>> Announcer: TheCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (pleasant music) >> We're back. This is Dave Vellante for our live coverage of MWC '23 SiliconANGLE's wall to wall, four-day coverage. We're here with Greg Manganello, who's from Fuijitsu. He's the global head of network services business unit at the company. And Ryan McMeniman is the director of product management for the open telecom ecosystem. We've been talking about that all week, how this ecosystem has opened up. Ryan's with Dell Technologies. Gents, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Thank you. >> Good to be here. >> Greg, thanks for coming on. Let's hear Fuijitsu's story. We haven't heard much at this event from Fuijitsu. I'm sure you got a big presence, but welcome to theCUBE. Tell us your angle. >> Thanks very much. So Fuijitsu, we're big O-RAN advocates, open radio access network advocates. We're one of the leading founders of that open standard. We're also members of the Open RAN Policy Coalition. I'm a board member there. We're kind of all in on OpenRAN. The reason is it gives operators choices and much more vendor diversity and therefore a lot of innovation when they build out their 5G networks. >> And so as an entry point for Dell as well, I mean obviously you guys make a lot of hay with servers and storage and other sort of hardware, but O-RAN is just this disruptive change to this industry, but it's also compute intensive. So from Dell's perspective, what are the challenges of getting customers to the carriers to adopt O-RAN? How do you de-risk it for them? >> Right, I mean O-RAN really needs to be seen as a choice, right? And that choice comes with building out an ecosystem of partners, right? Working with people like Fuijitsu and others helps us build systems that the carriers can rely upon. Otherwise, it looks like another science experiment, a sandbox, and it's really anything but that. >> So what specifically are you guys doing together? Are you doing integrations, reference architectures engineered systems, all of the above? >> Yeah, so I think it's a little bit of all of the above. So we've announced our cooperation, so the engineering teams are linked, and that we're combining our both sweet spots together from Fuijitsu's virtual CU/DU, and our OpenRAN radios, and Dell's platforms and integration capabilities. And together we're offering a pre-integrated bundle to operators to reduce that risk and kind of help overcome some of the startup obstacles by shrinking the integration cost. >> So you've got Greenfield customers, that's pretty straightforward, white sheet of paper, go, go disrupt. And then there's traditional carriers, got 4G and 5G networks, and sort of hybrid if you will, and this integration there. Where do you see the action now? I presume it's Greenfield today, but isn't it inevitable that the traditional carriers have to go open? >> It is, a couple of different ways that they need to go and they want to go might be power consumption, it might be the cloudification of their network. They're going to have different reasons for doing it. And I think we have to make sure that when we work on collaborations like we do with Fuijitsu, we have to look at all of those vectors. What is it that somebody maybe here in Europe is dealing with high gas prices, high energy prices, in the U.S. or wherever it's expansion. They're going to be different justifications for it. >> Yeah, so power must be an increasing component of the operating expense, with energy costs up, and it's a power hungry environment. So how does OpenRAN solve that problem? >> So that's a great question. So by working together we can really optimize the configurations. So on the Fuijitsu side, our radios are multi-band and highly compact and super energy efficient so that the TCO for the carrier is much, much lower. And then we've also announced on the rApp side power savings, energy savings applications, which are really sophisticated AI enabled apps that can switch off the radio based upon traffic prediction models and we can save the operator 30% on their energy bill. That's a big number. >> And that intelligence that lives in the, does it live in the RIC, is it in the brain? >> In the app right above the RIC, absolutely. >> Okay, so it's a purpose-built app to deal with that. >> It's multi-vendor app, it can sit on anybody's O-RAN system. And one of the beauties of O-RAN is there is that open architecture, so that even if Dell and Fuijitsu only sell part of the, or none of the system, an app can be selected from any vendor including Fuijitsu. So that's one of the benefits of whoever's got the best idea, the best cost performance, the best energy performance, customers can really be enabled to make the choice and continue to make choices, not just way back at RFP time, but throughout their life cycle they can keep making choices. And so that's really meaning that, hey, if we miss the buying cycle then we're closed out for 5 or 10 years. No, it's constantly being reevaluated, and that's really exciting, the whole ecosystem. But what we really want to do is make sure we partner together with key partners, Dell and Fuijitsu, such that the customer, when they do select us they see a bundle, not just every person for themselves. It de-risks it. And we get a lot of that integration headache out of the way before we launch it. >> I think that's what's different. We've been talking about how we've kind of seen this move before, in the nineties we saw the move from the mainframe vertical stack to the horizontal stack. We talked about that, but there are real differences because back then you had, I don't know, five components of the stack and there was no integration, and even converged infrastructure was kind of bolts that brought that together. And then over time it's become engineered systems. When you talk to customers, Ryan, is the conversation today mostly TCO? Is it how to get the reliability and quality of service of traditional stacks? Where's the conversation today? >> Yeah, it's the flip side of choice, which is how do you make sure you have that reliability and that security to ensure that the full stack isn't just integrated, but it lives through that whole life cycle management. What are, if you're bringing in another piece, an rApp or an xApp, how do you actually make sure that it works together as a group? Because if you don't have that kind of assurance how can you actually guarantee that O-RAN in and of itself is going to perform better than a traditional RAN system? So overcoming that barrier requires partnerships and integration activity. That is an investment on the parts of our companies, but also the operators need to look back at us and say, yeah, that work has been done, and I trust as trusted advisors for the operators that that's been done. And then we can go validate it. >> Help our audience understand it. At what point in time do you feel that from a TCO perspective there'll be parity, or in my opinion it doesn't even have to be equal. It has to be close enough. And I don't know what that close enough is because the other benefits of openness, the innovation, so there's that piece of it as the cost piece and then there is the reliability. And I would say the same thing. It's got to be, well, maybe good enough is not good enough in this world, but maybe it is for some use cases. So really my question is around adoption and what are those factors that are going to affect adoption and when can we expect them to be? >> It's a good question, Dave, and what I would say is that the closed RAN vendors are making incremental improvements. And if you think in a snapshot there might be one answer, but if you think in kind of a flow model, a river over time, our O-RAN like-minded people are on a monster innovation curve. I mean the slope of the curve is huge. So in the OpenRAN policy coalition, 60 like-minded companies working together going north, and we're saying that let's bring all the innovation together, so you can say TCO, reliability, but we're bringing the innovation curve of software and integration curve from silicon and integration from system vendors all together to really out-innovate everybody else by working together. So that's the-- >> I like that curve analogy, Greg 'cause okay, you got the ogive or S curve, and you're saying that O-RAN is entering or maybe even before the steep part of the S curve, so you're going to go hyperbolic, whereas the traditional vendors are maybe trying to squeeze a little bit more out of the lemon. >> 1, 2%, and we're making 30% or more quantum leaps at a time every innovation. So what we tell customers is you can measure right now, but if you just do the time-based competition model, as an organization, as a group of us, we're going to be ahead. >> Is it a Moore's law innovation curve or is it actually faster because you've got the combinatorial factors of silicon, certain telco technologies, other integration software. Is it actually steeper than maybe historical Moore's law? >> I think it's steeper. I don't know Ryan's opinion, but I think it's steeper because Moore's law, well-known in silicon, and it's reaching five nanometers and more and more innovations. But now we're talking about AI software and machine learning as well as the system and device vendors. So when all that's combined, what is that? So that's why I think we're at an O-RAN conference today. I'm not sure we're at MWC. >> Well, it's true. It's funny they changed the name from Mobile World Congress and that was never really meant to be a consumer show, but these things change that, right? And so I think it's appropriate MWC because we're seeing really deep enterprise technology now enter, so that's your sweet spot, isn't it? >> It really is. But I think in some ways it's the path to that price performance parity, which we saw in IT a long time ago, making its way into telecom is there, but it doesn't work unless everybody is on board. And that involves players like this and even smaller companies and innovative startups, which we really haven't seen in this space for some time. And we've been having them at the Dell booth all week long. And there's really interesting stuff like Greg said, AI, ML, optimization and efficiency, which is exciting. And that's where O-RAN can also benefit the Industry. >> And as I say, there are other differences to your advantage. You've got engineered systems or you've been through that in enterprise IT, kind of learned how to do that. But you've also got the cloud, public cloud for experimentation, so you can fail cheaply, and you got AI, right, which is, really didn't have AI in the nineties. You had it, but nobody used it. And now you're like, everybody's using ChatGPT. >> Right, but now what's exciting, and the other thing that Ryan and we are working on together is linking our labs together because it's not about the first time system integration and connecting the hoses together, and okay, there it worked, but it's about the ongoing life cycle management of all the updates and upgrades. And by using Dell's OTEL Lab and Fuijitsu's MITC lab and linking them together, now we really have a way of giving operators confidence that as we bring out the new innovations it's battle tested by two organizations. And so two logos coming together and saying, we've looked at it from our different angles and then this is battle tested. There's a lot of value there. >> I think the labs are key. >> But it's interesting, the point there is by tying labs together, there's an acknowledged skills gap as we move into this O-RAN world that operators are looking to us and probably Fuijitsu saying, help our team understand how to thrive in this new environment because we're going from closed systems to open systems where they actually again, have more choice and more ability to be flexible. >> Yeah, if you could take away that plumbing, even though they're good plumbers. All right guys, we got to go. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you much. >> It's great to have you. >> Appreciate it, Dave. >> Okay, keep it right there. Dave Vellante, Lisa Martin, and Dave Nicholson will be back from the Fira in Barcelona on theCUBE. Keep it right there. (pleasant music)

(cheerful music) >> Welcome to theCUBE's continuing coverage of AMD's 4th Generation EPYC launch. I'm Dave Nicholson, and I'm here in our Palo Alto studios talking to Greg Gibby, senior product manager, data center products from AMD, and Mohan Rokkam, technical marketing engineer at Dell. Welcome, gentlemen. >> Mohan: Hello, hello. >> Greg: Thank you. Glad to be here. >> Good to see each of you. Just really quickly, I want to start out. Let us know a little bit about yourselves. Mohan, let's start with you. What do you do at Dell exactly? >> So I'm a technical marketing engineer at Dell. I've been with Dell for around 15 years now and my goal is to really look at the Dell powered servers and see how do customers take advantage of some of the features we have, especially with the AMD EPYC processors that have just come out. >> Greg, and what do you do at AMD? >> Yeah, so I manage our software-defined infrastructure solutions team, and really it's a cradle to grave where we work with the ISVs in the market, so VMware, Nutanix, Microsoft, et cetera, to integrate the features that we're putting into our processors and make sure they're ready to go and enabled. And then we work with our valued partners like Dell on putting those into actual solutions that customers can buy and then we work with them to sell those solutions into the market. >> Before we get into the details on the 4th Generation EPYC launch and what that means and why people should care. Mohan, maybe you can tell us a little about the relationship between Dell and AMD, how that works, and then Greg, if you've got commentary on that afterwards, that'd be great. Yeah, Mohan. >> Absolutely. Dell and AMD have a long standing partnership, right? Especially now with EPYC series. We have had products since EPYC first generation. We have been doing solutions across the whole range of Dell ecosystem. We have integrated AMD quite thoroughly and effectively and we really love how performant these systems are. So, yeah. >> Dave: Greg, what are your thoughts? >> Yeah, I would say the other thing too is, is that we need to point out is that we both have really strong relationships across the entire ecosystem. So memory vendors, the software providers, et cetera, we have technical relationships. We're working with them to optimize solutions so that ultimately when the customer buys that, they get a great user experience right out of the box. >> So, Mohan, I know that you and your team do a lot of performance validation testing as time goes by. I suspect that you had early releases of the 4th Gen EPYC processor technology. What have you been seeing so far? What can you tell us? >> AMD has definitely knocked it out of the park. Time and again, in the past four generations, in the past five years alone, we have done some database work where in five years, we have seen five exit performance. And across the board, AMD is the leader in benchmarks. We have done virtualization where we would consolidate from five into one system. We have world records in AI, we have world records in databases, we have world records in virtualization. The AMD EPYC solutions has been absolutely performant. I'll leave you with one number here. When we went from top of Stack Milan to top of Stack Genoa, we saw a performance bump of 120%. And that number just blew my mind. >> So that prompts a question for Greg. Often we, in industry insiders, think in terms of performance gains over the last generation or the current generation. A lot of customers in the real world, however, are N - 2. They're a ways back, so I guess two points on that. First of all, the kinds of increases the average person is going to see when they move to this architecture, correct me if I'm wrong, but it's even more significant than a lot of the headline numbers because they're moving two generations, number one. Correct me if I'm wrong on that, but then the other thing is the question to you, Greg. I like very long complicated questions, as you can tell. The question is, is it okay for people to skip generations or make the case for upgrades, I guess is the problem? >> Well, yeah, so a couple thoughts on that first too. Mohan talked about that five X over the generation improvements that we've seen. The other key point with that too is that we've made significant process improvements along the way moving to seven nanocomputer to now five nanocomputer and that's really reducing the total amount of power or the performance per watt the customers can realize as well. And when we look at why would a customer want to upgrade, right? And I want to rephrase that as to why aren't you? And there is a real cost of not upgrading. And so when you look at infrastructure, the average age of a server in the data center is over five years old. And if you look at the most popular processors that were sold in that timeframe, it's 8, 10, 12 cores. So now you've got a bunch of servers that you need in order to deliver the applications and meet your SLAs to your end users, and all those servers pull power. They require maintenance. They have the opportunity to go down, et cetera. You got to pay licensing and service and support costs and all those. And when you look at all the costs that roll up, even though the hardware is paid for just to keep the lights on, and not even talking about the soft costs of unplanned downtime, and, "I'm not meeting your SLAs," et cetera, it's very expensive to keep those servers running. Now, if you refresh, and now you have processors that have 32, 64, 96 cores, now you can consolidate that infrastructure and reduce your total power bill. You can reduce your CapEx, you reduce your ongoing OpEx, you improve your performance, and you improve your security profile. So it really is more cost effective to refresh than not to refresh. >> So, Mohan, what has your experience been double clicking on this topic of consolidation? I know that we're going to talk about virtualization in some of the results that you've seen. What have you seen in that regard? Does this favor better consolidation and virtualized environments? And are you both assuring us that the ROI and TCO pencil out on these new big, bad machines? >> Greg definitely hit the nail on the head, right? We are seeing tremendous savings really, if you're consolidating from two generations old. We went from, as I said, five is to one. You're going from five full servers, probably paid off down to one single server. That itself is, if you look at licensing costs, which again, with things like VMware does get pretty expensive. If you move to a single system, yes, we are at 32, 64, 96 cores, but if you compare to the licensing costs of 10 cores, two sockets, that's still pretty significant, right? That's one huge thing. Another thing which actually really drives the thing is we are looking at security, and in today's environment, security becomes a major driving factor for upgrades. Dell has its own setups, cyber-resilient architecture, as we call it, and that really is integrated from processor all the way up into the OS. And those are some of the features which customers really can take advantage of and help protect their ecosystems. >> So what kinds of virtualized environments did you test? >> We have done virtualization across primary codes with VMware, but the Azure Stack, we have looked at Nutanix. PowerFlex is another one within Dell. We have vSAN Ready Nodes. All of these, OpenShift, we have a broad variety of solutions from Dell and AMD really fits into almost every one of them very well. >> So where does hyper-converged infrastructure fit into this puzzle? We can think of a server as something that contains not only AMD's latest architecture but also latest PCIe bus technology and all of the faster memory, faster storage cards, faster nicks, all of that comes together. But how does that play out in Dell's hyper-converged infrastructure or HCI strategy? >> Dell is a leader in hyper-converged infrastructure. We have the very popular VxRail line, we have the PowerFlex, which is now going into the AWS ecosystem as well, Nutanix, and of course, Azure Stack. With all these, when you look at AMD, we have up to 96 cores coming in. We have PCIe Gen 5 which means you can now connect dual port, 100 and 200 gig nicks and get line rate on those so you can connect to your ecosystem. And I don't know if you've seen the news, 200, 400 gig routers and switchers are selling out. That's not slowing down. The network infrastructure is booming. If you want to look at the AI/ML side of things, the VDI side of things, accelerator cards are becoming more and more powerful, more and more popular. And of course they need that higher end data path that PCIe Gen 5 brings to the table. GDDR5 is another huge improvement in terms of performance and latencies. So when we take all this together, you talk about hyper-converged, all of them add into making sure that A, with hyper-converged, you get ease of management, but B, just 'cause you have ease of management doesn't mean you need to compromise on anything. And the AMD servers effectively are a no compromise offering that we at Dell are able to offer to our customers. >> So Greg, I've got a question a little bit from left field for you. We covered Supercompute Conference 2022. We were in Dallas a couple of weeks ago, and there was a lot of discussion of the current processor manufacturer battles, and a lot of buzz around 4th Gen EPYC being launched and what's coming over the next year. Do you have any thoughts on what this architecture can deliver for us in terms of things like AI? We talk about virtualization, but if you look out over the next year, do you see this kind of architecture driving significant change in the world? >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It has the real potential to do that from just the building blocks. So we have our chiplet architecture we call it. So you have an IO die and then you have your core complexes that go around that. And we integrate it all with our infinity fabric. That architecture allows you, if we wanted to, replace some of those CCDs with specific accelerators. And so when we look two, three, four years down the road, that architecture and that capability already built into what we're delivering and can easily be moved in. We just need to make sure that when you look at doing that, that the power that's required to do that and the software, et cetera, and those accelerators actually deliver better performance as a dedicated engine versus just using standard CPUs. The other things that I would say too is if you look at emerging workloads. So data center modernization is one of the buzzwords in cloud native, right? And these container environments, well, AMD'S architecture really just screams support for those type of environments, right? Where when you get into these larger core accounts and the consolidation that Mohan talked about. Now when I'm in a container environment, that blast radius so a lot of customers have concerns around, "Hey, having a single point of failure and having more than X number of cores concerns me." If I'm in containers, that becomes less of a concern. And so when you look at cloud native, containerized applications, data center modernization, AMD's extremely well positioned to take advantage of those use cases as well. >> Yeah, Mohan, and when we talk about virtualization, I think sometimes we have to remind everyone that yeah, we're talking about not only virtualization that has a full-blown operating system in the bucket, but also virtualization where the containers have microservices and things like that. I think you had something to add, Mohan. >> I did, and I think going back to the accelerator side of business, right? When we are looking at the current technology and looking at accelerators, AMD has done a fantastic job of adding in features like AVX-512, we have the bfloat16 and eight features. And some of what these do is they're effectively built-in accelerators for certain workloads especially in the AI and media spaces. And in some of these use cases we look at, for example, are inference. Traditionally we have used external accelerator cards, but for some of the entry level and mid-level use cases, CPU is going to work just fine especially with the newer CPUs that we are seeing this fantastic performance from. The accelerators just help get us to the point where if I'm at the edge, if I'm in certain use cases, I don't need to have an accelerator in there. I can run most of my inference workloads right on the CPU. >> Yeah, yeah. You know the game. It's an endless chase to find the bottleneck. And once we've solved the puzzle, we've created a bottleneck somewhere else. Back to the supercompute conversations we had, specifically about some of the AMD EPYC processor technology and the way that Dell is packaging it up and leveraging things like connectivity. That was one of the things that was also highlighted. This idea that increasingly connectivity is critically important, not just for supercomputing, but for high-performance computing that's finding its way out of the realms of Los Alamos and down to the enterprise level. Gentlemen, any more thoughts about the partnership or maybe a hint at what's coming in the future? I know that the original AMD announcement was announcing and previewing some things that are rolling out over the next several months. So let me just toss it to Greg. What are we going to see in 2023 in terms of rollouts that you can share with us? >> That I can share with you? Yeah, so I think look forward to see more advancements in the technology at the core level. I think we've already announced our product code name Bergamo, where we'll have up to 128 cores per socket. And then as we look in, how do we continually address this demand for data, this demand for, I need actionable insights immediately, look for us to continue to drive performance leadership in our products that are coming out and address specific workloads and accelerators where appropriate and where we see a growing market. >> Mohan, final thoughts. >> On the Dell side, of course, we have four very rich and configurable options with AMD EPYC servers. But beyond that, you'll see a lot more solutions. Some of what Greg has been talking about around the next generation of processors or the next updated processors, you'll start seeing some of those. and you'll definitely see more use cases from us and how customers can implement them and take advantage of the features that. It's just exciting stuff. >> Exciting stuff indeed. Gentlemen, we have a great year ahead of us. As we approach possibly the holiday seasons, I wish both of you well. Thank you for joining us. From here in the Palo Alto studios, again, Dave Nicholson here. Stay tuned for our continuing coverage of AMD's 4th Generation EPYC launch. Thanks for joining us. (cheerful music)

(relaxing music) >> Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of AWS re:Invent. My name is Savannah Peterson and I am absolutely thrilled for this segment. We are joined by leaders at Cisco AppDynamics as well as Royal Caribbean. The two have been working together for over five years, leveraging full stack observability. We're going to dig in, but first of all please welcome Alice from Royal Caribbean and Greg from Cisco AppDynamics to the show. Hey friends. >> Hi. How are you doing? >> I'm excited, clearly. How are you doing, Greg? >> I'm doing fantastic. Thanks for having me on the show today. >> Hey, it's our, it is absolutely our pleasure. Alice, I have to start with you. I don't think there are too many industries that have gotten as much coverage as cruising has over the last couple of years. You've been working with Royal Caribbean for over a decade so you've seen it through the stormy seas of the pandemic, if you will. What has the last few years and the last few months been like for you? >> You know, it's really been a wild ride. To your point, we were sailing high, and then I don't think any other industry experienced what we did in COVID, that you walked in one day and then that day the whole industry shut down. So it was a big challenge for us. And then as soon as we shut down and we weathered the storm with COVID, then we had what we called our healthy return to service. So as quickly as it stopped, we had to start sailing again. So it's really been a challenge but we're happy to be back on our feet and heading in the right direction now. >> I really hope we can continue the sailing metaphors throughout the course of this interview. And you nailed that for a segment, Alice, I'm so here for it. I want to talk about how you've worked together but I want to give Greg a second to chime in here. So, Greg, you're the executive CTO at Cisco AppDynamics. How have you and the team weathered the last two and a half years? >> Well, you know, it's interesting, the pandemic really brought together an interesting conundrum, right? So on one hand, you had, you know, the consumers, the end users that became very reliant on digital services. They had a function in a way that was very performing, right? So, 84% of the respondents that we had come back through a report called the App Attention Index, came back and said that digital services were really instrumental for them to get back to some level of normalcy. But the interesting part that came about that is that out of those respondents, 60% of them blamed the brand if the application did not work the way they expected it. So they didn't really care about the complex- >> Wow. >> In the back end, right? So when you look at- >> Yeah. >> You look at the shift in the IT department, the IT department had to go out and quickly innovate. Quickly start to introduce new services, which ultimately brought together a sprawl in their technology stack. So, when you're adding to it you're not taking things away, you're continuously growing. So finding that the problems or the root cause of an application issue became more difficult. So that's where, you know, from a Cisco AppDynamics perspective, you know we're one of the leading observability and application performance monitoring tools. So, we help customers like Royal Caribbean to be able to zero in on root cause and ensure that their end users have that best experience. >> It's, I'm smiling as someone who was a former waitress and I can remember the amount of times I was scolded for something that happened that was far out of my control in the complex layers of the kitchen. (Greg laughs) And I think that anyone who's had a poor customer experience while interacting with a brand may or may not intentionally, you know, I think it's actually sometimes very unintentional to your point, get frustrated with said brand. I can imagine that is an experience and a priority that you have at Royal Caribbean, Alice. How has full stack observability played a role in your team's ability to serve the customers and keep your community engaged during this very kind of wobbly time? >> Yeah, you know, we have really worked hard to improve and remove friction from our guest vacation. And we want to keep them on vacation and having a great time. You know, we say we don't really sell a cruise. We sell an experience. So we use AppDynamics to monitor those key applications that our guests are interacting with to ensure that they're having that experience that we expect. You know, we've learned that just because a system or a server says, hey I'm up 99% of the time, that doesn't mean that my guests are experiencing that same type of stability, you know? So once again, we really worked well with AppDynamics. They've partnered with us to ensure that, you know, our guests are getting that vacation experience they're looking for. >> Do you think, just a follow up there, do you think that you would have advanced in the ways that you have working with Cisco AppDynamics and across functions over the last few years, without this crunch? Was necessity the mother of invention for you to any degree? >> You know, I don't think that the crunch brought it on 'cause we, like I said, we started this journey back in 2017. And we're not unlike a lot of companies where we're on this maturity ride where we want to go from being reactive, where our guests are telling us something is broken, to being preventive. Definitely, you know, COVID played into this because I think we learned to do less, you know, more with less. So, you know, it's very hard in the cruise industry. We did take a hit but we were able to use the AppDynamics tools to ensure that our systems were running with having less people also watching those systems. So less eyes on glass, more automation. >> And that's more stability, more credibility, and more transparency is definitely something that we're all looking forward. And it's nice to see that implemented, especially at scale when you're dealing with so many customers from all over the world trying to access your service and wanting that personalized experience. Greg, what does it feel like for you as a leader to hear someone like Alice say how powerful your tool has been in ensuring that customer experience? >> Yeah, that's, you know, it's absolutely fantastic. And especially, you know, Alice is absolutely right. You know, the cruise industry was really, had a very unique challenge in front of them. And I really applaud the folks at Royal Caribbean for stepping up to make sure that when the pandemic eased, so to speak, that the experience to the customer was actually even better, right? So when we were able to work and partner together to make sure that, you know, the user experience is topnotch, the availability's there, the resiliency of their platform is there. So, by working with customers like Royal Caribbean is really one of the shining stars that we can talk about that really helped make a big difference in, you know that post pandemic era to be able to really do what's right for the customer. >> How often are you engaging with customers like Alice as a team? How big is that feedback in your product roadmap? >> Oh, personally, I'm engaged with customers on a daily basis. And I see it across the map from many different industries. And, you know, a lot of folks had different challenges, but the ultimate commonality that I've seen across, you know, multiple industries is that, you know, when we're in that pandemic state, digital services were the only way that their customers were interacting with them. So, you know, when you're looking at a bank or you're looking at, you know, different types of travel agencies and organizations that, you know like Royal Caribbean as well, that really had that opportunity to focus on what's the most valuable thing to them which is user experience. It's a very, very common trend that we saw. And, you know, you see an expedited path of digital transformation happen. And really that's where we partner with, you know, customers like Royal Caribbean and many others across different industries to make sure that the business outcomes were being driven towards the proper direction as well as that, you know, the user experience. And I don't think I can emphasize user experience as being so critically important, anymore than I already have. But it's really one of the most valuable currencies most organizations have. >> One of my favorite lines is community is your first defensible asset. And you know, you can talk about user experience as much as you want on here, at the end of the day. If people aren't having a positive interaction with your brand or your product, it's probably not going to last super long unless it's legacy. And we don't have to go down that rabbit hole today. >> Especially if I can add, there's a lot of competition there. >> Of course. >> Right? There's a lot of competition out there. So if your applications do not perform or your digital services do not perform the end user has the quick ability to just quickly delete and move on. And the same thing with what Alice sees in the cruise industry, you know. You have an opportunity to rise to the top and I really applaud them for taking advantage of that opportunity. >> Yeah. Well, I'm here for both of you cheering each other on. Certainly, the water level rises together. >> That's right. >> Alice, what sort of challenges are you taking on currently that you're able to disclose? What sort of leaps do you think or it doesn't have to be leaps, but what kind of experience are you hoping to continue to enhance for Royal Caribbean customers? >> You know, right now, you know with our current connectivity it's all about managing that bandwidth. You know, we're hoping to go to that state where bandwidth isn't at a high cost. So now we're going to be even able to watch our user interaction more from ship to shore. You know, and we're maybe moving to that area where we're thinking cloud first from a shift. If you think about it, we've got 50 plus data centers floating around the world. So that connectivity is key. Now we're opening up that bandwidth. Now I need to see how the transactions are performing as we come off ship. You know, with that, once again, that cloud first mentality. It's a super exciting time for us. And I really see, you know, AppD is going to play a role in that. >> I love that visual just for a second of 50 data centers with also, surrounded by people having a very wonderful time on board. What a nice thought. I can't say that every data center I've ever been to is as glamorous, fun or sexy as being on a Royal Caribbean ship. However, I hope that we move perhaps in that direction. We were just at Super Computing a few weeks ago and it was great to see all the hardware there. So you never know. What role do you see yourself and the team and Cisco AppDynamics playing in that future for companies like Royal Caribbean, Greg? >> You know, it's really, it's really staying right lockstep with our customers as they move through that digital transformation efforts. The key piece is that we look at it from that full stack view. So we offer full stack observability, which, you know, if you look at the challenges that we want to go after. Traditional IT departments were historically siloed pretty significantly between, you know network and infrastructure, security, app dev. So I mean, ensuring that we can get our customers to be able to have that common view that shows what's the real important pieces across all domains. So when they start moving down the path of digital transformation, that's an opportunity to also revamp how their processes are, the people interact and the technology that they use to be able to deliver the proper business outcomes. So we talk a lot with our customers around full stack observability, but the key part is business context. So if you have a big effort for digital transformation, you're starting to add new services to it. How do you know if it's actually impacting the business in a positive or negative way? So by us implementing the business context to ensure that you understand the investments being made, that you can show to your business leaders, is showing an uptake in the business outcomes you're going after. It's really, really about a strong partnership with our customers. But also ensuring that their business is being positively impacted by our technology to be able to help them really align the teams and be able to have the right desired outcomes. >> I love that Greg and I love that customer first, that community first attitude. It's something that you both share. Final question for the two of you. And I'm going to start with you, Alice, since I suspect you've probably been on more cruises than Greg and I combined. Though I could be making a wild assumption. Where are you cruising to next? >> You know, I just got off a cruise. So next stop, I want to revisit the Galapagos. I think the Galapagos is the best place to go. And if you haven't done it that's absolutely where you should go. >> Oh, it's a beautiful trip. Greg, have you ever done the Galapagos? Is that going to be your next Royal Caribbean cruise? >> I have never done the Galapagos, but that may just have made it to my list. >> Fantastic. Well, I second Alice's endorsement on that. I had the pleasure of going about a decade ago. Very magical place that teaches you a lot about nature. Much like the two of you have taught us very extensively about full stack observability, how it applies to user experience, customer experience and the ocean that I am currently staring at here in Pacifica, California. Alice, thank you so much for joining us from Miami. Greg, to you in Colorado. I hope that you both continue to work in harmony together and that we can all see each other on the friendly seas soon. Thank you all for tuning in to our AWS re:Invent coverage. This is theCUBE. My name's Savannah Peterson. And we look forward to seeing you for our next segment. (relaxing music)

>>Hello everyone and welcome back to The Cube's Continuing coverage of AWS Reinvent. My name is Savannah Peterson and I am absolutely thrilled for this segment. We are joined by leaders at Cisco App Dynamics, as well as Royal Caribbean. The two have been working together for over five years, leveraging full stack observability. We're gonna dig in, but first of all, please welcome Alice from Royal Caribbean and Greg from Cisco App, app Dynamics to the show. Hey friends. >>Hi. How are you doing? >>I'm excited, clearly. How are you doing, Greg? >>I'm doing fantastic. Thanks for having me on the show today. >>Hey, it's our, it is absolutely our pleasure. Alice, I have to start with you. I don't think there are too many industries that have gotten as much coverage as cruising has over the last couple of years. You've been working with Royal Caribbean for over a decade, so you've seen it through the stormy seas of the pandemic, if you will. What has the last few years and the last few months been like for you? >>You know, it's, it's really been a wild ride. To your point, we were sailing high and then I don't think any other industry experience what we did in Covid, that you walked in one day and then that day the whole industry shut down. So it was a, it was a big challenge for us. And then as soon as we shut down and we weathered the storm with Covid, then we have what we called our healthy and return to service. So as quickly as it stopped, we had to start sailing again. So it's, it's really been a challenge, but we're happy to be back on our feet and heading in the right direction now. >>I, I really hope we can continue the sailing metaphors throughout the course of this interview. And you, you nailed that for a segment. Alice, I'm, I'm, I'm so, I'm so here for it. I, I, I wanna talk about how you've worked together, but I wanna give Greg a second to chime in here. So Greg, you're the executive CTO at Cisco App Dynamics. How, how have you and the team, whether the last two and a half years? >>Well, you, you know, it's interesting, the, the pandemic really brought together an interesting conundrum, right? So on, on one hand, you had, you know, the, the, the consumers, the end users that became very reliant on digital services. They had a function in a way that was very performing, right? So, 84% of the respondents that we had come back through a report called the App Attention Index, came back and said that digital services were, were really instrumental for them to, to get back to some level of normalcy. But the interesting part that came about that is that out of those respondents, 60% of them blame the brand if the, if the application did not work the way they expected it. So they didn't really care about the, it's in the back end, right? So when you look at, yeah, you look at the shift in the IT department, the IT department had to go out and, and quickly innovate, quickly start to introduce new services, which ultimately brought together a, a sprawl in their technology stack. So when you're adding to it, you're not taking things away, you're continuously growing. So finding that that, that the problems or the, the root cause of an application issue became more difficult. So that's where, you know, from an app, Cisco AppDynamics perspective, you know, we're one of the leading observability and app application performance monitoring tools. So we help customers like Ro Caribbean to be able to zero in on root cause and ensure that their end users have that best experience. It's, >>It's, it's, I I'm smiling as someone who was a, a former waitress and I can remember the amount of times I was scolded for something that happened that was far out of my control and the complex layers of the kitchen. And I think that, that anyone who's, who's had a, a poor customer experience while interacting with a brand may or may not intentional, I think it's actually sometimes very unintentional to your point, get frustrated with said brand. I can imagine that is an experience and a priority that you have at Royal Caribbean. Alice, how, how has Full Stack Observability played a role in your, in your team's ability to, to serve the customers and your, and keep your community engaged during this, this very kind of wobbly time? >>Yeah, you know, we have, have really worked hard to improve and remove friction from our guest vacation. And we wanna keep them on vacation and having a great time. You know, we say we don't really sell a cruise. We sell an experience. So we use App AppDynamics to monitor those key applications that our guests are interacting with to ensure that they're having that experience that we expect, you know, we've learned that just because a system or a server says, Hey, I'm up 99% of the time, that doesn't mean that my guests are experiencing that same type of stability, you know? So once again, we really worked well with App Dynamics. They've partnered with us to ensure that, you know, our guests are getting that vacation experience they're looking for. >>Do you think, just a follow up there, do you think that you would have advanced in the ways that you have working with Cisco App Dynamics and across functions over the last few years without this crunch, was necessity the mother of invention for you to any degree? >>You know, I don't, I don't think that the Crunch brought it on cuz we, like I said, we started this journey back in 2017 and we're not unlike a lot of companies where we're on this maturity ride where we wanna go from being reactive, where our guests are telling us something is broken to being preventive. Definitely, you know, COVID played into this because I think we learned to do less, you know, more with less. So, you know, we, you know, it's very hard in the cruise industry. We did take a hit, but we were able to use the app dynamics tools to ensure that our systems were running with having less people also watching those systems. So less eyes on glass, more automation, >>And that's a more, with more, more stability, more credibility, and more transparency is definitely something that we're all looking forward. And, and it's nice to see that implemented, especially at scale when you're dealing with so many customers from all over the world trying to access your service and, and wanting that personalized experience. Greg, what does it feel like for you as a leader to hear someone like Alice say how powerful your tool has been in ensuring that customer experience? >>Yeah, that's, you know, it's absolutely fantastic and especially, you know, Alice is absolutely right. You know, the, the, the cruise industry was really, had a very unique challenge in front of them, and I, I really applaud the folks at Royal Caribbean for stepping up to make sure that when the pandemic eased, so to speak, that they, that the experience to the customer was actually even better, right? So when we were able to work and partner together to make sure that, you know, the, the, the user experience is topnotch, the availability is there, the, the, the, the resiliency of their platform is there. So by, by working with customers like Royal CRI and is really one of the, the, the shining stars that we can talk about that really help make a big difference in, you know, that post pandemic era to be able to really do what's right for the customer. >>How often are you engaging with customers like Alice as a team? How big is that feedback in your product roadmap? >>Oh, personally, I, I'm, I'm engaged with customers on a daily basis and I see it fr across the map from many different industries. And, you know, a lot of folks had different challenges, but the, the ultimate commonality that I've seen across, you know, multiple industries is that, you know, when you, when we're in that pandemic state, digital services were the only way that they, their customers were interacting with, with them. So, you know, when you, when you're looking at a, at a bank or you're looking at a, you know, different types of travel agencies and organizations that, you know, like rural Caribbean as well, that, that really had that opportunity to, to focus on what's the most valuable thing to them, which is user experience. It's a very, very common common trend that we saw. And, you know, you see an expedited path of, of, of digital transformation happen. And really that's where we partner with, you know, customers like Royal Caribbean and, and many others across different industries to make sure that that, that the, the business outcomes were being driven towards the, the proper direction. As well as that, you know, the, the user experience, and I don't think I can emphasize user experience as being so critically important anymore than I've already have, but it's really the, one of the most valuable currencies most organizations have. >>I, one of my favorite lines is, is community is your first defensible asset. And you know, I, you can, you can talk about user experience as much as you want on here. At the end of the day, if people aren't having a positive interaction with your brand or your product, it's probably not going to last super long unless it's legacy. And we won't have to go down that rabbit hole today, >>Especially if I can add there's a lot of competition there. Course, right? There's a lot of competition out there. So if your applications do not perform, or your digital services do not perform, the end user has the quick ability to just quickly delete and move on. And, and the same thing with, with what Alice sees in the, in the cruise industry, you know, you have an opportunity to rise to the top and I, I really applaud them for taking advantage of that, that opportunity. Community. >>Community. Yeah. Well, I'm, I'm here for both of you cheering each other on certainly the, the water level rises together. That's >>Right. Alice, >>What sort of, what sort of challenges are you taking on currently that you're able to disclose? What, what sort of leaps do you think, or doesn't have to be leaps, but what, what kind of experience are you hoping to continue to enhance for Royal Caribbean customers? >>So I think, you know, one of our big challenges that we've, you know, we've announced that we do have a relationship with starlink, so that's going to improve our satellite connectivity, and it really is a game changer for our industry. It's very exciting and, and, but it puts the, it puts the user back in the forefront once again. You know, right now, you know, with our current connectivity, it's all about managing that bandwidth. You know, we're hoping to go to that state where bandwidth isn't at a high cost, so now we're gonna be even able to watch our user interaction more from ship to shore, you know, and you're, and you're, we're maybe moving to that area where we're thinking cloud first from a shift. If you think about it, we've got 50 plus data centers floating around the world, so that connectivity is key. Now we're opening up that bandwidth now I need to see how that, how the transactions are performing as we come off ship. You know, with that, once again, that cloud first mentality, it's a super exciting time for us. And I really see, you know, AppD is gonna play a role in that. >>I, I I, I love that visual just for a second of 50 data centers with also surrounded by people having a very wonderful time on board. What a, what a nice spot. I, I can't say that every data center I've ever been to is, is glamorous, fun or sexy as being on a Royal Caribbean ship. However, I, I hope that we move perhaps in that direction. We were just at super computing a few weeks ago and it was great to see all the hardware there. So you never know. What role do you see yourself in the team and, and Cisco app Dynamics playing in that future for companies like Royal Caribbean, Greg? >>You know, it's really, it's really staying right lockstep with our customers as they move through that digital transformation efforts. The key piece is that we look at it from that full stack view. So we offer full stack observability, which, you know, if you look at the challenges that we want to go after is traditional IT departments were historically siloed pretty significantly between, you know, network and infrastructure security app dev. So ensuring that we can get our customers to, to be able to have that common view that shows what's the real important pieces across all domains. So when they start moving down the path of digital transformation, that's an opportunity to also revamp how their processes are that people interact and the technology that they use to be able to deliver the proper business outcomes. So we talk a lot with our customers around full stack observability, but the key part is business context. >>So if you have a big effort for digital transformation, you're starting to add new services to it, how do you know if it's actually impacting the business in a positive or negative way? So by us implementing the, the business context to ensure that you understand the investments being made that you can show to your business leaders is showing an uptick and the business outcomes you're, you're going after, it's really, really about a strong partnership with our customers, but also ensuring that their business is being positively impacted by our technology to be able to help them really align the teams and be able to have the right desired outcomes. >>I love that Greg and I love that customer first. That community first attitude, it's something that you both share. Final question for the two of you, and I'm gonna start with you, Alice, since I suspect you've probably been on more cruises than Greg and I combined, though I could be making a wild assumption. Where are you cruising to next? >>You know, I just got off the cruise, so next up I wanna revisit the Galapagos. I think the Galapagos is the best place to go, and if you haven't done it, that's absolutely where you should go. >>Oh, it's a beautiful trip. Greg, have you ever done the Galapagos? Is that gonna be your next Royal Caribbean cruise? >>I have never done the Galapagos, but I may just have made it to my list. >>Fantastic. Well, I second Alice's endorsement on that. I, I had the pleasure of going about a decade ago. Very magical place that teaches you a lot about nature, much like the two of you have taught us very extensively about full stack absorbability, how it applies to user experience, customer experience, and the ocean that I am currently staring at here in Pacifica, California. Alice, thank you so much for joining us from Miami Greg to you in Colorado. I hope that you both continue to work in harmony together and that we can all see each other on the friendly sees soon. Thank you all for tuning in to our AWS reinvent coverage. This is the cube. My name's Savannah Peterson, and we look forward to seeing you for our next segment.

(lighthearted music) >> Hey all. Welcome back to theCube's coverage of Kubecon North America '22 CloudNativeCon. We're in Detroit. We've been here all day covering day one of the event from our perspective. Three days of coverage coming at you. Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. John, a lot of buzz today. A lot of talk about the maturation of Kubernetes with different services that vendors are offering. We talked a little bit about security earlier today. One of the things that is a hot topic is national security. >> Yeah, this is a huge segment we got coming up. It really takes that all that nerd talk about Kubernetes and puts it into action. We actually see demonstrable results. This is about advanced artificial intelligence for tactical decision making at the edge to support our military operations because a lot of the deaths are because of bad technology. And this has been talked about. We've been covering Silicon Angle, we wrote a story there now on this topic. This should be a really exciting segment so I'm really looking forward to it. >> Excellent, so am I. Please welcome back one of our alumni, Nick Barcet senior director, customer led open innovation at Red Hat. Great to have you back. Greg Forrest joins us as well from Lockheed Martin Director of AI Foundations. Guys, great to have you on the program. Nick, what's been your perception before we dig into the news and break that open of KubeCon 2022? >> So, KubeCon is always a wonderful event because we can see people working with us in the community developing new stuff, people that we see virtually all year. But it's the time at which we can really establish human contact and that's wonderful. And it's also the moments where we can make big topic move forward and the topics have been plenty at this KubeCon from MicroShift to KCP, to AI, to all domains have been covered. >> Greg, you're the director of AI foundations at Lockheed Martin. Obviously well known, contractors to the military lot of intellectual property, storied history. >> Greg: Sure. >> Talk about this announcement with Red Hat 'cause I think this is really indicative of what's happening at the edge. Data, compute, industrial equipment, and people, in this case lives are in danger or to preserve peace. This is a killer story in terms of understanding what this all means. What's your take on this relationship with Red Hat? What's the secret sauce? >> Yeah, it's really important for us. So part of our 21st century security strategy as a company is to partner with companies like Red Hat and Big Tech and bring the best of the commercial world into the Department of Defense for our soldiers on the ground. And that's exactly what we announced today or Tuesday in our partnership. And so the ability to take commercial products and utilize them in theater is really important for saving lives on the ground. And so we can go through exactly what we did as part of this demonstration, but we took MicroShift at the edge and we were able to run our AI payloads on that. That provided us with the ability to do things like AI based RF sensing, so radio frequency sensing. And we were also able to do computer vision based technologies at the edge. So we went out, we had a small UAV that went out and searched for a target on the ground. It found a target using its radio frequency capabilities, the RF capabilities. Then once we're able to hone in on that target, what Red Hat device edge and MicroShift enables us to do is actually then switch sensing modalities. And then we're able to look at this target via the camera and use computer vision-based technologies to actually more accurately locate the target and then track that target in real time. So that's one of the keys to be able to actually switch modalities in real time on one platform is really important for our joint all domain operations construct. The idea of how do you actually connect all of these assets in the environment, in the battle space. >> Talk about the challenge and how hard it is to do this. The back haul, you'll go back to the central server, bring data back, connecting things. What if there's insecurity around connectivity? I mean there's a lot of things going, can you just scope the magnitude of how hard it's to actually deploy something at a tactical edge? >> It is. There's a lot of data that comes from all of these sensors, whether they're RF sensors or EO or IR. We're working across multiple domains, right? And so we want to take that data back and train on that and then redeploy to the edge. And so with MicroShift, we're able to do that in a way that's robust, that's repeatable, and that's automated. And that really instills trust in us and our customers that when we deploy new software capabilities to the edge over the air, like we did in this demonstration that they're going to run right on the target hardware. And so that's a huge advantage to what we're doing here that when we push software to the edge in real time we know it's going to run. >> And in realtime is absolutely critical. We talk about it in so many different industries. Oh, it's customers expect realtime access whether it's your banking app or whatnot. But here we're talking about literally life and death situations on the battlefield. So that realtime data access is literally life and death. >> It's paramount to what we're doing. In this case, the aircraft started with one role which was to go find a radio frequency admitter and then switch roles to then go get cameras and eyes on that. So where is that coming from? Are there people on the ground? Are there dangerous people on the ground? And it gives the end user on the ground complete situational awareness of what is actually happening. And that is key for enhanced decision making. Enhanced decision making is critical to what we're doing. And so that's really where we're advancing this technology and where we can save lives. >> I read a report from General Mattis when he was in service that a lot of the deaths are due to not having enough information really at the edge. >> Greg: Friendly fire. >> Friendly fire, a lot of stuff that goes on there. So this is really, really important. Nick, you're sitting there saying this is great. My customer's talking about the product. This is your innovation, Red Hat device edge in action. This is real. This is industrial- >> So it's more than real. Actually this type of use case is what convinced us to transform a technology we had been working on which is a small form factor of Kubernetes to transform it into a product. Because sometimes, US engineers have a tendency to invent stuff that are great on paper, but it's a solution trying to find a problem. And we need customers to work with us to make sure that do solution do solve a real problem. And Lockheed was great. Worked with us upstream on that project. Helped us prove out that the concept was actually worth it and we waited until Lockheed had tested the concept in the air. >> Okay, so Red Hat device edge and MicroShift, explain that, how that works real quick for the folks that don't know. So one of the thing we learned is that Kubernetes is great but it's only part of the journey. In order to get those workloads on those aircraft or in order to get those workloads in a factory, you also need to consider the full life cycle of the device itself. And you don't handle a device that is inside of a UAV or inside of a factory the same way you handle a server. You have to deal with those devices in a way that is much more akin to a setup box. So we had to modify how the OS was behaving to deal with devices and we reduced what we had built in real for each edge aspect and combined it with MicroShift and that's what became with that Red Hat device edge. >> We're in a low SWAP environment, space, weight and power, right? Or very limited, We're on a small UAS in this demonstration. So the ability to spool up and spool down containers and to save computing power and to do that on demand and orchestrate that with MicroShift is paramount to what we're doing. We wouldn't be able to do it without that capability. >> John: That's awesome. >> I want to get both of your opinions. Nick, we'll start with you and then Greg we'll go to you. In terms of MicroShift , what is its superpower? What differentiates it from other competing solutions in the market? >> So MicroShift is Kubernetes but reduced to the strict minimum of a runtime version of Kubernetes so that it takes a minimal footprint so that we maximize the space available for the workload in those very constraints environments. On a board where you have eight or 16 gig of RAM, if you use only two gig of that to run the infrastructure component, you leave the rest for the AI workload that you need on the drone. And that's what is really important. >> And these AI payloads, the inference that we're doing at the edge is very compute intensive. So again, the ability to manage that and orchestrate that is paramount to running on these very small board computers. These are small drones that don't have a lot of weight that don't allow a lot of space. >> John: Got to be efficient >> And be efficient with it. >> How were you guys involved? Talk about the relationship. So you guys were tightly involved. Talk about the roles you guys played together. Was it co-development? Was it customer/partner? Talk about the relationship. >> Yeah, so we started actually with satellite. So you can think of small cube sets in a very similar environment to a low powered UAV. And it started there. And then in the last, I would say year or so, Nick we have worked together to develop MicroShift. We work closely on Slack channels together like we're part of the same team. >> John: That's great. >> And hey Red Hat, this is what we need, this is what we're looking for. These are the constraints that we have. And this team has been amazing and just delivered on everything that we've asked for. >> I mean this is really an example of the innovation at the edge, industrial edge specifically. You got an operating system, you got form factor challenges, you got operating parameters. And just to having that flex, you can't just take this and put it over there. >> But it's what really is a community applied to an industrial context. So what happened there is we worked as part of the MicroShift community together with a real time communication channel, the same slack that anybody developing Kubernetes uses we've been using to identify where the problems were, how to solve them, bring new ideas and that's how we tackle these problems. >> Yeah, a true open source model I mean the Red Hat and the Lockheed teams were in it together on a daily basis communicating like we were part of the same company. And and that's really how you move these things forward. >> Yeah, and of course open source is great but also you got to lock down the security. How did you guys handle that? What's going on with the security? 'Cause you got to make sure no take over the devices. >> So the funny thing is that even though what we produce is highly inclusive of security concern, our development model is completely open. So it's not security biopurification, it's security because we apply the best practices. >> John: You see everything. >> Absolutely. >> Yes. >> And then you harden it in the joint development, there it is. >> Yeah, but what we support, what we offer as a product is the same for Lockheed or for any other customer because there is no domain where security is not important. When you control the recognition on a drone or where you control the behavior of a robot in a factory, security is paramount because you can't immobilize a country by infecting a robot the same way you could immobilize a military operation- >> Greg: That's right. >> By infecting a UAV. >> Not to change the subject, but I got to go on a tangent here cause it pops in my head. You mentioned cube set, not related to theCUBE of course. Where theCube for the video. Cube sets are very powerful. People can launch space right now very inexpensively. So it's a highly contested and congested environment. Any space activity going on around the corner with you guys? 'Cause remember the world's not around, it's edge is now in space. Mars is the edge. >> That's right. >> Our first prototype for MicroShift was actually a cube set. >> Greg: That's where it started. >> And IBM project, the project called Endurance. That's the first time we actually put MicroShift into use. And that was a very interesting project, very early version of MicroShift . And now we have talks with many other people on reproducing that at more industrial level this was more like a cool high school project. >> But to your point, the scalability across different platforms is there. If we're running on top of MicroShift on this common OS, it just eases the development. Behind the scenes, we have a whole AI factory at Lockheed Martin where we have a common ecosystem for how we actually develop and deploy these algorithms to the edge. And now we've got a common ecosystem at the edge. And so it helps that whole process to be able to do that in automated ways, repeatable ways so we can instill trust in our DRD customer that the validation of verification of this is a really important aspect. >> John: Must be a fun place to work. >> It is, it's exciting. There's endless opportunities. >> You must get a lot of young kids applying for those jobs. They're barely into the whole. I mean, AI's a hot feel and people want to get their hands on real applications. I was serious about space. Is there space activity going on with you guys or is it just now military edge, not yet military space? Or is that classified? >> Yeah, so we're working across multiple fronts, absolutely. >> That's awesome. >> What excite, oh, sorry John. What excites you most, never a dull moment with what you're doing, but just the potential to enable a safer, a more secure world, what excites you most about this partnership and the direction and the we'll say the trajectory it's going on? >> Yeah, I think, for me, the safer insecure world is paramount to what we're doing. We're here for national defense and for our allies and that's really critical to what we're doing. That's what motivates me. That's what gets me up in the morning to know that there is a soldier on the ground who will be using this technology and we will give be giving that person the situational awareness to make the right decisions at the right time. So we can go from small UAVs to larger aircraft or we can do it in a small confined edge device like a stalker UAV. We can scale this up to different products different platforms and they don't even have to be Lockheed Martin >> John: And more devices that are going to be imagined. >> More devices that we haven't even imagined yet. >> Right, that aren't even on the frontier yet. Nick, what's next from your perspective? >> In the domain we are in, next is always plenty of things. Sustainability is a huge domain right now on which we're working. We have lots of things going on in the AI space, stuff going on with Lockheed Martin. We have things going on in the radio network domain. We've been very heavily involved in telecommunication and this is constantly evolving. There is not one domain that, in terms of infrastructure Red Hat is not touching >> Well, this is the first of multiple demonstrations. The scenarios will get more complex with multiple aircraft and in the future, we're also looking at bringing a lot of the 5G work. Lockheed has put a large focus on 5G.mil for military applications and running some of those workloads on top of MicroShift as well is things to come in the future that we are already planning and looking at. >> Yeah, and it's needed in theater to have connectivity. Got to have your own connectivity. >> It's paramount, absolutely. >> Absolutely, it's paramount. It's game-changing. Guys, thank you so much for joining John and me on theCube talking about how Red Hat and Lockheed Martin are working together to leverage AI to really improve decision making and save more lives. It was a wonderful conversation. We're going to have to have you back 'cause we got to follow this. >> Yeah, of course. >> This was great, thank you so much. >> Thank you very much for having us. >> Lisa: Our pleasure, thank you. >> Greg: Really appreciate it. >> Excellent. For our guests and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE Live from KubeCon CloudNativeCon '22 from Detroit. Stick around. Next guest is going to join John and Savannah in just a minute. (lighthearted music)

>>The cube presents, Coon and cloud native con Europe, 2022. Brought to you by red hat, the cloud native computing foundation and its ecosystem partners. >>Welcome to Valencia Spain and cuon cloud native con 20 Europe, 2022. I'm your host Keith towns alongside a new hope en Rico, senior reti, senior editor. I'm sorry, senior it analyst at <inaudible> Enrique. Welcome to the program. >>Thank you very much. And thank you for having me. It's exciting. >>So thoughts, high level thoughts of CU con first time in person again in couple years? >>Well, this is amazing for several reasons. And one of the reasons is that yeah, I had the chance to meet, uh, with, uh, you know, people like you again. I mean, we, we met several times over the internet over zoom calls. I, I started to eat these zoom codes. <laugh> because they're really impersonal in the end. And like last night we, we are together group of friends, industry folks. It's just amazing. And a part of that, I mean, the event is, uh, is a really cool, it's really cool. There are a lot from people interviews and, you know, real people doing real stuff, not just, uh, you know, again, in personal calls, you don't even know if they're telling the truth, but when you can, you know, look in their eyes, what they're doing, I, I think that's makes a difference. >>So speaking about real people, meeting people for the first time, new jobs, new roles, Greg Moscarella, enterprise container management and general manager at SUSE. Welcome to the show, welcome back clue belong. >>Thank you very much. It's awesome to be here. It's awesome to be back in person. And I completely agree with you. Like there's a certain fidelity to the conversation and a certain, uh, ability to get to know people a lot more. So it's absolutely fantastic to be here. >>So Greg, tell us about your new role and what SUSE has gone on at KU coupon. >>Sure. So I joined SA about three months ago to lead the rancher business unit, right? So our container management pieces and, you know, it's a, it's a fantastic time. Cause if you look at the transition from virtual machines to containers and to moving to microservices, right alongside that transition from on-prem to cloud, like this is a very exciting time to be in this industry. And rancher has been setting the stage. And again, I'm go back to being here. Rancher's all about the community, right? So this is a very open, independent, uh, community driven product and project. And so this, this is kinda like being back to our people, right. And being able to reconnect here. And so, you know, doing it, digital is great, but, but being here is changes the game for us. So we, we feed off that community. We feed off the energy. So, uh, and again, going back to the space and what's happening in it, great time to be in this space. And you guys have seen the transitions you've seen, I mean, we've seen just massive adoption, uh, of containers and Kubernetes overall and ranchers been been right there with some amazing companies doing really interesting things that I'd never thought of before. Uh, so I'm, I'm still learning on this, but, um, but it's been great so far. >>Yeah. And you know, when we talk about strategy about Kubernetes today, we are talking about very broad strategies. I mean, not just the data center or the cloud with, you know, maybe smaller organization adopting Kubernetes in the cloud, but actually large organization thinking guide and more and more the edge. So what's your opinion on this, you know, expansion of Kubernetes towards the edge. >>So I think you're, I think you're exactly right. And that's actually a lot of meetings I've been having here right now is these are some of these interesting use cases. So people who, uh, whether it be, you know, ones that are easy to understand in the telco space, right? Especially the adoption of 5g and you have all these space stations, new towers, and they have not only the core radio functions or network functions that they're trying to do there, but they have other applications that wanna run on that same environment. Uh, I spoke recently with some of our, our good friends at a major automotive manufacturer, doing things in their factories, right. That can't take the latency of being somewhere else. Right. So they have robots on the factory floor, the latency that they would experience if they tried to run things in the cloud meant that robot would've moved 10 centimeters. >>By the time, you know, the signal got back, it may not seem like a lot to you, but if, if, if you're an employee, you know, there, you know, uh, a big 2000 pound robot being 10 centimeters closer to you may not be what you, you really want. Um, there's, there's just a tremendous amount of activity happening out there on the retail side as well. So it's, it's amazing how people are deploying containers in retail outlets. You know, whether it be fast food and predicting, what, what, how many French fries you need to have going at this time of day with this sort of weather. Right. So you can make sure those queues are actually moving through. It's, it's, it's really exciting and interesting to look at all the different applications that are happening. So yes, on the edge for sure, in the public cloud, for sure. In the data center and we're finding is people want a common platform across those as well. Right? So for the management piece too, but also for security and for policies around these things. So, uh, it really is going everywhere. >>So talk to me, how do, how are we managing that as we think about pushing stuff out of the data center, out of the cloud cloud, closer to the edge security and life cycle management becomes like top of mind thought as, as challenges, how is rancher and sushi addressing >>That? Yeah. So I, I think you're, again, spot on. So it's, it starts off with the think of it as simple, but it's, it's not simple. It's the provisioning piece. How do we just get it installed and running right then to what you just asked the management piece of it, everything from your firmware to your operating system, to the, the cluster, uh, the Kubernetes cluster, that's running on that. And then the workloads on top of that. So with rancher, uh, and with the rest of SUSE, we're actually tacking all those parts of the problems from bare metal on up. Uh, and so we have lots of ways for deploying that operating system. We have operating systems that are, uh, optimized for the edge, very secure and ephemeral container images that you can build on top of. And then we have rancher itself, which is not only managing your ES cluster, but can actually start to manage the operating system components, uh, as well as the workload components. >>So all from your single interface, um, we mentioned policy and security. So we, yeah, we'll probably talk about it more, um, uh, in a little bit, but, but new vector, right? So we acquired a company called new vector, just open sourced, uh, that here in January, that ability to run that level of, of security software everywhere again, is really important. Right? So again, whether I'm running it on, whatever my favorite public cloud providers, uh, managed Kubernetes is, or out at the edge, you still have to have security, you know, in there. And, and you want some consistency across that. If you have to have a different platform for each of your environments, that's just upping the complexity and the opportunity for error. So we really like to eliminate that and simplify our operators and developers' lives as much as possible. >>Yeah. From this point of view, are you implying that even you, you are matching, you know, self, uh, let's say managed clusters at the, at the very edge now with, with, you know, added security, because these are the two big problems lately, you know, so having something that is autonomous somehow easier to manage, especially if you are deploying hundreds of these that's micro clusters. And on the other hand, you need to know a policy based security that is strong enough to be sure again, if you have these huge robots moving too close to you, because somebody act the, the, the class that is managing them, that is, could be a huge problem. So are you, you know, approaching this kind of problems? I mean, is it, uh, the technology that you are acquired, you know, ready to, to do this? >>Yeah. I, I mean, it, it really is. I mean, there's still a lot of innovation happening. Don't, don't get me wrong. We're gonna see a lot of, a lot more, not just from, from SA and ranch here, but from the community, right. There's a lot happening there, but we've come a long way and we solved a lot of problems. Uh, if I think about, you know, how do you have this distributed environment? Uh, well, some of it comes down to not just, you know, all the different environments, but it's also the applications, you know, with microservices, you have very dynamic environment now just with your application space as well. So when we think about security, we really have to evolve from a fairly static policy where like, you might even be able to set an IP address and a port and some configuration on that. >>It's like, well, your workload's now dynamically moving. So not only do you have to have that security capability, like the ability to like, look at a process or look at a network connection and stop it, you have to have that, uh, manageability, right? You can't expect an operator or someone to like go in and manually configure a YAML file, right? Because things are changing too fast. It needs to be that combination of convenient, easy to manage with full function and ability to protect your, your, uh, your resources. And I think that's really one of the key things that new vector really brings is because we have so much intelligence about what's going on there. Like the configuration is pretty high level, and then it just runs, right? So it's used to this dynamic environment. It can actually protect your workloads wherever it's going from pod to pod. Uh, and it's that, that combination, again, that manageability with that high functionality, um, that, that is what's making it so popular. And what brings that security to those edge locations or cloud locations or your data center. >>So one of the challenges you're kind of, uh, touching on is this abstraction on, upon abstraction. When I, I ran my data center, I could put, uh, say this IP address, can't talk to this IP address on this port. Then I got next generation firewalls where I could actually do, uh, some analysis. Where are you seeing the ball moving to when it comes to customers, thinking about all these layers of abstraction IP address doesn't mean anything anymore in cloud native it's yes, I need one, but I'm not, I'm not protecting based on IP address. How are customers approaching security from the name space perspective? >>Well, so it's, you're absolutely right. In fact, even when you go to IPV six, like, I don't even recognize IP addresses anymore. <laugh> yeah. >>That doesn't mean anything like, oh, just a bunch of, yeah. Those are numbers, alpha Ric >>And colons. Right. You know, it's like, I don't even know anymore. Right. So, um, yeah, so it's, it comes back to that, moving from a static, you know, it's the pets versus cattle thing. Right? So this static thing that I can sort of know and, and love and touch and kind of protect to this almost living, breathing thing, which is moving all around, it's a swarm of, you know, pods moving all over the place. And so, uh, it, it is, I mean, that's what Kubernetes has done for the workload side of it is like, how do you get away from, from that, that pet to a declarative approach to, you know, identifying your workload and the components of that workload and what it should be doing. And so if we go on the security side some more like, yeah, it's actually not even namespace namespace. >>Isn't good enough if we wanna get, if we wanna get to zero trust, it's like, just cuz you're running in my namespace doesn't mean I trust you. Right. So, and that's one of the really cool things about new vectors because of the, you know, we're looking at protocol level stuff within the network. So it's pod to pod, every single connection we can look at and it's at the protocol layer. So if you say you're on my SQL database and I have a mye request going into it, I can confirm that that's actually a mye protocol being spoken and it's well formed. Right. And I know that this endpoint, you know, which is a, uh, container image or a pod name or some, or a label, even if it's in the same name, space is allowed to talk to and use this protocol to this other pod that's running in my same name space. >>Right. So I can either allow or deny. And if I can, I can look into the content that request and make sure it's well formed. So I'll give you an example is, um, do you guys remember the log four J challenges from not too long ago, right. It was a huge deal. So if I'm doing something that's IP and port based and name space based, so what are my protections? What are my options for something that's got logged four J embedded in like, I either run the risk of it running or I shut it down. Those are my options. Like those neither one of those are very good. So we can do, because again, we're at the protocol layer. It's like, ah, I can identify any log for J protocol. I can look at whether it's well formed, you know, or if it's malicious and it's malicious, I can block it. If it's well formed, I can let it go through. So I can actually look at those, those, um, those vulnerabilities. I don't have to take my service down. I can run and still be protected. And so that, that extra level, that ability to kind of peek into things and also go pod to pod, you know, not just same space level is one of the key differences. So I talk about the evolution or how we're evolving with, um, with the security. Like we've grown a lot, we've got a lot more coming. >>So let's talk about that a lot more coming what's in the pipeline for SUSE. >>Well, probably before I get to that, we just announced new vector five. So maybe I can catch us up on what was released last week. Uh, and then we can talk a little bit about going, going forward. So new vector five, introduce something called um, well, several things, but one of the things I can talk in more detail about is something called zero drift. So I've been talking about the network security, but we also have run time security, right? So any, any container that's running within your environment has processes that are running that container. What we can do is actually comes back to that manageability and configuration. We can look at the root level of trust of any process that's running. And as long as it has an inheritance, we can let that process run without any extra configuration. If it doesn't have a root level of trust, like it didn't spawn from whatever the, a knit, um, function was in that container. We're not gonna let it run. Uh, so the, the configuration that you have to put in there is, is a lot simpler. Um, so that's something that's in, in new vector five, um, the web application firewall. So this layer seven security inspection has gotten a lot more granular now. So it's that pod Topo security, um, both for ingress egress and internal on the cluster. Right. >>So before we get to what's in the pipeline, one question around new vector, how is that consumed and deployed? >>How is new vector consumed, >>Deployed? And yeah, >>Yeah, yeah. So, uh, again with new vector five and, and also rancher 2 65, which just were released, there's actually some nice integration between them. So if I'm a rancher customer and I'm using 2 65, I can actually deploy that new vector with a couple clicks of the button in our, uh, in our marketplace. And we're actually tied into our role-based access control. So an administrator who has that has the rights can just click they're now in a new vector interface and they can start setting those policies and deploying those things out very easily. Of course, if you aren't using, uh, rancher, you're using some other, uh, container management platform, new vector still works. Awesome. You can deploy it there still in a few clicks. Um, you're just gonna get into, you have to log into your new vector, uh, interface and, and use it from there. >>So that's how it's deployed. It's, it's very, it's very simple to use. Um, I think what's actually really exciting about that too, is we've opensourced it? Um, so it's available for anyone to go download and try, and I would encourage people to give it a go. Uh, and I think there's some compelling reasons to do that now. Right? So we have pause security policies, you know, depreciated and going away, um, pretty soon in, in Kubernetes. And so there's a few things you might look at to make sure you're still able to run a secure environment within Kubernetes. So I think it's a great time to look at what's coming next, uh, for your security within your Kubernetes. >>So Paul, we appreciate chief stopping by from ity of Spain, from Spain, I'm Keith Townsend, along with en Rico Sinte. Thank you. And you're watching the, the leader in high tech coverage.

>>The cube presents, Coon and cloud native con Europe 22, brought to you by the cloud native computing foundation. >>Welcome to Valencia Spain and con cloud native con 20 Europe, 2022. I'm your host, Keith Townson alongside a new host en Rico senior reti, senior editor. I'm sorry, senior it analyst at giong Enrique. Welcome to the program. >>Thank you very much. And thank you for having me. It's exciting. >>So thoughts, high level thoughts of CU con first time in person again in couple years? >>Well, this is amazing for several reasons. And one of the reasons is that yeah, I had the chance to meet, uh, with, uh, you know, people like you again. I mean, we, we met several times over the internet, over zoom codes. I, I started to eat these zoom codes. <laugh> because they're very impersonal in the end. And like last night we, we are together group of friends, industry folks. It's just amazing. And a part of that, I mean, the event is, uh, is a really cool, it's really cool. There are a lot from people interviews and, you know, real people doing real stuff, not just, uh, you know, again, in personal calls, you don't even know if they're telling the truth, but when you can, you know, look in their eyes, what they're doing, I, I think that's makes a difference. >>So speaking about real people, meeting people for the first time, new jobs, new roles, Greg Moscarella enterprise container management in general manager at SUSE, welcome to the show, welcome back clue belong. >>Thank you very much. It's awesome to be here. It's awesome to be back in person. And I completely agree with you. Like there's a certain fidelity to the conversation and a certain, uh, ability to get to know people a lot more. So it's absolutely fantastic to be here. >>So Greg, tell us about your new role and what SUSE has gone on at KU con. >>Sure. So I joined SA about three months ago to lead the rancher business unit, right? So our container management pieces and, you know, it's a, it's a fantastic time. Cause if you look at the transition from virtual machines to containers and to moving to micro services, right alongside that transition from on-prem to cloud, like this is a very exciting time to be in this industry and rancher's been setting the stage. And again, I'm go back to being here. Rancher's all about the community, right? So this is a very open, independent, uh, community driven product and project. And so this, this is kinda like being back to our people, right. And being able to reconnect here. And so, you know, doing it, digital is great, but, but being here is changes the game for us. So we, we feed off that community. We feed off the energy. So, uh, and again, going back to the space and what's happening in it, great time to be in this space. And you guys have seen the transitions you've seen, I mean, we've seen just massive adoption, uh, of containers and Kubernetes overall, and rancher has been been right there with some amazing companies doing really interesting things that I'd never thought of before. Uh, so I'm, I'm still learning on this, but, um, but it's been great so far. >>Yeah. And you know, when we talk about strategy about Kubernetes today, we are talking about very broad strategies. I mean, not just the data center or the cloud with, you know, maybe smaller organization adopting Kubernetes in the cloud, but actually large organization thinking guide and more and more the edge. So what's your opinion on this, you know, expansion of Kubernetes towards the edge. >>So I think you're, I think you're exactly right. And that's actually a lot of meetings I've been having here right now is these are some of these interesting use cases. So people who, uh, whether it be, you know, ones that are easy to understand in the telco space, right? Especially the adoption of 5g and you have all these base stations, new towers, and they have not only the core radio functions or network functions that they're trying to do there, but they have other applications that wanna run on that same environment, uh, spoke recently with some of our, our good friends at a major automotive manufacturer, doing things in their factories, right. That can't take the latency of being somewhere else. Right? So they have robots on the factory floor, the latency that they would experience if they tried to run things in the cloud meant that robot would've moved 10 centimeters. >>By the time, you know, the signal got back, it may not seem like a lot to you, but if, if, if you're an employee, you know, there, you know, uh, a big 2000 pound robot being 10 centimeters closer to you may not be what you, you really want. Um, there's, there's just a tremendous amount of activity happening out there on the retail side as well. So it's, it's amazing how people are deploying containers in retail outlets. You know, whether it be fast food and predicting, what, what, how many French fries you need to have going at this time of day with this sort of weather. Right. So you can make sure those queues are actually moving through. It's, it's, it's really exciting and interesting to look at all the different applications that are happening. So yes, on the edge for sure, in the public cloud, for sure. In the data center and we're finding is people want to common platform across those as well. Right? So for the management piece too, but also for security and for policies around these things. So, uh, it really is going everywhere. >>So talk to me, how do, how are we managing that as we think about pushing stuff out of the data center, out of the cloud cloud, closer to the edge security and life cycle management becomes like top of mind thought as, as challenges, how is rancher and sushi addressing >>That? Yeah. So I, I think you're, again, spot on. So it's, it starts off with the think of it as simple, but it's, it's not simple. It's the provisioning piece. How do we just get it installed and running right then to what you just asked the management piece of it, everything from your firmware to your operating system, to the, the cluster, uh, the Kubernetes cluster, that's running on that. And then the workloads on top of that. So with rancher, uh, and with the rest of SUSE, we're actually tacking all those parts of the problems from bare metal on up. Uh, and so we have lots of ways for deploying that operating system. We have operating systems that are, uh, optimized for the edge, very secure and ephemeral container images that you can build on top of. And then we have rancher itself, which is not only managing your Kubernetes cluster, but can actually start to manage the operating system components, uh, as well as the workload components. >>So all from your single interface, um, we mentioned policy and security. So we, yeah, we'll probably talk about it more, um, uh, in a little bit, but, but new vector, right? So we acquired a company called new vector, just open sourced, uh, that here in January, that ability to run that level of, of security software everywhere again, is really important. Right? So again, whether I'm running it on, whatever my favorite public cloud providers, uh, managed Kubernetes is, or out at the edge, you still have to have security, you know, in there. And, and you want some consistency across that. If you have to have a different platform for each of your environments, that's just upping the complexity and the opportunity for error. So we really like to eliminate that and simplify our operators and developers lives as much as possible. >>Yeah. From this point of view, are you implying that even you, you are matching, you know, self, uh, let's say managed clusters at the, at the very edge now with, with, you know, added security, because these are the two big problems lately, you know, so having something that is autonomous somehow easier to manage, especially if you are deploying hundreds of these that's micro clusters. And on the other hand, you need to know a policy based security that is strong enough to be sure again, if you have these huge robots moving too close to you, because somebody act the class that is managing them, that could be a huge problem. So are you, you know, approaching this kind of problems? I mean, is it, uh, the technology that you are acquired, you know, ready to, to do this? >>Yeah. I, I mean, it, it really is. I mean, there's still a lot of innovation happening. Don't, don't get me wrong. We're gonna see a lot of, a lot more, not just from, from SA and rancher, but from the community, right. There's a lot happening there, but we've come a long way and we've solved a lot of problems. Uh, if I think about, you know, how do you have this distributed environment? Uh, well, some of it comes down to not just, you know, all the different environments, but it's also the applications, you know, with microservices, you have very dynamic environment now just with your application space as well. So when we think about security, we really have to evolve from a fairly static policy where like, you might even be able to set an IP address in a port and some configuration on that. It's like, well, your workload's now dynamically moving. >>So not only do you have to have that security capability, like the ability to like, look at a process or look at a network connection and stop it, you have to have that, uh, manageability, right? You can't expect an operator or someone to like go in and manually configure a YAML file, right? Because things are changing too fast. It needs to be that combination of convenient, easy to manage with full function and ability to protect your, your, uh, your resources. And I think that's really one of the key things that new vector really brings is because we have so much intelligence about what's going on there. Like the configuration is pretty high level, and then it just runs, right? So it's used to this dynamic environment. It can actually protect your workloads wherever it's going from pod to pod. Uh, and it's that, that combination, again, that manageability with that high functionality, um, that, that is what's making it so popular. And what brings that security to those edge locations or cloud locations or your data center >>Mm-hmm <affirmative> so one of the challenges you're kind of, uh, touching on is this abstraction on upon abstraction. When I, I ran my data center, I could put, uh, say this IP address, can't talk to this IP address on this port. Then I got next generation firewalls where I could actually do, uh, some analysis. Where are you seeing the ball moving to when it comes to customers, thinking about all these layers of abstraction I IP address doesn't mean anything anymore in cloud native it's yes, I need one, but I'm not, I'm not protecting based on IP address. How are customers approaching security from the name space perspective? >>Well, so it's, you're absolutely right. In fact, even when you go to I P six, like, I don't even recognize IP addresses anymore. <laugh> >>Yeah. Doesn't mean anything like, oh, just a bunch of, yes, those are numbers, ER, >>And colons. Right. You know, it's like, I don't even know anymore. Right. So, um, yeah, so it's, it comes back to that, moving from a static, you know, it's the pets versus cattle thing. Right? So this static thing that I can sort of know and, and love and touch and kind of protect to this almost living, breathing thing, which is moving all around, it's a swarm of, you know, pods moving all over the place. And so, uh, it, it is, I mean, that's what Kubernetes has done for the workload side of it is like, how do you get away from, from that, that pet to a declarative approach to, you know, identifying your workload and the components of that workload and what it should be doing. And so if we go on the security side some more like, yeah, it's actually not even namespace namespace. >>Isn't good enough. We wanna get, if we wanna get to zero trust, it's like, just cuz you're running in my namespace doesn't mean I trust you. Right. So, and that's one of the really cool things about new vectors because of the, you know, we're looking at protocol level stuff within the network. So it's pod to pod, every single connection we can look at and it's at the protocol layer. So if you say you're on my database and I have a mye request going into it, I can confirm that that's actually a mye protocol being spoken and it's well formed. Right. And I know that this endpoint, you know, which is a, uh, container image or a pod name or some, or a label, even if it's in the same name, space is allowed to talk to and use this protocol to this other pod that's running in my same name space. >>Right. So I can either allow or deny. And if I can, I can look into the content that request and make sure it's well formed. So I'll give you an example is, um, do you guys remember the log four J challenges from not too long ago, right. Was, was a huge deal. So if I'm doing something that's IP and port based and name space based, so what are my protections? What are my options for something that's got log four J embedded in like I either run the risk of it running or I shut it down. Those are my options. Like those neither one of those are very good. So we can do, because again, we're at the protocol layers like, ah, I can identify any log for J protocol. I can look at whether it's well formed, you know, or if it's malicious, if it's malicious, I can block it. If it's well formed, I can let it go through. So I can actually look at those, those, um, those vulnerabilities. I don't have to take my service down. I can run and still be protected. And so that, that extra level, that ability to kind of peek into things and also go pod to pod, you know, not just name space level is one of the key differences. So I talk about the evolution or how we're evolving with, um, with the security. Like we've grown a lot, we've got a lot more coming. >>So let's talk about that a lot more coming what's in the pipeline for SUSE. >>Well, how, before I get to that, we just announced new vector five. So maybe I can catch us up on what was released last week. Uh, and then we can talk a little bit about going, going forward. So new vector five, introduce something called um, well, several things, but one of the things I can talk in more detail about is something called zero drift. So I've been talking about the network security, but we also have run time security, right? So any, any container that's running within your environment has processes that are running that container. What we can do is actually comes back to that manageability and configuration. We can look at the root level of trust of any process that's running. And as long as it has an inheritance, we can let that process run without any extra configuration. If it doesn't have a root level of trust, like it didn't spawn from whatever the, a knit, um, function was and that container we're not gonna let it run. Uh, so the, the configuration that you have to put in there is, is a lot simpler. Um, so that's something that's in, in new vector five, um, the web application firewall. So this layer seven security inspection has gotten a lot more granular now. So it's that pod Topo security, um, both for ingress egress and internal on the cluster. Right. >>So before we get to what's in the pipeline, one question around new vector, how is that consumed and deployed? >>How is new vector consumed, >>Deployed? And yeah, >>Yeah, yeah. So, uh, again with new vector five and, and also rancher 2 65, which just were released, there's actually some nice integration between them. So if I'm a rancher customer and I'm using 2 65, I can actually just deploy that new vector with a couple clicks of the button in our, uh, in our marketplace. And we're actually tied into our role-based access control. So an administrator who has that has the rights can just click they're now in a new vector interface and they can start setting those policies and deploying those things out very easily. Of course, if you aren't using, uh, rancher, you're using some other, uh, container management platform, new vector still works. Awesome. You can deploy it there still in a few clicks. Um, you're just gonna get into, you have to log into your new vector, uh, interface and, and use it from there. >>So that's how it's deployed. It's, it's very, it's very simple to use. Um, I think what's actually really exciting about that too, is we've opensourced it? Um, so it's available for anyone to go download and try, and I would encourage people to give it a go. Uh, and I think there's some compelling reasons to do that now. Right? So we have pause security policies, you know, depreciated and going away, um, pretty soon in, in Kubernetes. And so there's a few things you might look at to make sure you're still able to run a secure environment within Kubernetes. So I think it's a great time to look at what's coming next, uh, for your security within your Kubernetes. >>So, Paul, we appreciate you stopping by from ity of Spain. I'm Keith Townsend, along with en Rico Sinte. Thank you. And you're watching the, the leader in high tech coverage.

>>Mm. Okay, we're back. Digging into the infrastructure to make hybrid work possible. High performance, cost effective, scalable and secure. That's what it's all about. So far, we've covered the rapid migration to WiFi 60 technology and the role that switching is going to play. And now we're gonna get into private five g to do that. Let's welcome Masumi here. Who is vice president and general manager of mobile cable and the Iot business at Cisco and Greg Dorey, who is the vice president of product management for the networking experiences group of Cisco. He's responsible for Catalyst access that whole portfolio enterprise five G Cisco DNA spaces, Cisco, Iasi A lot of stuff there. Uh, Greg gentlemen, welcome, >>Dave. Thank you for having us. >>Yeah, our pleasure. So let's start with you on the topic of private five g five g. What do we need to know about that? And more specifically, you know what's unique about Cisco's private five G? >>So, most importantly, delivering private five G in enterprise terms that's super important to look at five p. Many of our peer groups might have got it wrong. We're looking at private five g with the lens of enterprise. What enterprise really needs is five g going to come and displace a lot of existing technology? Or is it going to help augment the technology that enterprise has an excellent Their digitisation is you need. I wanted to start Dave with the basic premise of hybrid work, and what hybrid work really means. Is it only for knowledge worker or is it for all workers? So we strongly believe hybrid work needs to empower all workers. It's not only connecting remote workers but also bringing people things and space together. And I strongly believe the combination of WiFi six n five g for private network is going to accelerate that journey, bringing people things and space together in a very, very cohesive way. Why are our offer is so unique? We are going to create a continent. Enterprises don't have to make a hard choice. They will be using WiFi technology and five G technology hand in hand without creating a disruption on their policy and identity systems. They don't have to rethink. Do I have to go and build a new background is a common background that will support both WiFi as well as five t Most importantly, delivering this enter offer as a service with the ease of consumption is of operation and trusted environment that they can put their mission critical workloads on. >>I like it. So couple takeaways there are inclusive of all workers, not just knowledge workers non disruptive. Everybody loves to hear that. And of course, the as a service model is key. So let me stay with you. I mean, we can't wait for five g, right? It's lightning fast. They've got super low latency, very high bandwidth. So that's what everybody is excited about. The question, though, is is five g gets introduced. You know it's going to power things like Coyote Networks. Is that going to replace WiFi and legacy Wired broadband? >>Absolutely not. So we see private five years, an augmentation to the enterprise on top of WiFi WiFi. As you heard in the previous conversation, WiFi is bringing more capability with WiFi six and WiFi 16 and five G is going to be yet another augmentation. WiFi and fight. The will coexist within enterprise for many years to come. I would like my friend Greg to talk a little bit about this continuum. Greg. >>Yeah, I think it's sort of like I like to say it's an and not an AR because there's enough use cases out there. Richard Pryor Spectrum And you know, spectrum >>is a constraint, so >>you have private five G, your WiFi six and both offer opportunities. So, for example, in an indoor carpet setting where you're basically connecting your phone for basic browsing or connecting your laptop, WiFi is sufficient. But if it's a process automation, uh, factory where you need seven nines of reliability, private five g is a better technology. Similarly outdoor large areas. It's probably private. Five g right like this, you can have easy handoff between public and private, so it's use case driven, and once it's used case driven, it's going to be an are because there's so many next time use cases, whether it's a are we are drones, self driving cars, you name it right, like And so I think these two technologies five g and Y 5 60 is gonna work hand in hand to deliver awesome outcomes for our customers. >>Yeah, and just the data volumes are gonna be incredible. We always talk about the data volumes. You ain't seen nothing yet is what I always say. But the thing is, every new tech that's introduced into the enterprise, you can almost be certain that is going to bring adoption challenges. And not only that also is going to bring changes in the way you do things. And that brings new complexities from an operational standpoint. So my question is, how are you addressing this with the introduction of five g. >>Dave, this is a fantastic question, and this is why we have spent me and Greg have spent tremendous amount of time to create continual. I'll start with the foundation first, back down. So we have been building this enterprise backbone, supporting what Wild Connexion as well as WiFi Connexion. We wanted to make sure that as private five G camps within enterprise, you don't have to rethink and reimagine your background is the common backbone that will support both WiFi WiFi six WiFi 60 as well as private five g. You rest assured that it is the same backbone that we have heard in the previous section on the Cap 90 that will also support a private key access. The second aspect of private five G is as you build any new technology into enterprise. Oftentimes we get into this trap to get to an outcome. We move fast and we create asylum. And then that silo operation creates a barriers to mainstream it. So upfront we have to think about not creating another silent and how we're doing it. Number one is a device that can connecting to WiFi network or a private five G network. You don't have to reimagine or rethink how I'm going to manage. The identity will create continue of the common identity across the WiFi access or five t access in the same environment. The second aspect of that is, how are we going to reach in all our staff are enterprise staff is well trained with WiFi technology and white technology. Now five G comes with tremendous amount of value and benefit, but it also comes with inherent technology complexity, learning problems. This is where our simple to consume simple to operate model of sass comes to play. That we're going to take all those complexity away. It is a cloud deliberate service enterprise don't have to go through this massive learning car. Adopting this technology last but not list on how you're going to manage your capital. Any new technology and enterprise, Oftentimes you need a huge amount of upfront investment to adopt the technology to get to the other side of getting the outcome. So again, our business model of SARS will allow Enterprise to adopt this new technology and pay as you go model to meet with enterprise needs. Finally, I also wanted to pass to break to touch a little bit more on how we are thinking about this common identity across any access in the enterprise. Greg to your >>So we we talk about it in two different ways. One is a lot of enterprises today use our identity and secure management platform. We call it Isis Co ice platform. And so years and years of policy and identities Excess service, radio service they use, uh, etcetera are plugged in already into our eyes. Right. So if you can share that with this private five years as a service, uh, infrastructure that Muslims been building, we think we'll be able to create that bridge because we're not forcing enterprises to create new identities, a new policy. So thats sort of step one to make it easier. Uh, you also talk through something where, in the case of a public five g network, for example, the It's very convenient because you take your phone out of your pocket and it's connected to the network, right? Was this for WiFi? You have to log into an S I D in your hotel or in your home and home. It's automatic, but that's that logging process that creates friction. And that's a problem, because then you can't be seamless. So we initiated what we call us open roaming, right? Like that's, uh, identity federation that we first created between identity owners. Could be carriers could be, um, anything that anyone who owns an identity and they will share with venues. And so if the sharing happens, then that Onboarding can be automatic and once on boarding is automatic, then it's easy to pass off between five and five G. And so that's again another way in which you can lower the adoption barriers because you share across public private G and WiFi networks. So these are two concrete examples of how we thought about lowering the barriers of adoption. As we enter into this heterogeneous >>world, >>I can't wait. Let's let's talk about how this thing scales in the go to market, what are the most likely or maybe preferred or obvious routes to market for private five g Francisco >>so they stay tuned when when they announce more about it. But I can also assure you that exposed to the spectrum is a challenge for many enterprises when it comes to cellular technology. In some countries, there are more spectrum accessible by enterprise. In many countries, that's not the case. So we have talked to very carefully that how do we bring this offer to the market? Partnering with many service providers and mobile operators, where in countries where we don't have direct access to the spectrum, our partnership with mobile operators that you will hear more about as we come to mobile world Congress is going to allow our enterprise to consume this technology even if they don't have the spectrum in places where the enterprise might have direct spectrum access. We'll also bring in our relativist providers to hide the complexity of the new technology on top of our cell services or a cloud deliberate services. This is the augmentation with the partnership with menaces providers and mobile operators that will ease this journey for enterprises are most important. Primitive in this journey is to keep it simple for enterprise. Make it intuitive and trust it from day one. >>Outstanding. Okay. Assume, Greg, Thanks so much. It's great to have you guys. I really appreciate your time. >>Thank you. Thank you. Mm mm.

>> As to the adoption challenges, I wasn't clear on where that should go. I mean, I'm happy to just throw it out there. >> You'll again punch it back to me, right? >> Okay. >> Question comes to me and I'm going to pass the ball to Greg to connect the thread on one backbone is needed. Emphasizing Cat 9K that we just talked about. >> And same thing for the last question. The routes to market? >> Yes. >> Okay. >> Yes. >> Great. So we'll use that program for everything. Perfect. >> Masum, could you... Yeah, right there. So mark your place and try not to move that seat. That's it. Now, come forward just a tad, just a tad. There we go. Yeah. Okay, that's fine. Okay Alex, we're good. >> Okay. So Leonard don't leave after this 'Cause I'm going to do my outro. I'm going to do that as a separate asset, okay? >> You bet. >> Okay, great. So guys just it'll be five, four, three, silent, two, one. And then just follow my lead, okay? All right, Alex, you're ready? Masum and Greg, you're ready? >> Ready. >> Ready. >> Okay, here we go on me. On Dave in five, four, three, (beep). Okay, we're back. Digging into the infrastructure to make hybrid work possible. High performance, cost effective, scalable, and secure. That's what it's all about. And so far, we've covered the rapid migration to Wi-Fi 6E technology, and the role that switching is going to play. And now we're going to get into Private 5G and to do that, let's welcome Masum Mir, who is Vice President, and General Manager of Mobile, Cable and IoT business at Cisco. And Greg Dorai who is the Vice President of Product Management for the networking experiences group at Cisco. He's responsible for Catalyst access, that whole portfolio, Enterprise 5G, Cisco DNA Spaces, Cisco ISE, a lot of stuff there Greg. And gentlemen, welcome. >> Dave thank you for having us. >> Yeah, our pleasure. Masum let's start with you on the topic of Private 5G. What do we need to know about that? And more specifically, what's unique about Cisco's Private 5G? >> So most importantly, delivering Private 5G in enterprise terms, that's super important to look at 5G. Many of our peer groups might have got it wrong. We're looking at Private 5G with the lens of enterprise, what enterprise really needs. Is 5G going to come and displace a lot of existing technology, or is it going to help augment the technology that enterprise. It has an excellent the digitization journey. I wanted to start Dave with the basic premise of hybrid work. And what hybrid work really means. Is it only for knowledge worker, or is it for all workers? So we strongly believe hybrid work needs to empower all workers. It's not only connecting remote workers but also bringing people, things and space together. And we strongly believe the combination of Wi-Fi 6 and 5G for private network is going to accelerate that journey bringing people, things and space together in a very, very cohesive way. Why our offer is so unique? We are going to create a continuum. Enterprises don't have to make a hard choice. They will be using Wi-Fi technology and 5G technology hand in hand without creating a disruption on their policy and identity systems. They don't have to rethink, "Do I have to go and build a new backbone?" Is a common backbone that will support both Wi-Fi as well as 5G. Most importantly, delivering this entire offer as a service with the ease of consumption, ease of operation, and a trusted environment that they can put their mission critical workload on. >> Now, I like it. So a couple takeaways there. I mean, it's inclusive of all workers not just knowledge workers, non disruptive, everybody loves to hear that. And of course, it has service model as key Masum, let me stay with you. I mean, we can't wait for 5G, right? It's lightning fast, it got super low latency, very high bandwidth. So that's what everybody's excited about. The question though is, 5G gets introduced, yeah it's going to power things like IoT networks. Is that going to replace Wi-Fi and legacy wired broadband? >> Absolutely not. So we see Private 5G as an augmentation to the enterprise on top of Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi as you heard in the previous conversation, Wi-Fi is bringing more capability with Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E. And 5G is going to be yet another augmentation. Wi-Fi and 5G will coexist within enterprise for many years to come. I would like my friend, Greg to talk a little bit about this continuum. Greg? >> Yeah, I think it's sort of like, I like to say it's an and not an or. Because there's enough use cases out there which require spectrum. And you know, spectrum is a constraint. So you have Private 5G, your Wi-Fi 6, and both offer opportunities. So for example, in an indoor carpeted setting where you're basically connecting your phone for basic browsing, or connecting your laptop, Wi-Fi is sufficient. But if it's a process automation factory where you need seven nines of reliability, Private 5G is the better technology. Similarly outdoor, large areas, it's probably Private 5G, right? 'Cause you can have easy handoff between public and private. So it's use case driven. And once it's use case driven, it's going to be an or because there's so many next-gen use cases. Whether it's AR VR, drones, you know, self-driving cars you name it, right? And so I think these two technologies, 5G and Wi-Fi 6E is going to work hand in hand to deliver awesome outcomes for our customers. >> Yeah. And just the data volumes are going to be incredible. We always talk about the data volumes. You ain't seen nothing yet is what I always say. But the thing is every new tech that's introduced into the enterprise, you can almost be certain that it's going to bring adoption challenges. And not only that, it also is going to bring changes in the way you do things. And that brings new complexities from an operational standpoint. So my question is, how are you addressing this with the introduction of 5G? >> Dave, this is a fantastic question. And this is why we have spent, me and Greg have spent tremendous amount of time to create continuum. I'll start with the foundation first, backbone. So we have been building this enterprise backbone supported with wired connection as well as Wi-Fi connection. We wanted to make sure that as Private 5G comes within enterprise, you don't have to rethink and reimagine your backbone. It's the common backbone that will support what Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi 6, Wi-Fi 6E, as well as Private 5G. You're rest assured that it is the same backbone that we have heard in the previous section on the Cat 9K that will also support a Private 5G access. The second aspect of Private 5G is as you build any new technology into enterprise often time we get into this trap. To get to an outcome, we move fast and we create a silo. And then that silo operation creates barriers to mainstream it. So upfront, we have to think about not creating another silo. And how we are doing it. Number one, is a device that can connect into Wi-Fi network or a Private 5G network. You don't have to reimagine or rethink how I'm going to manage the identity. We'll create continuum with a common identity across the Wi-Fi access or 5G access in the same environment. The second aspect of that is how are we going to retain all our staff? Our enterprise staff is well trained with Wi-Fi technology and wired technology. Now 5G comes with tremendous amount of value and benefit. But it also comes with inherent technology complexity, learning curve problem. This is where our simple to consume, simple to operate model of SaaS comes to play. That we're going to take all those complexity away. It is a cloud delivered service. So enterprise don't have to go through this massive learning curve adopting this technology. Last but not least, on how we are going to manage your capital. Any new technology and enterprise often time, you need huge amount of upfront investment to adopt the technology to get to the other side of getting the outcome. So again, our business model of SaaS will allow enterprise to adopt this new technology and pay as your grow model to meet with enterprise needs. Finally, I also wanted to pass to Greg to touch a little bit more on how we are thinking about this common identity across any access in the enterprise. Greg, to you. >> So we thought about it in two different ways. One is, a lot of enterprises today use our identity and secure management platform. We call it ISE, Cisco ISE platform. And so, years and years of policy and identities, and which access servers, radio servers they use et cetera, are plugged in already into our ISE, right? So, if you can share that with this Private 5G as a service infrastructure that Masum's been building, we think we'll be able to create that bridge. Because we are not forcing enterprises to create new identities or new policies. So that's sort of step one to make it easier. We also thought through so something where in the case of a public 5G network, for example. It's very convenient because you take your phone out of your pocket and it's connected to the network, right? Versus for wifi, you have to log into an SSID in your hotel, or in your home, and in home, it's automatic. But that's that login process that creates friction. And that's a problem because then you can't be seamless. So we initiated what we call as open roaming, right? Like that's a identity federation that we first created between identity owners. Could be carriers, could be anything, right? Anyone who owns an identity. And they will share with venues. And so if the sharing happens, then that onboarding can be automatic. And once onboarding is automatic, then it's easy to pass off between Wi-Fi and 5G. And so that's again, another way in which you can lower the adoption barriers 'cause you share across public Private 5G and Wi-Fi networks. So these are two concrete examples of how we thought about lowering the barriers of adoption as we enter into this heterogeneous world. >> Nice, I can't wait. Let's talk about how this thing, scales in the go to market. What are the most likely, or maybe preferred, or obvious routes to market for Private 5G from Cisco? >> So Dave stay tuned right when they announce more about it. But I can also assure you that access to this spectrum is a challenge for many enterprises when it comes to cellular technology. In some countries there are more spectrum accessible by enterprise. In many countries, that's not the case. So we have thought through very carefully that how do we bring this offer to the market partnering with many service providers and mobile operators. Where in countries where you don't have direct access to the spectrum, our partnership with mobile operators, that you will hear more about as we come to Mobile World Congress, is going to allow our enterprise to consume this technology. even if they don't have the spectrum. In the places where the enterprise might have spectrum access, we'll also in our manage service providers to hide the complexity of the new technology on top of our SaaS services, or cloud delivered services. This is the augmentation with the partnership with manage service providers and mobile operators that will ease this journey for enterprises. Our most important primitive in this journey is to keep it simple for enterprise, make it intuitive, and trust it from day one. >> Outstanding. Okay, Masum, Greg, thanks so much. It was great to have you guys on. I really appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> In a moment, I'll be back with some closing thoughts and an opportunity for you to actually see this technology in action and talk to the experts directly. Keep it right there.

>>We'll come back to the cubes coverage of AWS reinvent 2021, the industry's most important hybrid event. Very few hybrid events, of course, in the last two years. And the cube is excited to be here. Uh, this is our ninth year covering AWS reinvent this the 10th reinvent we're here with Joel Minnick, who the vice president of product and partner marketing at smoking hot company, Databricks and Greg Rokita, who is executive director of technology at Edmonds. If you're buying a car or leasing a car, you gotta go to Edmund's. We're gonna talk about busting data silos, guys. Great to see you again. >>Welcome. Welcome. Glad to be here. >>All right. So Joel, what the heck is a lake house? This is all over the place. Everybody's talking about lake house. What is it? >>And it did well in a nutshell, a Lakehouse is the ability to have one unified platform to handle all of your traditional analytics workloads. So your BI and reporting Trisha, the lake, the workloads that you would have for your data warehouse on the same platform as the workloads that you would have for data science and machine learning. And so if you think about kind of the way that, uh, most organizations have built their infrastructure in the cloud today, what we have is generally customers will land all their data in a data lake and a data lake is fantastic because it's low cost, it's open. It's able to handle lots of different kinds of data. Um, but the challenges that data lakes have is that they don't necessarily scale very well. It's very hard to govern data in a data lake house. It's very hard to manage that data in a data lake, sorry, in a, in a data lake. >>And so what happens is that customers then move the data out of a data lake into downstream systems and what they tend to move it into our data warehouses to handle those traditional reporting kinds of workloads that they have. And they do that because data warehouses are really great at being able to have really great scale, have really great performance. The challenge though, is that data warehouses really only work for structured data. And regardless of what kind of data warehouse you adopt, all data warehouse and platforms today are built on some kind of proprietary format. So once you've put that data into the data warehouse, that's, that is kind of what you're locked into. The promise of the data lake house was to say, look, what if we could strip away all of that complexity and having to move data back and forth between all these different systems and keep the data exactly where it is today and where it is today is in the data lake. >>And then being able to apply a transaction layer on top of that. And the Databricks case, we do that through a technology and open source technology called data lake, or sorry, Delta lake. And what Delta lake allows us to do is when you need it, apply that performance, that reliability, that quality, that scale that you would expect out of a data warehouse directly on your data lake. And if I can do that, then what I'm able to do now is operate from one single source of truth that handles all of my analytics workloads, both my traditional analytics workloads and my data science and machine learning workloads, and being able to have all of those workloads on one common platform. It means that now not only do I get much, much more simple in the way that my infrastructure works and therefore able to operate at much lower costs, able to get things to production much, much faster. >>Um, but I'm also able to now to leverage open source in a much bigger way being that lake house is inherently built on an open platform. Okay. So I'm no longer locked into any kind of data format. And finally, probably one of the most, uh, lasting benefits of a lake house is that all the roles that have to take that have to touch my data for my data engineers, to my data analyst, my data scientists, they're all working on the same data, which means that collaboration that has to happen to go answer really hard problems with data. I'm now able to do much, much more easy because those silos that traditionally exist inside of my environment no longer have to be there. And so Lakehouse is that is the promise to have one single source of truth, one unified platform for all of my data. Okay, >>Great. Thank you for that very cogent description of what a lake house is now. Let's I want to hear from the customer to see, okay, this is what he just said. True. So actually, let me ask you this, Greg, because the other problem that you, you didn't mention about the data lake is that with no schema on, right, it gets messy and Databricks, I think, correct me if I'm wrong, has begun to solve that problem, right? Through series of tooling and AI. That's what Delta liked us. It's a man, like it's a managed service. Everybody thought you were going to be like the cloud era of spark and Brittany Britain, a brilliant move to create a managed service. And it's worked great. Now everybody has a managed service, but so can you paint a picture at Edmonds as to what you're doing with, maybe take us through your journey the early days of a dupe, a data lake. Oh, that sounds good. Throw it in there, paint a picture as to how you guys are using data and then tie it into what y'all just said. >>As Joel said, that they'll the, it simplifies the architecture quite a bit. Um, in a modern enterprise, you have to deal with a variety of different data sources, structured semi-structured and unstructured in the form of images and videos. And with Delta lake and built a lake, you can have one system that handles all those data sources. So what that does is that basically removes the issue of multiple systems that you have to administer. It lowers the cost, and it provides consistency. If you have multiple systems that deal with data, you always arise as the issue as to which data has to be loaded into which system. And then you have issues with consistency. Once you have issues with consistency, business users, as analysts will stop trusting your data. So that was very critical for us to unify the system of data handling in the one place. >>Additionally, you have a massive scalability. So, um, I went to the talk with from apple saying that, you know, he can process two years worth of data. Instead of just two days in an Edmonds, we have this use case of backfilling the data. So often we changed the logic and went to new. We need to reprocess massive amounts of data with the lake house. We can reprocess months worth of data in, in a matter of minutes or hours. And additionally at the data lake houses based on open, uh, open standards, like parquet that allowed us, allowed us to basically hope open source and third-party tools on top of the Delta lake house. Um, for example, a Mattson, we use a Matson for data discovery, and finally, uh, the lake house approach allows us for different skillsets of people to work on the same source data. We have analysts, we have, uh, data engineers, we have statisticians and data scientists using their own programming languages, but working on the same core of data sets without worrying about duplicating data and consistency issues between the teams. >>So what, what is, what are the primary use cases where you're using house Lakehouse Delta? >>So, um, we work, uh, we have several use cases, one of them more interesting and important use cases as vehicle pricing, you have used the Edmonds. So, you know, you go to our website and you use it to research vehicles, but it turns out that pricing and knowing whether you're getting a good or bad deal is critical for our, uh, for our business. So with the lake house, we were able to develop a data pipeline that ingests the transactions, curates the transactions, cleans them, and then feeds that curated a curated feed into the machine learning model that is also deployed on the lake house. So you have one system that handles this huge complexity. And, um, as you know, it's very hard to find unicorns that know all those technologies, but because we have flexibility of using Scala, Java, uh, Python and SQL, we have different people working on different parts of that pipeline on the same system and on the same data. So, um, having Lakehouse really enabled us to be very agile and allowed us to deploy new sources easily when we, when they arrived and fine tune the model to decrease the error rates for the price prediction. So that process is ongoing and it's, it's a very agile process that kind of takes advantage of the, of the different skill sets of different people on one system. >>Because you know, you guys democratized by car buying, well, at least the data around car buying because as a consumer now, you know, I know what they're paying and I can go in of course, but they changed their algorithms as well. I mean, the, the dealers got really smart and then they got kickbacks from the manufacturer. So you had to get smarter. So it's, it's, it's a moving target, I guess. >>Great. The pricing is actually very complex. Like I, I don't have time to explain it to you, but knowing, especially in this crazy market inflationary market where used car prices are like 38% higher year over year, and new car prices are like 10% higher and they're changing rapidly. So having very responsive pricing model is, is extremely critical. Uh, you, I don't know if you're familiar with Zillow. I mean, they almost went out of business because they mispriced their, uh, their houses. So, so if you own their stock, you probably under shorthand of it, but, you know, >>No, but it's true because I, my lease came up in the middle of the pandemic and I went to Edmonds, say, what's this car worth? It was worth like $7,000. More than that. Then the buyout costs the residual value. I said, I'm taking it, can't pass up that deal. And so you have to be flexible. You're saying the premises though, that open source technology and Delta lake and lake house enabled that flexible. >>Yes, we are able to ingest new transactions daily recalculate our model within less than an hour and deploy the new model with new pricing, you know, almost real time. So, uh, in this environment, it's very critical that you kind of keep up to date and ingest their latest transactions as they prices change and recalculate your model that predicts the future prices. >>Because the business lines inside of Edmond interact with the data teams, you mentioned data engineers, data scientists, analysts, how do the business people get access to their data? >>Originally, we only had a core team that was using Lakehouse, but because the usage was so powerful and easy, we were able to democratize it across our units. So other teams within software engineering picked it up and then analysts picked it up. And then even business users started using the dashboarding and seeing, you know, how the price has changed over time and seeing other, other metrics within the, >>What did that do for data quality? Because I feel like if I'm a business person, I might have context of the data that an analyst might not have. If they're part of a team that's servicing all these lines of business, did you find that the data quality, the collaboration affected data? >>Th the biggest thing for us was the fact that we don't have multiple systems now. So you don't have to load the data. Whenever you have to load the data from one system to another, there is always a lag. There's always a delay. There is always a problematic job that didn't do the copy correctly. And the quality is uncertain. You don't know which system tells you the truth. Now we just have one layer of data. Whether you do reports, whether you're data processing or whether you do modeling, they all read the same data. And the second thing is that with the dashboarding capabilities, people that were not very technical that before we could only use Tableau and Tableau is not the easiest thing to use as if you're not technical. Now they can use it. So anyone can see how our pricing data looks, whether you're an executive, whether you're an analyst or a casual business users, >>But Hey, so many questions, you guys are gonna have to combat. I'm gonna run out of time, but you now allow a consumer to buy a car directly. Yes. Right? So that's a new service that you launched. I presume that required new data. We give, we >>Give consumers offers. Yes. And, and that offer you >>Offered to buy my league. >>Exactly. And that offer leverages the pricing that we develop on top of the lake house. So the most important thing is accurately giving you a very good offer price, right? So if we give you a price, that's not so good. You're going to go somewhere else. If we give you price, that's too high, we're going to go bankrupt like Zillow debt, right. >>It took to enable that you're working off the same dataset. Yes. You're going to have to spin up a, did you have to inject new data? Was there a new data source that we're working on? >>Once we curate the data sources and once we clean it, we see the directly to the model. And all of those components are running on the lake house, whether you're curating the data, cleaning it or running the model. The nice thing about lake house is that machine learning is the first class citizen. If you use something like snowflake, I'm not going to slam snowflake here, but you >>Have two different use case. You have >>To, you have to load it into a different system later. You have to load it into a different system. So like good luck doing machine learning on snowflake. Right. >>Whereas, whereas Databricks, that's kind of your raison d'etre >>So what are your, your, your data engineer? I feel like I should be a salesman or something. Yeah. I'm not, I'm not saying that. Just, just because, you know, I was told to, like, I'm saying it because of that's our use case, >>Your use case. So question for each of you, what, what business results did you see when you went to kind of pre lake house, post lake house? What are the, any metrics you can share? And then I wonder, Joel, if you could share a sort of broader what you're seeing across your customer base, but Greg, what can you tell us? Well, >>Uh, before their lake house, we had two different systems. We had one for processing, which was still data breaks. And the second one for serving and we iterated over Nateeza or Redshift, but we figured that maintaining two different system and loading data from one to the other was a huge overhead administration security costs. Um, the fact that you had to consistency issues. So the fact that you can have one system, um, with, uh, centralized data, solves all those issues. You have to have one security mechanism, one administrative mechanism, and you don't have to load the data from one system to the other. You don't have to make compromises. >>It's scale is not a problem because of the cloud, >>Because you can spend clusters at will for different use cases. So your clusters are independent. You have processing clusters that are not affecting your serving clusters. So, um, in the past, if you were running a serving, say on Nateeza or Redshift, if you were doing heavy processing, your reports would be affected, but now all those clusters are separated. So >>Consumer data consumer can take that data from the producer independ >>Using its own cluster. Okay. >>Yeah. I'll give you the final word, Joel. I know it's been, I said, you guys got to come back. This is what have you seen broadly? >>Yeah. Well, I mean, I think Greg's point about scale. It's an interesting one. So if you look at cross the entire Databricks platform, the platform is launching 9 million VMs every day. Um, and we're in total processing over nine exabytes a month. So in terms of just how much data the platform is able to flow through it, uh, and still maintain a extremely high performance is, is bar none out there. And then in terms of, if you look at just kind of the macro environment of what's happening out there, you know, I think what's been most exciting to watch or what customers are experiencing traditionally or, uh, on the traditional data warehouse and kinds of workloads, because I think that's where the promise of lake house really comes into its own is saying, yes, I can run these traditional data warehousing workloads that require a high concurrency high scale, high performance directly on my data lake. >>And, uh, I think probably the two most salient data points to raise up there is, uh, just last month, Databricks announced it's set the world record for the, for the, uh, TPC D S 100 terabyte benchmark. So that is a place where Databricks at the lake house architecture, that benchmark is built to measure data warehouse performance and the lake house beat data warehouse and sat their own game in terms of overall performance. And then what's that spends from a price performance standpoint, it's customers on Databricks right now are able to enjoy that level of performance at 12 X better price performance than what cloud data warehouses provide. So not only are we jumping on this extremely high scale and performance, but we're able to do it much, much more efficiently. >>We're gonna need a whole nother section second segment to talk about benchmarking that guys. Thanks so much, really interesting session and thank you and best of luck to both join the show. Thank you for having us. Very welcome. Okay. Keep it right there. Everybody you're watching the cube, the leader in high-tech coverage at AWS reinvent 2021

>> Narrator: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re;Invent 2020 special coverage sponsored by AWS global partner network. >> Welcome to theCUBE. This is our coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 with special coverage of the APN partner experience. I'm Lisa Martin I've got a couple of gentlemen from BMC software joining me. Please welcome Greg Bukowski, the technology solutions director and Simon Blanks, area vice president Gentlemen it's great to have you on theCUBE virtual. >> Great to be here Lisa. >> Representing social distancing from across the country here. So guys, I'd like to just start Greg with you give our audience an understanding of your role technology solutions director your role and responsibilities at BMC. >> Sure I play the role of a field CTO. So I actually am aligned with our strategic CTO office and I bring their message to our customers all of our strategic customers within North America. >> And Simon, tell us a little bit about your role as area vice president. >> Well first of all, thanks for having us I have responsibility for our channels and our partners in the Americas. So I get to work both within our organization with our customers and with our partners to help them grow, to help us grow and deliver value to our customers. >> Speaking of your customers Simon the last year has been incredibly challenging and brought on a lot of challenges but opportunities. Talk to me about how that has impacted BMCs customers. >> That's a great question. You know, I think our customers are wanting to simplify that they're wanting to focus on what makes them win, right and get away from the things that, you know are not the competitive advantage. We see a lot of customers wanting to get out of the day-to-day operation of the data centers and migrate to the world of AWS but it's not as easy as we would all like it there's lots of challenges. AWS consulting partners are there to help them. One of the largest areas of challenges we see that they are having to address is manage these millions of IT assets that are constantly changing and some of them they don't even know exist and moving those to AWS, but moving them quickly, securely and of course, in a cost-effective manner. >> Talk to me a little bit about some of the speed like in the last nine months, have you seen an acceleration of those customers wanting to move workloads to AWS as we think of way back when the pandemic started and every business had to suddenly send workforces home no access to a data center or very limited. Is that something that you've seen speed up the last few months? >> Yeah we believe it's not only gained in velocity but will continue. We don't think that some of these changes to how a business is conducted are going to stop once the vaccine comes out. So yeah and you know the complexity of making this happen, you know it's difficult, especially in some of the very large organizations be it banks or telecoms or manufacturers or retailers you know it's not an easy chore and you know we've experienced some great wins in that area and helping some of our most strategic customers make that happen. >> So talk to me a little bit about Simon, what's your elevator pitch when you're going and i know you talk with customers, you talk with partners how do you describe BMC and what you guys deliver? >> Well BMC is a 40 year old company with 6,000 employees. we help 93% of the global 1000 manage their IT infrastructure right. In addition to that we help thousands of other customers with the same problems. So, you know what I tell organizations is we're there to help them be successful and to make things tick. >> Awesome thank you. So Greg, talk to me about more about the BMC solutions. You said in your role, you're also field CTO. What are some of the BMC solutions that you recommended AWS consulting partners consider to help customers, especially in this time as you're seeing more and more migrations AWS? >> Yeah I think that's a great point, Lisa. I mean, with the pandemic coming in, you know there was an initial pullback right that we saw from our customers and now as that trend, you know as the summer came on, not that it's gotten less, right. I mean obviously it's a big concern for customers but the realization of how they're going to operationalize themselves and still be a tech driven company and tech driven organization has really accelerated their digital transformation and it's driven more than anything the adoption of cloud technologies and to move into that cloud space it's brought about understanding customers how did they become more digital and to do that they have to connect their services. So underlying that challenge is really what we wanted to bring today to talk about is that BMC has an industry leading solution it's called a BMC discovery solution and it automatically goes within an organization's footprint and understands the dependencies between their infrastructure and their applications. That's really difficult, right? Typically we can just find assets, right? A lot of solutions out there can do that. What BMC does or what our solution does. That's unique in this space is that it understands relationships so that you understand from an application viewpoint which ultimately ties back to a business service into the software that runs on those assets into the applications that are supporting that as well as the platforms and infrastructure and that becomes more and more complex to date. What we see with our customers as they have cloud services they've got containers, they've got on-premise stuff. So we're working with customers today, right? We are the largest retailers in the US working with them to actually transform how they're doing business continuity. So it becomes not only an acceleration but a risk aversion program for them as well as a cost savings effort of trying to adopt that understanding those services from both within their data center, through the mainframe back into their cloud, right and understanding all those interdependencies so that they can run their business more efficiently. >> So Greg have you automated what used to be a traditionally manual lengthy process of that discovery. >> I think that is the key point Lisa. I mean when partners look to us for what value we can bring to them it's about accelerating that time all about reducing the time through automation what used to be a manual effort of understanding how these things connect and being able to having go talk to the application teams. We worked with a large bank as well. They were using other solutions in the marketplace and were taking six to nine months to map a single business service which is complex right it's got about a dozen applications that support it. We brought in our solution and they did it in three hours with one piece of information from an application team. It was unbelievable, right and these are the stories we hear all the time from our customers and this is a great solution that we have that runs in AWS. That's part of our AWS migration competency that we have and you know this is why we're here today on theCUBE. >> Well that speed improvement is massive as you just talked about Greg you know, when you think of organizations now that there is no time, there is no six to nine months to figure things out anymore right. Especially because we've all learned, I think a lot in the last nine months, professionally and personally but there's competition out there. That's ready to come and be nimble and faster and maybe with less legacy than any type of whether it's a retailer or a financial institution. So being able to get in there and discover and align this business and IT services folks to discover what they have, where they should move it that fast is really something that sounds to me like not just a survival mechanism, keeping the lights on during a strange time, but something that may even set apart the winners and the losers of tomorrow. >> Absolutely right. I mean you have to be able to tie into your existing infrastructure for print that traditional legacy or heritage as we call it for print that you have, that still runs your core business. Right, if you're a retailer it's probably some kind of supply chain rate If you're a bank it's all the financial transaction stuff that you do but then also adopt the technology and innovation that exists within the fintech space for a financial services customer and bringing that together and when you're doing that at the native integration point a lot of it comes into the cloud services, right and that's really where they're going to get the acceleration to attack new markets grow their margin in that space and that's where they need partners to help them. To adopt and learn those technologies and integrate those additionally, right we have other advanced capabilities that we offer from an AWS migration competency standpoint around cloud optimization. So when those services are running in there we also do a cost optimization that doesn't look at it from the infrastructure standpoint but actually it takes the same discovery data and lines it back to the lines of business. So the line of business now has visibility into if they're going to change what their operating model is how that's going to affect the cost in the backend services they can optimize their resources. >> So Simon looking at the capabilities that BMC is delivering. Talk to me about the BMC partner program. Why become a BMC partner? I think there's a couple of answers to that. First of all, what Greg was talking about in terms of this you know massive I'll call it reinvention of the amount of time it takes to perform some of these tasks. Some of these tasks that are done in every migration from you know months to days or hours that in and of itself can help the AWS consulting partners massively you know in their efforts. So that's one but I think more importantly than that is the culture of BMC and the importance of partners and the focus that it's getting whether or not it be from our board or CEO or down the management rank. So the channel has become massively important to our success and we're committed to helping our partners be successful right, we're committing to help them make money, right. We're actually, as a part of AWS re;Invent here were going to offer an incentive to partners to come and join our family. Traditionally there's enablement and costs associated with that and we're going to refund that cost. Plus we're going to invest our monies and refund any costs associated with the first co-marketing effort together that we can go out to the market and help them. So I think you know, it's sort of the three legs of the stool. The technology itself is you know, impressive the commitment of our leadership and we're also willing to make it you know, very economically attractive so that would be the reasons >> Everybody likes that, especially economically attractive. So in terms of what you're offering you said that around re;Invent with respect to interested perspective partners, how do they move forward with BMC to become an AWS consulting partner? What's that process like? >> Well, we have you know an onboarding team that Susan DuRoff she reports in to me and helps me with that process. But the best way to do it would be to contact me directly. My email address is simon_blanks@bmc.com and if you reach out to me directly, I'll make sure we get back to you promptly. We can have further discussions and you know, facilitate it and we really look forward to making that happen. >> That's pretty excellent personal service I like that. So Greg talk to me as we get towards the wrap here as field CTO, looking forward into 2021 which we all hope is going to be trim significantly better than 2020. What are some of the opportunities that you see that this time has uncovered for the IT folks and the business folks to get even stronger alignment? >> Yeah, I think this is a great opportunity for customers to realize that bringing together the IT organizations in alignment with their business organizations is a great opportunity from the Revolut to accelerate their adoption of technology accelerate their migrations into adoption of cloud services. But then also look for the opportunities to take advantage of, to grow revenue streams. Right I mean, challenges present opportunities and opportunities present growth, right? That's how customers grow when they recognize those opportunities and become agile enough to adopt them and go after them. >> That's a great mindset because it's absolutely true. It's not matter of how we look at it and look at what's being uncovered to then kind of exploit for good new products, new services, competitive differentiators all sorts of things going on. Well gentlemen, it's been a pleasure having you on theCUBE virtual today. Thank you for joining me. >> Thank you so much appreciate the time and thank you. >> All right. For my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World. Digital Experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, the Digital Experience. I am Lisa Martin and I've got a couple of guests joining me. Please welcome Puneet Dhawan, the Director of Product Management, Hyper-converged infrastructure for Dell Technologies. Puneet great to see you today. >> Thank you, for having me over. >> And we've got a customer that's going to be articulating all the value that Puneet's going to talk about. Please welcome Greg Altman, the IT infrastructure manager from Swiff-Train. Hey, Greg, how are you today? >> I'm doing well. Thank you. >> Excellent. All right guys. So Puneet, let's start with you, give us a little bit of an overview of your role. You lead product management, for Dell Technologies partner aligned HCI systems. Talk to us about that? >> Sure, absolutely. Um so, you know, it's largely about providing customers the choice. My team specifically focuses on developing Hyper-converged infrastructure products for our customers that are aligned to key technologies from our partners, such as Microsoft, Nutanix, et cetera. And that, you know, falls very nicely with meeting our customers on what technology they want to pick on, what technology they want to go with, whether it's VMware, Microsoft, Nutanix, we have to source from the customers. >> Let's dig into Microsoft. Talk to us about Azure Stack HCI. How is Dell Tech working with them to position this in the market? >> Sure, um, this is largely about following the customer journey towards digital transformation. So both in terms of where they are in digital transformation and how they want to approach it. So for example, we have a large customer base who's looking to modernize their legacy Hyper-V architectures, and that's where Azure Stack HCI fits in very nicely, and not only our customers are able to modernize the legacy architectures using the architectural benefits of simplicity, high performance, simple management, scalability. (Greg breathes heavily) For HCI for Hyper-V, at the same time, they can connect to Azure to get the benefits of the bullet's force. Now on the other end, we have a large customer base who started off in Azure, you know, they have cloud native applications, you know, kind of born in the cloud. But they're also looking to bring some of the applications down to on-prem, or things like disconnected scenarios, regulatory concerns, data locality reasons. And for those customers, Microsoft and Dell have a department around Dell EMC Integrated solutions for Azure Stack Hub. And that's what essentially brings Azure ecosystem, on-prem so it's like running cloud in your own premises. >> So you mentioned a second ago giving customers choice, and we always talk about that at pretty much every event that we do. So tell me a little bit about how the long standing partnership that Dell Technologies has with Microsoft decades. How is that helping you to really differentiate the technology and then show the customers the different options, together these two companies can deliver? >> Sure, so we've had a very long standing partnerships, actually over three decades now. Across the spectrum whether we talk about our partnership more on the Windows 10 side, and the modernization of the workforce, to the level of hybrid cloud and cloud solutions, and helping even customers, you know, run their applications on Azure to our large services offerings. Over the past several years, we have realized how important is hybrid cloud and multicloud for customers. And that's where we have taken our partnership to the next level, to co-develop, co-engineer and bring to the market together our full portfolio of Azure Stack Hybrid Solutions. And that's where I've said, meeting customers on where they are either bringing Azure on-prem, or helping customers on-prem, modernize on-prem architectures using Azure Stack HCI. So, you know, there's a whole lot of core development we have done together to simplify how customers manage on-prem infrastructures on a day-to-day basis, how do they install it, even how they support it, you know, we have joined support agreements with Microsoft that encompassed and bearing the entirety of the portfolio so that customers have one place to go, which is Dell Technologies to get not only the product, either in US or worldwide, to a very secure supply chain to Dell EMC, at the same time for all their support consulting services, whether they're on-prem or in the cloud. We offer all those services in very close partnership with Microsoft. >> Terrific. Great. Let's switch over to you now, probably we talk about what Swiff-Train is doing with its Azure Stack HCI, tell our audience a little bit about Swiff-Train what you guys are what you do. >> Well, Swiff-Train is a full covering flooring wholesaler, we sell flooring across Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, even into Florida. And we're an 80 year old company, 80 plus. And we've been moving forward with kind of hybridizing our infrastructure, making use of cloud where it makes sense. And when it came to our on-prem infrastructure, it was old, well five, six years old, running Windows 2012 2016, it was time to upgrade. And when we look at doing a large scale upgrade, like that, we called Dell and say, you know, this is what we're trying to do, and what's the new technologies that we can do that makes the migration work easier. And that's where we wound up with Azure Stack. >> So from a modernization perspective, you mentioned 80 plus year old company, I was looking on the website 1937. I always like to talk to companies like that, because modernizing when you've been around for that long it's challenging, it's challenging culturally , it's challenging historically, But talk to us a little bit about some of the specifics, that you guys were looking to Dell and Microsoft to help modernize. And was this really to drive things like, you know, operational simplicity, allow the business to have more agility so that it can expand in some of those other cities, like we talked about? >> Absolutely. We were dealing with a long maintenance window five or six hours every week patching, updating. Since we moved to Azure Stack HCI, we have virtually zero downtime. That allows our night shifts or weekend crews to be able to keep working. And the system is just bulletproof. It just does not go down. And with the lifecycle management tools that we get with Windows Admin Center, and Dell's OpenManage Plug-in, I log into one pane of glass in the morning, and I look and I say, "Hey, all my servers are going great. Everything's in the green." I know that that day, I'm not going to have any infrastructure issues, I can deal with other issues that make the business money. >> And I'm sure they appreciate that. Tell us a little bit about the the actual implementation and the support as, as Puneet talked about all of the core development, the joint support that these two powerhouses deliver. Tell us about that implementation. And then for your day to day, what's your interaction with Dell and or Microsoft like? >> Well, for the implementation, we worked with our Dell representative. And we came up with a sizing plan. This is what we needed to do, we had eight or nine physical servers that we wanted to get rid of. And we wanted to compress down. Now we're definitely went from eight or nine to you servers down to three rack units of space with an edge, including the extra switches and stuff that we had to do. So I mean we were able to get rid of a lot of storage space or rack space. And as far as the implementation was really easy. Dell literally has a book, you follow the book and it's that simple. (Puneet chuckles) >> I like that I think more of us these days, can you somewhat write a book that we can just follow? That would be fantastic. One more question, Greg for you, before we go back to Puneet. As Puneet talked about in the beginning from describing his role, that you know, Dell Technologies works with a lot of other vendors. Why Azure Stack HCI for Swiff-Train? >> Well, it made sense for us. We were already moving, several of our websites were already moved to Azure, we've been a Hyper-V user for many years. So it was just kind of a natural evolution to migrate in that direction, because it kind of pulls all of our management tools into one, well you know, a one pane of glass type of scenario. >> Excellent. All right Puneet back to you. With some of the things that you talked about before and that Greg sort of articulated about simplifying day-to-day. Greg, I saw in my notes that you had this old aging infrastructure, you were spending five hours a week patching maintain, that you say is now virtually eliminated, Puneet, Dell Technologies and Microsoft had done quite a bit of work to simplify the operational experience. Talk to us about that, and what are some of the measurable improvements that you guys have made? >> Sure. It all starts with neither on how we approach the problem, and we have always taken a very product-centric approach at Azure Stack HCI. You know, unlike, some of our competition, which had followed. There is a reference architecture, you can put Windows Server 2019 on it and go run your own servers, and the Hyper-converged Stack on it, but we have followed a very different approach where we have learned quite a lot, you know, we are the number one vendor in HCI space, and we know a thing or two about HCI and what customers really need there. So that's why from the very beginning, we have taken a product-centric approach, and doing that allows us to have product type offers in terms of our Kx notes that are specifically designed and built for Azure Stack HCI. And on top of that, we have done very specific integration to the management Stack, we've been doing Admin Center, that is the new management tool for Microsoft to manage, both on-prem, Hyper-converged infrastructure, your Windows servers, as well as any VM's that you're running on Azure, to provide customers a very seamless, you know, a single pane of glass for both the on-prem as well as infrastructure on public cloud services. And in doing that, our customers have really appreciated how simple it is to keep their clusters running, to reduce the maintenance windows, based on some of our internal testing that we have done. IT administrators can reduce the time they spend on maintaining the clusters by over 90%. Over 40% reduction in the maintenance window itself. And all that leads to your clusters running in a healthy state. So you don't have to worry about pulling the right drivers, right founder from 10 different places, making sure whether they are qualified or not when running together, we provide one single pane of glass that customers can click on, and you know, see whether their questions are compliant or not, and if yes go update. And all this has been possible by a joint engineering with Microsoft. >> Can you just describe the difference between an all in one validated HCI solution, which is what you're delivering, versus competitors that are only delivering a reference architecture? >> Absolutely. So if you're running just a reference architecture, you are running an operating system, systems Stack on a server, we know that when it comes to running HCI, that means running also business critical applications on a clustered environment. You need to make sure that all the hardware, the drivers, the founder, the hard drives, the memory configuration, the network configurations, all that can be very complex very easily. And if you have reference architectures, there is no way to know, but then running certified components in my note are not. How do you tell then? If a part fails? How do which part to sell or send, you know, for a replacement? If you're just running a reference architecture, you have no way to say the part the hard drive that failed, the one that was sent to the customer to replace whether that is certified for Azure Stack HCI or not? You know, what, how do you really make a determination, what is the right firmware that needs to be applied to a cluster of what other drivers that apply to be cluster, that are compliant and tested for Azure Stack HCI. None of these things are possible, if you just have a reference architecture approach. That's why we have been very clear that our approach is a product-based approach. And, you know, very frankly this is how we have... that's the feedback we've provided the Microsoft to, and we've been working very, you know, closely together. And you see that, now in terms of the new Azure Stack HCI, that Microsoft announced at Inspirely this year, that brings Microsoft into the mainstream HCI space as a product offering, and not just as a feature or a few features within the Windows Server program. >> Greg, I saw in the notes with respect to Swiff-Train that you guys have with Azure Stack HCI, you have reduced Rackspace by 50%, you talked about some of the Rackspace benefits. But you've also reduced energy by 70%. Those are big, impactful numbers, impacting not just your day-to-day but the overall business. >> That's true, >> Last question for you, Greg. If you think about how can you just describe the difference between an all in one validated HCI solution versus a reference architecture. For your peers watching in any industry. what's your... what are your top recommendations for going with a validated all in one solution? >> Well, we looked at doing the reference architecture's path, if you will, because we're hands on we like to build things and I looked at it and like Puneet said, "Drivers and memory and making sure that everything is going to work well together." And not only that everything is going to work well together. But when something fails, then you get into the finger pointing between vendors, your storage vendor, your process vendor, that's not something that we need to deal with. We need to keep a business running. So we went with Dell, it's one box, you know, but one box per unit and then you Stack two of them together you have a cluster. >> You make it sound so easy. >> Let us question-- >> I put together children's toys that were harder than building the Stack I promise you, I did it in an afternoon. >> Music to my ears Greg, thank you. (Greg giggles) >> It was that easy >> That is gold >> Easier to put together Azure Stack HCI than some, probably even opening the box of some children's toys I can imagine. (all chuckling) >> We should use that as a tagline. >> Exactly. You should, I think you have a new tagline there. Greg, thank you. Puneet, well last question for you, Would Dell Technologies World sessions on hybrid cloud benefits with Dell and Microsoft? Give us a flavor of what some of the things are that the audience will have a chance to learn. >> Yeah, this is a great session with Microsoft that essentially provides our customers an overview of our joint hybrid cloud solutions, both for Microsoft Azure Stack Hub, Azure stack HCI as well as our joint solutions on VMware in Azure. But much more importantly, we also talk about what's coming next. Now, especially with Microsoft as your Stack at CIO's a full blown product. Hyper hybrid, you know, HCI offering that will be available as, Azure service. So customers could run on-prem infrastructure that is Hyper-converged but managed pay bill for as an Azure service, so that they have always the latest and greatest from Microsoft. And all the product differentiation we have created in terms of a product-centric approach, simpler lifecycle management will all be applicable, in this new hybrid, hybrid cloud solution as well. And that led essentially a great foundation for our customers who have standardized on Hyper-V, who are much more aligned to Azure, to not worry about the infrastructure on-prem. But start taking advantages of both the modernization benefits of HCI. But much more importantly, start coupling back with the hybrid ecosystem that we are building with Microsoft, whether it's running an Azure Kubernetes service on top to modernize the new applications, and bringing the Azure data services such as Azure SQL Server on top, so that you have a consistent, vertically aligned hybrid cloud infrastructure Stack that is not only easy to manage, but it is modern, it is available as a pay as you go option. And it's tightly integrated into Azure, so that you can manage all your on-prem as well as public cloud resources on one single pane of glass, thereby providing customers whole lot more simplicity, and operational efficiency. >> And as you said, the new tagline said from, beautifully from Greg's mouth, "The customer easier to put together than many children's toys." Puneet, thank you so much for sharing with us what's going on with Azure Stack HCI, what folks can expect to learn and see at Dell Tech World of virtual experience. >> Thank you. >> And Greg, thank you for sharing the story, what you're doing. Helping your peers learn from you. And I'm going to say on behalf of Dell Technologies, that awesome new tagline. That was cool. (Greg chuckles) (Lisa chuckles) >> Thank you. 'Preciate your time. >> We're going to use it for sure. (Greg chuckles) >> All right, for Puneet Dhawan and Greg Altman. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World, the Digital Experience. (soft music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube >>with digital coverage of VM World 2020 brought to you by VM Ware and its ecosystem partners. Hello and welcome back to the VM World 2020 Virtual coverage with the Cube Virtual I'm John for day. Volonte your hosts our 11th year covering VM. We'll get a great guest Greg Lavender, SBP and the CTO of VM. Where, uh, welcome to the Cube. Virtual for VM World 2020 Virtual Great. Thanks for coming on. >>Privileged to be here. Thank you. >>Um, really. You know, one of the things Dave and I were commenting with Pat on just in general start 11th year covering VM world. Uh, a little difference not face to face. But it's always been a technical conference. Always a lot of technical innovation. Project Monterey's out there. It's pretty nerdy, but it's a it's called the catnip of the future. Right? People get excited by it, right? So there's really ah lot of awareness to it because it kinda it smells like a systems overhaul. It smells like an operating system. Feels like a, you know, a lot of moving parts that are, quite frankly, what distributed computing geeks and software geeks love to hear about and to end distributed software intelligence with new kinds of hardware innovations from and video and whatnot. Where's that innovation coming from? Can you share your thoughts on this direction? >>Yeah, I think first I should say this isn't like, you know, something that just, you know, we decided to do, you know, six months ago, actually, in the office of C T 04 years ago, we actually had a project. Um, you know, future looking project to get our core hyper visor technology running on arm processors and that incubated in the office of the CTO for three years. And then last December, move the engineering team that had done that research and advanced development work in the office of the CTO over to our cloud platforms business unit, you know, and smart Knicks, you know, kind of converged with that. And so we were already, you know, well along the innovation path there, and it's really now about building the partnerships we have with smart nick vendors and driving this technology out to the benefit of our customers who don't want to leverage it. >>You get >>Greg, I want if you could clarify something for me on that. So Pat talked about Monterey, a complete re architect ing of the i o Stack. And he talked about it affecting in video. Uh, intel, melon, ox and Sandoz part of that when he talks about the Iot stack, you know, specifically what are we talking about there? >>So you know any any computing server in the data center, you know, in a cola facility or even even in the cloud, you know? Ah, large portion of the, you know CPU resource is, and even some memory resource is can get consumed by just processing. You know, the high volumes of Iot that's going out, you know, storage devices, you know, communicating between the different parts of multi tiered applications. And so there's there's a there's an overhead that that gets consumed in the course server CPU, even if its multi core multi socket. And so by offloading that a lot of that I owe work onto the arm core and taking advantage of the of the hardware offloads there in the smart Knicks, you can You can offload that processing and free up even as much as 30% of the CPU of a server, multi socket, multicourse server, and give that back to the application so that the application gets the benefit of that extra compute and memory resource is >>So what about a single sort of low cost flash tear to avoid the complexities of tearing? Is that part of the equation? >>Well, you know, you can you can, um you know, much storage now is network attached. And so you could if it's all flash storage, you know, using something like envy me fabric over over Ethernet, you can essentially build large scale storage networks more efficiently, you know more cheaply and take advantage of that offload processing, uh, to begin to reduce the Iot Leighton. See, that's required taxes. That network attached storage and not just storage. But, you know, other devices, you know, that you can use you could better network attached. So disaggregated architectures is term. >>Uh, is that a yes? Or is that a stay tuned? >>Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes. I mean the storage. You know, more efficient use of different classes of storage and storage. Tearing is definitely a prime use case there. >>Yeah, great. Thank you. Thanks for that. John, >>How could people think about the edge now? Because one of the things that's in this end to end is the edge. Pat brought it up multi cloud and edge or two areas that are extending off cloud and hybrid. What should people think about the innovation equation around those things? Is that these offload techniques? What specifically in the systems architecture? Er, do you guys see as the key keys there? >>So so, you know, edges very diversified, heterogeneous place, Uh, in the architectures of multi cloud services. So one thing we do know is, you know, workload. I would like to say workload follows data, and a lot of the data will be analyzed, the process at the edge. So the more that you can accelerate that data processing at the edge and apply some machine learning referencing at the edge were almost certainly gonna have kubernetes everywhere, including the edge. So I think you're seeing a convergence of the hardware architectures er the kubernetes control plane and services and machine learning workloads. You know, traveling to the edge where the where the data is going to be processed and actions could be taken autonomously at the edge. So I think we're in this convergence point in the industry where all that comes together. >>How important do you >>do you see that? Okay, John, >>how important is the intelligence piece? Because again, the potatoes at the edge. How do you guys see the data architecture being built out there? >>Um, well, again, it's depending on the other. The thick edge of the thin edge. You know, you're gonna have different, different types of data, and and again, a lot of the the inference thing that could happen at the edges. Going to, I think, for mawr, you know, again to take action at the edges, opposed to calling home to a cloud, you know, to decide what to do. So, depending on, you know, the computational power and the problem with its video processing or monitoring, you know, sensors, Aaron, oil. Well, the kind of interesting that will happen at the edge will will be dependent on that data type and what kind of decisions you want to make. So I think data will be moving, you know, from the edge to the cloud for historical analytics and maybe transitional training mechanisms. But, you know, the five G is gonna play heavily into this is well right for the network connectivity. So we read This unique point is often occurs in the industry every few years of all these technology innovations converging to open up an entirely new platform in a new way of computing that happens at the edge, not just in your data center at the cloud. >>So, Greg, you did a fairly major stint at a large bank. What would something you mentioned? You know, like an oil rig. But what would something like these changes mean for a new industry like banking or financial? Uh, will it have an impact there and put on your customer hat for a minute and take us through that >>e? You know, eight machines, you know, branches, chaos. You know, there's all make banks always been a very distributed computing platform. And so, you know, people want to deliver mawr user experience, services, more video services. You know all these things at the edge to interact positively with the customer without using the people in the loop. And so the banking industry has already gone through the SD when, and I want transformation to deliver the bandwidth more capably to the edge. And I just think that they'll just now be able to deliver Mawr Edge services that happened can happen more autonomously at the edge is opposed that having the hairpin home run everything back to the data center. >>Awesome. Well, Pat talks about the modern platform, the modern companies. Greg, I wanna ask you because we're seeing with Kovar, there's to use cases, you know, the people who don't have a tailwind, Um, companies that are, you know, not doing well because there's no business that you have there modernizing their business while they have some downtime. Other ones have a tailwind. They have a modern app that that takes advantage, this covert situation. So that brings up this idea of what is a modern app look like? Because now, if you're talking about a distributed architecture, some of things you're mentioning around inference, data edge. People are starting to think about these modern naps, and they are changing the game for the business. Now you have vertical industries. You mentioned oil and gas, you got financial services. It used to be you had industry solution. It worked like that and was siloed. Now you have a little bit of a different architectures. If we believe that we're looking up, not down. Does it matter by industry? How should people think about a modern application, how they move faster? Can you share your insights into into some of this conceptual? What is a modern approach and does it doesn't matter by vertical or industry. >>Yes, I mean, certainly over the course of my career, I mean, there's there's a massive diversity of applications. And of course, you know, the explosion of mobile and edge computing is just another sort of sort of use cases that will put demands on the infrastructure in the architecture and the networking. So a modern, a modern app I mean, we historically built sort of these monolithic app. So we sort of built these sort of three tier apse with, you know, sort of the client side, the middleware side. The database back in is the system of record. I mean, this is even being more disaggregated in terms of, you know, the the consumer edges both not just web here, but mobile tear. And, you know, we'll see what emerges out of that. The one thing for sure that is that, um they're becoming less monolithic and mawr a conglomeration of sass and other services that are being brought together, whether it's from the cloud services or whether it's s, you know, SBS delivering, you know, bring your own software. Um, and they're becoming more distributed because people need operated higher degrees of scale. There's a limit to Virgil vertical scaling, so you have to go to horizontal scaling, which is what the cloud is really good at. So I think all these things were driving a whole new set of technologies like next generation AP gateways. Message Busses, service mesh. We're announcing Tanzi's service message being world. Um, you know, this is just allowing allowing that application to be disaggregated and then integrated with other APS assassin services that allow you to get faster time to market. So speed of delivery is everything. So modern C I. C d. Modern software, technology and ability to deploy and run that workload anywhere at the edge of the core in the data center in the cloud. >>So when you do in your re architecture like this, Greg, I mean you've seen over the course of history in our industry you've seen so many companies have hit a wall and in VM, whereas it's just amazing engineering culture. How are you able toe, you know, change the engine mid flight here and avoid like, serious technical debt. And I mean, it took, you know, you said started four years ago, but can you give us a peek inside? You know, that sort of transformation and how you're pulling that off? >>Well, I mean, we're providing were delivered the platform and, you know, spring Buddhas a key, you know, technology that's used widely across the industry already, which is what we've got is part of our pivotal acquisition. And so what we're just trying to do is just keep keep delivering the technology and the platform that allows people to go faster with quality security and safety and resiliency. That's what we do really well at VM ware. So I think you're seeing more people building these APS Cloud native is opposed to, you know, taking an existing legacy app In trying to re factor it, they might do what it called e think somebody's called two speed architectures. Take the user front, end the consumer front in, and put that cloud native in the cloud. But the back end system of record still runs in the private cloud in a highly resilient you know, backed up disaster recovered way. So you're having, I think, brand new cloud native APS we're seeing. And then you're seeing people very carefully because there's a cost to it of looking at How do I basically modernized the front end but maintain the reliability of the scalability of security and the reliability of that sort of system of record back in? So either way, it's it's winning for the companies because they could do faster delivery to their businesses and their clients and their partners. But you have to have the resiliency and reliability that were known for for running those mission critical workloads, >>right? So the scenario is that back end stays on premise on the last earnings call, I think, Pat said, or somebody said that, that I think I just they said on Prem or maybe the man hybrid 30 to 40% cheaper, then doing it in the cloud. I presume they were talking about those kind of back end systems that you know you don't wanna migrate. Can you add some color that again from your customer perspective That the economics? >>Yeah. You know, um, somebody asked me one time what's really a cloud. Greg and I said, automation, automation, automation you can take you can take You can take your current environments and highly automate the release. Lifecycle management develop more agile software delivery methods. And so therefore, you could you could get sort of cloud benefits, you know, from your existing applications by just highly optimizing them and, you know, on the cost of goods and services. And then again, the hybrid cloud model just gives customers more choice, which is okay. I want to reduce the number of data centers I have, but I need to maintain reliability, scalability, etcetera. Take advantage of, you know, the hybrid cloud that we offer. But you'll still run things. Cloud natives. I think you're seeing this true multi cloud technology and paradigm, you know, grow out as people have these choices. And then the question is okay. If you have those choices, how do you maintain security? How do you maintain reliability? How do you maintain up time yet be able to move quickly. And so I think there's different speeds in which those platforms will evolve. And our goal is to give you the ability to basically make those choices and and optimize for economics as well as technical. You know, capability. >>Great. I want to ask you a question with Cove it we're seeing and we've been reporting the Cube virtual evolve because we used to be it at events, but we're not there anymore. But the as everyone has realized with cove it it's exposed some projects that you might not want to double down on or highlighted some gaps in architecture. Er, I mean, certainly who would have forecast of the disruption of 100% work from home VP and provisioning to access and access management security, and it really is exposed. What kind of who's where in the journey, Right in digital transformation. So I gotta ask you, what's the most important story or thing to pay attention, Thio as the smart money and smart customers go, Hey, you know what? I'm gonna double down on that. I'm gonna kill that project or sunset. That or I'm not gonna re factor that I'm gonna contain Arise it and there's probably there's a lot of that going on. In our conversations with customers, they're like it's pretty obvious. It's critical path. It's like we stay in business. We build a modern app, but I'm doubling down. I'm transitioning. It's a whole nother ballgame. What >>is >>the most important thing that you see that people should pay attention to around maintaining an innovation and coming out on the other side? >>Yeah, well, I think I think it just generally goes to the whole thesis of software defined. I mean, you know the idea of taking an appliance physical, You know, you have to order the hardware, get it on your loading dock, install in your data center. You know, go configure it, mapping into the rest of your environment. You know, whereas or you could just spend up new, softer instances of load balancers, firewalls, etcetera. So I think you know what's What's really helped in the covert era is the maturity of software to find everything. Compute storage, networking. Lan really allowed customers and many of our customers toe, you know, rapidly make that pivot. And so you know what? It's the you know, the workspace, the remote workspace. You gotta secure it. That's a key part of it, and you've got to give it. You know, you gotta have the scalability back in your data centers or, if you don't have it, be able to run those virtual desktops you know, in the cloud. And I think so. This ability again to take your current environment and, more importantly, your operating model, which, you know the technology could be agile and fast. But if you're operating models not agile, you know you can't executed Well, One of the best comments I heard from a customer CEO was, you know, for six months we debated, you know, the virtual networking architecture and how to deploy the virtual network. And, you know, when covet hit. We made the decision that did it all in one week. So the question the CEO asked now is like Well, why do we Why do we have to operate in that six month model going forward? Let's operate in the one week model going forward. E. I think that that z yeah, that's e think that's the big That's a big inflection point is the operating model has to be agile. We got all kinds of agile technology and choices I mentioned it's like, How do you make your organization agile to take advantage of those technological offerings? That's really what I've been doing the last six months, helping our customers achieve. >>I think that's a key point worth calling out and doubling down on day because, you know, whether you talk about our q Q virtual, our operating model has changed and we're doing new things. But it's not bad. It's actually beneficial. We could talk to more people. This idea of virtual ization. I mean pun intended virtual izing workforces face to face interactions air now remote. This is a software defined operating business. This is the rial innovation. I think this is the exposure. As companies wake up and going. Why didn't we do that before? Reminds me of the old mainframe days. Days? You know, why do we have that mainframe? Because they're still clutching and grabbing onto it. They got a transition. So this is the new the new reality. >>We were joking earlier that you know it ain't broke, don't fix it. And all of a sudden Covic broke everything. And so you know, virtualization becomes a fundamental component of of of how you respond. But and I wonder if Greg you could talk about the security. Peace? How how that fits in. You know everybody you know, the bromide, of course, is security can't be a bolt on. It's gotta be designed in from the start, Pat Gelsinger said years ago in the Cube. Security is a do over. You guys have purchased many different security components you've built in. Security comes. So how should we think about? And how are you thinking about designing insecurity across that entire stack without really bolting in, You know, pieces, whether it's carbon, carbon, black or other acquisitions that you've made? >>Yeah, I mean, I think that's that's the key. Inflection point we're in is an industry. I mean, getting back to my banking experience, I was responsible for cybersecurity, engineering the platforms that we engineered and deployed across the bank globally. And the challenge, the challenge. You know, that's I had, you know, 150 plus security products, and you go to bed at night wondering what? Which one did I forget to deploy or what did I get that gap? Do you think you think you're safe by the sheer number, but when you really boil down to it is like, you know, because you have to sort of like both all this stuff together to create a secure environment, you know, on a global level. And so really, our philosophy of VM where is Okay? Well, let's kind of break that model. That's what we call it intrinsic security, which is just, you know, we have the hyper visor. If you're running, the hyper visor is running on most of the service in your data center. If we have your if you have our network virtualization, we see all the traffic going between all those hyper visors and out to the cloud as well hybrid cloud or public cloud with our NSX technology. And then, you know, then you sort of bring into that the load balancers and the software to find firewalls. And pretty soon you have realized Okay, look, we have we have most of the estate. Therefore we could see everything and bring some intelligent machine learning to that and get proactive as opposed to reactive. Because our whole model now is we. All this technology and some alert pops and we get reactive. How about proactively telling me that something nasty is going on. >>I need to ask you a >>question. May be remediated. Sorry, John. It may be remediated at some point anyway. Bring in some machine intelligence tow. So instead of like you said, getting an alert actually tells me what what happened and how it was fixed, you know? Or at least recommending what I should dio, right? >>Yeah. I mean, part of the problem in the historic architectures is it was all these little silos. You know, every business unit had its own sort of technology. And Aziz, you make things virtualized. You you sort of do the virtual networking. The virtual stories of virtual compute all the software. You know, all of a sudden you have you have a different platform, you have lots of standardization. Therefore you don't have your operating model simplifies right and amount of and then it's about just collecting all the data and then making sense of the data. So you're not overwhelming the human's capacity to respond to it. And so I think that's really the fundamental thing we're all trying to get to. But the surface area is enlarged outside the data centers we've discussed out to the edge, whatever the edges, you know, into the cloud hybrid or public. So now you've got this big surface area where you've gotta have all that telemetry and all that visibility again, Back to getting proactive. So you got to do it in Band is opposed out of band. >>Great. I want to ask you a question on cyber security. We have an event on October 4th, the virtual event that Cuba is hosting with Cal Poly around this space and cybersecurity, symposiums, intersection of space and cyber. I noticed VM Ware recently announced last month that the United States Space Force has committed to the Tan Xue platform for for Continuous Dev ops operation for agility. I interviewed Lieutenant General John Thompson, Space Force, and we talked about that. He said quote, it's hard to do break fix in space. Uh, illustrating, really? Just can't send someone to swap out something in space. Not yet, at least. So they're looking at software defined as a key operating reality. Okay, so again, talk about the edge of space Isas edges. You're gonna get it. Need to be completely mad and talk about payloads and data. This >>is kind >>of interesting data point because you have security issues because space is gonna be contested and congested as an edge device. So it's actually the government's interested in that. But fundamentally, the death hops problem that you're you guys are involved in This >>is a >>reality. It's kind of connects this reality idea of operating models based in reality have to be software. What's >>your name? Yeah. I mean, I think the term we use now is def sec ops because you can't just do Dev ops. You have to have the security component in there, So, uh, yeah, the interesting. You know, like, there's a lot of interesting things happen just in fundamental networking, right? I mean, you know, the StarLink, you know, satellites at Testa. His launched Elon musk has launched and, you know, bringing sort of, you know, higher band with laurel agency to those. Yeah, we'll call it near space the and then again, just opens up all new opportunities for what we can dio. And so, Yeah, I think that's the software that the whole the whole saw for development ecosystem again, back to this idea. I think of three things. You gotta have speed. You gotta have scale and you gotta have security. And so that's really the emerging platform, whether it's a terrestrial or in near space, Uh, that's giving us the opportunity, Thio Do new architectures create service measures of services, some terrestrial, some some you know, far remote. And as you bring these new application architectures and system platform architectures together with all the underlying hardware and networking innovations that are occurring, you mentioned flash. But even getting into pmm persistent memory, right? So this this is so much happening that is converging. What's exciting to me about being a TV? Where is the CTO and we partner with all the hardware vendors? We partner with all the system providers, like in video and others. You know, the smart nick vendors. And then we get to come up with software architectures that sort of bring that together holistically and give people a platform. We can run your workloads to get work done wherever you need to land those workloads. And that's really the excitement about >>the candy store. And yet you've got problems hard problems to work on to solve. I mean, this really brings the whole project moderate, full circle because we think about space and networks and all these things you're talking about, You need to have smart everything. I mean, isn't that software? It's a complete tie into the Monterey. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, Exactly. You're right. It's not just it's not just connecting everything and pushing data around its than having the intelligence to do it efficiently, economically, insecurely. And that's you know. So I see that you don't want to over hype machine learning. I did not to use the term AI, but use the machine learning technologies, you know, properly trained with the proper data sets, you know, and then the proper algorithms. You know that you can then a employee, you know, at the edge small edge, thick edge, you know, in the data center at the cloud is really Then you give the visibility so that we get to that proactive world I was talking about. >>Yeah, great stuff, Greg. Great insight, great conversation. Looking forward to talking mawr Tech with you. Obviously you are in the right spot was in the center of all the action across the board final point. If you could just close it out for us. What is the most important story at VM World 2020 this year. >>Um, well, I think you know, I like to say that I have the best job. I think you know that I've had in my career. I've had some great ones is you know, we get to be disruptive innovators, and we have a culture of perpetual innovation and really being world for us, Aly employees and all the people that work together to put it together is we get to showcase. You know, some of that obviously have more up our sleeves for the future. But, you know, being world is are, you know, coming coming out out show of the latest set of innovations and technologies. So there's going to be so much I have, ah, vision and innovation. Keynote kickoff, right. Do some lightning demos. And actually, I talk about work we're doing in sustainability, and we're putting a micro grid on our campus in Palo Alto and partnership with City of Palo Alto so that when the wildfires come through or there is power outages, you know we're in oasis of power generating capacity with our solar in our batteries. And so the city of Palo Alto could take their emergency command vehicles and plug into our batteries when the power is out in Palo Alto and operate city services and city emergency services. So we're not just innovating, you know, in cortex we're innovating to become a more, you know, sustainable company and provide sustainable, you know, carbon neutral technology for our customers to adopt. And I think that's an area we wanna talk about me. We talk about it next time, but I think you know our innovations. We're gonna basically help change the world with regard to climate as well. >>Let's definitely do that. Let's follow up for another in depth conversation on the societal impact. Of course, VM Ware VM Ware's VM World's 2020 is virtual is a ton of sessions. There's a Cloud City portion. Check out the 60 solution demos. Of course, they ask the expert, Greg, you're in there with Joe Beta Raghu, all the experts, um, engage and check it out. Thank you so much for the insight here on the Cube. Virtual. Thanks for coming on. >>Appreciate the opportunity. Great conversation and good questions. >>Great stuff. Thank you very much. Innovation that vm where it's the heart of their missions always has been, but they're doing well on the business side, Dave. Okay. The cube coverage. They're not there in person. Virtual. I'm John for day. Volonte. Thanks for watching.

>> From around the globe it's theCUBE with coverage of the GLOBAL.NEXT DIGITAL EXPERIENCE brought to you by Nutanix. >> Hi and welcome back, we're wrapping up our coverage of the Nutanix .Next Global Digital Experience, I'm Stu Miniman and I'm happy to welcome to the program, help us as I said wrap things up. We're going to be talking about running better, running faster and running anywhere. A theme that we've heard in the keynotes and throughout the two day event of the show. We have three VPs to help go through all the pieces coming up on the screen with first of all we have Greg Smith who's the vice president of product technical marketing right next to him is Madhukar Kumar, who is the vice president of product and solutions marketing and on the far end, the senior vice president Thomas Cornely, he is the senior vice president, as I said for product portfolio management. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us. >> Good to be here Stu. >> Alright, so done next to show we really enjoy, of course this the global event so not just the US and the European and Asia but what really gets to see across the globe and a lot going on. I've had the pleasure of watching Nutanix since the early days, been to most of the events and the portfolio is quite a bit bigger than just the original HCI solution. Thomas since you've got to portfolio management is under your purview, before we get into summarizing all of the new pieces and the expansion of the cloud and software and everything just give us if you could that overview of the portfolio as it's coming into the show. >> Yeah absolutely Stu. I mean as you said we've been doing this now for 10 plus years and we've grown the portfolio we developed products over the years and so what we rolled out at this conference is a new way and to talk about what we do at Nutanix and what we deliver in terms of set of offerings and we talk about the 4 D's. We start with our digital hyper converged infrastructure cartridges, dual core HCI stack that you can run on any server and that stack these two boards are data center services which combines our storage solutions, our business computing and data recovery solution and security solutions on DevOps services, which is our database automation services, our application delivery automation services and now our new common and that's one of the service offerings and then our desktop services catridges which is our core VDI offering and offering our discipline and service offerings. So put all these together this is what we talk about in the 4 D's, which is on Nutanix cloud platform that you can run on premises and now on any job. >> Well thank you Thomas for laying the ground work for us, Greg we're going to come to you first that run better theme as Thomas said and as we know HCI is at the core a lot of discussions this year of course, the ripple effect of the global pandemic has more people working remotely that's been a tailwind for many of the core offerings, but help us understand, how's that building out some of the new things that we should look at in the HCI. >> Yeah ,thanks too for Nutanix and our customers a lot of it begins with HCI, right. And what we've seen in the past year is really aggressive adoption for HCI, particularly in core data center and private cloud operations and customers are moving to HCI in our not only for greater simplicity, but to get faster provisioning and scaling. And I think from a workload perspective, we see two things, that ACI is being called upon to deliver even more demanding apps those with a really very low latency such as large scale database deployments. And we also see that HCI is expected to improve the economics of IT and the data center and specifically by increasing workload density. So we have a long history, a storied history of continually improving HCI performance. In fact every significant software release we've optimized the core data path and we've done it again. We've done it again with our latest HCI software release that we announced just this week as our next. The first enhancement we made was in 518, was to reduce the CPU overhead and latency for accessing storage devices such as SSD and NBME and we've done this by managing storage space on physical devices in the HCI software. So rather than rely on slower internal file systems and this new technology is called block store and our customers can take advantage of block store simply by upgrading to the new software released and we're seeing immediate performance gains of 20 to 25% for IOPS and latency. And then we built on top of that, we've added software support for Intel Optane by leveraging user space library, specifically SPDK or storage performance development kit. And SPDK allows Nutanix to access devices from user space and avoid expensive interrupts and systems calls. So with this support along with block store we're seeing application performance gains about this 56% or more. So we're just building our own a legacy of pushing performance and software and that's the real benefit of moving to HCI. >> And just to add to that too when it comes to run better I think one of the things that we think of running better is automation and operation then when it comes to automation and operation there are a couple of ways I would say significant announcements that we also did to. One is around Comm as a service. Comm is one of those products that our customers absolutely love and now with Comm as a service you have a SaaS plane, so you can just without installing anything or configuring anything you could just take advantage of that. And the other thing we also announced is something called Nutanix central and Nutanix central gives you the way to manage all your applications on Nutanix across all of your different clusters and infrastructure from a single place as well. So two big parts of a run better as well. >> Well, that's great and I've really, is that foundational layer, Madhukar if we talk about expanding out, running faster the other piece we've talked about for a few years is step one is you modernize the platform and then step two is really you have to modernize your application. So maybe help us understand that changing workload cloud native is that discussion that we've been having a few years now, what are you hearing from your customers and what new pieces do you have to expand and enable that piece of the overall stack? >> Yeah, so I think what you mentioned which is around cloud data the big piece over there is around Cybernetics's and they already had a carbon, so with carbon a lot of the things of complexities around managing cybernetics is all taken care of, but there are higher level aspects on it like you have to have observability, you have to have log, you have to have managed the ingress ,outgress which has a lot of complexity involved with, so if you're really just looking for building of applications what we found is that a lot of our customers are looking for a way to be able to manage that on their own. So what we announced which is carbon platform service enables you to do exactly that. So if you're really concerned about creating cloud native applications without really worrying too much about how do I configure the cybernetics clusters? How do I manage Histio? How do I manage all of that carbon platform service that actually encapsulates all of that to a sass plate So you can go in and create your cloud native application as quickly and as fast as possible, but just in a typical Nutanix style we wanted to give that freedom of choice to our customers as well. So if you do end up utilizing this what you can also choose is the end point where you want these application to run and you could choose any of the public clouds or the hyper scaler or you could use a Nutanix or an IOT as an endpoint as well. So that was one of the big announcements we've made. >> Great, Greg and Madhukar before we go on, it's one of the things that I think is a thread throughout but maybe doesn't get highlighted as much but security of course is been front and center for a while, but here in 2020 is even more emphasized things like ransomware, of course even more so today than it has been for a couple of years. So maybe could it just address where we are with security and any new pieces along there that we should understand? >> Yeah, I can start with that if I could. So we've long had security in our platform specifically micro-segmentation, fire walling individual workloads to provide least privilege access and what we've announced this week at .Next is we've extended that capability, specifically we've leveraged some of the capabilities in Xi beam and this is our SAS based service to really build a single dashboard for security operators. So with security central, again a cloud based SAS app, Nutanix customers can get a single pane from which they can monitor the entire security posture of their infrastructure and applications, it gives you asset reporting, asset inventory reporting, you can get automated compliance checks or HIPAA or PCI and others. So we've made security really easy in keeping with the Nutanix theme and it's a security central is a great tool for that security operations team so it's a big step for Nutanix and security. >> Yeah. >> To actually add on this one, one bit piece of security central is to make it easier, right. To see your various network bills and leverage the flow micro segmentation services and configure them on your different virtual machines, right? So it's really a key enabler here to kind of get a sense of what's going on in your environment and best configure and best protect and secure infrastructure. >> Thomas is exactly right. In fact, one of the things I wanted to chime into and maybe Greg you could speak a little bit more about it. One of my favorite announcements that we heard or at least I heard was the virtualized networking and coming from a cloud native world, I think that's a big deal. The ability to go create your virtual private cloud or VPCs and subnets and then be able to do it across multiple clouds. That's, something I think has been long time coming, so I was personally very, very pleased to hear that as well. Greg, do you want to add a little bit more? >> Yeah, that's a good point I'm glad you brought that up, when we talk about micro-segmentation that's one form of isolation, but what we've announced is virtual networking. So we really adopted some cloud principles, specifically virtual private clouds constructs that we can now bring into private cloud data centers. So this gives our customers the ability to define and deploy virtual networks or overlays this sort of sit on top of broadcast domains and VLANs and it provides isolation for different environments. So a number of great use cases, we see HCI specifically being relied upon for fast provisioning in a new environment. But today the network has always been sort of an impediment to that we're sort of stuck with physical network plants, switches and routers. So what virtual networking allows us to do is through APIs, is to create an isolated network a virtual private cloud on a self service basis. This is great for organizations that increasing operating as service providers and they need that tenant level segmentation. It's also good for developers who need isolated workspace and they want to spin it up quickly. So we see a lot of great use cases for virtual networks and it just sort of adds to our full stack so we've software defined compute, we've software defined storage, now we're completing that with software defining networking. >> And if I have it right in my notes the virtual networking that's in preview today correct? >> Yes, we announce it this week and we are announcing upcoming availability, so we have number of customers who are already working with us to help define it and ready to put it into their environments. The virtual private network is upcoming from Nutanix. >> Yeah, so I absolutely I've got, Mudhakar, I've got a special place in my heart for the networking piece that's where a lot of my background is, but there was a different announcement that got a little bit more of my attention and Thomas we're going to turn to you to talk a little bit more about clusters. I got to speak with Monica and Tarkin, ahead of the conference when you had the announcement with AWS, for releasing Nutanix clusters and this is something we've been watching for a bit, when you talk about the multicloud messaging and how you're taking the Nutanix software and extending it even further that run anywhere that you have talk about in the conference. So Thomas if you could just walk us through the announcements as I said something we've been excited, I've been watching this closely for the last couple of years with Nutanix and great to see some of the pieces really starting to accelerate. >> Well absolutely and as you said this is something that's been core to the strategy in terms of getting and enabling customers to go and do more with hybrid cloud and public cloud and if you go back a few weeks when we announced clusters on AWS this was a few weeks back now, we talked of HCI is a prerequisite to getting the most of your hybrid cloud infrastructure, which is the new HCI in our mind and what we covered at .Next was this great announcement with Microsoft Azure, right, and just leveraging their technologies bringing some of their control plan onto our cloud platform but also now adding clusters on Azure and announcing that we'll be doing this in a few months. Enabling the customers to go and take the same internet cloud platform the same consistent set of operations and technology services from data center services, DevOps services and desktop services and deploying those anywhere on premises, on AWS or on Microsoft Azure and again for us cloud is not a destination. This is not a now we just accomplished something. This is a new way of operating, right? And so it's touching, giving customers options in terms of where they want to go to count so we keep on adding new counts as we go but also it's a new form of consuming infrastructure, right? From an economist perspective you probably know, you don't extend it you're pressing into the moving to is fiction based offering on all of our solutions and our entire portfolio and as we go and enable these clusters offering, we're not making consumptions more granular to non customers do not consume our software on an hourly basis or a monthly basis. So again this is kind of that next step of cloud is not just technology, it's not a destination it's a new way of operating and consuming technology. >> Why think about the flexibility that this brings to existing new techs customers it gives them enormous choices in terms of new infrastructure and whether they set up new clusters. So think about in text a customer today. They may have data centers throughout the US or in Europe and in Asia Pacific, but now they have a choice rather than employ their Nutanix environment, in an existing data center or Colo, they can put it into AWS and they can manage it exactly the same. So it just provides near infinite choice for our customers of how they deploy HCI and our full software stack. In addition to the consumption that Thomas talked about, consumption choices. >> Yeah, just to add to that again I should have said this is also one of my favorite announcements as well, yesterday. We Greg, myself, Thomas, we were talking to some industry analysts and they were talking about, Hey, you know how there is a need for pods where you have compute, you have network and you have storage altogether, and now people want to run it across multiple different destination but they have to have the freedom of choice. Today using one different kind of hardware tomorrow you want to use something else. They should be portability for that, so with clusters, I think what we have been able to do is to take that concept and apply it across public cloud. So the same whether you want to call it a pod or whatever but compute, storage, networking. Now you have the freedom of choice of choosing a public cloud as an end point where you want to run it. So absolutely one of those I would say game-changing announcements that we have made more recently. >> Yeah-- >> To close that loop actually and talk about portability as enabling quality of occupations. But also one thing that's really unique in terms of how we're delivering this to customers is probability of licenses. The fact that you have a subscription term license for on premises you can very easily now repay the license if you decide to move a workload and move a cluster from one premises to your count of choice, that distance is also affordable. But so again, full flexibility for these customers, freedom of choice from a technology perspective but also a business perspective. >> Well, one of the things I think that really brings home how real this solution is, it's not just about location, Thomas as you said, it's not about a destination, but it's about what you can do with those workloads. So one of the use cases I saw during the conference was talking about a very long partner of a Nutanix Citrix and how that plays out in this clusters type of environment so maybe if you could just illustrate that as one of those proof points is how customers can leverage the variety of choice. >> Yeah, we're very excited about this one, right? Because given what we're currently going through as a humanity right now, across the world with COVID situation, and the fact that we all have now to start looking at working from home, enabling scaling of existing infrastructure and doing it without having to go and rethink your design enabling this clusters in our Citrix solution is just paramount. Because what it will ask you to do is if you say you started and you had an existing VDI solution on premises using Citrix, extending that now and you putting new capacity in every location where you can go and spin this up in any AWS region or Azure region, no one has to go and the same images, the same processes, the same operations of your original desktop infrastructure would apply regardless of where you're moving now your workforce to work remotely. And this is again it's about making this very easy and keeping that consistency operations, from managing the desktops to managing that core infrastructure that is now enabled by using different clusters on Azure or AWS. >> Well, Thomas back in a previous answer, I thought you were teeing something up when you said we will be entering a new era. So when you talk about workloads that are going to the cloud, you talk about modernization probably the hottest area that we have conversations with practitioners on is what's happening in the database world. Of course, there's migrations, there's lots of new databases on there, and Nutanix era is helping in that piece. So maybe if we could as kind of a final workload talk about how that's expanding and what updates you have for the database. >> Absolutely and so I mean Eras is one of our key offerings when it comes to a database automation and really enabling teams to start delivering database as a service to their own and users. We just announced Era 2.0 which is now taking Era to a whole other level, allowing you to go and manage your devices on cross clusters. And this is very topical in this current use case, because we're talking of now I can use era to go in as your database that might be running on premises for production and using Era to spin up clones for test drive for any team anywhere potentially in cloud then using clusters on the all kind of environments. So those use cases of being which more leverage the power of the core is same structure of Nutanix for storage management for efficiency but also performance and scaling doing that on premises and in unique cloud region that you may want to leverage, using Era for all the automation and ensuring that you keep on with your best practices in terms of deploying and hacking your databases is really critical. So Era 2.0 great use cases here to go and just streamline how you onboard databases on top of HCI whether you're doing HCI on premises or HCI in public town, and getting automation of those operations at any scale. >> Yeah, hey Tom has mentioned a performance and Era has been a great extension to the portfolio sitting on top of our HCI. As you know Stu database has long been a popular workload to run it all HCI, particularly Nutanix and it extends from scalability performance. A lot of I talked about earlier in terms of providing that really low latency to support the I-Ops, to support the transactions per second, that are needed these very demanding databases. Our customers have had great success running SAP, HANA, Oracle SQL server. So I think it's a combination of Era and what we're doing as Thomas described as well as just getting a rock solid foundational HCI platform to run it on and so that's what we're very excited about to go forward in the database world. >> Wonderful, well look, we covered a lot of ground here. I know we probably didn't hit everything there but it's been amazing to watch Nutanix really going from simplicity at its core and software driving it to now that really spiders out and touches a lot of pieces. So I'll give you each just kind of final word as you having conversations with your customers, how do they think of Nutanix today and expect that we have a little bit of diversity and the answers but it's one of those questions I think the last couple of years you've asked when people register for .Next. So it's, I'm curious to hear what you think on that. Maybe Greg if we start with you and kind of go down the line. >> Yeah, for me what sums it up is Nutanix makes IT simple, It makes IT invisible and it allows professionals to move away from the care and feeding structure and really spend more time with the applications and services that power their business. >> And I agree with Greg I think the two things that always come up, one is the freedom of choice, the ability for our customers to be able to do so many different things, have so many more choices and we continue to do that every time we add something new or we announce something new and then just to add onto what Greg said is to try and make the complexities invisible, so if there are multiple layers, abstract them out so that our customers are really focused on doing things that really matter versus trying to manage all the other underlying layers, which adds more complexity. >> Yeah You could just kind of send me to it up right. In the end, internet is becoming much more than HCI, as hyper converged infrastructure this is not taking it to another level with the hybrid cloud infrastructure and when you look at what's been built over the last few years from the portfolio points that we now have, I think it was just growing recognition that internet actually delivers this cloud platform that you can all average to go and get to a consistency of services, operations and business operations in any location, on premises through our network constant providers through our Nutanix cloud offerings and hyper scaler with Nutanix clusters. So I think things are really changing, the company is getting to a whole other level and I couldn't be more excited about what's coming out now the next few years as we keep on building and scaling our cloud platform. >> And I'll just add my perspective as a long time watcher of Nutanix. For so long IT was the organization where you typically got an answer of no, or they were very slow to be able to react on it. It was actually a quote from Alan Cohen at the first .Next down in Miami he said, "we take need to take those nos "and those slows and get them to say go." So the ultimate, what we need is of course reacting to the business, taking those people, eliminating some of the things that were burdensome or took up too much time and you're freeing them up to be able to really create value for the business. Want to thank Greg, Madhukar, Thomas, thank you so much for helping us wrap up, theCUBE is always thrilled to be able to participate in .Next great community customers really engaged and great to talk with all three of you. >> Thank you. >> Alright so that's a rack for theCUBES coverage of the Nutanix Global.Next digital experience. Go to thecube.com. thecube.net is the website where you can go see all of the previous interviews we've done with the executives, the partners, the customers. I'm Stu Miniman and as always thank you for watching theCUBE.

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we're in our Palo Alto studios today on this kind of ongoing leadership conversation, reaching out to the community during these crazy times, we're two months into the COVID crisis, and we're excited to have two of our favorite guests, one is a frequent guest, Greg Sands, he's the founder and managing partner of Costanoa Ventures, Greg, great to see you. And he brought along Martina Lauchengo, also from Costanoa, Martina, great to see you, is this, I think your first time on theCUBE, right? >> This is my first time, nice to be on, Jeff. >> Great, and Greg, great to see you as well. >> Great to be here. >> So let's get into it, I mean, part of this conversation came from a lot of efforts that you guys are putting into really getting information out to the community, and I think if there's a silver lining and there's a couple here and there, that have come from this, is that everyone is really trying to help each other out. So you've come up with something you call virtual office hours. What is that all about, is that new, or is that just kind of a greater emphasis now that most people are working from home? >> Well, we've also always done a great deal of work with our portfolio on how to deal with changing times, how to graph, go to market, both sales and marketing onto what are often product-led and founder-led companies, and in a time of crisis, we felt like it was important to share that knowledge more broadly, and to set up a venue where we can interact with the broader startup community, and hopefully in the process of doing that, we're useful. >> I just saw a quote I think today or yesterday, from Jim Hackett, the CEO of Ford, and it was "I didn't have the playbook for the global pandemic," in terms of preparation and being able to pull something off the shelf to help work through this, so as we've gone through mid-March, just this immediate, full stop, unanticipated light switch moment, now we're two months in, what are the specific actions you've been giving to your portfolio companies, and how has that changed over the course of the last 60 days? >> Well I'll take a first stab, and Martina, feel free to jump in if you've got additional thoughts, I think the first piece, going back, six, seven, eight weeks, was we all had that hair on fire moment, where you just have to understand where you are. And so I think that sense of situational awareness, and how does it affect your customers and your market, and figure out if the basics of the business, including revenue rate and what's guaranteed and what's not and expense base and planned growth trajectory are any of those foundational elements what you thought they were going to be, and readjust them, and re-plan, so almost every company went through two or three complete planning cycles, trying to understand where we are. And I think also trying to do that with a sense of authenticity and transparency and humanity, 'cause you're dealing with a company, and people's careers and people's jobs. So now I think we're more at the place where we understand the foundation, and you can more reasonably plan for the future. >> Yeah, I'd say I think what I've observed in our portfolio is people are through the shock, and that's also true for all of the customers that they're trying to reach out to, and the big adjustment is, what does our new normal look like? Jeff, before we started we were talking about how everyone has moved digital and virtual, so people did that initially because they had no choice, but now they're looking at the data they've been collecting saying "Gosh, should this mean that we should no longer do "physical events because we're having five or 10x "the amount of registration that we did before." Our digital channels are way more successful than they were in terms of outreach and awareness raising, and so everyone's looking at this moment, and saying "How should be adjust our new normal, "even post-COVID era, and do things differently "as a result of what we're learning from this time "where we have to be constrained in what we--" >> Right, so Greg, you had an interesting quote in an article recently talking about the harder challenge is going to be for people that are on this blitz scaling run, and you've talked about there's kind of two paths, there's growth at all costs, and then there's growth within a reasonable plan, clearly, if you were growth at all costs, and you were Uber or Lyft or one of these types of operations where your revenue just got turned practically off, really significant challenge, so as you look at it from an investor point of view, and what is a good rate of growth, what is the way to build a company versus this hellbent hair on fire, grab global market share at absolutely no, just spend spend spend spend spend? >> Yeah, and so of course this is independent of the pandemic, I think it's the case that there was this orientation towards blitz scaling, towards we're going to grow as fast as we can, and one of the things, if you just think about a biological metaphor, growth is expensive, growth takes a ton of capital, a ton of hiring, a ton of on-ramping, and the like, and you do all of that at very rapid speeds and you tend to cut corners, have people poorly trained, drop balls on the floor and the like, so I think the, generally speaking, our experience is that our portfolio companies, partly due to our guidance, partly 'cause we've selected each other, have been, look, we've got some very fast growers, we've got companies like Alation that have been here a lot, that have created brand new categories, but they've done it with bounce, and they've done it efficiently, and that's always what we preach, it's always what we've believed in, and I think our companies are in much better shape as a result. Martina and I both grew up as young athletes, and one of the things that you learn as an athlete is you got to be balanced, you don't know if your next step is going to have to be forward, back, left or right, and you've got to have all your sensors out and be paying attention, to figure out where you ought to go, and if you're all in one direction, you can only go forward. And when the environment changes, you're toast. >> Yeah, it's really wild to see, 'cause who ever plans for literally a binary turnoff of revenue stream, and we're seeing it in hotels and in obviously conferences and airlines and a whole bunch of industries, so it's pretty challenging. But for a lot of people, business still goes on, and Martina I want to jump into it with you, 'cause you've been a marketer in tech for a long time, but man oh man, the conference itself, the physical events, whether it be a big giant one like AWS re:Invent which had I don't know, 50,000 people, it's going to outgrow Vegas, to smaller events, those are no longer an option, yet people are still delivering products, they still have messaging to get out, they still want to touch their community. How are you kind of looking at the new normal around marketing, both for the portfolio companies but also a little bit of a broader view? >> So I'll start with the broader view, I'd say in general, Dreamforce is canceled, AWS, I mean all these things have shifted so massively and all the major companies have simultaneously made that shift, and I think one thing that they are all seeing is, they are getting a lot more registration, they're getting a lot more in engagement, this happened at Atlassian where, they rapidly made the shift to virtual, and what they saw was because they had that many more people participating in events, that they had a much bigger social bump, because that many more people were talking about what was happening simultaneously, and it also became this virtuous loop, where more and more people were talking, it was creating this intrigue, where people wanted to participate and see what was happening. So, I think people are looking at that and saying "Well how does that affect our business, "and how does that increased potential "for evangelism actually positively convert towards "a future customer, or more people talking about us "in a positive way?" So this is where they're looking at what they've put out in market and seeing what they should learn from that and I'd say that's the number one recommendation I have for all of our companies is, look at what the data is telling you, and trying to extract what your lessons are about this to what your ongoing normal should be from a marketing perspective. >> Yeah, it's such a good tip, there was so much focus at the beginning of this about what you cannot do in digital, you can't have the hall room chat or you can't have the water cooler chat, but on the other hand there's so many things you can do in digital that you can't do in the physical. And by separating content generation versus content publishing, if you will, and then content consumption, and those no longer have to happen at the same one hour window where there's an available conference room for a breakout session at the Sands on Tuesday at six, that I can't see 'cause I want to see somebody else's conference Tuesday, I mean there's so many things that you can do, and kind of just democratization of the access to the conference, if you don't have the means, the time, or just the ability to get on a plane and fly to Vegas or to New York or San Francisco, so there's a lot of stuff you can do in digital that's different, it's just not the same as the physical space, what are some of the other things that you're finding that are kind of unique and novel and actually really great? >> Well, one thing that you talked about is it relates to events, it's not just the attendees being there, it's also the talent. A lot of times you would want talent, but they're not available because they have a conflict or they can't accommodate that travel, a guy participating in a conference that's based out of London, and they are having people that it doesn't matter what time zone you're in, because they're like "Oh, you can prerecord it, "you can do it live if you choose," and so there's a flexibility that just wasn't there before, certainly as it relates to events. But in terms of novel stuff, people are reexamining things that they might have charged for in the past, so one company in our portfolio used to charge for their certifications, and now they've made it free and they've had over 1000 signups in the last couple of weeks, and so that was a small program that they ran and it's now the single largest generator of new leads for them, because they reexamined it and said "Well what assets do we have "and how can we use them differently?" And so I'd say it's not so much that people are doing monumentally new things that they haven't tried before, but they're examining the quiver of assets they have at their disposal and they're saying "Well how can we deploy them differently?" And they see the two things that are really bubbling up are you just have to do things in an excellent way, number one, and number two, you really have to do it in that much more empathetic way. >> Right, right. And Greg, I want to go back to you, go ahead. >> Jeff, if I can add two things, I think there are some things that it's worth noting that digital is uniquely good at. So one of which is inferring intent, which you don't necessarily get in the context of conferences, and the second is that as companies have dug deep and realized that they really need to take full advantage of their assets, one of the things that we find people really trying to do is to marry first party data, their own data about their own customers and their own interactions, with third party data which includes that intent data, and when you combine those together in a business to business marketing context, you can really do extraordinary things, and many companies have been under-optimized on that because they could rely on going to events and traditional face to face marketing activities. >> Well, and to me there's so many things, I mean conferences were designed in an age where there was no telephone, and you sent letters, and the speed of communication was weeks, and so that's how you had to get people together, but today, 2020, when information flows, it seems so waterfall to me to kind of squeeze everything in, especially for a big company, into three days in Las Vegas, in terms of all your product announcements, all your partner announcements, all these things, it seems completely against the trend of more of a DevOps world, which is if product group A is ready to roll, why do they have to wait to that date, and wait for product B and everyone else, not to mention that if you're some esoteric cool thing that gets lost in the sea of product announcements and press releases and events, does it really make sense? What we're seeing is there's certainly an opportunity for what's called a rally moment, whether that's a keynote or introducing a new CEO, or we want to have this moment where we have singular focus, but as soon as that's open, let the content be free, let people find what they want, when they want, and to your point Martina, if people want to self-organize, you can actually have almost infinite long tail sessions, if you give people a platform in which to organize, versus being this one way conduit of information which is the old way of working, but not really the new way in which we find, consume, and learn about things in 2020, it just seems so antiquated when we actually take a step back and think of how do we get our information today, and it's not wrapped up in one big giant splash moment. >> Well Jeff, I want to pull on a thread a little bit that you just brought up, which is that the old way of doing things, and I'd say old average, just there's no space for it right now, so I'm going to read through five things that were in my inbox this morning that went into the auto-delete pile, which is what everyone does every morning. "Tomorrow's webinar," "Only three days left, "have you registered yet?" "This week in review." So those were the bad ones that went to the automatic delete pile, that's the average run of the mill stuff that all of us get every day, and I hope everyone that's listening to this stops sending them. And here's the ones that stood out, "Why every startup CEO needs a chief of staff," so something that was specific, it told me more concretely why I should engage with what was being sent to me, it didn't tell me if it was an article or webinar, but it engaged me with content, and if you just look at Netflix as a platform, as an example of how they're very very content-forward, and they're trying to find what specifically is going to get you engaged, all the way down to the thumbnail level, that's what we are needing to do as marketers, where we're taking advantage of the knowledge that we have of our customers, where they are, and trying to create genuine connection with whatever it is we're trying to bring to them. >> With data, right, and you can AB type and all the stuff that Netflix does, it's so funny to me, the answers are all around us, we're just not looking in the right place, but I want to shift gears a little bit for marketing and talk about leadership, we've been doing a lot of these around leadership, 'cause leadership is so important. And really the uncertainty, more even the tough times, I think it's the uncertainty that really challenges people, and you mentioned something Greg, earlier, about really the transparency, and I think there's so much to be learned in terms of being human in your leadership, showing vulnerability, admitting, I'm a little scared too, I don't know what's happening, no one has been through this type of inexperience before, so from just a leadership perspective, again, what are you sharing with your portfolio companies, how are you advising people who are in this position, because they're probably nervous and uncomfortable as well, to lead these teams and to help them through this time of uncertainty. >> Well, it's an amazing and uncertain time, and frankly everybody is challenged by it, nobody's been through it before, even those of us that went through 2008 and 2000 and 2001, the ecommerce blowup in 9/11, this is different, it has a different cause and a different set of effects. I know in my case I spent the weekend rereading Jerry Collona's book, "Reboot," which talks about leading from the heart, and leading with transparency, and leading with authenticity, and what we've been trying to do in working with our founders is one, listen, and be there, and be a support, and recognize that we don't know all the answers either, and so we're in it together. Second is to try to give them the confidence and the room to do that in leading within their teams, and then the third is to focus on a couple of things that I think are particularly important, which is as I said before, situational awareness, you got to understand where you are, and the second is focus. So one of the things that everybody is finding, and we find it true with people's customers, too, hey, we were going to do five things, now we're going to do two. So companies have got to narrow the scope, they got to figure out how to be in the top two for their customers that have to get done. And so you got to do that from a strategic and execution perspective, you got to lead your team to do it, and in order to rally around it, people have to understand the facts, they have to trust you. And they have to know that your heart's in it. >> Yeah, it's almost interesting, the fact that everyone is separated, we have to communicate more, we have to communicate more frequently and we had Darren on from GitLab talking about the variety of types of communications beyond just your standard staff meeting and project updates to things, like social things and happy hours and these things, so it almost feels like because we're forced into scheduled communication, it's almost happening more frequently because you have to make sure it does, then maybe some of the ad hoc stuff that might happen in the hallways are on a more informal basis. You find that happening, are people really stepping up the scale in which they're making sure they're touching base with their team members? >> I'm definitely seeing that throughout our portfolio, so people are doing things like scheduled game nights that would've been more ad hoc in the past, or specifically scheduling water cooler time, or one of our companies has been doing specific meetings and get-togethers of parents, how do you maintain your full time job and actually coparent or figure it out while your kids are doing whatever it is that they need to and being a part of home, and working at home, and so they've definitely scheduled more, but it's really been about acknowledging the whole self that is part of this unique time, and that everybody's in the same boat, I think that is something that is really unique about this is that it is a global phenomenon, and so it's not sort of like oh, this country or this state or this industry is facing this, all of us are facing this, and so to your point, Jeff, about what does it mean to be human and to connect, it is a time in which we are uniquely capable of connecting with one another, and we all have the same way to do it, I meet a bunch of new people every week, and now we all start off actually seeing each other's homes. Saying "Oh, what is that, what book are you reading?" And so it's almost an invitation to have a more personal connection and I've definitely found despite the fact that we're doing all these meetings virtually, I actually feel more connected to a lot of people than I would have normally. >> Law of unintended consequences, you just never know. So last topic to shift gears before I let you go, we're still in the business of investing, and as I'm sure you're seeing or starting to see, now that the shock and awe's kind of over, and people are starting to define new opportunities, basically, to reassemble assets, to reassemble delivery methodologies, to reassemble business plans, and I wonder, as you look forward now to your next wave of investments, assuming everything's medium settled with the current portfolio, how is your investment thesis changing a little bit, what are you seeing in kind of a rejiggering of assets and business models that are going to take advantage of this new normal, 'cause sure enough, I'm sure there's a whole bunch of people in garages right now that are building those companies based on this new normal that are going to be leaders down the road. What are you thinking of, how are you thinking about what's going to happen later this year, and in 2021 and beyond? >> So, we absolutely are continuing to invest, and so for quick context, we're seed and A up and down the stack of enterprise technology, so think of it as applied AI and the infrastructure that supports it, much of which is data and machine learning infrastructure, but also cybersecurity and DevOps, and I think for us, one of the things that showed up right away was this idea of, we're all going to work in more distributed fashion. And I think many versions of that were "Oh, we've got a new work from home app," or the like, and we haven't actually found that those are the difference makers, what we think is that these business processes that tie together application logic and data and analytics and a collaboration layer, like in Alation, so that you can collaborate on your data, you can collaborate while you're performing an absolutely critical business function, and what used to be tribal knowledge that was passed around in the halls is embedded in software, and cataloged. And so we're seeing lots of opportunities to do that, both in workflow context and in the context of data scientists and data engineers working on the data stack and developers in and around the DevOps ecosystem, that we think are really interesting and acknowledge the fact that you can't assume that all the people working on this application are sitting in the same building, and get to talk around the water cooler. So they talk about it in the application. >> I just want to add a little something to what Greg said in terms of the things that we're seeing, really the importance of data right now, people are trying to refactor all of our operating plans, they're trying to say "What is this actually doing to our demand," and so the accuracy of data and the quality of it is more important than it ever has been, and being able to do that wherever it exists, if it's frontline, inside of a dashboard, if it's cleaning up stuff that's coming out of a data lake, people are investing in that infrastructure right now because they have the capacity to, so that's a place where we've seen I'd say probably the least amount of change, and then the other thing that this has revealed are gaps in the technology infrastructure that wasn't available, so for example supply chain, being able to identify all the elements of the mask, or the ventilator supply chain. Those systems were massively disconnected and extremely manual, and so people are looking at that saying there are some gaps that still need to be closed in a big way with infrastructure and technology, and those are some areas that we're seeing very interesting and illuminated as a result of this time. >> Yeah, I mean to certainly, what we've been talking about really is just a light switch moment, in terms of digital transformation and whether that is working from home, which is probably the top focus for a lot of people in the short term, or whether that's in education, suddenly everyone from kindergarten teachers to professors at Stanford had to suddenly learn to teach online with absolutely no preparation, no time to think about it, and then up into the data layer as well, because it's just this ongoing democratization and now with distributed teams, you are forced now to make that data available to them, really as a process as much as an objective to get it into hands to do more things, so certainly a digital transformation accelerant, like nobody expected, there's no more time to prepare and plan, it's ready set go, now. So we see it over and over again. Well thank you so much for coming on, thank you for sharing the information, just kind of last point, one of the things that I think is so interesting about today's time is it used to be the power was held by the people that had the information. And really what we've seen, and what you guys support is now the information is infinite and it's everywhere, and you should be able to find it. Now it's more about who shares the information, who's a trusted source to filter, to find the right information, and who can I go to who I know's going to give me stuff that's relevant for me, and I think you guys have really shown time and time again that in sharing information and helping others to do better, you get this multiplier effect that you wouldn't get if you're just worrying about yourself, and I think it's such a modern way to think about empowering people, and as you said, it even makes you more powerful and more successful, so really a very different way than it used to be in terms of everybody kind of holding the information, and who had the keys, had the information, that's completely turned up on the side of it's head. >> That is absolutely right, and we're thrilled to be here talking about it with you today, thanks for your continued support of the community and trying to help good people get the word out. >> Thank you, thanks a lot. >> Thanks for doing exactly what you're talking about, which is getting the right information out to people so they can be better. >> All right, well Greg, Martina, stay safe, thanks for stopping by, and hopefully next time we'll see you in person. You're watching theCUBE Conversation, Jeff Frick here in Palo Alto studio, thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (calm music)

Narrator: From the Cube studios in Palo Alto and Boston, (upbeat intro music) it's theCUBE! Covering IBM Think. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hi, everybody, we're back. This is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE's coverage of the IBM Think 2020 digital event experience, wall to wall coverage, of course in the remote Cube studios in Palo Alto and Boston. Greg Lotko is here. He's with Broadcom. He's a senior vice president and general manager of the Broadcom mainframe division. Greg, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Hey good seeing you too, happy to be here. >> Hey, lets talk Z. You know, I got to say when Broadcom made a nearly 19 billion dollar acquisition of CA, many people, myself included said, "Huh? I don't really get it." But as you start to see what's happening, the massive CA install base and the cross selling opportunities that have come to Broadcom, you start to connect the dots and say, "Ah, maybe this does make some sense." But you know, how's it going? How's the acquisition been? It's been, you know, what now, two years since that move? >> Yeah we're coming up on two years. I think it kind of shocked the world, right? I mean, there is a lot of value there and the customers that have been using the mainframe and running their core businesses for many, many years, they knew this, right? So Broadcom came in and said, "Hey, you know, I don't think this is the cash cow "that others maybe have been treating it as." You know, we absolutely believed with some investment that you could actually drive greater value to customers and you know, what a novel concept right? You know, expand expense, invest, drive greater value, and that would be the way you'd expand revenue and profit. >> Yeah, I mean I think generally, the mainframe market is misunderstood. It obviously goes in cycles. I did a report, you know, a couple of months ago on really focusing on Z15X, it was last summer. And how historically, IBM performance overall as a company is really driven still by mainframe cycles because it all still drags so much software and services and so we're in the midst of a Z15 tailwind and so, of course, the COVID changes everything. But nonetheless it's a good business. IBM's a dominant player in that business. Customers continue to buy mainframes because it just works. It's too risky to rip 'em out. People say, "Oh, why don't you get rid of the mainframe?" No way customers are going to do that. It's running their business. So it's a fabulous business if you have a play there and clearly... (poor internet connection interrupts Dave speaking) >> Yeah, and if you think about those cycles that's largely driven by the hardware, right? As each generation comes out, and if you look at traditional pricing metrics that really look at using that capacity, or even using full capacity, that's what caused this cyclicality with the software as well but, you know, there's a lot of changes even in that space. I mean with us, with mainframe consumption licensing from Broadcom, with IBM doing tailor fit pricing, you know, the idea that you can have that headroom on the hardware and then pay as you go, pay as you grow. I think that actually will smooth out and remove some of that cyclicality from the software space. And as you said, correctly, you look at the COVID stuff going on, I mean there's an awful lot of transactions going on online. People are obviously checking their financials with the economics going on. The shipping companies are booming with what they have to do, so that's actually driving transactions up as well, to use that capacity that's in the boxes. >> Yeah, and financial services is actually in really good... I know that the stocks have been hit, but the liquidity in the banks is very, very strong because of the 2009 crisis. So the fiscal policy sort of, you know, dictated that or, you know, the public policy dictated that. And the banks are obviously huge consumers of mainframe. >> Sure. >> One of the things that IBM did years ago was to sort of embrace Linux, was one of its first moves to open up the mainframe. But it's much more than just Linux. I wonder if you could talk about sort of your point of view on open meets mainframe. >> Yeah, so open is way more than just Linux, right? I mean Linux is good, running around the mainframe. I mean that's absolutely an open paradigm from the operating system, but open is also about opening up the API's, opening up the connectivities so that it's easier to interact with the platform. And, you know, sometimes people think open is just about dealing with open source. Certainly we've made a lot of investments there. We contributed the command line interface and actually a little more than 50% of the original contribution to the Zowe project, under the OMP, the Open Mainframe Project. So that was about allowing open source technologies that interact with distributed and cloud technologies to now interact with that mainframe. So it's not just the open source technologies, but opening up the API's, so you can then connect across technologies that are on the platform or off platform. >> So what about the developer community? I mean there's obviously a lot of talk in the industry about DevOps. How does DevOps fit into the mainframe world? What about innovations like Agile? And sort of beyond DevOps, if you will. Can you comment on that? >> Yeah, absolutely, I mean you can bring all those paradigms, all those capabilities to the mainframe now with opening up those API's. So I mean we had a large European retail bank that has actually used the Git Bridge that we work with providing, you know, through Zowe, to connect into Endeavor, so they could leverage all the investments they had made in that existing technology over the years, but actually use the same kind of CICD pipeline, the same interaction that they do across distributed platforms and mainframe together, and open up that experience across their development community. What that really means is you're using the same concepts, the same tools that they maybe became comfortable with in university or on different platforms, to then interact with the mainframe and it's not that you're doing anything that, you know, takes away from core capabilities of the mainframe. You're still leveraging the stability, the resiliency, the through put, the service ability. But you're pressing down on it and interacting with it just like you do with other platforms. So it's really cool. And that goes beyond Linux, right? Because you're interacting with capabilities and technologies that are on the mainframe and ZOS environment. >> Yeah, and the hardened security as well, >> Absolutely. >> is another key aspect of the mainframe. Let's talk about cloud. A lot of people talk about cloud, cloud first, multicloud. Where does the mainframe fit in the cloud world? >> So, there's a lot of definitions of cloud out there, right? I mean people will talk about private cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud across multiple private clouds. They'll talk about, you know, this multicloud. We actually talk about it a little differently. We think about the customer's cloud environment. You know, our institution that we're dealing with, say it's a financial institution, to their end customers, their cloud is however you interact. And you think about it. If you're checking an account balance, if you're depositing in a check, if you're doing any of these interactions, you're probably picking up a mobile device or a PC. You're dealing with an edge server, you're going back into distributed servers, and you're eventually interacting with the mainframe and then that's got to come all the way back out to you. That is our customer's cloud. So we talk about their cloud environment, and you have to think about this paradigm of allowing the mainframe to connect through and to all of that while you hit it, preserving the security. So we think of cloud as being much more expansive and the mainframe is an integral part of that, absolutely. >> Yeah, and I've seen some of your discussions where you've talked about and sort of laid out, look, you know, the mainframe sits behind all this other infrastructure that, you know, ultimately the consumer on his or her mobile phone, you know, goes through a gateway, goes through, you know, some kind of site to buy something. But, you know, ends up ultimately doing a transaction and that transaction you want to be, you know, secure. You want it to be accurate. And then how does that happen? The majority of the word's transactions are running on some kind of, you know, IBM mainframe somewhere, in someway touches that transaction. You know, as the world gets more complex, that mainframe is... I called it sort of the hardened, you know, sort of back end. And that has to evolve to be able to adapt to the changes at the front end. And that's really kind of what's happening, whether it's cloud, whether it's mobile, whether it's, you know, Linux, and other open source technology. >> Right, it's fabulous that the mainframe has, you know, IO rates and throughput that no other platform can match, but if you can't connect that to the transactions that the customer is driving to it, then you're not leveraging the value, right? So you really have to think about it from a perspective of how do you open up everything you possibly can on the mainframe while preserving that security? >> I want to end with just talking about the Broadcom portfolio. When you hit the Broadcom mainframe site, it's actually quite mind boggling, the dozens and dozens of services and software capabilities that you provide. How would you describe that portfolio and what do you see as the vision for that portfolio going forward? >> Yeah, so when people normally say portfolio, they're thinking software products, and we have hundreds of software products. But we're looking at our portfolio as more than just the software. Sometimes people talk about, hey let me just talk to you about my latest and greatest product. One of the things we were really afforded the opportunity to do with Broadcom acquiring us was to reinvest, to double down on core products that customers have had for many years and we know that they want to be able to count on for many years to come. But the other really important thing we believe about driving value to our customers was those offerings and capabilities that you put around that, you know? Think about the idea of if you want to migrate off of a competitive product, or if you want to adopt an additional product that have the ability to tie these together. Often in our customer's shops, they don't have all the skills that they need or they just don't have the capacity to do it. So we've been investing in partnership. You know, we kept our services business from, at least the resources, the people, from CA. We rolled them directly into the division and we're investing them in true partnership, working side by side with our customers to help them deploy these capabilities, get up and running, and be successful. And we believe that that's the value of a true partnership. You invest side by side to have them be successful with the software and the capabilities and their operation. >> Well, like I said, it caught a lot of people, myself included, by surprise that acquisition. It was a big number, but you could see it, you know, Broadcom's performance post. You know, the July 2018 acquisition, done quite well. Obviously COVID has affected, you know, much of the market, but it seems to be paying off great. Thanks so much for coming to theCUBE and sharing your insights, and best of luck going forward. Stay safe. >> Pleasure being here. Everybody here, yourself, and everybody out there, be safe, be well. Take care. >> And thank you for everybody for watching. This is theCUBE's coverage of the IBM Think 2020 digital event experience. We'll be right back, right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat outro music)