centers. Now we use the exact same software but on AWS, Bermuda instances. And what that means is that the same applications as is can be used either on prem or public cloud. So it's really easy for customers, for their business and mission. A mission critical applications. >>Yeah. I want to highlight a thing you talked about there, that bare metal service from Amazon, which is a relatively new thing. My understanding that was designed for the VMware on AWS, but they're opening up for ecosystem partners to do. And you said Nutanix clusters, is that what I had heard about at dot. Nexen was called XY clusters before. >>Yes. As part of this early access, we've renamed this, um, to Nutanix lessors, but this is the same idea, uh, in the idea is really that customers can now use our software. Uh, in AWS you see other cloud vendors also starting to offer bare metal services for this exact reason. And we are really evolving our company as well, where our software itself is going to be portable. So customers know they deploy our software, for example, on prem today they have a direct path to AWS. And other clouds in the future because we have heard from many customers that perhaps replatform let's say to AWS now, they're not sure what to do if they ever wanted to go to another vendor. Right. Um, so what we were trying to do is have a single platform that can go, can support multiple clouds and also the software itself has to be portable. And so that's the path we're on. >>What about portability? What are some of the key use cases that it will enable customers to achieve? >>Yeah, so many, many times now we hear that the customers are not looking to manage their physical infrastructure anymore. And so in cases where perhaps they acquired multiple companies and they have kind of a data center sprawl, they want to consolidate, one option is to consolidate into a data SQL data center. But another option now would be to consolidate into AWS location near them or in the region that they need. But the key here in the case of clusters is that the same VMs, same third party integrations that have had daily practices cannot work simply managed on AWS as opposed to managing their own data center. So it eases the operational burden, but it does not require a big lift and replatforming to achieve that. >>Yeah. So I was hearing, sorry, so I was hearing one of the loud and clear when you were saying that operational efficiency seems pretty loud and clear as a key benefit. >>Alright. So kill what you're describing there really reminds me of what I'm hearing from customers when they're talking about one of the reasons that they're adopting Coobernetti's. Uh, of course Amazon has a, you know, various ways to leverage Kubernetes socially EKS day down to the far gate, uh, it being supported there. Um, I know has carbon two carbon Nutanix clusters, how does that go together in the whole group and Eddie's story? Yes. >>So when I talk about clusters, it's really the, the entire South of that that we have that can be used across the, across the environments in that software stack includes many aspects to it. Of course the core is does having very resilient infrastructure software that you can run applications on, but it has many other phases to it. And one of them is containers. So like you run virtual machines either on our hypervisor or third party hypervisors. You can also run containers on any Coubernetties or our Kubernetes that we support as part of that software. And that whole thing is portable. So really what I'm talking about here is very foundational and definitely supports carbon as well. So customers know that both traditional and modern applications can, can be poured across clouds. Give us some customer examples where you've seen a legacy enterprise that has to transform in order to stay in business. >>I was working with Nutanix to do just that. Yes. So we have many customers, especially on the high end of the market and to your point, pharmaceuticals with security concerns, financial services that want to modernize, but they have very heavy investments in their traditional and business critical applications. And now that their cloud journey is maturing, they want to address those workloads. Those workloads are very hard to migrate or to replatform specifically. So they're looking for this way to maintain all the investments that they've done over years, but also get the benefits of public clouds where it's appropriate either for migration or for bursting. And so having that same software that could run the same VMs as is across multiple environments is a perfect solution for them. You know, eliminating the need to utilize different cloud native services. Maybe they'll do that over time, but right now this really helps them save millions because we hear from many customers. To your point, the CIO has the mandate to do this transformation, but I can't do it. Or my teams have resistance to do it because of this investments. >>Yeah, kill. I'm glad. Glad you're hitting on that transfer nation note because Nutanix itself has gone through a bit of a transformation recently, all software, that model, it feels like we've kind of gone through that transition. What does that help Nutanix learn when when you're working with your customers that you know, transformation is not easy, that the keynote talked about, that you need leadership involved and this chest can't be an incremental thing. You need to take bold moves to move things forward. And Nutanix itself has gone through some own of its own transformation. Absolutely. >>As always with Nutanix, we were very aggressive with execution, both in product velocity and here also in terms of business models. So we've moved from hardware to software and now to subscription. We find that customers absolutely love the notion that they have a lot more flexibility in terms of subscription. And as I mentioned before, we're evolving this further to support multiple clouds. And because we believe the, the five to 10 years ahead of us are going to be all about cloud everywhere rather than just on-prem. Uh, we need to support that in terms of our motto. And so we're going through that transformation ourselves. >>One of the things also that was talked about this week is just, well, maybe not talked about as multi-cloud, right? That's kind of a four letter word for Amazon, but it is often an operating model that we see a lot of customers are in for various reasons. Maybe not strategic. Maybe it's more we've inherited this or an enterprise as acquired smaller companies that have myriad cloud solutions and this is more of a reality than anything else. Some of the many announcements that AWS has made this week. You talked about this sort of validating the direction that Nutanix has been going in, but from what is the signal to you in terms of of Amazon's own evolution? >>Yes, I think we are really seeing an evolution, you know, while resisting the change to some extent. So I agree with you. Moldy cows, absolute no-no hybrid was a no-no. Now, hybrid is embraced, I think for a hybrid. There really are trying to reach for greater adoption for, I think the hard part. Like I mentioned before, business and mission critical applications, that's the main thing. I think with multi there's still resistance, but it's absolutely critical. Like you're saying, every EBC meeting that I've been here, customers talk about multi cloud because of organic adoption or evolution or acquisitions and so it's absolutely critical to have tuning like our hybrid cloud services that support multiple clouds. So we have services that support governance across clouds, cost optimization, security, compliance, automation, self-service. All these things really help customers, customers drive towards a more unified or harmonized way of managing multiple environments. And it's absolutely critical. I agree. >>We look into like a magic crystal ball kind of in the spirit of evolution. We look at cloud one. Dot. Oh, John furrier talks a lot about cloud two. Dot. Oh no. What if you look, say down the road the next five years, what do you think the state of cloud is going to look like? >>Yeah, I think our vision has been, and I really see this materializing as cloud everywhere rather than thinking about cloud is a centralized place where that is the cloud. Uh, if you think about even, uh, edge requiring heavy local processing, real compute, real storage, uh, very sensitive in terms of latency for networking. Uh, maybe our car is even right, are going to be a little mobile data centers. And so there's going to be a need to have cloud everywhere while still offloading some stuff for centralized processing. So we really need to find a way to bring that cloud everywhere. And what we've been working at Newtanics is towards that division of bringing that platform that has strong resiliency, uh, uh, very good latency sensitive workloads everywhere we might need it, uh, in preparation for that vision. And I think it's going to be very exciting to see how all these vendors and customers evolve their environment over time. It's going to be, I think, very different from what we thought about 20 years ago for sure. >>Do you see any one industry in particular as really right for this to be able to do, not just bring cloud everywhere but to live it and really completely flip an industry on its head? Anything that really kind of pops into your mind? >>Um, I'm not sure. I think in terms of vision it's going to be across the industries, but the more you have applications that do require that edge processing to be, again, low latency and robust. So IOT use cases, for example, with cus with retail, uh, maybe manufacturing and so on. I think we're going to see these guys lead the, the wave here because they simply cannot offload everything to the cloud, but others are going to follow it because it just makes sense. And if it's not an anomaly, then they'll be more comfortable in that process. >>So much change to come, but also so much opportunity. Gil, thank you for joining Stu and me on the cube this morning. Great to be here. Thank you very much. Our pleasure for Stu Miniman. I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching the cube live from AWS, reinvent 19 from Vegas. Thanks for watching.

(Upbeat Techno Music) >> Announcer: Live from Copenhagen, Denmark. It's theCUBE! Covering Nutatnix.Next 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.Next. We are here at the Bella Center in Copenhagen. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, alongside of Stu Miniman, the analyst for theCUBE. We have two guests for this segment. We have Manoj Agarwal. He is the SVP of Engineering at Nutanix. Thanks so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you Rebecca. That's good. >> And Gil Haberman. He is the Senior Director of Product Marketing at Nutanix. Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Thanks for having me. So, our topic today is Xi Clusters. These were announced at Anaheim, at .Next back in Anaheim. Gil, why don't we start with you. Describe the business problems you were hearing from customers and how these Xi Clusters are designed to help solve them. >> Gil: Sure, first thanks for inviting me. I'm a big fan of theCUBE. It's so great to be here. To your question, at Nutanix, we've been working with customers on the vision of Hybrid Cloud for a number of years now. And the different challenges have evolved over time. Initially, there were pockets of public cloud adoption where customers wanted to simply find a way to operate across multiple clouds. But today, the challenges are different. Now, as customers are looking to adopt business critical applications that span private and public, bursting and migrating applications, there's a strong need for consistency across environments. And we gear around consistency around 3 aspects. The first is infrastructure. The second is operations. And the third is the consumption model itself. From an individual perspective, what we keep hearing is that the same VMs and applications must be able to work across environments, without significant replatforming or retooling. From an operation's perspective, cloud engineers truly need a way to utilize the same practices, integrations, in work that they have done on their applications for many years, across multiple clouds. So there's a need to sustain the same practices across these multiple clouds. And finally from a consumption model perspective, there's a need to have a platform that drives the same level of consistency in terms of licensing and software across different environments. And for that, we at Nutanix have to evolve to empower operators to be able to address all of these needs of consistency across private and public. >> Now, I would like to add something to it. You just think about three years ago. The entire world was talking about "Everything is going to be public cloud." And very soon, all these CIOs also realized that it's not going to be just public cloud or just private cloud. It's going to be Hybrid. And we ran a survey with 2,700 IT professionals who participated in the survey, and what we learned mainly 91% of them, they said hybrid is ideal. And the second thing that was not also a surprising thing was 94% of them, they said the app migration or app mobility is going to be the key. And then we look at that option like "How are you going to adopt?" And that was also strikingly similar, like what we see currently maybe 18% or so, that they are into the hybrid world and getting onto close to 41% or so in the next 24 months. >> Yeah, but Manoj, I'm glad you brought that up. When I talk to users, the thing that they're concerned the most about are their applications% and their data. And in IT forever, migrations have been a challenging thing to do and it was usually, you set up a migration and it takes you weeks or months to do it. Today, migrations aren't even going to be even a one time thing. If I'm moving from one cloud to another, if I'm moving from private to public, or even public to private. I need to have some flexibility to what I'm building. How has that informed how you're building your architectural designs? >> That's a great point. In fact, we always feel that architecture matters, and why the fundamental technologies that we are building should help. Two things that I'll say. One is the data replication technologies that we have built and strengthened over time. Plus the second thing is the network. If you get the network right, then you are very slowly there. And we had been reflecting on the data side, you know. 10 years of journey and data replication technologies like we have built. Networking we have been very hard at work on that front also in the last three years or so, with the building of Xi Cloud. We'll see and hear more and more, especially in the context of Xi Cluster. What you see is that we have done the ready integration with AWS ETCs. Thereby first of all all the services that exist in AWS. It's available to the customers with their app, running on XI Clusters without changing anything there. >> This is a competitive market so let's talk about differentiation. How do you see the product as completely different from your rivals and then how are you positioning it to your customers? >> Yeah. I'll go back to again the same thing. Architecture matters. We were not the first ones to go out with a hybrid converse like in 2013. There were a lot of competitive solutions that existed at the time. But we took our time. We wanted to make sure that we do it right. We do provide choice to our customers. That's where we matter. As we are building out solutions, again going back to the four principles. Applications sort of require change. You don't require an IPO presence to change, so when we are building the solution, we are making sure if you want to pay for private cloud, on-prem our service provider. Or you want a public cloud. Any of the big cloud players or this new cloud, that you have a common architecture underneath. You have the same management plain with the prism. You can really orchestrate, and manage the entire infrastructure. You have the flexibility in terms of the networking. Other services that you want to go and use, you have the choice of wahtever platform also. Like something that we don't want you to go and change if you don't need a change. Lastly, I would say, on the business side, we do want to give the smarty cloud world the flexibility for the customers to bring a cloud of their choice and if they want to switch, they should be able to switch with one click also. >> Yeah. Gil, I'm wondering if you can actually explain to our audience one of the challenges here is deploying unbared metal is not something that anybody can just do on the public clouds. For AWS, the first solution was actually VM ware on AWS. They had to develop that but they're now opening that to be able to use. Can you walk us through where we are with the cloud providers and that's I think part of the reason why this isn't yet generally available. Indeed, AWS has been the first to open bare metal and this is really the path for us at Nutanix to make clouds invisible as well. We worked with a number of platforms on Prem and now we want to extend that to public cloud and having an ability to actually access bare metal is the first step in doing so. Beyond that, what we've done is what we believe is the hard work of making things very simple to drive customer delight. And so what we've done is integrate into AWS rather than just running on top of AWS, inside existing accounts and VPCs of customers and the outcome has benefits on both technology and business perspective. From the technology perspective, cloud operators can see all bare metal as well as cloud native services in one place, one inventory. And we believe that this type of topology will provide better performance. And then on the business side, this allows us to do a couple of things. The first, if you are an AWS user like most of our customers, they can use AWS credits for that bare metal infrastructure. At Nutanix, we are now able to evolve our services to provide hybrid licenses, so our licenses would eventually be portable. And so you see how we are gradually building towards this portability across multiple clouds, AWS being the first cloud. >> Yeah, it's great to see Nutanix- We've seen a few other companies moving towards that model because if I'm software and truly agnostic, you should be able to have it across those environments. I believe Solidfire a couple of years ago started doing some of the things; A couple other companies. So the X in AWS sounds like it will be first. We know Google has been the partner of Nutanix for a while. Could you just give us where are we with Google and Azure? Kind of to round out the big three. >> Sure, so we have started to work with AWS and we have announced early access now inviting customers to sign up with us to get access. We are also actively working with Azure to figure out how to together bring better bare metal services and the type of software on top of that. And of course, we believe that other cloud vendors are going to open this up as well and Google Cloud being a close partner of ours is an important part of that strategy as well. >> And we are doing something with Google already as you know. We have integrated the entire stack using their nested vertilization technologies, like running on their vertilization the HB which is nested. Today, we run a lot of our customers prospect they run. The test, our experience the entire solution on Google test prime. We have brought out more than a thousand users every month, that they access it. So it's a journey, like when they have the full bare metal, you can see a lot more but we are very engaged with them. >> I want to talk about the future now and have you looked into your crystal ball a bit, 6, 10, years from now. What do you see- This is such a fast changing environment but how do you see the cloud evolving and then how do you see Nutanix? What role does Nutanix play? >> Last 10 years, it was all about how we bring public cloud into the private cloud, right? Next 5, 10 years when you think about it is all how do we really make it hybrid. The experience that what customers have come to expect in the last 10 years. You can go and pick any kind of platform on which you want to run the same stack. You won't need to worry about it. Something similar that needs to happen and the underlying architecture of technology which will go and drive that is going to be data mobility, same control plane that can go and extend this smarty cloud. This story by the way resonates very very well with the customers because it's not easy to get your IT for support, to get trained on different cloud technologies also because the talent things cost there. And if you can go and teach them one interface and have them run with the choice of infrastructure or the back form or the cloud, that's what we think we can make a huge difference for the customers. >> Yeah, so I want to make sure I understand when talking about your hybrid or multicloud strategy, we've got Xi Clusters help you get in and matches what you have on sight. Have you had a conversation about Kubernetes yet? Where does Carbon which is the Nutanix Kubernetes fit into this overall discussion? Is that just part of the platform that gets baked in and therefore we don't need to talk about it or am I missing a piece? >> That's a great question because the beauty of what we're talking about is that we bring the entire software and the entire platform with us wherever we go. Part of that stack is carbon and calm. We need the ability to have both traditional applications alongside modern applications with Kubernetes. Even hybrid applications that include some front end that might be containerized, maybe back end that is not yet containerized. And all that, everything that we've been doing on-prem, can now be moved into any other public cloud we provide. >> It's part of the compute, right? You got the VMs, now you got the containers. It's part of the backbone. >> So yeah, we've heard from some people say that Kubernetes is just the new containerized compute. We don't need to talk about it and I'm okay with that, because it's just in there. >> Yes. Absolutely. >> Excellent. Well Gil and Manoj, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Manoj: Thanks so much for hosting us. >> Gil: Thanks for having us. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of .Next. (Techno outro plays)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, celebrating ten years of high-tech coverage, it's theCUBE! Covering VMworld, 2019. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Kay welcome back everyone, live CUBE coverage here at VMworld 2019 in San Francisco, we're in Moscone North lobby, I'm John Furrier. My cohost Stu Miniman. We're here with two great guests, David Appel, Vice President C2 Space and Intelligence and Defense, Civil Solutions at Raytheon, and Gil Shneorson, who's the senior vice president general manager of VxRail, of Dell EMC, great to have Raytheon, anything with space Stu and I get jacked up for that. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah I appreciate it, thank you, I'm glad to be here. >> Gil, VxRail, got a customer here, impressive role out. Talk about the story. >> Well I think it starts with the fact that we have recently announced our support for Pivotal community services over VMware Cloud Foundation over VxRail which has actually the only Q-rated automated stacking industry that allows people to leverage containers and infrastructure as a service on one stack and we've been doing this for about three years now in a different way called Pivotal Ready Architecture and Raytheon has actually adopted that architecture to help their customer, the air force. And that's why we're here today together to talk about you know. >> Seriously modernization couldn't be a more important conversation in government solutions, you guys are a big provider, Raytheon, known for the tech chops, known for having good engineering. Talk about the solution, what you guys did, what's the use case, talk about the deployment. >> Yes with what's going on with the federal government for a while is the acquisition processes and what's taking sometimes years or decades to get software in the field is causing a lot of unmet requirements and needs of the ultimate user, the war fighters out in the field, to be met. So we've been on a journey for the last two years with Pivotal and Dell of how to help the air force, modernize the air force has gone under a transformation and a program called Kessel Run which is where we've deployed the Pivotal Ready Architecture to allow us to quickly deploy an infrastructure and allow us to focus on the end users and develop the capabilities that they need worldwide. And what took years and to now months and days so it's been a fantastic journey. >> Tell us what that means for the folks that might not know the pace of the procurement process. I mean some of this stuff is like 1995 procurement rules. I mean modernization these days is such an important part of it because the impact is significantly relevant. Share some color into the process. >> If you think about in the commercial world today where hundreds of applications be deployed overnight and updates on the what, hourly basis. In the government space it can literally take years to define a requirement, then you have to go through a budgeting cycle all the way up through congress and then you have to go through an acquisition cycle that could take a year to complete and so by the time you're actually fielding capability it is literally five years or more by the time the need was actually identified. And in that five years the technology probably changed which means your solution has probably changed from what's currently available. So shortening the cycles is what it's all about. >> And that's really about having the right product at the right time, not the old product five years ago. How fast things change, it's pretty important to have that nailed down. >> It's pretty amazing and you know I think you look at transformation and there's usually a trade off. What we have been working on and what we're announcing but really what we've been leaving over the last four years is a way to transform but stay close to your core. In other words transformation without trade offs. And so if you can get your VMware stack now running containers in a fully managed automated stack you don't have to change your skill set and you can do all of that and start innovating while staying very close to your core competency. You know you transform but you don't have to go too far and I think the story what Raytheon did is fairly amazing because they turned, you know, what did you tell me, a 50-year-old process, you know in like in less than half a year you turned automated systems that you know saves the US air force a lot of money. >> And lives too, are saved. I mean you're talking about people in the field, this is about people's lives too, I mean this is the money making. >> And it's been about transforming the culture of the way the DoD does software and the first example that Gil is mentioning was tanker planning which was the ability for the air force to refuel flight missions in the air, would typically take over eight hours to plan. And it was done by a white board. It was done manually. And in order to automate that and shrink the time, again that would have gone to that five year procurement cycle. We were able to deploy new applications using the Pivotal-ready architecture within 150 days and get those out worldwide to the field. That's done two things. It's from a financial perspective it's saving over $200,000 a day in just fuel costs from optimizing the tanker planning. But more importantly it's actually more efficient and protecting the safety of those flight crews. They're not in the air as long, they might not be in a hostile environment as long, so the security of the air force is even more important. >> As Pivotal always says they're outcome driven and that's pretty good outcome. I mean talk about the impact that you've had on everyone else around you because I'm sure there's some blockers in your way, people's feathers got ruffled, but then people see success they want to come copy it, right? So that's a pattern you see in a lot of government work. Hey there's a new way to do it, modern way. >> Yeah so our hindsight we're seeing it in two ways. One from a broader DoD perspective. The air force was out front here. They established this and from a DoD perspective what they're calling their Kessel Run initiative is really taking off. You're seeing other Kessel Run like programs being stood up like a program called Kobayashi Maru and Rogue Blue and a few others across DoD. So it's proliferating out across the DoD from a customer perspective, DoD customer perspective. From an industry perspective you know our competitors are quickly trying to catch up to us and they're trying to, you know, copy our playbook but we're continuing to innovate and continue on this journey so we're moving ahead with Pivotal and Dell. >> First of all David I think Pat Gelsinger must have been talking to your team because you're mashing up Star Wars and Star Trek with Kessel Run and Kobayashi there. But talk about mashing up, the stack that you're putting together, VxRail was really built around simplicity. It delivers that, that's what hyperconverged infrastructure does. You start talking about VCF and containers and PKS on that, Kubernetes nobody says is simple, but you know help us walk through, you know, how simple is it for you to leverage and deploy this. You've got organizational challenges and other things, so, you know, where is the solution, it sounds like you use the ready node, and where directionally is it headed? >> Yeah let me answer from this perspective. So we started this journey with Pivotal and the air force about two years ago. And at that time we started with a group of probably a dozen or less folks that actually even understood the technology or the products and the solutions that Dell and Pivotal bring forward. In those two years we're now up to over 100 people. Fully embracing the technology. It's creating an environment where it's easier for us to recruit and retain people because it's modern, it's not the old ways we used to do business. And we're finding that it's been very easy to deploy, very easy to train people up and very easy to operate. So from that perspective it's just been fantastic from not just the technology perspective but also the cultural transformation perspective. >> Yeah Gil I'd love you to comment on that because you know remember gosh when CI and HCI first rolled out you know the people that had those jobs were worried we were going to take their jobs away. Now when I hear your customer talking about, you know, it's easy to train them and even easier for me to recruit and retain, a powerful story. Are you hearing that across your customer base? >> Yeah I'll tell you what's a little different. In the past we have simplified things and we've made work somewhat go away but there was no alternative work. Today every developer, every IT person, they can't wait to go and be a dev ops person, right? So for IT when we come in and we say we're going to take this off your plate so you can free up your time, it really means something now, 'cause they know exactly what they want to do. They want to go and they want to be dev ops, they want to develop new apps, they want to move forward. And so it's very syngergistic in a way that we offload some of the burden from them and they actually do free up to do cooler stuff and then they like it. >> And they get to keep their traditional apps, with containers, gives them great capabilities. Not the throwaway. >> And that's a great point I think as I said before and it's really important to convey this, the transformation without trade offs is a big deal because they can keep the application. They can run the same environment. Right in our case they can do it you know at ease and in remote locations all over the world with less management. And at the same time they can innovate and manage those environments. And I think as long as we can keep that up we'll make a lot of people productive. >> Well I got to ask David the security question because one of the things that comes up all the time obviously Department of Defense, security's top of mind. Industrial IOT are now not just malware getting in for credit card information, you're talking about actual equipment, you're talking about flights in the air, hacking with physical things is a concern and it's a big IOT kind of conversation. You're in the middle of that, this is your world. What's your thoughts on the security? >> You know so we've obviously had to go through that in order to get authority to operate to push things into theater and one of the strongest benefits we've seen is the dev ops process and the platforms has all that security built in and all the testing as we're going through it. So the thousands of tests that are running as new threats are identified, the platform is updating with the latest patches or whatever it may be, so. >> John: On the automation stuff? >> On the automation side of it. So we're actually seeing a lot of the security, I don't want to call it risks go away, but our ability to mitigate them is being built into the software itself. So we haven't seen an issue yet where we haven't been able to get things authority to operate and push it out to the field, so. >> There's a high bar there too, obviously. >> It's a very high bar, very high bar, and that was part of the also the challenge of getting systems fielded in months and days versus years because of the ability to get that operations. >> Now this is a really big story I think. First of all Raytheon's a well-known brand, but, the modernization of getting stuff into theater and or into your production theater, military operations, that's a big deal, I mean, I think people don't really understand that aren't in government how fast this happens. I think that's a real testament to the solution, so I mean. >> Well the powerful thing to it is the national defense strategy is all about capability at the speed of relevance, and that's all about technology. Future wars aren't going to be decided by the size of your army or the size of your arsenal. It's going to be about how do you get data to decision makers faster and how do they can act faster. And that's where software and this infrastructure we're putting in place and putting capabilities in the hands of people that need it faster. That's what it's all about. >> And you know Secretary Matthis who was former Secretary of Defense said 48% of all the casualties are usually frontline war fighters. And that's where the technology edges so to speak. So again this is such a cutting edge topic, talk about it for days. How do you feel about this? This is pretty exciting. >> I'm just happy that every time I come into theCUBE, this is the second time I do it with a customer, you give me the opportunity to learn, you know, have a deeper relationship with one of my of probably now 7,000 customers. Which you know is really hard to keep up with these days and so you know we make technologies for people to use and when you see it in the field doing good it's a great thing. >> Well it's a transformation story. It's really a great transformation story. They have to, making a difference. >> Great, David, would love to hear, you know, what's on your ask for your partners that are deploying. Kind of give us a look forward roadmap that you can share. >> Yeah again I go back to everything we're about right now is speed and and getting capability faster. Currently in our marketplace right now we're fully embracing agile dev ops and everything it takes to deploy software from that perspective. Moving into things like artificial intelligence and machine learning and autonomy are the big things that are on our horizon from a technology perspective. And as our partners are in those areas and can help us bring more capability in that, that's going to help our end customer, the DoD, faster as well, so. >> What's the big takeaway from VMworld this year for you guys? What's the big observation? >> I'll be honest this is my first time at VMware. I'm amazed, I was at Dell Technology World a few months ago, I've really enjoyed it, I think it's a great event. And I'm just enjoying learning all the technologies so, it's, I've enjoyed the day. >> Gil what's your big takeaway? >> Well I'm part of the family. So I'm a little more familiar and even for me-- >> Whoever: You were briefed. >> No, no, even for me the rate of innovation that Vmworld puts out there is amazing. Right and you see how everything plugs together and you see how the vision keeps being, you know, completed, right, and we're in a good spot in the sense that we actually have what people need right now. And we do it better than everybody else. And you'd think that being number one in almost every category you'd be sitting there complacent and no, you know, we keep pushing the envelope, doing more innovating, more integrating more, so it's very exciting to see what's happening. >> Well great story here, Raytheon congratulations for your success I think it's super important to have a prepared military, certaintly, and saving lives and doing it in a modern way is kind of of a miracle these days in government, so congratulations. >> And I thank our partners for continuing to innovate 'cause that's helping us so. >> All right, great story, CUBE coverage here, Vmworld 2019, I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. We'll be back with more after this short break. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Hi, Lisa Martin with theCUBE, live day three of theCUBE's double set coverage of Dell Technologies World 2019 I am with Stu Miniman. We've got one alumni back. We've got Gil Schneorson, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Vxrail. Gil welcome back. >> Thank you nice to be back. >> And it's show and tell you brought Niv Raz CTO of Harel Insurance one of your successful customers, Niv it's great to have you on the program. >> Thank you and great to be here. >> So Niv let's start with you. Give our audience an understanding of Harel Insurance where you're located, what it is that you do and then we'll get into why think Dell EMC is so fantastic. >> Harel Insurance is a insurance company doing a life, now life insurances very wide portfolio of business products in the insurance and investments in Israel. More than 5000 employees and three million customers managing around 240 billion shekels in 2018. So it's very innovative company to work in. >> So Niv interesting. Dell has a podcast and I'm just given a little plug here 'cause at the gym this morning the latest episode by Walter Issacson talks about transformation going on in the insurance business. Some people think, oh insurance has been around a long time, I mean heck to the Roman Era when they had some of this but today Insurance is changing fast. Can you give us at a macro level, give us what are some the changes and stresses on the company and how's that impact your job. >> It's funny you mentioning that. In 2015 our CEO has declared innovative program named Recalculating Routes. The purpose of the program the strategic plan was to take a role from traditional insurance company to more digital transform, data transform. We Israel has the brokers. The brokers are our sales person but once the customer and the sales part, the onboarding part, you want a more innovative service after that. The post service part is very hard in insurance and we investing a lot to make the post service customer experience very advantaged. >> We talk a lot about customer insurance at every, oh sorry, customer insurance, well that's important too, customer experience is the word I was going for. It's essential right because in 2019 customers of any type of product or service have so much choice. So talk to us Niv from looking through that lens of delivering an outstanding customer experience obviously your sales folks need to have innovative technology to deliver that outstanding customer experience. But when a company says we've got to transform digitally we've got to stay ahead of the market, delight our customers Where do you start? Talk to us about maybe a phased approach that you're taking to digital transformation. >> Digital transformation is all about how customer experience feel like in your environment. So if a person entering your website and trying to do some post service and running into some old fashionable process that is very hard to him and its really frustrating to do that. And actually if I look about what our approach about it, we're thinking about the digital transformation, we're thinking about how to take the onboarding part for our brokers, the post service for our customers, to make the process, the services we are offering to our customers easy as possible to just can submit. >> All right so Gil let's bring you into the discussion here. And I think back Converge Infrastructure, Hyper-converge Infrastructure you've been riding the rocket ship that is Vxrail, digital transformation wasn't the leading use for that when we started. It was simplification driving that wave of virtualization, we've heard Vxrail everywhere in the discussion this week. It was like all of these different cloud pieces, what's underneath them, VxRail. Help us connect the dots, the transformations that your customers are going where VxRail and the new solutions built with VxRail help enable your customers. >> Yeah thanks Stu. We talk about a digital transformation a lot. Reality is that many of the customers, not all of them are transformative like Harel Insurance right. Many of them look at ATI and VxRail as the next simple tech refresh. They see the agility, they see the economical benefit but there's a growing majority of customers who look to this is as transformational. And so that's where you see ATI and VxRail specifically in our case starting to grow beyond being an infrastructure for workloads to be an infrastructure for their hybrid cloud and multi cloud environment. So what is so exciting about this show is because we've been very successful we're growing very fast, but by putting this building block in many of our customers' data centers they've made the choice that will enable them to now embark on a more transformational strategy. And I think we demonstrated in the last two days that hybrid cloud is here and it's sellable, operational and with VxRail and the integration with VML cloud foundation and the ability to add and burst into a cloud move workloads It's here and its now, I thinks that's what's nice about this whole thing. >> All right so Gil it's great for you to say it even as an analyst as a media organization for us to say it but what we love is that you brought a customer here to tell us the reality as to where cloud fits into your overall discussion. And I would love your feedback as to what Gil's saying. What's the reality in your world and the impact on your work >> I would connect the previous question this one because it's like a very rolling on questions about it. So you as the customers your expectations about the company is to do every operation from everywhere very easy way and the mobility and the digital transformation itself all the mobile applications, all the things that's taking the customer experience to the next level will took the organization to a phase that I need understand how to scalable the systems. So in this journey when you're looking about digital transformation you must have a infrastructure that support the scalability, the elasticity, the availability that the customer demands. You don't think to yourself that you are enter some E-commerce customer and they will send you on application. sorry Sir, we currently offline the management reasons or maintenance reasons. That thing in 2019 you will not think about and it's not be acceptable. So to do a scalability our multi cloud strategy in Harel is to have infrastructure free environment to focus on the service applications and not to focus on the infrastructure management part. That's the big concerns of our IT teams was how to care about support and matrix's and compatibility and maintenance and when you go into the private cloud environment, the private cloud environment, that's VxRail on the bottom and VML cloud foundation on the top allow Harel is to start the journey to a phase that said okay we're going to our infrastructure free road map. >> Tell us about the outcomes that for example go back to, what we were talking about your brokers who need to be able to deliver any service. I imagine they're out in the field sometimes with customers depending on the types of services that they need to deliver. What has been some of the feedback or maybe the outcomes for the brokers. Are they able to do their jobs faster, deliver quotes faster to customers. What are some of the exciting outcomes that you're seeing as a result of the infrastructure that Dell EMC is helping you to establish. >> Part of digital transformation we're talking about micro servicing a lot of old virtual machines I'm saying that. So service applications on the password virtual machine now your micro services, why you micro servicing it because in 8:00 a.m, perhaps there is 20 persons that's selling your policies but perhaps on the 11:00 after some TV show said something about Harel you can have thousands of customers entering to your website. So how you can support that? So again brokers need the tools to support the operation, the sales operations and the customers need the tools to support the post service for themselves, how to claim, how to do claims how to do more preventives aspects of insurances. So basically again when you're looking about what exciting is, is the reality that I'm seeing a process of a customer and is saying, wow that was easy. So taking the digital transformation to make our customer experience better. >> All right Gil help us zoom out a little bit. We talked to one customer here but the business overall joint product development between Dell EMC and the VMware teams is something that we think was transformational and helped accelerate the HTI growth. What are some the big drivers what's changed in the business. Give us the overall update. >> Yeah look, I think that when we discovered that working together pays off through our joint leadership through examples like VxRail and others we started looking at every part of the business and how collaboration could enable us to add even more value and any value transfer to finances and there's a very strong interest in so this recent innovation we've introduced with integration with cloud foundation, people don't realize how much work goes into integrating two products regardless, even between 1 company you're talking about engineers co-location, you're talking about joint sprints you're talking about test fests, design workshop, customers interaction and so, but you know what I mean, it pays off. You deliver a new outcome that didn't exist before now with VCF and VxRail you can have a full life cycle management of the entire VMX stack and the entire hardware stack drivers, framework everything life cycled together, it's a very, very impressive outcome and it's ready now and I'm really thinking that shift is going to be more than just ATI, people are going to start embracing the full stack because they can, because we're simplifying it. In addition to that Stu I think it's important to understand or I'd like the people to know that the other way we're taking the ATI stack and the full stack is into much more intelligence so machine learning and predictability all the way eventually to remediation and so in this show we introduced the analytical consulting engine for VxRail and we put it out there as a field trial, as an early access. The thought process is we have a very large amount of intelligent customers that could tell us where they need this to take them. What's exciting about it is that every product these days is trying to be intelligent because we have a full stack we have a lot of context, a lot of things we could correlate. So we're very excited about this and we're hoping that our customers will participate in that design, I'm sure Harel will as soon as we can give it to them, the access and, not only full stack but make it much more intelligent, I think it's going to be very exciting year til next time we speak. >> Harel you have? >> Something to say about it. We are customers, us as an organization understand the public cloud allowed us to be infrastructure free and now they said okay some workloads are good for public cloud some workloads are good for private cloud and the multi cloud approach that VMcloud Foundation gives us the infrastructure free to just focus on the services. You need to understand the manageability of traditional infrastructure is very costly. Why? You need to manage it, you need to support it, you need to upgrade the frameworks, the buyers, the drivers and all the time to be concerned about if everything is supportable, how you do that all the job and again once you taking the VxRail as a hardware platform for that and the VMcloud foundation the software you getting a complete life cycle that assist you to just focusing about to be a service broker just add new services to the exist environment. >> Well Niv, thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE and sharing with Stu and me where you guys are on this digital transformation journey, the successes you've achieved so far with Dell EMC, Gil again always great to have you on the program and we can't wait to hear more next year maybe Ace is going to give us some really insightful insights that will be groundbreaking. >> I believe so. Thank you very much. >> For Stu Minneman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching us on theCUBE, live from day three of our coverage of Dell Technologies World. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, this is theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2018 here in Las Vegas, Nevada. We'll go back to San Francisco next year, but here in Vegas, third year in a row, and I'm Stu Miniman. My cohost is John Troyer. Welcome back to the program Gil Shneorson, who's the SVP and VxRail general manager with Dell EMC. Gil, great to see you. >> Great to see you, it's still great to see you, John. >> All right, so I caught up with you at Dell World just a few months ago, down the strip. At that point, we couldn't take an autonomous vehicle. But since then, that Lyft now has like autonomous vehicles, so we know things can change pretty fast in the area. Why don't you give us, what's the update on your end? What's changed since last we talked? >> Thanks for asking. As you know, we're moving very fast. We're moving very fast, picking up many, many new customers every quarter, but the reason for that is because we keep innovating. So for example, in the show we announced a new G Series, a new 560 which is a new two-by-four Dell-based model, with more memory, more CPU, more capacity. Very popular form factor by our customers. We announced that we are now doing a simship with VMware, we're calling it synchronous releases. Our customers told us that they don't want to wait between a vSAN release and a VxRail release. We announced VxRail participation in Dell's customer loyalty program, which is a lot of features for future proof. We just included VxRail in the network fabric design center, which is kind of a sign for things to come, as where do we need the whole solution to be with networking inclusion. More configurability for VxRack SDDC, in other words, we keep moving forward very quickly. >> Gil, we've had the chance to document this since day one. So vSAN, I said when it was first announced, this was the rising tide that will really raise all the ships in what we launched as the hyperconverged environment. VxRail was, at the time, EMC and VMware creating a team together, took the product people, took some various components and made a product that really accelerated the marketplace and was very successful, thousands of customers. vSAN's got 15,000 customers, you've got to be one of the top deployments out. You're all under the Dell family, but is it still made up of those people and how does that teamwork and innovation between various groups work today? >> Look, when we did this there was no runbook. How do you take two teams from two companies? But we discovered all the time that what we've created is extremely powerful. We were growing three times the market. And usually that's not a simple thing and so on both of our sides we're doubling down. On the roadmap, the integration between the companies. And as I said, synchronous shipping is an investment, because what you really have to do is move more things towards the VMware side so testing are done quickly because you don't want to forego quality. So we're very happy with this model, and I think customers are happy with this model. You take the software, you put it with a specific configuration, you automate it to match, and you get something that's very resilient, and I think both of us know that and both of us keep investing it because it's working. >> That's great. Gil, I wanted to kind of follow on with what you said about the VMware and the Dell teams coming together. So my tribe is on the VMware side, right? And the VMware admins have always been very involved with storage. And for the last couple years they had been very involved cross-training on vSAN. So I'm kind of curious about the demand for VxRail and where it's coming from. Is it the VMware folks that are saying, "Hey, let's look at this"? Is it the C-level, is it the old storage team, is it the business unit? What's driving this transformation? >> Yeah, I'll tell you. Two years ago you needed to talk to people about why HCI. More and more, the conversation is why you're HCI. And we have a very unique position because we are part of the VMware stack. And in fact, maybe we'll touch on it later but HCI has its place, but we're already looking at what multiclouds means from infrastructure standpoint, right? And so, if it's a transformative conversation it would be some sort of an architect in that environment that's transforming. And they'd have a cloud project and they'll have a name for me, Cloud One, My Cloud, one of those. But most of the cases it's still a tech refresh, they're moving from a three-tier architecture, to a consolidated hyperconverge. And vAdmins have a lot to say. The server admins have a lot to say. And the reason they buy an appliance or basically buy our automation, because they realize that it saves them time, and it takes away risk. And many of them, by the way, choose to deploy vSAN on their own with servers which we call ReadyNodes, and they're also very successful. In other words, it's how much value you want on top of vSAN that you're willing to pay for and they're voting with their wallets. >> Yeah, Gil, I'm really glad you brought up multicloud because it's one of the big themes of the show. And it's funny, because we know that vSAN is a critical component of the VMware Cloud Foundation, the VCF stuff. But I hadn't really thought about, VxRail is just built with vSAN. So I still, even though I know it's a software thing, I think of it as an appliance and something coming from Dell. Talk to us about how VxRail fits into the multicloud world for customers. >> So VxRail, today we have VxRail and we have VxRack. They differ only in parts of the management stack on top of them. There's VxRail manager, there is an SDDC manager that comes from VCF. And by the way, those over time will find their way into somewhere of a consolidated stack. And the reason I'm talking about multicloud today is because we have not, we keep innovating with the vSAN team. We keep benefiting from their innovation, we keep adding on top of it. But more and more you'll see us integrate with other parts of the VMware stack. So for example, I think Pat touched on our future or upcoming integration with our Cloud Assembly services. So you can take a software-based management vRealize and manage VxRails that you own as a service. So our current roadmap in investments are not only to invest in being the most resilient, robust, vSAN-based infrastructure, but tying to every part of the VMware stack so we can really be that infrastructure for multicloud. So between VxRail and VxRack and the different touchpoints across the stack, we're really weaving it into the entire stack. That's our strength, we are a VMware product essentially. And so we realize that we need to take the whole breadth of the VMware stack and integrate as appropriate at every level, so this choice becomes a no-brainer for customers. >> Gil, since VxRail is an appliance, how often does it get updated and are people capable of taking those updates since it's an engineered system like that? >> Yeah, look, in the past, when people wanted a lot of things to work together, they'd qualify them, they'd test them and then they'd go upgrade them manually. Piece by piece through a recipe, if you will. What we've done in the appliance model, we've added our own IP which basically takes all of that and automates it. So what our customers get is a downloadable package from Dell EMC that includes the entire VMware stack update, all of the drivers, all of the firmware involved, and does a one-boot update for each node in the cluster and cycles through it automatically. So, because we now are synchronously shipping with VMware, and by the way, customers are concerned with express patches. Those we do within seven days, or even faster. So every time VMware moves forward, every time we move forward, we package it all up and we make it downloadable and upgradeable automatically. So it happens as fast as they need it to be, you know what I mean? There's no limitation because it's an appliance, it's the same thing as having a stack. >> Gil, I'm wondering if we can talk a little bit up the stack. The early customers that I've talked to, we know that modernizing your applications can be really challenging. A pattern that I've seen from a number of customers is step one, modernize the platform, step two, start modernizing the applications. What are you seeing from your rack and rail customers as they go through that kind of transition? >> That's a good question. (chuckles) I think most of the customers we're talking to today are still modernizing the infrastructure. That's the reality. They need a more agile environment because they need to take care of things up the stack and go into development models of all sorts. You can also see that there's a lot of success with our joint work with Pivotal on Pivotal Ready Architecture. And so Pivotal and us have created the Ready Architecture, based on VxRail. The value in that is really Cloud Foundry and what it brings to the table, and the design. And we see a lot of adoption for that, so people are adopting Cloud Foundry as a development model and a deployment model. They're using VxRail as an infrastructure, and obviously because of its ability to migrate across environments, that infrastructure transcends, it makes sense. So there are two angles, but I think a lot of people are still modernizing their base infrastructure to be ready for greater things. >> Absolutely. All right, Gil, want to give you the final word. What should we be looking for from your group as we go through the rest of 2018? >> We're going to keep moving, we're going to keep innovating. We're going to make sure that the solutions fit into the existing VMware environments in a more seamless way every time we work on it. And I got to say, if there are customers watching this Cube interview, I keep reaching out to customers saying, look, we have many, many thousands of customers now. We do not want to lose the intimate relationship with them. So if anybody's watching and they're interested in a conversation telling us what they wish to see on the roadmap, voicing their opinions directly to the product group, I know my title and Twitter handle are going to be here at the bottom, I invite people to reach out and talk to us. >> All right, great closing point. Gil, we're always loving fostering conversations and feedback. So, Gil Shneorson, his Twitter handle's on a screen in case Shneorson doesn't come off your keyboard nice and easy. John Troyer, and I'm Stu Miniman, we're also, always love the feedback when you send it on Twitter. And we'll be back with lots more coverage here from VMworld 2018, thank you for watching theCUBE. >> Thank you. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering ZertoCON 2018, brought to you by Zerto. >> This is theCUBE, I'm Paul Gillin, we're on the ground here in Boston for ZertoCON 2018 The third ZertoCON, and with me is a gentleman who has been to all the ZertoCONs as well as many years before that, Gil Levonai, the Chief Marketing Officer at Zerto, welcome, thanks for joining us. >> Thanks for having me here. >> You were one of the first people at Zerto I understand, way back in the day >> Yeah, yeah I'm kind of like ground zero type person here in Zerto, I managed back then the product team and the marketing team. Then we grew bigger and bigger And now I own all of the marketing for Zerto. >> So how do you feel coming to a conference like this with all these people here, you've got big name keynote speakers, having joined the company as one of the earliest employees, what does that feel like? >> It's like, I have three teenagers, so I know what it means to be proud of your child, it's a very proud moment, okay. Because really, I think the caliber of customers we see here in the conference, first there's the quantity of customers, et cetera, but also the caliber of customers, the caliber of discussion that's happening here, is really, it really makes me proud. And knowing that this company started a few years ago from, just like any other startup, a very small company, and now we're really making a dent in the industry, and changing and making customers successful, is really really proud. >> Your first user conference is a milestone of sorts isn't it? >> Yeah, two years ago it was really like having a child now it's like we've gotten into a rhythm we know what we're doing now, we know what the conference looks like and we know what it means. But, just like with children, the older they get, the bigger the challenges. Same thing, the bigger the conference gets, different challenges, and it's a always hectic few weeks. >> But very valuable because you come here and you have a chance to talk to customers nonstop really for three days, what are you hearing from them? What are the trends that are emerging to you from the conversations you're having out there? >> So with, going back to why I was hired to Zerto, as one of the first few people, is actually a good example of that. Because I was hired because I was actually a marketing and product management guy, hired in Zerto before we actually wrote our first line of code. Why? Because we want to make sure that we talk to customers and we get their feedback and we get our guidelines in what we should be doing, back in that day. So from that point on, we always are doing the same thing, we're listening to our customers. that's kind of like a key DNA for Zerto. So this conference is an amazing place to do that, to really hear from our customers what are there challenges, we had our Customer Advisor Board, we had our Partner Advisor Board here, but also everybody hallway conversation with the customers is the same thing. What do you need to do, what are you trying to do that you're not capable of doing? And that's where we actually understand the trends and the marketing. We have John and people like that, that analyze, are amazing but there's nothing like an unbiased conversation with a customer and understanding their needs. And what we see, is really two major aspects. And kind of like as you've mentioned in the skin. One, the delays are totally different. It's really, really, really unacceptable to be down, or to lose data, done. No industry can do that, no type of customer, no size of customer, it doesn't matter if you're retail, if you're airline, or if you're banking. >> Paul: Five nines isn't enough anymore. >> People, we all have phones, we used to always on, and everything needs to be always on. So that drives the whole narrative of guys, I can't tell you hey I'm going to recover from two hours ago, it's not enough anymore, okay. The second thing is they are all facing a lot of complexities in kind of like the changing infrastructure. They all want to move to cloud, we hear about continuing, we hear about the cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud. And it's all really coming from the right reasons, it's coming from trying to change their business models. It's coming from trying to change their cost structure. But it introduce so much complexity, so between these two, they just need to really rethink the way they're doing what they're doing. In terms of data protection, mobility, et cetera, and that's where we came to this kind of like high-resilience platform concept, from the needs of the market. >> So we see customers, they want more flexibility, they want to use multiple clouds, they want hybrid clouds, they want to shift workloads around seamlessly, all of this has risk, and resilience in an environment like that is challenging. What is Zerto going to do to make that more seamless for them? >> I think resilience is double challenging. It's challenging because, really to be successful, you can't only be kind of resilient to hey how am I addressing bad things have happened. You need to be resilient to the fact that, you changing your business is part of your business now, okay. And how am I effectively change my business, run forward, run fast, while I'm not leaving behind any gaps, or anything that hey, I might get struck by some bad luck, or intentional cyber thing, okay and lose my business, and that happens also. You'll see major companies that have big impacts on their business because of events like that. So, the key to doing that, is really, to A, simplify the way you protect everything, and really move to what we call continuous protection, and that's from a product perspective, but think about it from a meta doz perspective. You need to have the ability to always recover anytime, anywhere, whatever you need, realistically, whenever you need it. It's the only way possible, and only technologies that are, we started from, we're coming from the high-end of the market to this much wider market. Because we're coming from protecting huge Oracle databases, with huge change rates, which seconds of our bills, okay. That's our DNA, that's what we know to now take that into entire kind of like IT, say you need that IT to be available wherever you need it, and you need to be able to protect it at any point in time, and move everything around between clouds as you say, and that's where our contacts are messaging the market. You need to be able to do that, our platform is the way to do that. But that's the only way you can actually, not only survive what's going on, but also thrive in this environment. >> Now that's because you have a converged platform, and the time is right, I hear Zerto executives saying the time is right for convergence, why is that? >> It's when you see the market, look today at any player in the back of the R-space website, all say the same thing. Why are all, everybody's saying the same thing. Everybody's saying the same thing, because everybody's trying to sell the same thing. Everybody's trying to set all of these business cases okay. And some don't fully converge, or they do it doesn't matter, the fact of the matter is, from a customer perspective, if you look at any vendor today in this space, all of them are trying to provide all of these services. So that's where we see, hey, this is what's happening. And the customers are also telling us, guys, we are using, we just heard it on stage now, we are using Zerto instead of our backup. Why? Because in the short-term retention you're giving us a much better solution. So we see from the customers that they're saying hey, I want less systems, I want one place where I go, and I can mobilize, I can protect, I can recover, I have compliance, I have ransomware protection, all of that in one place, so the market is really telling us convergence is happening right there. And that's where I kind of like, we believe we have the best DNA in the base for technology to provide that converged solution, because eventually it's about the atomic engine of how are you doing your protection, and I think we have the best avenue there. But if you look at, everybody's the same, talking the convergence game. >> Well so where is backup going long-term, does eventually does backup disappear, or does everything become continuous? >> Not in a million years, literally, okay no pun intended. Because everybody, the legal holds, the compliance >> Paul: Retention schedules. >> The act of backing up your data, your application, that's not going away, that's going to stay. We believe that there is a shift that needs to take place in the market that we're leading is, what do I, what does short-term backup mean, okay. 'Cause short-term backup is really, kind of like the same thing today as recovering from once more, it's the same thing as mobilizing an application. And that needs to be continuous, and then you need one platform that can also take care of your long-term, you know months years, depending on what industry you're in, regulated backups. I just talked to a large customer of ours last night, in our break party, he said, hey I'm doing 14 days, and I don't care about anything after that. I'm in an unregulated industry, and I do what's good for my business, and for my business, 14 days is good. I don't really need anything, I sometime have some more copies later, but that's it. So the actual uses of backup depends on the industry. But it's not going away, there's no question that the use case of backup is staying, we think that the way technology, the technology that drives that should change. >> As we're talking today, we 're two days out from the implementation of GDPR in the European Union, does this have an impact on your business? >> Oh a major impact, first of all, we're a company, number one, I don't know if you know but, >> International company. >> Yes, and we work globally, we have offices and places in Europe, and customers in Europe, and operations in Europe, so all of that. We're marketing, you know our marketing guy, we're marketing in Europe. We actually had a session here in the conference, a joint session by our corporate council, and some customers talking about the GDPR, because it's actually a joint project in Zerto, from all sides, to say okay, what do we do with the GDPR. So us as a company, that's number one. Second thing is for our customers. There's a number of things, that you know, for example, take a look at knowing where your data is. Which is part of GDPR, we had helped by identifying exactly where is your data, where is your back up data, where is your application data, et cetera. There's lots of kind of like, we believe there's going to be more and less compliance kind of like related things that we converge for GDPR, but also you know there's like the rights to be forgotten, what does that mean about backups. Do I need to now go open all my backups >> Paul: Still open. >> So if you can see, and again, not me but we have people that go down, for example, the right to be forgotten is one of the less stronger rights. Because I think even the regulator understood, it's a bit hard to forget someone from you know, do I need to open my backup from like five years, and delete something, that's going to be a huge cost. So there's definitely going to be implications, and I think time will tell where this is going, in terms of like what are the bigger implications. >> No shortage of agendas for Zerto going forward, that's for sure. >> Gil: Oh no shortage, no. >> Gil Levonai thank you very much for joining us, Chief Marketing Officer at Zerto. >> Thank you very very much, >> We will be right back, I'm Paul Gillin, this is theCUBE. >> Gil: Thank you very much. (upbeat music)