(upbeat music) >> Hey, gang. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Snowflake Summit '22 live on the show floor at Caesar's Forum in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. Couple of guests joining us to unpack more of what we've been talking about today. George Fraser joins us, the CEO of Fivetran, and Veronika Durgin, the head of data at Saks Fifth Avenue. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Thank you for having us. >> Hello. >> George, talk to us about Fivetran for the audience that may not be super familiar. Talk to us about the company, your vision, your mission, your differentiation, and then maybe the partnership with Snowflake. >> Well, a lot of people in the audience here at Snowflake Summit probably are familiar with Fivetran. We have almost 2000 shared customers with them. So a considerable amount of the data that we're all talking about here, flows through Fivetran. But in brief, what Fivetran is, is we're data pipeline. And that means that we go get all the data of your company in all the places that it lives. So all your tools and systems that you use to run your company. We go get that data and we bring it all together in one place like Snowflake. And that is the first step in doing anything with data is getting it all in one place. >> So you've been considerable amount of shared customers. I think I saw this morning on the slide over 5,900, but you're saying you're already at around 2000 shared customers. Lots of innovation I'm sure, with between both companies, but talk to us about some of the latest developments at Fivetran, in terms of product, in terms of company growth, what's going on? >> Well, one of the biggest things that happened recently with Fivetran is we acquired another data integration company called HVR. And HVR specialty has always been replicating the biggest, baddest enterprise databases like Oracle and SQL Server databases that are enormous, that are run within an inch of their capabilities by their DBAs. And HVR was always known as the best in the business at that scenario. And by bringing that together with Fivetran, we now really have the full spectrum of capabilities. We can replicate all types of data for all sizes of company. And so that's a really exciting development for us and for the industry. >> So Veronika, head of data at Saks, what does that entail? How do you spend your time? What's your purview? >> So the cool thing abouts Saks is a very old company. Saks is the premier luxury e-commerce platform. And we help our Saks Fifth Avenue customers just express themselves through fashion. So we're trying to modernize very old company and we do have the biggest, baddest databases of any flavor you can imagine. So my job is to modernize, to bring us to near real-time data, to make sure data is available to all of our users so they can actually take advantage of it. >> So let's talk about some of those biggest, baddest hair balls that you've, and how you deal with that. So lot of over time, you've built up a lot of data. You've got different data stores. So, what are you doing with that? And what role does Fivetran and Snowflake play in helping you modernize? >> Yeah, Fivetran helps us ingest data from all of those data sources into Snowflake near real-time. It's very important to us. And like one of the examples that I give is within a matter of maybe a few weeks, we were able to get data from over a dozen of different data sources into Snowflake in near real-time. And some of those data sources were not available to our users in the past, and everybody was so excited. And the reason they weren't available is because they require a lot of engineering effort to actually build those data pipelines to manage them and maintain them. >> Lisa: Whoa, sorry. >> That was just a follow up. So, Fivetran is the consolidator of all that data and- >> That's right. >> Snowflake plays that role also. >> We bring it all together, and the place that it is consolidated is Snowflake. And from there you can really do anything with it. And there's really three things you were touching on it that make data integration hard. One is volume, and that's the one that people tend to talk about, just size of data. And that is important, but it's not the only thing. It's also latency. How fresh is the data in the locus of consolidation? Before Fivetran, the state of the art was nightly snapshots, once a day was considered pretty good. And we consider now once a minute pretty good and we're trying to make it even better. And then the last challenge, which people tend not to talk about, it's the dark secret of our industry is just incidental complexity. All of these data sources have a lot of strange behaviors and rules and corner cases. Every data source is a little bit different. And so a lot of what we bring that to the table, is that we've done the work over 10 years. And in the case of HVR, since the 90s', to map out all of these little complexities of all these data sources, that as a user, you don't have to see it. You just connect source, connect destination, and that's it. >> So you don't have to do the M word migrate off of all those databases. You can maybe allow them to dial them down over time, then create new value with using Fivetran and Snowflake. Is that the right way to think about it? >> Well, Fivetran, it's incredibly simple. You just connect it to whatever source, And then the matter of minutes you have a pipeline. And for us, it's in the matter of minutes, for Fivetran, there's hundreds of engineers, we're extending our data engineering team to now Fivetran. And we can pick and choose which tables we want to replicate which fields. And once data lands in Snowflake, now we have data across different sources in one place, in central place. And now we can do all kinds of different things. We can integrate it data together, we can do validations, we can do reconciliations. We now have ability to do point in time historical journey, in the past in transactional system, you don't see that, you only see data that's right now, but now that we replicate everything to Snowflake and Snowflake being so powerful as an analytical platform, we can do, what did it look like two months ago? What did it look like two years ago? >> You've got all that time series data, okay. >> And to address that word you mentioned a moment ago, migrate, this is something people often get confused about. What we're talking about here is not a migration, these source systems are not going away. These databases are the systems powering saks.com and they're staying right there. They're the systems you interact with when you place an order on this site. The purpose of our tool and the whole stack that Veronika has put together, is to serve other workloads in Snowflake that need to have access to all of the data together. >> But if you didn't have Snowflake, you would have to push those other data stores, try to have them do things that they have sometimes a tough time doing. >> Yeah, and you can't run analytical workloads. You cannot do reporting on the transactional database. It's not meant for that. It's supporting capability of an application and it's configured to be optimized for that. So we always had to offload those specific analytical reporting functionality, or machine learning somewhere else, and Snowflake is excellent for that. It's meant for that, yeah. >> I was going to ask you what you were doing before, you just answered that. What was the aha moment for realizing you needed to work with the power of Fivetran and Snowflake? If we look at, you talked about Saks being a legacy history company that's obviously been very successful at transforming to the digital age, but what was that one thing, as the head of the data you felt this is it? >> Great question. I've worked with Fivetran in the past. This is my third company, same with Snowflake. I actually brought Fivetran into two companies at this point. So my first experience with both Fivetran and Snowflake, was this like, this is where I want to be, this is the stack and the tooling, and just the engineering behind it. So as I moved on the next company, that that was, I'm bringing tools with me. So that was part. And the other thing I wanted to mention, when we evaluate tools for a new platform, we look at things in like three dimensions, right? One with cloud first, we want to have cloud native tools, and they have to be modular, but we also don't want to have too many tools. So Fivetran's certainly checks that off. They're first cloud native, and they also have a very long list of connectors. The other thing is for us, it's very important that data engineering effort is spent on actually analyzing data, not building pipelines and supporting infrastructure. In Fivetran, reliable, it's secure, it has various connectors, so it checks off that box as well. And another thing is that we're looking for companies we can partner with. So companies that help us grow and grow with us, we'll look in a company culture, their maturity, how they treat their customers and how they innovate. And again, Fivetran checks off that box as well. >> And I imagine Snowflake does as well, Frank Lutman on stage this morning talked about mission alignment. And it seemed to me like, wow, one of the missions of Snowflake is to align with its customer's missions. It sounds like from the conversations that Dave and I have had today, that it's the same with partners, but it sounds like you have that cultural alignment with Fivetran and Snowflake. >> Oh, absolutely. >> And Fivetran has that, obviously with 2000 shared customers. >> Yeah, I think that, well, not quite there yet, but we're close, (laughs) I think that the most important way that we've always been aligned with our customers is that we've been very clear on what we do and don't do. And that our job is to get the data from here to there, that the data be accurately replicated, which means in practice often joke that it is exactly as messed up as it was in the source. No better and no worse, but we really will accomplish that task. You do not need to worry about that. You can well and fully delegate it to us, but then what you do with the data, we don't claim that we're going to solve that problem for you. That's up to you. And anyone who claims that they're going to solve that problem for you, you should be very skeptical. >> So how do you solve that problem? >> Well, that's where modeling comes in, right? You get data from point A to point B, and it's like bad in, bad out. Like, that's it, and that's where we do those reconciliations, and that's where we model our data. We actually try to understand what our businesses, how our users, how they talk about data, how they talk about business. And that's where data warehouse is important. And in our case, it's data evolve. >> Talk to me a little bit before we wrap here about the benefits to the end user, the consumer. Say I'm on saks.com, I'm looking for a particular item. What is it about this foundation that Saks has built with Fivetran and with Snowflake, that's empowering me as a consumer, to be able to get, find what I want, get the transaction done like that? >> So getting access to, our end goal is to help our customers, right? Make their experience beautiful, luxurious. We want to make sure that what we put in front of you is what you're looking for. So you can actually make that purchase, and you're happy with it. So having that data, having that data coming from various different sources into one place enables us to do that near real-time analytics so we can help you as a customer to find what you're looking for. >> Magic on the back end, delighting customers. >> So the world is still messed up, right? Airlines are out of whack. There's supply imbalances. You've got the situation in Ukraine with oil prices. The Fed missed the mark. So can data solve these problems? If you think about the context of the macro environment, and you bring it down to what you're seeing at Saks, with your relationship with Fivetran and with Snowflake, do you see the light at the end of that confusion tunnel? >> That's such a great question. Very philosophical. I don't think data can solve it. Is the people looking at data and working together that can solve it. >> I think data can help, data can't stop a war. Data can help you forecast supply chain misses and mitigate those problems. So data can help. >> Can be a facilitator. >> Sorry, what? >> Can be a facilitator. >> Yeah, it can be a facilitator of whatever you end up doing with it. Data can be used for good or evil. It's ultimately up to the user. >> It's a tool, right? Do you bring a hammer to a gunfight? No, but t's a tool in the right hands, for the right purpose, it can definitely help. >> So you have this great foundation, you're able to delight customers as especially from a luxury brand perspective. I imagine that luxury customers have high expectations. What's next for Saks from a data perspective? >> Well, we want to first and foremost to modernize our data platform. We want to make sure we actually bring that near real-time data to our customers. We want to make sure data's reliable. That well understood that we do the data engineering and the modeling behind the scenes so that people that are using our data can rely on it. Because it's like, there is bad data is bad data but we want to make sure it's very clear. And what's next? The sky's the limit. >> Can you describe your data teams? Is it highly centralized? What's your philosophy in terms of the architecture of the organization? >> So right now we are starting with a centralized team. It just works for us as we're trying to rebuild our platform, and modernize it. But as we become more mature, we establish our practices, our data governance, our definitions, then I see a future where we like decentralize a little bit and actually each team has their own analytical function, or potentially data engineering function as well. >> That'll be an interesting discussion when you get there. >> That's a hot topic. >> It's one of the hardest problems in building a data team is whether decentralized or decentralized. We're still centralized at Fivetran, but companies now over 1000 people, and we're starting to feel the strain of that. And inevitably, you eventually have to find a way to find scenes and create specialization. >> You just have to be fluid, right? And then go with the company as the company grows and things change. >> Yeah, I've worked with some companies. JPMC is here, they've got a little, I'll call it a skunk works. They're probably under states what they're doing, but they're testing that out. A company like HelloFresh is doing some things 'cause their Hadoop cluster just couldn't scale. So they have to begin to decentralize. It is a hot topic these days. And I'm not sure there's a right or wrong. It's really a situational. But I think in a lot of situations, it's maybe the trend. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, I think centralized versus decentralized technology is a different question than centralized versus decentralized teams. >> Yes. >> They're both valid, but they're very different. And sometimes people conflate them, and that's very dangerous. Because you might want one to be centralized and the other to be decentralized. >> Well, it's true. And I think a lot of folks look at a centralized team and say, "Hey, it's more efficient to have these specialized roles, but at the same time, what's the outcome?" If the outcome can be optimized and it's maybe a little bit more people expensive, or I don't know. And they're in the lines of business where there's data context, that might be a better solution for a company. >> So to truly understand the value of data, you have to specialize in that specific area. So I see people like deep diving into specific vertical or whatever that is, and truly understanding what data they have and how to taken advantage of it. >> Well, all this talk about monetization and building data products, you're there, right? >> Yeah. >> You're on the cusp of that. And so who's going to build those data products? It's going to be somebody in the business. Today they don't "Own the life cycle" of the data. They don't feel responsible for it, but they complain when it's not what they want. And so, I feel as though what Snowflake is doing is actually attacking some of those problems. Not 100% there obviously, but a lot of work to do. >> Great analysts are great navigators of organizations amongst other things. And one of the best things that's happened as part of this evolution from technology like Hadoop to technology like Snowflake is the new stack is a lot simpler. There's a lot less technical knowledge that you need. You still need technical knowledge, but not nearly what you used to. And that has made it accessible to more people. People who bring different skills to the table. And in many cases, those are the skills you really need to deliver value from data is not, do you know the inner workings of HDFS? But do you know how to extract from your constituents in the organization, a precise version of the question that they're trying to ask? >> We really want them spending their time, the technical infrastructure is an operational detail, so you can put your teams on those types of questions, not how do we make it work? And that's what Hadoop was, "Hey, we got it to work." >> And that's something we're obsessed with. We're always trying to hide the technical complexities of the problem of data centralization behind the scenes. Even if it's harder for us, even if it's more expensive for us, we will pay any costs so that you don't have to see it. Because that allows our customers to focus on more high impact. >> Well, this is a case where a technology vendor's R&D is making your life easier. >> Veronika: Easier, right. >> I would presume you'd rather spend money to save time, than spend your time, to save engineering time, to save money. >> That's true. And at the end of the day, hiring three data engineers to do custom work that a tool does, it's actually not saving money. It costs more in the end. But to your point, pulling business people into those data teams gives them ownership, and they feel like they're part of the solution. And it's such a great feeling so that they're excited to contribute, they're excited to help us. So I love where the industry's going like in that direction. >> And of course, that's the theme of the show, the world around data collaborations. Absolutely critical, guys. Thank you so much for joining Dave and me, talking about Fivetran, Snowflake together, what you're doing to empower Saks, to be a data company. I'm going to absolutely have a different perspective next time I shop there. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. >> Dave: Thank you, guys. >> Thank you. >> For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Snowflake Summit '22, from Vegas. Stick around, our next guest joins us momentarily. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Cybersecurity stocks have been sending mixed signals as of late, mostly negative like much of tech, but some such as Palo Alto Networks, despite a tough go of it recently have held up better than most tech names. Others like CrowdStrike, had been out performing Broader Tech in March, but then flipped in May. Okta's performance was pretty much tracking along with CrowdStrike for most of the past several months, a little bit below, but then the Okta hack changed the trajectory of that name. Zscaler has crossed the critical billion dollar ARR revenue milestone, and now sees a path to five billion dollars in revenue, but the company stock fell sharply after its last earnings report and has been on a down trend since last November. Meanwhile, CyberArk's recent beat and raise, was encouraging and the stock acted well after its last report. Security remains the number one initiative priority amongst IT organizations and the spending momentum for many high flying cyber names remain strong. So what gives in cyber security? Hello, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we focus on security and will update you on the latest data from ETR to try to make sense out of the market and read into what this all means in both the near and long term, for some of our favorite names in cyber. First, the news. There's always something happening in security news cycles. The big recent news is new President Rodrigo Chavez declared a national emergency in Costa Rica due to the preponderance of Russian cyber attacks on the country's critical infrastructure. Such measures are normally reserved for natural disasters like earthquakes, but this move speaks to the nature of today's cyber threats. Of no surprise is modern superpower warfare even for a depleted power like Russia almost certainly involves cyber warfare as we continue to see in Ukraine. Privately held Arctic Wolf Networks hired Dustin Williams as its new CFO. Williams has taken three companies to IPO, including Nutanix in 2016, a very successful IPO for that company. Whether AWN chooses to pull the trigger this year or will wait until markets are less choppy or obviously remains to be seen. But it's a pretty clear sign the company is headed to IPO at some point. Now, big point of discussion this week at Red Hat Summit in Boston and the prior week at Dell technologies world was security. In the case of Red Hat, securing the digital supply chain was the main theme. And from Dell building, many security features into its storage arrays and cyber resilience services into its as a service offering called Apex. And we're seeing a trend where buyers want to reduce the number of bespoke tools they use if they, in fact can. Here's IDC's Jim Mercer, sharing data from a recent survey they conducted on the topic. Play the clip. >> Interestingly, we did a survey, I think around last August or something. And one of the questions was around where do you want your security, right? Where do you want to get your DevSecOps security from? Do you want to get it from individual vendors, right? Or do you want to get it from like your platforms that you're using and deploying changes in Kubernetes? >> Great question. What did they say? >> The majority of them, they're hoping they can get it built into the platform. That's really what they want-- >> Now, whether that's actually achievable is debatable because you have so much innovation and investment going on from the likes of startups and for instance, lace work or sneak and security companies that you see even trying to build platforms, you've got CrowdStrike, Okta, Zscaler and many others, trying to build security platforms and put it all under their umbrella. Now the last point will hit here is there was a lot of buzz in the news about Okta. The reaction to what was a relatively benign hack was pretty severe and probably overblown, but Okta's stock is paying the price of what is generally considered a blown communications plan versus a technical failure. Remember, identity is not an easy thing to rip and replace and Okta remains a best-of-breed player and leader in the space. So we're going to look at some ETR data later in this segment to try and make sense of the recent action in the market and certain names. Speaking of which let's take a look at how some of the names in cybersecurity have fared relative to some of the indices and relative indicators that we like to look at. Here's a Google finance comparison for a number of stocks and names in the bottom there you can see we plot the hack ETF which tracks security stocks. This is a year to date view. And so we don't show it here but the tech heavy NASDAQ is off around 26% year to date whereas the cyber ETF that we're showing is down 18%, okay. So cyber holding up a little bit better than broader tech as we've reported earlier, was actually much better and still seems to be a gap there, but the data are mixed. You can see Okta is way off relative to its peers. That's a combination of the breach that we talked about but also the run up in the stock since COVID. CrowdStrike was actually faring better but broke this month, we'll see how it's upcoming earnings announcements are received when it announces on June 2nd after the close. Palo Alto in the light blue has done better than most and until recently was holding up quite well. And of course, Sailpoint is another identity specialist, it is kind of off the charts here because it's going private with the acquisition by Thoma Bravo at nearly seven billion dollars. So you see some mixed signals in cyber these past several months and weeks. And so we're trying to understand what that all means. So let's take a look at the survey data and see how spending momentum is holding up. As we've reported IT spending forecast, at the macro level, they've come off their 8% highs from the end of the year, the ETRS December survey, but robust tech spending is still there. It's expected at nearly seven percent and this is amongst 1200 ETR respondents. Here's a picture from the ETR survey of the cybersecurity landscape. That y-axis that's net score or a measure of spending momentum and that horizontal access is overlap. We used to talk about it as a market share which is a measure of pervasiveness in the data set. That dotted red line at 40% indicates an elevated spending momentum level on the vertical axis and we filter the names and limited to only those with a hundred or more responses in the ETR survey. Then the pictures still pretty crowded as you can see. You got lots of companies above the red dotted line, including Microsoft which is up into the right, they're so far off the chart, it's just amazing. But also Palo Alto and Okta, Auth0, which of course is now owned by Okta, Zscaler, CyberArk is making moves. Sailpoint and Cloudflare, they're all above that magic 40% line. Now, you look at Cisco, it shows a very large presence in the horizontal axis in the data set. And it's got pretty respectable momentum and you see Splunk doing okay, no before and tenable just below that 40% line and a lot of names in the very respectable 20% zone. And we've included some legacy names just for context that fall below the zero percent line with a negative net score. And that means a larger proportion, that negative net score means a larger proportion of their customers in the survey are spending less than those that are spending more. Now, typically for these legacy names you're going to have a huge proportion of customers who have flat spending that kind of fat middle and that's why they sort of don't have that highly elevated score, but they're still viable as they get the recurring revenue each year. But the bottom line is that spending remains robust for some of the top names that we've talked about earlier despite their rocky stock performance. Now, let's filter this data a bit more to make it a little bit easier to read. So to do that, we take out Microsoft because they're just so dominant and we cherry pick some names to make the data more consumable and scannable. The other data point we've added is Okta's net score breakdown, the multicolored rows there, that row in the bottom right. Net score, it measures the percent of customers that are adding the platform new, that's the lime green, at 18% for Okta. The forest green is at 42%. That's the percent of customers in the survey that are spending six percent or more. The gray is flat spending. That's 32% for Okta, this past survey. The pink is customers that are spending less, that's three percent. They're spending six percent or worse in the survey, so only three percent for Okta. And the bright red at three percent is decommissioning the platform. You subtract the reds from the greens and you get a net score, well, into the 50s for Okta and you can see. We highlight Okta here because it's a name that we've been following for quite some time and customers have given us really solid feedback on the technology and up until the hack, they're affinity to Okta, but that seems to be continuing. We'll talk more about that. This recent breach to Okta has caused us to take a closer look. And you may recall, we reported with our ETR colleague, Eric Bradley. The breach was announced right in the middle of ETR collecting data in the last survey. And while we did see a noticeable downtick right after the announcement, the exposure of the hack and Okta's net score just after the breach was disclosed, you can see the combination of Okta and Auth0 remains very strong. I asked Eric Bradley this morning what he thought about Okta, and he pointed out that you can't evaluate this company on its price to earnings ratio. But it's forward sales multiple is now below 7X. And while attractive, these high flyers at some point, Eric says, they got to start making a profit. So you going to hold that thought, we'll come back to that. Now, another cut of the ETR data to look at our four star security names here. A while back we developed a methodology to try and cut through the noise of the crowded security sector using the ETR data to evaluate two key metrics; net score and shared N. Net score again is, spending momentum, the latter is an indicator of presence in the data set which is a proxy for market presence. Okay, we assigned those companies that cracked the top 10 in both net score and shared N, we give them four stars, okay, if they make the top 10. This chart here shows the April survey data for those companies with an N that's greater than, equal to a hundred responses. So again, we're filtering on those with a hundred or more responses. The table on the left that you see there, that's sorted by net score, okay. So we're sorting by spending momentum. And then the one on the right is sorted by shared N, so their presence in the data set. Seven companies hit the top 10 for both categories; Palo Alto Network, Splunk, CrowdStrike Okta, Proofpoint, Fortinet and Zscaler. Now, remember, take a look, Okta excludes Auth0, in this little methodology that we came up with. Auth0 didn't make the cuts but it hits the top 10 for net score. So if you add in Auth0's 112 N there that you see on the right. You add that into Okta, we put Okta in the number two spot in the survey on the right most table with the shared N of 354. Only Cisco has a higher presence in the data set. And you can see Cisco in the left lands just below that red dotted line. That's the top 10 in security. So if we were to combine Okta and Auth0 as one, Cisco would make the cut and earn four stars. Now, some other notables are CyberArk, which is just below the red line on the right most chart with an impressive 177 shared N. Again, if you combine Auth0 and Okta, CyberArk makes the four star grade because it's in the top 10 for net score on the left. And Sailpoint is another notable with a net score above 50% and it's got a shared N of 122, which is respectable. So despite the market's choppy waters, we're seeing some positive signs in the survey data for some of the more prominent names that we've been following for the last couple of years. So what does this mean for the markets going forward? As always, when we see these confusing signs we like to reach out to the network and one of the sharpest traders out there is Chip Simonton. We've quoted him before and we like to share some of his insights. And so we're going to highlight some of that here. So technically, almost every good tech stock is oversold. And as such, he suggested we might see a bounce here. We certainly are seeing that on this Friday, the 13th. But the right call tactically has been to sell into the rally these past several months, so we'll see what happens on Monday. The key issue with the name like Okta and some other momentum names like CrowdStrike and Zscaler is that when money comes back into tech, it's likely going to go to the FAANG stocks, the Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, and of course, you put Microsoft in there as well. And we'll see about Amazon, by the way, it's kind of out of favor right now, as everyone's focused on the retail side of the business meanwhile it's cloud business is booming and that's where all the profit is. We think that should be the real focus for Amazon. But the point is, for these momentum names in cybersecurity that don't make money, they face real headwinds, as growth is slowing overall and interest rates rise, that makes the net present value of these investments much less attractive. We've talked about that before. But longer term, we agree with Chip Simonton that these are excellent companies and they will weather the storm and we think they're going to lead their respective markets. And in cyber, we would expect continued M&A activity, which could act as a booster shot in the arms of these names. Now in 2019, we saw the ETR data, it pointed to CrowdStrike, Zscaler, Okta and others in the security space. Some of those names that really looked to us like they were moving forward and the pandemic just created a surge in these names and admittedly they got out over their skis. But the data suggests that these leading companies have continued momentum and the potential for stay in power. Unlike the SolarWinds hack, it seems at this point anyway that Okta will recover in the market. For the reasons that we cited, investors, they might stay away for some time but longer term, there's a shift in CSO security strategies that appear to be permanent. They're really valuing cloud-based modern platforms, these platforms will likely continue to gain share and carry their momentum forward. Okay, that's it for now, thanks to Stephanie Chan, who helps with the background research and with social, Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out and do some great work as well. Alex Morrison is on production and handles all of our podcast. Alex, thank you. And Rob Hof is our Editor in Chief at SiliconANGLE. Remember, all these episodes, they're available as podcast, you can pop in the headphones and listen, just search "Breaking Analysis Podcast." I publish each week on wikibon.com and SiliconANGLE.com. Don't forget to check out etr.ai, best in the business for real customer data. It's an awesome platform. You can reach me at dave.vellante@siliconangle.com or @dvellante. You can comment on our LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for the CUBEinsights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. And we'll see you next time. (bright upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Mobile World Congress is alive, theCUBE will be there and we'll certainly let you know if it's alive and well when we get on the ground. Now, as we approach a delayed mobile world congress, it's really appropriate to reflect in the state of the telecoms industry. Let's face it. Telcos have done of really good job of keeping us all connected during the pandemic, supporting work from home and that whole pivot, accommodating the rapid shift to landline traffic, securing the network and keeping it up and running but it doesn't change the underlying fundamental dilemma that Telco has faced. Telco is a slow growth, no growth industry, with revenue expectations in the low single digits. And at the same time network traffic continues to grow at 20% annually. And last year it grew at 40% to 50%. Despite these challenges, Telcos are still investing in the future. For example, the Telco industry collectively is selling out more than a trillion dollars in the first half of this decade on 5G and fiber infrastructure. And it's estimated that there are now more than 200 5G networks worldwide. But a lot of questions remain, not the least of which is, can and should Telcos go beyond connectivity and fiber. Can the Telcos actually monetize 5G or whatever's next beyond 5G? Or is that going to be left to the ecosystem? Now what about the ecosystem? How is that evolving? And very importantly, what role will the Cloud Hyperscalers play in Telco? Are they infrastructure on which the Telcos can build or are they going to suck the value out of the market as they have done in the enterprise? Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's Wiki Bond Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, it's my pleasure to welcome a long time telecoms industry analyst and colleague, and the founding director of Lewis Insight, Mr. Chris Lewis. Chris, welcome to the program. Thanks for coming on >> Dave, it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. >> It is really our pleasure. So, we're going to cover a lot of ground today. And first thing, we're going to talk about Mobile World Congress. I've never been, you're an expert at that and what we can expect. And then we're going to review the current state of telecoms infrastructure, where it should go. We're going to dig into transformation. Is it a mandate? Is it aspirational? Can Telcos enter adjacent markets in ways they haven't been able to in the past? And then how about the ecosystem? We're going to talk about that, and then obviously we're going to talk about Cloud as I said, and we'll riff a little bit on the tech landscape. So Chris, let's get into it, Mobile World Congress, it's back on, what's Mobile World Congress typically like? What's your expectation this year for the vibe compared to previous events? >> Well Dave, the issue of Mobile World Congress is always that we go down there for a week into Barcelona. We stress ourselves building a matrix of meetings in 30 minutes slots and we return at the end of it trying to remember what we'd been told all the way through. The great thing is that with the last time we had a live, with around 110,000 people there, you could see anyone and everyone you needed to within the mobile, and increasingly the adjacent industry and ecosystem. So, he gave you that once a year, big download of everything new, obviously because it's the Mobile World Congress, a lot of it around devices, but increasingly over the last few years, we saw many, many stands with cars on them because the connected car became an issue, a lot more software oriented players there, but always the Telcos, always the people providing the network infrastructure. Increasingly in the last few years people provided the software and IT infrastructure, but all of these people contributing to what the network should be in the future, what needs to be connected. But of course the reach of the network has been growing. You mentioned during lockdown about connecting people in their homes, well, of course we've also been extending that connection to connect things whether it's in the home or the different devices, monitoring of doorbells and lights and all that sort of stuff. And in the industry environment, connecting all of the robots and sensors. So, actually the perimeter, the remit of the industry to connect has been expanding, and so is the sort of remit of Mobile World Congress. So, we set an awful lot of different suppliers coming in, trying to attach to this enormous market of roughly $1.5 trillion globally. >> Chris, what's the buzz in the industry in terms of who's going to show up. I know a lot of people have pulled out, I've got the Mobile World Congress app and I can see who's attending. And it looks like quite a few people are going to go but what's your expectation? >> Well, from an analyst point of view, obviously I'm mainly keeping up with my clients and trying to get new clients. I'm looking at it and going most of my clients are not attending in person. Now, of course, we need the DSMA, we need Mobile World Congress for future for the industry interaction. But of course, like many people having adopted and adapted to be online, then they're putting a lot of the keynotes online, a lot of the activities will be online. But of course many of the vendors have also produced their independent content and content to actually deliver to us as analysts. So, I'm not sure who will be there. I like you, but you'll be on the ground. You'll be able to report back and let us know exactly who turned up. But from my point of view, I've had so many pre-briefs already, the difference between this year and previous years, I used to get loads of pre-briefs and then have to go do the briefs as well. So this year I've got the pre-brief so I can sit back, put my feet up and wait for your report to come back as to what's happening on the ground. >> You got it. Okay, let's get into a little bit and talk about Telco infrastructure and the state, where it is today, where it's going, Chris, how would you describe the current state of Telco infrastructure? Where does it need to go? Like, what is the ideal future state look like for Telcos in your view? >> So there's always a bit of an identity crisis when it comes to Telco. I think going forward, the connectivity piece was seen as being table stakes, and then people thought where can we go beyond connectivity? And we'll come back to that later. But actually to the connectivity under the scenario I just described of people, buildings, things, and society, we've got to do a lot more work to make that connectivity extend, to be more reliable, to be more secure. So, the state of the network is that we have been building out infrastructure, which includes fiber to connect households and businesses. It includes that next move to cellular from 4G to 5G. It obviously includes Wi-Fi, wherever we've got that as well. And actually it's been a pretty good state, as you said in your opening comments they've done a pretty good job keeping us all connected during the pandemic, whether we're a fixed centric market like the UK with a lot of mobile on top and like the US, or in many markets in Africa and Asia, where we're very mobile centric. So, the fact is that every country market is different, so we should never make too many assumptions at a very top level, but building out that network, building out the services, focusing on that connectivity and making sure we get that cost of delivery right, because competition is pushing us towards having and not ever increasing prices, because we don't want to pay a lot extra every time. But the big issue for me is how do we bring together the IT and the network parts of this story to make sure that we build that efficiency in, and that brings in many questions that we going to touch upon now around Cloud and Hyperscalers around who plays in the ecosystem. >> Well, as you know, Telco is not my wheelhouse, but hanging around with you, I've learned, you've talked a lot about the infrastructure being fit for purpose. It's easy from an IT perspective. Oh yeah, it's fossilized, it's hardened, and it's not really flexible, but the flip side of that coin is as you're pointing out, it's super reliable. So, the big talk today is, "Okay, we're going to open up the network, open systems, and Open RAN, and open everything and microservices and containers. And so, the question is this, can you mimic that historical reliability in that open platform? >> Well, for me, this is the big trade-off and in my great Telco debate every year, I always try and put people against each other to try and to literally debate the future. And one of the things we looked at was is a more open network against this desire of the Telcos to actually have a smaller supplier roster. And of course, as a major corporation, these are on a national basis, very large companies, not large compared to the Hyperscalers for example, but they're large organizations, and they're trying to slim down their organization, slim down the supplier ecosystem. So actually in some ways, the more open it becomes, the more someone's got to manage and integrate all those pieces together. And that isn't something we want to do necessarily. So, I see a real tension there between giving more and more to the traditional suppliers. The Nokia's, Ericsson's, Huawei's, Amdocs and so on, the Ciscos. And then the people coming in breaking new ground like Mavenir and come in, and the sort of approach that Rakuten and Curve taken in bringing in more open and more malleable pieces of smaller software. So yeah, it's a real challenge. And I think as an industry which is notorious for being slow moving, actually we've begun to move relatively quickly, but not necessarily all the way through the organization. We've got plenty of stuff sitting on major or mainframes still in the back of the organization. But of course, as mobile has come in, we've started to deal much more closely, uninteractively in real time, God forbid, with the customers. So actually, at that front end, we've had to do things a lot more quickly. And that's where we're seeing the quickest adaptation to what you might see in your IT environment as being much more, continuous development, continuous improvement, and that sort of on demand delivery. >> Yeah, and we're going to get to that sort of in the Cloud space, but I want to now touch on Telco transformation which is sort of the main theme of this episode. And there's a lot of discussion on this topic, can Telcos move beyond connectivity and managing fiber? Is this a mandate? Is it a pipe dream that's just aspirational? Can they attack adjacencies to grow beyond the 1% a year? I mean, they haven't been successful historically. What are those adjacencies that might be, an opportunity and how will that ecosystem develop? >> Sure. >> So Chris, can and should Telcos try to move beyond core connectivity? Let's start there. >> I like what you did there by saying pipe dreams. Normally, pipe is a is a negative comment in the telecom world. But pipe dream gives it a real positive feel. So can they move beyond connectivity? Well, first of all, connectivity is growing in terms of the number of things being connected. So, in that sense, the market is growing. What we pay for that connectivity is not necessarily growing. So, therefore the mandate is absolutely to transform the inner workings and reduce the cost of delivery. So, that's the internal perspective. The external perspective is that we've tried in many Telcos around the world to break into those adjacent markets, being around media, being enterprise, being around IOT, and actually for the most part they've failed. And we've seen some very significant recent announcements from AT&T, Verizon, BT, beginning to move away from, owning content and not delivering content, but owning content. And the same as they've struggled often in the enterprise market to really get into that, because it's a well-established channel of delivery bringing all those ecosystem players in. So, actually rather than the old Telco view of we going to move into adjacent markets and control those markets, actually moving into them and enabling fellow ecosystem players to deliver the service is what I think we're beginning to see a lot more of now. And that's the big change, it's actually learning to play with the other people in the ecosystem. I always use a phrase that there's no room for egos in the ecosystem. And I think Telcos went in initially with an ego thinking we're really important, we are on connectivity. But actually now they're beginning to approach the ecosystem things saying, "How can we support partners? How can we support everyone in this ecosystem to deliver the services to consumers, businesses and whomever in this evolving ecosystem?" So, there are opportunities out there, plenty of them, but of course, like any opportunity, you've got to approach it in the right way. You've got to get the right investment in place. You've got to approach it with the right open API so everyone can integrate with your approach, and approach it, do I say with a little bit of humility to say, "Hey, we can bring this to the table, how do we work together? >> Well, it's an enormous market. I think you've shared with me, it's like 1.4 trillion. And I want to stay on these adjacencies for a minute, because one of the obvious things that Telcos will talk about is managed services. And I know we have to be careful of that term in an IT context, that it's different in a, you're talking about managing connectivity, but there's professional services. That's a logical sort of extension of their business and probably a safe adjacency, maybe not even adjacency, but they're not going to get into devices. I mean, they'll resell devices, but they're not going to be, I would presume not go back to trying to make devices, but there's certainly the edge and that's so, it'll define in opaque, but it's huge. If there's 5G, there's the IT component and that's probably a partnership opportunity. And as you pointed out, there's the ecosystem, but I wonder, how do you think about 5G as an adjacency or indoor opportunity? Is it a revenue opportunity for Telcos or is that just something that is really aspirational? >> Oh, absolutely it's a revenue opportunity, but I prefer to think of 5G as being a sort of a metaphor for the whole future of telecom. So, we usually talk, and MWC would normally talk about 5G just as a mobile solution. Of course, what you can get with, you can use this fixed wireless access approach, where the roots that sits in your house or your building. So, it's a potential replacement for some fixed lines. And of course, it's also, gives you the ability to build out, let's say in a manufacturing or a campus environment, a private 5G network. So, many of the early opportunities we're seeing with 5G are actually in that more private network environment addressing those very low latency, and high bandwidth requirements. So yeah, there are plenty of opportunities. Of course, the question here is, is connectivity enough, or especially with your comment around the edge, at the edge we need to manage connectivity, storage, compute, analytics, and of course the applications. So, that's a blend of players. It's not going to be in the hands of one player. So yes, plenty of opportunities but understanding what comes the other way from the customer base, where that's, you and I in our homes or outward as an about, or from a business point of view, an office or a campus environment, that's what should be driving, and not the technology itself. And I think this is the trap that the industry has fallen into many times, is we've got a great new wave of technology coming, how can we possibly deliver it to everybody rather than listening to what the customers really require and delivering it in a way consumable by all those different markets. >> Yeah now, of course all of these topics blend together. We try to keep them separately, but we're going to talk about Cloud, we're going to talk about competition, But one of the areas that we don't have a specific agenda item on is, is data and AI. And of course there's all this data flowing through the network, so presumably it's an opportunity for the Telcos. At the same time, they're not considered AI experts. They do when you talk about Edge, they would appear to have the latency advantage because of the last mile and their proximity, to various end points. But the Cloud is sort of building out as well. How do you think about data and AI as an opportunity for Telco? >> I think the whole data and AI piece for me sits on top of the cake or pie, whatever you want to call it. What we're doing with all this connectivity, what we're doing with all these moving parts and gathering information around it, and building automation into the delivery of the service, and using the analytics, whether you call it ML or AI, it doesn't really matter. But actually using that information to deliver a better service, a better outcome. Now, of course, Telcos have had much of this data for years and years, for decades, but they've never used it. So, I think what's happening is, the Cloud players are beginning to educate many of the Telcos around how valuable this stuff is. And that then brings in that question of how do we partner with people using open APIs to leverage that data. Now, do the Telcos keep hold of all that data? Do they let the Cloud players do all of it? No, it's going to be a combination depending on particular environments, and of course the people owning their devices also have a vested interest in this as well. So, you've always got to look at it end to end and where the data flows are, and where we can analyze it. But I agree that analysis on the device at the Edge, and perhaps less and less going back to the core, which is of course the original sort of mandate of the Cloud. >> Well, we certainly think that most of the Edge is going to be about AI inferencing, and then most of the data is going to stay at the edge. Some will come back for sure. And that is big opportunity for whether you're selling compute or conductivity, or maybe storage as well, but certainly insights at the Edge. >> Everything. >> Yeah. >> Everything, yeah. >> Let's get into the Cloud discussion and talk about the Hyperscalers, the big Hyperscaler elephant in the room. We're going to try to dig into what role the Cloud will play in the transformation of telecoms on Telecom TV at the great Telco debate. You likened the Hyperscalers, Chris, to Dementors from Harry Potter hovering over the industry. So, the question is, are the Cloud players going to suck the value out of the Telcos? Or are they more like Dobby the elf? They're powerful, there's sometimes friendly but they're unpredictable. >> Thank you for extending that analogy. Yes, it got a lot of reaction when I use that, but I think it indicates some of the direction of power shift where, we've got to remember here that Telcos are fundamentally national, and they're restricted by regulation, and the Cloud players are global, perhaps not as global as they'd like be, but some regional restrictions, but the global players, the Hyperscalers, they will use that power and they they will extend their reach, and they are extending their reach. If you think they now command some fantastic global networks, in some ways they've replaced some of the Telco international networks, all the submarine investments that tend to be done primarily for the Hyperscalers. So, they're building that out. So, as soon as you get onto their network, then you suddenly become part of that environment. And that is reducing some of the spend on the longer distances we might have got in the past approaches from the Telcos. Now, does that mean they're going to go all the way down and take over the Telcos? I don't believe so, because it's a fundamentally different business digging fiber in people's streets and delivering to the buildings, and putting antennas up. So, they will be a coexistence. And in fact, what we've already seen with Cloud and the Hyperscalers is that they're working much more close together than people might imagine. Now, you mentioned about data in the previous question, Google probably the best known of the of the AI and ML delivers from the Cloud side, working with many of the Telcos, even in some cases to actually have all the data outsourced into the Google Cloud for analytics purposes. They've got the power, the heavy lifting to do that. And so, we begin to see that, and obviously with shifting of workloads as appropriate within the Telco networking environment, we're seeing that with AWS, and of course with Azure as well. And Azure of course acquired a couple of companies in affirmed and Metro switch, which actually do some of the formal 5G core and the likes there within the connectivity environment. So, it's not clean cuts. And to go back to the analogy, those Dementors are swooping around and looking for opportunities, and we know that they will pick up opportunities, and they will extend their reach as far as they can down to that edge. But of course, the edge is where, as you rightly say, the Telcos have the control, they don't necessarily own the customer. I don't believe anyone owns the customer in this digital environment, because digital allows you to move your allegiance and your custom elsewhere anyway. So, but they do own that access piece, and that's what's important from a national point of view, from an economic point of view. And that's why we've seen some of the geopolitical activity banning Huawei from certain markets, encouraging more innovation through open ecosystem plays. And so, there is a tension there between the local Telco, the local market and the Hyperscaler market, but fundamentally they've got an absolute brilliant way of working together using the best of both worlds to deliver the services that we need as an economy. >> Well, and we've talked about this you and I in the past where the Telcos, portions of the Telco network could move into the Cloud. And there of course the Telcos all run the big data centers, and portions of that IT infrastructure could move into the Cloud. But it's very clear, they're not going to give up the entire family jewels to the Cloud players. Why would they? But there are portions of their IT that they could move into. Particularly, in the front end, they want to build like everybody. They want to build an abstraction layer. They're not going to move their core systems and their backend Oracle databases, they're going to put a brick wall around those, but they wanted abstraction layer, and they want to take advantage of microservices and use that data from those transaction systems. But the web front end stuff makes sense to put into Cloud. So, how do you think about that? >> I think you've hit the nail on the head. So you can't move those big backend systems straight away, gradually over time, you will, but you've got to go for those easy wins. And certainly in the research I've been doing with many of my clients, they're suggested that front end piece, making sure that you can onboard customers more easily, you can get the right mix of services. You can provide the omnichannel interaction from that customer experience that everybody talks about, for which the industry is not very well known at all by the way. So, any improvement on that is going to be good from an MPS point of view. So yeah, leveraging what we might, what we call BSS OSS in the telecom world, and actually putting that into the Cloud, leveraging both the Hyperscalers, but also by the way, many of the traditional players who people think haven't moved Cloud wards, but they are moving Cloud wards and they're embracing microservices and Cloud native. So, what you would have seen if we'd been in person down in Barcelona next week, would be a lot of the vendors who perhaps traditionally seems a bit slow moving, actually have done a lot of work to move their portfolio into the Cloud and into Cloud native environments. And yes, as you say, we can use that front end, we can use the API openness that's developed by people at the TM forum, to actually make sure we don't have to do the backend straight away, do it over time. Because of course the thing that we're not touching upon here, is the revenue stream is a consistent revenue stream. So, just because you don't need to change the backend to keep your revenue stream going, this is on a new, it keeps delivering every month, we keep paying our 50, 40, whatever bucks a month into the Telco pot. That's why it's such a big market, and people aren't going to stop doing that. So, I think the dynamics of the industry, we often spend a lot of time thinking about the inner workings of it and the potential of adjacent markets, whereas actually, we keep paying for this stuff, we keep pushing revenue into the pockets of all the Telcos. So, it's not a bad industry to be in, even if they were just pushed back to be in the access market, it's a great business. We need it more and more. The elasticity of demand is very inelastic, we need it. >> Yeah, it's the mother of old golden geese. We don't have a separate topic on security, and I want to touch on security here, is such an important topic. And it's top of mind obviously for everybody, Telcos, Hyperscalers, the Hyperscalers have this shared responsibility model, you know it well. A lot of times it's really confusing for customers. They don't realize it until there has been a problem. The Telcos are going to be very much tuned into this. How will all this openness, and we're going to talk about technology in a moment, but how will this transformation in your view, in the Cloud, with the shared responsibility model, how will that affect the whole security posture? >> Security is a great subject, and I do not specialize in it. I don't claim to be an expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I would say security for me is a bit like AI and analytics. It's everywhere. It's part of everything. And therefore you cannot think of it as a separate add on issue. So, every aspect, every element, every service you build into your micro services environment has to think about how do you secure that connection, that transaction, how do you secure the customer's data? Obviously, sovereignty plays a role in that as well in terms of where it sits, but at every level of every connection, every hop that we look through, every route to jump, we've got to see that security is built in. And in some ways, it's seen as being a separate part of the industry, but actually, as we collapse parts of the network down, we're talking about bringing optical and rooting together in many environments, security should be talked about in the same breath. So when I talked about Edge, when I talked about connectivity, storage, compute, analytics, I should've said security as well, because I absolutely believe that is fundamental to every chain in the link and let's face it, we've got a lot of links in the chain. >> Yeah, 100%. Okay, let's hit on technologies and competition, we kind of blend those together. What technology should we be paying attention to that are going to accelerate this transformation. We hear a lot about 5G, Open RAN. There's a lot of new tech coming in. What are you watching? Who are the players that we maybe should be paying attention to, some that you really like, that are well positioned? >> We've touched upon it in various of the questions that have proceeded this. So, the sort of Cloudification of the networking environment is obviously really important. The automation of the process we've got to move away from bureaucratic manual processes within these large organizations, because we've got to be more efficient, we've got to be more reliable. So, anything which is related to automation. And then the Open RAN question is really interesting. Once again, you raised this topic of when you go down an Open RAN routes or any open route, it ultimately requires more integration. You've got more moving parts from more suppliers. So, therefore there are potential security issues there, depending on how it's defined, but everybody is entering the Open RAN market. There are some names that you will see regularly next week, being pushed, I'm not going to push them anymore, because some of them just attract the oxygen of attention. But there are plenty out there. The good news is, the key vendors who come from the more traditional side are also absolutely embracing that and accept the openness. But I think the piece which probably excites me more, apart from the whole shift towards Cloud and microservices, is the coming together, the openness between the IT environment and the networking environment. And you see it, for example, in the Open RAN, this thing called the RIC, the RAN Interconnection Controller. We're actually, we're beginning to find people come from the IT side able to control elements within the wireless controller piece. Now that that starts to say to me, we're getting a real handle on it, anybody can manage it. So, more specialization is required, but understanding how the end to end flow works. What we will see of course is announcements about new devices, the big guys like Apple and Samsung do their own thing during the year, and don't interrupt their beat with it with MWC, but you'll see a lot of devices being pushed by many other providers, and you'll see many players trying to break into the different elements of the market. But I think mostly, you'll see the people approaching it from more and more Cloudified angle where things are much more leveraging, that Cloud capability and not relying on the sort of rigid and stodgy infrastructure that we've seen in the past >> Which is kind of interesting because Cloud, a lot of the Clouds are Walled Gardens, at the same time they host a lot of open technologies, and I think as these two worlds collide, IT and the Telco industry, it's going to be interesting to see how the Telco developer ecosystem evolves. And so, that's something that we definitely want to watch. You've got a comment there? >> Yeah, I think the Telco developer they've not traditionally been very big in that area at all, have they? They've had their traditional, if you go back to when you and I were kids, the plain old telephone service was a, they were a one trick pony, and they've moved onto that. In some ways, I'd like them to move on and to have the one trick of plain old broadband that we just get broadband delivered everywhere. So, there are some issues about delivering service to all parts of every country, and obviously the globe, whether we do that through satellite, we might see some interesting satellite stuff coming out during NWC. There's an awful lot of birds flying up there trying to deliver signal back to the ground. Traditionally, that's not been very well received, with the change in generation of satellite might help do that. But we've known traditionally that a lot of developer activity in there, what it does bring to the four though, Dave, is this issue of players like the Ciscos and Junipers, and all these guys of the world who bring a developer community to the table as well. This is where the ecosystem play comes in, because that's where you get the innovation in the application world, working with channels, working with individual applications. And so it's opening up, it's basically building a massive fabric that anybody can tap into, and that's what becomes so exciting. So, the barriers to entry come down, but I think it will see us settling down, a stabilization of relationship between the Telcos and the Hyperscalers, because they need each other as we talked about previously, then the major providers, the Ciscos, Nokias, Ericssons, Huawei's, the way they interact with the Telcos. And then allowing that level of innovation coming in from the smaller players, whether it's on a national or a global basis. So, it's actually a really exciting environment. >> So I want to continue that theme and just talk about Telco in the enterprise. And Chris, on this topic, I want to just touch on some things and bring in some survey data from ETR, Enterprise Technology Research, our partner. And of course the Telcos, they've got lots of data centers. And as we talked about, they're going to be moving certain portions into the Cloud, lots of the front end pieces in particular, but let's look at the momentum of some of the IT players within the ETR dataset, and look at how they compare to some of the Telcos that ETR captures specifically within the Telco industry. So, we filtered this data on the Telco industry. So, this is our X, Y graph that we show you oftentimes on the vertical axis, is net score which measures spending momentum, and in the horizontal axis is market share, which is a measure of pervasiveness in the dataset. Now, this data is for shared accounts just in the Telco sector. So we filtered on certain sectors, like within the technology sectors, Cloud, networking, and so it's narrow, it's a narrow slice of the 1500. It respondents, it represents about 133 shared accounts. And a couple of things to jump right out. Within the Telco industry, it's no surprise, but Azure and AWS have massive presence on the horizontal axis, but what's notable as they score very highly in the vertical axis, with elevated spending velocity on their platforms within Telco. Google Cloud doesn't have as much of a presence, but it's elevated as well. Chris was talking about their data posture before, Arista and Verizon, along with VMware are also elevated, as is Aruba, which is HPEs networking division, but they don't have the presence on the horizontal axis. And you got Red Hat OpenStack is actually quite prominent in Telco as we've reported in previous segments. Is no surprise You see Akamai there. Now remember, this survey is weighted toward enterprise IT, so you have to take that into consideration, but look at Cisco, very strong presence, nicely elevated as is Equinox, both higher than many of the others including Dell, but you could see Dell actually has pretty respectable spending in Telco. It's an area that they're starting to focus on more. And then you got that cluster below, your Juniper, AT&T, Oracle, the rest of HPE TELUM and Lumen which is formerly, century link via IBM. Now again, I'm going to caution you. This is an enterprise IT heavy survey, but the big takeaway is the Cloud players have a major presence inside of firms that say they're in the telecommunications industry. And certain IT players like Cisco, VMware and Red Hat appear to be well positioned inside these accounts. So Chris, I'm not sure if any of this commentary resonates with you, but it seems that the Telcos would love to partner up with traditional IT vendors and Cloud players, and maybe find ways to grow their respective businesses. >> I think some of the data points you brought out there are very important. So yes, we've seen a Microsoft Azure and AWS very strong working with Telcos. We've seen Google Cloud platform actually really aggressively pushed into the market certainly the last 12, 24 months. So yeah, they're well positioned, and they all come from a slightly different background. As I said, the Google with this, perhaps more data centric approach in its analytics, tools very useful, AWS with this outpost reaching out, connecting out, and as you'll, with its knowledge of the the Microsoft business market certainly pushing into private networks as well, by the way. So yeah, and Cisco, of course in there does have, and it's a mass scale division, a lot of activity there, some of the people collapsing, some of that rooting an obstacle together, their big push on Silicon. So, what you've got here is a sort of cross representation of many of the different sorts of suppliers who are active in this market. Now Telcos is a big spenders, the telecom market, as we said, a $1.4 trillion market, they spend a lot, they probably have to double bubble spend at the moment to get over the hump of 5G investment, to build out fiber where they need to build out. So, any anything that relates to that is of course a major spending opportunity, a major market opportunity for players. And we know when you need the infrastructure behind it, whether it's in data centers or in their own data centers or in the Cloud to deliver against it. So, what I do like about this as an analyst, a lot of people would focus on one particular piece of the market. So you specialize on handsets, people specialize on home markets and home gateways. So, I tend to sit back and try and look at the big picture, the whole picture. And I think we're beginning to see some very good momentum where people are, where companies are building upon, of course their core business within the telecom industry, extending it out. But the lines of demarcation are blurring between enterprise, Telco, and indeed moving down into small business. And you think about the SD-WAN Market, which came from nowhere to build a much more flexible solution for connecting people over the wide area network, which has been brilliant during the pandemic, because it's allowed us to extend that to home, but be of course, build a campus ready for the future as well. So there are plenty of opportunities out there. I think the big question in my mind is always about from going into the Telco, as I said, whether they wannna reduce the number of suppliers on the roster. So that puts a question mark against some of the open approaches, and then from the Telco to the end customer, because it goes to the Telcos, 30% of their revenue comes from the enterprise market, 60% from the consumer market. How do they leverage the channel? Which includes all the channels, we talked about security, all of the IT stuff that you've already touched upon and the Cloud. It's going to be a very interesting mix and balancing act between different channels to get the services that the customers want. And I think increasingly, customers are more aware of the opportunities open to them to reach back into this ecosystem and say, "Yeah, I want a piece of humans to Telco, but I want it to come to me through my local integrated channel, because I need a bit of their expertise on security." So, fascinating market, and I think not telecom's no longer considered in isolation, but very much as part of that broader digital ecosystem. >> Chris, it's very hard to compress an analysis of a $1.4 trillion business into 30 or 35 minutes, but you're just the guy to help me do it. So, I got to really thank you for participating today and bringing your knowledge. Awesome. >> Do you know, it's my pleasure. I love looking at this market. Obviously I love analogies like Harry Potter, which makes it bring things to life. But at the end of the day, we as people, we want to be connected, we as business, we want to be connected, in society we want to be connected. So, the fundamental of this industry are unbelievably strong. Let's hope that governments don't mess with it too much. And let's hope that we get the right technology comes through, and help support that world of connectivity going forward. >> All right, Chris, well, I'll be texting you from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and many thanks to my colleague, Chris Lewis, he brought some serious knowledge today and thank you. And remember, I publish each week on wikibond.com and siliconangle.com. And these episodes are all available as podcasts. You just got to search for Breaking Analysis podcasts. You can always connect with me on twitter @dvellante or email me at dave.vellante@siliconangle.com. And you can comment on my LinkedIn post, and don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey data. This is Dave Vellante, for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Be well, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> UiPath has had a long, strange trip to IPO. How so you ask? Well, the company was started in 2005. But it's culture, is akin to a frenetic startup. The firm shunned conventions and instead of focusing on a narrow geographic area to prove its product market fit before it started to grow, it aggressively launched international operations prior to reaching unicorn status. Well prior, when it had very little revenue, around a million dollars. Today, more than 60% of UiPath business is outside of the United States. Despite its headquarters being in New York city. There's more, according to recent SEC filings, UiPath total revenue grew 81% last year. But it's free cash flow, is actually positive, modestly. Wait, there's more. The company raised $750 million in a Series F in early February, at a whopping $35 billion valuation. Yet, the implied back of napkin valuation, based on the number of shares outstanding after the offering multiplied by the proposed maximum offering price per share yields evaluation of just under 26 billion. (Dave chuckling) And there's even more to this crazy story. Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights, Powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis we'll share our learnings, from sifting through hundreds of pages (paper rustling) of UiPath's red herring. So you didn't have to, we'll share our thoughts on its market, its competitive position and its outlook. Let's start with a question. Mark Roberge, is a venture capitalist. He's a managing director at Stage 2 Capital and he's also a teacher, a professor at the B-School in Harvard. One of his favorite questions that he asks his students and others, is what's the best way to grow a company? And he uses this chart to answer that question. On the vertical axis is customer retention and the horizontal axis is growth to growth rate and you can see he's got modest and awesome and so forth. Now, so I want to let you look at it for a second. What's the best path to growth? Of course you want to be in that green circle. Awesome retention of more than 90% and awesome growth but what's the best way to get there? Should you blitz scale and go for the double double, triple, triple blow it out and grow your go to market team on the horizontal axis or should be more careful and focus on nailing retention and then, and only then go for growth? What do you think? What do you think most VCs would say? What would you say? When you want to maybe run the table, capture the flag before your competitors could get there or would you want to take a more conservative approach? What would Daniel Dines say the CEO of UiPath? Again, I'll let you think about that for a second. Let's talk about UiPath. What did they do? Well, I shared at the top that the company shunned conventions and expanded internationally, very rapidly. Well before it hit escape velocity and they grew like crazy and it got out of control and he had to reign it in, plug some holes, but the growth didn't stop, go. So very clearly based on it's performance and reading through the S1, the company has great retention. It uses a metric called gross retention rate which is at 96 or 97%, very high. Says customers are sticking with it. So maybe that's the right formula go for growth and grow like crazy. Let chaos reign, then reign in the chaos as Andy Grove would say. Go fast horizontally, and you can go vertically. Let me tell you what I think Mark Roberge would say, he told me you can do that. But churn is the silent killer of SaaS companies and perhaps the better path is to nail product market fit. And then your retention metrics, before you go into hyperbolic growth mode. There's all science behind this, which may be antithetical to the way many investors want to roll the dice and go for super growth, like go fast or die. Well, it worked for UiPath you might say, right. Well, no. And this is where the story gets even more interesting and long and strange for UiPath. As we shared earlier, UiPath was founded in 2005 out of Bucharest Romania. The company actually started as a software outsourcing startup. It called the company, DeskOver and it built automation libraries and SDKs for companies like Microsoft, IBM and Google and others. It also built automation scripts and developed importantly computer vision technology which became part of its secret sauce. In December 2015, DeskOver changed its name to UiPath and became a Delaware Corp and moved its headquarters to New York City a couple of years later. So our belief is that UiPath actually took the preferred path of Mark Roberge, five ticks North, then five more East. They slow-cooked for the better part of 10 years trying to figure out what market to serve. And they spent that decade figuring out their product market fit. And then they threw gas in the fire. Pretty crazy. All right, let's take a peak (chuckling) at the takeaways from the UiPath S1 the numbers are impressive. 580 million ARR with 65% growth. That asterisk is there because like you, we thought ARR stood for annual recurring revenue. It really stands for annualized renewal run rate. annualized renewal run rate is a metric that is one of UiPath's internal KPIs and are likely communicate that publicly over time. We'll explain that further in a moment. UiPath has a very solid customer base. Nearly 8,000, I've interviewed many of them. They're extremely happy. They have very high retention. They get great penetration into the fortune 500, around 63% of the fortune 500 has UiPath. Most of UiPath business around 70% comes from existing customers. I always say you're going to get more money out of existing customers than new customers but everybody's trying to go out and get new customers. But UiPath I think is taking a really interesting approach. It's their land and expand and they didn't invent that term but I'll come back to that. It kind of reminds me of the early days of Tableau. Actually I think Tableau is an interesting example. Like UiPath, Tableau started out as pretty much a point tool and it had, but it had very passionate customers. It was solving problems. It was simplifying things. And it would have bid into a company and grow and grow. Now the market fundamentals for UiPath are very good. Automation is super hot right now. And the pandemic has created an automation mandate to date and I'll share some data there as well. UiPath is a leader. I'm going to show you the Gartner Magic Quadrant for RPA. That's kind of a good little snapshot. UiPath pegs it's TAM at 60 billion dollars based on some bottoms up calculations and some data from Bain. Pre-pandemic, we pegged it at over 30 billion and we felt that was conservative. Post-pandemic, we think the TAM is definitely higher because of that automation mandate, it's been accelerated. Now, according to the S1, UiPath is going to raise around 1.2 billion. And as we said, if that's an implied valuation that is lower than the Series F, so we suspect the Series F investors have some kind of ratchet in there. UiPath needed the cash from its Series F investors. So it took in 750 million in February and its balance sheet in the S1 shows about 474 million in cash and equivalent. So as I say, it needed that cash. UiPath has had significant expense reductions that we'll show you in some detail. And it's brought in some fresh talent to provide some adult supervision around 70% of its executive leadership team and outside directors came to the company after 2019 and the company's S1, it disclosed that it's independent accounting firm identified last year what it called the "material weakness in our internal controls over financial report relating to revenue recognition for the fiscal year ending 2018, caused by a lack of oversight and technical competence within the finance department". Now the company outlined the steps it took to remediate the problem, including hiring new talent. However, we said that last year, we felt UiPath wasn't quite ready to go public. So it really had to get its act together. It was not as we said at the time, the well-oiled machine, that we said was Snowflake under Mike Scarpelli's firm operating guidance. The guy's the operational guru, but we suspect the company wants to take advantage of this mock market. It's a good time to go public. It needs the cash to bolster its balance sheet. And the public offering is going to give it cache in a stronger competitive posture relative to its main new competitor, autumn newbie competitor Automation Anywhere and the big whales like Microsoft and others that aspire and are watching what UiPath is doing and saying, hey we want a piece of that action. Now, one other note, UiPath's CEO Daniel Dines owns 100% of the class B shares of the company and has a 35 to one voting power. So he controls the company, subject of course to his fiduciary responsibilities but if UiPath, let's say it gets in trouble financially, he has more latitude to do secondary offerings. And at the same time, it's insulated from activist shareholders taking over his company. So lots of detail in the S1 and we just wanted to give you some of those highlights. Here are the pretty graphs. If whoever wrote this F1 was a genius. It's just beautiful. As we said, ARR, annualized renewal run rate all it does is it annualizes the invoice amount from subscriptions in the maintenance portion of the revenue. In other words, the parts that are recurring revenue, it excludes revenue from support and perpetual license. Like one-time licenses and services is just kind of the UiPath's and maybe that's some sort of legacy there. It's future is that recurring revenue. So it's pretty similar to what we think of as ARR, but it's not exact. Lots of customers with a growing number of six and seven figure accounts and a dollar-based net retention of 145%. This figure represents the rate of net expansion of the UiPath ARR, from existing listing customers over a 12 month period. Translation. This says UiPath's existing customers are spending more with the company, land and expand and we'll share some data from ETR on that. And as you can see, the growth of 86% CAGR over the past nine quarters, very impressive. Let's talk about some of the fundamentals of UiPath's business. Here's some data from the Brookings Institute and the OECD that shows productivity statistics for the US. The smaller charts in the right are for Germany and Japan. And I've shared some similar data before the US showed in the middle there. Showed productivity improvements with the personal productivity boom in the mid to late 90s. And it spilled into the early 2000s. But since then you can see it's dropped off quite significantly. Germany and Japan are also under pressure as are most developed countries. China's labor productivity might show declines but it's level, is at level significantly higher than these countries, April 16th headline of the Wall Street Journal says that China's GDP grew 18% this quarter. So, we've talked about the snapback in post-COVID and the post-isolation economy, but these are kind of one time bounces. But anyway, the point is we're reaching the limits of what humans can do alone to solve some of the world's most pressing challenges. And automation is one key to shifting labor away from these more mundane tasks toward more productive and more important activities that can deliver lasting benefits. This according to UiPath, is its stated purpose to accelerate human achievement, big. And the market is ready to be automated, for the most part. Now the post-isolation economy is increasingly going to focus on automation to drive toward activity as we've discussed extensively, I got to share the RPA Magic Quadrant where nearly everyone's a winner, many people are of course happy. Many companies are happy, just to get into the Magic Quadrant. You can't just, you have to have certain criteria. So that's good. That's what I mean by everybody wins. We've reported extensively on UiPath and Automation Anywhere. Yeah, we think we might shuffle the deck a little bit on this picture. Maybe creating more separation between UiPath and Automation Anywhere and the rest. And from our advantage point, UiPath's IPO is going to either force Automation Anywhere to respond. And I don't know what its numbers are. I don't know if it's ready. I suspect it's not, we'd see that already but I bet you it's trying to get there. Or if they don't, UiPath is going to extend its lead even further, that would be our prediction. Now personally, I would have Pegasystems higher on the vertical. Of course they're not an IPO, RPA specialist, so I kind of get what Gartner is doing there but I think they're executing well. And I'd probably, in a broader context I'd probably maybe drop blue prism down a little bit, even though last year was a pretty good year for the company. And I would definitely have Microsoft looming larger up in the upper left as a challenger more than a visionary in my opinion, but look, Gartner does good work and its analysts are very deep into this stuff, deeper than I am. So I don't want to discount that. It's just how I see it. Let's bring in the ETR data and show some of the backup here. This is a candlestick chart that shows the components of net score, which is spending momentum, however, ETR goes out every quarter. Says you're spending more, you're spending less. They subtract the lesses from the mores and that's net score. It's more complicated than that, but that's that blue line that you see in the top and yes it's trending downward but it's still highly elevated. We'll talk about that. The market share is in the yellow line at the bottom there. That green represents the percentage of customers that are spending more and the reds are spending less or replacing. That gray is flat. And again, even though UiPath's net score is declining, it's that 61%, that's a very elevated score. Anything over 40% in our view is impressive. So it's, UiPath's been holding in the 60s and 70s percents over the past several years. That's very good. Now that yellow line market share, yes it dips a bit, but again it's nuanced. And this is because Microsoft is so pervasive in the data stat. It's got so many mentions that it tends to somewhat overwhelm and skew these curves. So let's break down net score a little bit. Here's another way to look at this data. This is a wheel chart we show this often it shows the components of net score and what's happening here is that bright red is defection. So look at it, it's very small that wouldn't be churn. It's tiny. Remember that it's churn is the killer for software companies. And so that forest green is existing customers spending more at 49%, that's big. That lime green is new customers. So again, it's from the S1, 70% of UiPath's revenue comes from existing customers. And this really kind of underscores that. Now here's more evidence in the ETR data in terms of land and expand. This is a snapshot from the January survey and it lines up UiPath next to its competitors. And it cuts the data just on those companies that are increasing spending. It's so that forest green that we saw earlier. So what we saw in Q1 was the pace of new customer acquisition for UiPath was decelerating from previous highs. But UiPath, it shows here is outpacing its competition in terms of increasing spend from existing customers. So we think that's really important. UiPath gets very high scores in terms of customer satisfaction. There's, I've talked to many in theCUBE. There's places on the web where we have customer ratings. And so you want to check that out, but it'll confirm that the churn is low, satisfaction is high. Yeah, they get dinged sometimes on pricing. They get dinged sometimes, lately on service cause they're growing so fast. So, maybe they've taken the eye off the ball in a couple of counts, but generally speaking clients are leaning in, they're investing heavily. They're creating centers of excellence around RPA and automation, and UiPath is very focused on that. Again, land and expand. Now here's further evidence that UiPath has a strong account presence, even in accounts where its competitors are presence. In the 149 shared accounts from the Q1 survey where UiPath, Automation Anywhere and Microsoft have a presence, UiPath's net score or spending velocity is not only highly elevated, it's relative momentum, is accelerating compared to last year. So there's some really good news in the numbers but some other things stood out in the S1 that are concerning or at least worth paying attention to. So we want to talk about that. Here is the income statement and look at the growth. The company was doing like 1 million dollars in 2015 like I said before. And when it started to expand internationally it surpassed 600 million last year. It's insane growth. And look at the gross profit. Gross margin is almost 90% because revenue grew so rapidly. And last year, its cost went down in some areas like its services, less travel was part of that. Now jump down to the net loss line. And normally you would expect a company growing at this rate to show a loss. The street wants growth and UiPath is losing money, but it's net loss went from 519 million, half a billion down to only 92 million. And that's because the operating expenses went way down. Now, again, typically a company growing at this rate would show corresponding increases in sales and marketing expense, R&D and even G&A but all three declined in the past 12 months. Now reading the notes, there was definitely some meaningful savings from no travel and canceled events. UiPath has great events around the world. In fact theCUBE, Knock Wood is going to be at its event in October, in Las Vegas at the Bellagio . So we're stoked for that. But, to drop expenses that precipitously with such high growth, is kind of strange. Go look at Snowflake's income statement. They're in hyper-growth as well. We like to compare it to Snowflake is a very well-run company and it's in hyper-growth mode, but it's sales and marketing and R&D and G&A expense lines. They're all growing along with that revenue. Now, perhaps they're growing at a slower rate. Perhaps the percent of revenue is declining as it should as they achieve operating leverage but they're not shrinking in absolute dollar terms as shown in the UiPath S1. So either UiPath has applied some magic automation mojo to it's business (chuckling). Like magic beans or magic grits with my cousin Vinny. Maybe it has found the Holy grail of operating leverage. It's a company that's all about automation or the company was running way too hot on the expense side and had a cut and clean up its income statement for the IPO and conserve some cash. Our guess is the latter but maybe there's a combination there. We'll give him the benefit of the doubt. And just to add a bit more to this long, strange trip. When have you seen an explosive growth company just about to go public, show positive cashflow? Maybe it's happened, but it's rare in the tech and software business these days. Again, go look at companies like Snowflake. They're not showing positive cashflow, not yet anyway. They're growing and trying to run the table. So you have to ask why is UiPath operating this way? And we think it's because they were so hot and burning cash that they had to reel things in a little bit and get ready to IPO. It's going to be really interesting to see how this stock reacts when it does IPO. So here's some things that we want you to pay attention to. We have to ask. Is this IPO, is it window dressing? Or did UiPath again uncover some new productivity and operating leverage model. I doubt there's anything radically new here. This company doesn't want to miss the window. So I think it said, okay, let's do this. Let's get ready for IPO. We got to cut expenses. It had a lot of good advisors. It surrounded itself with a new board. Extended that board, new management, and really want to take advantage of this because it needs the cash. In addition, it really does want to maintain its lead. It's got Automation Anywhere competing with it. It's got Microsoft looming large. And so it wants to continue to lead. It's made some really interesting acquisitions. It's got very strong vision as you saw in the Gartner Magic Quadrant and obviously it's executing well but it's really had to tighten things up. So we think it's used the IPO as a fortune forcing function to really get its house in order. Now, will the automation mandate sustain? We think it will. The forced match to digital worked, it was effective. It wasn't pleasant, but even in a downturn we think it will confer advantage to automation players and particularly companies like UiPath that have simplified automation in a big way and have done a great job of putting in training, great freemium model and has a culture that is really committed to the future of humankind. It sounds ambitious and crazy but talk to these people, you'll see it's true. Pricing, UiPath had to dramatically expand or did dramatically expand its portfolio and had to reprice everything. And I'm not so worried about that. I think it'll figure that pricing out for that portfolio expansion. My bigger concern is for SaaS companies in general. I don't like SaaS pricing that has been popularized by Workday and ServiceNow, and Salesforce and DocuSign and all these companies that essentially lock you in for a year or two and basically charge you upfront. It's really is a one-way street. You can't dial down. You can only dial up. It's not true Cloud pricing. You look at companies like Stripe and Datadog and Snowflake. It is true Cloud pricing. It's consumption pricing. I think the traditional SaaS pricing model is flawed. It's very unfairly weighted toward the vendors and I think it's going to change. Now, the reason we put cloud on the chart is because we think Cloud pricing is the right way to price. Let people dial up and dial down, let them cancel anytime and compete on the basis of your product excellence. And yeah, give them a price concession if they do lock in. But the starting point we think should be that flexibility, pay by the drink. Cancel anytime. I mentioned some companies that are doing that as well. If you look at the modern SaaS startups and the forward-thinking VCs they're really pushing their startups to this model. So we think over time that the term lock-in model is going to give way to true consumption-based pricing and at the clients option, allow them to lock-in for a better price, way better model. And UiPath's Cloud revenue today is minimal but over time, we think it's going to continue to grow that cloud. And we think it will force a rethink in pricing and in revenue recognition. So watch for that. How is the street going to react to Daniel Dines having basically full control of the company? Generally, we feel that that solid execution if UiPath can execute is going to outweigh those concerns. In fact, I'm very confident that it will. We'll see, I kind of like what the CEO says has enough mojo to say (chuckling) you know what, I'm not going to let what happened to for instance, EMC happen to me. You saw Michael Dell do that. You saw just this week they're spinning out VMware, he's maintaining his control. VMware Dell shareholders get get 40.44 shares for every Dell share they're holding. And who's the biggest shareholder? Michael Dell. So he's, you got two companies, one chairman. He's controlling the table. Michael Dell beat the great Icahn. Who beats Carl Icahn? Well, Michael Dell beats Carl Icahn. So Daniel Dines has looked at that and says, you know what? I'm not just going to give up my company. And the reason I like that with an if, is that we think will allow the company to focus more on the long-term. The if is, it's got to execute otherwise it's so much pressure and look, the bottom line is that UiPath has really favorable market momentum and fundamentals. But it is signing up for the 90 day short clock. The fact that the CEO has control again means they can look more long term and invest accordingly. Oftentimes that's easier said than done. It does come down to execution. So it is going to be fun to watch (chuckling). That's it for now, thanks to the community for your comments and insights and really always appreciate your feedback. Remember, I publish each week on Wikibon.com and siliconangle.com and these episodes are all available as podcasts. All you got to do is search for the Breaking Analysis podcast. You can always connect with me on Twitter @dvellante or email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com or comment on my LinkedIn posts. And we'll see you in clubhouse. Follow me and get notified when we start a room, which we've been doing with John Furrier and Sarbjeet Johal and others. And we love to riff on these topics and don't forget, please check out etr.plus for all the survey action. This is Dave Vellante, for theCUBE Insights Powered by ETR. Be well everybody. And we'll see you next time. (gentle upbeat music)

>> From the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston bringing you data-driven insights from the cube in ETR. This is breaking analysis with Dave Vellante. >> There are four A players, in the IS slash pass hyperscale cloud services space, AWS, Azure, Alibaba, and alphabet, pretty clever, huh? In our view, these four have the resources, the momentum, and stamina to outperform all others virtually indefinitely. Now combined, we believe these companies will generate more than $115 billion in 2021 IaaS and PaaS revenue. That is a substantial chunk of market opportunity that is growing as a whole in the mid 30% range in 2021. Welcome to this week's Wiki bond cube insights, powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we are initiating coverage of Alibaba for our IaaS and PaaS market segments. And we'll update you on the latest hyperscale cloud market data, and survey data from ETR. Big week in hyperscale cloud land, Amazon and alphabet reported earnings and AWS CEO Andy Jassy was promoted to lead Amazon overall. I interviewed John Furrier on the cube this week. John has a close relationship with Jassy and a unique perspective on these developments. And we simulcast the interview on clubhouse, and then hosted a two hour clubhouse room that brought together all kinds of great perspectives on the topic. And then, we took the conversation to Twitter. Now in that discussion, we were just riffing on our updated cloud estimates and our numbers. And here's this tweet that inspired the addition of Alibaba. Now this gentleman is a tech journalist out of New Delhi and he pointed out that we were kind of overlooking Alibaba and I responded that no, we do not just discounting them but we just need to do more homework in the company's cloud business. He also said we're ignoring IBM, but really they're not in this conversation as a hyperscale IaaS competitor to the big four in our view. And we'll just leave it at that for now on IBM, but, back to Alibaba and the big four, we actually did some homework. So thank you for that suggestion. And this chart shows our updated IaaS figures and includes the full year 2020 which was pretty close to our Q4 projections. You know, the big change is we've added Alibaba in the mix. Now these four companies last year, accounted for $86 billion in revenue, and they grew it 41% rate combined relative to 2019. Now, notably as your revenue for the first time is more than half of that of AWS's revenue which of course hit over $45 billion. AWS's revenue, over top 45 billion last year, which is just astounding. Alibaba you'll note, is larger than Google cloud. The Google cloud platform, I should say GCP, at just over eight billion for Alibaba. Now, the reason Baba is such a formidable competitor, is because the vast majority of its revenue comes from China inside that country. And the company do have plans to continue their international expansion, so we see Alibaba as a real force here. Their cloud business showed positive EBITDA for the first time in the history of the company last quarter. So that has people excited. Now, Google, as we've often reported, is far behind AWS and Azure, despite its higher growth rates Google's overall cloud business lost 5.6 billion in 2020 which has some people concerned. We on the other hand are thrilled, because as we've reported in our view, Google needs to get its head out of its ads cloud is it's future. And we're very excited about the company pouring investments into its cloud business. Look with $120 billion essentially in the balance sheet, we can think of a better use of its cash. Now, I want to stress that these figures are our best efforts to create an apples to apples comparison across all four clouds. Many people have asked about, how much of these figures represent, for example, Microsoft office 365 or Google G suite, which by the way now is called workspaces. And the answer is our intention is $0. These are our estimates of worldwide IaaS in PaaS revenue. You know, some of said, we're too low. Some of said, we're too high. Hey, if you have better numbers, Please share them, happy to have a look. Now you maybe asking, what are the drivers of these figures and the growth that we're showing here? Well, all four of these companies, of course, they're benefiting from an accelerated shift to digital as a result to COVID, but each one has other tailwinds. You know, for example, AWS, it's Capitalizing on its a large headstart. It's created tremendous brand value. And as well, despite the fact that, while we estimate that more than 75% of AWS revenue comes from compute and storage, AWS is feature and functional differentiation combined with this large ecosystem is a very much a driving force of it's growth. In the case of Azure, in addition to its captive software application estate, the company on its earnings calls cited strong growth in its consumption based business across all of its industries and customer segments. As we've said, many times, Microsoft makes it really easy for customers to tap into Azure and a true consumption pricing model, with no minimums and cancel any time. Those kinds of terms make it extremely attractive to experiment and get hooked. We certainly saw this with AWS over the years. Now for Google it's growth is being powered by its outstanding technology, and in particular its prowess in AI and analytics. As well we suspect that much of the losses in Google cloud are coming from large go to market investments for Google cloud platform, and they're paying growth dividends. Now, as Tim Crawford said on Twitter, 6 billion, you know that's not too shabby. Also Google cited wins at Wayfair in Etsy, that Google is putting forth in our view to signal that many retailers they might be are you reluctant to do business with Amazon, was of course a big retailer competitor. These are two high profile names, we'd like to see more in future quarters and likely will. Now let's give you another view of this data and paint a picture of, how the pie is being carved out in the market. Actually we'll use bars because my, millennials sounding boards they hate pie charts. And I like to pay attention, to these emerging voices. At any rate amongst these four, AWS has more than half of the market. AWS and Azure are well ahead of the rest. And we think we'll continue to hold serve for quite some time. Now while we're impressed with Alibaba, they're currently constrained to doing business mostly in China. And we think it'll take many years for Baba and GCP to close that gap on the two leaders if they'll ever even get there. Now let's take a look at, what the customers are saying within the ETR survey data. The chart that we're showing here, this is X, Y chart that we show all the time. It's got net score or spending moments on the vertical axis, and market share or the pervasiveness in the datasets in the survey on the horizontal axis. Now on the upper right, you can see the net scores and the number of mentions for each company and the detailed behind this data. And what we've done here is cut the January survey data of 1,262 respondents, you can see that in filtered in there on the left, and we've filtered the data by cloud meaning the respondents are answering about the companies, cloud computing offerings only. So we're filtering out anything of the non-cloud spend. That's a nice little capability of the ETR platform. Azure is really quite amazing to us. It's got a net score of 72.6%, and that's across 572 responses out of the 1262. AWS is the next most pervasive in the data set with 492 shared accounts and a net score of 57.1%. Now, you may be wondering, well, why is Azure bigger in the dataset than AWS? And when we just told you that the opposite is the case in the market in the previous slide. And the answer is, like this is a survey and it's a lot of Microsoft out there, they're everywhere. And I have no doubt that the respondants notion of cloud doesn't directly map into IaaS and PaaS views of the world, but the trends are clear and consistent. Amazon and Azure, they dominate in this market space. Now for context, we've included functions in the form of AWS Lambda as your functions and Google cloud functions. Because, as you can see, there's a lot of spending momentum in these capabilities in these services. You'll also note, that we've added Alibaba to this chart, and it's got a respectable 63.6% net Score, but there are only 11 shared responses in the data. So they'll go into the bank on these numbers, but look, 11 data points, we'll take it. It's better than zero data points. We've also added VMware cloud on AWS in this chart, and you can see that, that capability that service, that has the momentum and you can see those ones that we've highlighted above the 40% red dotted line, that's where the real action in the market is. So all of those offerings have very strong or strong spending velocity in the ETR data set. Now, for context, we've put Oracle and IBM in the chart. And you can see, they both have, you know they've got a decent presence in the data set. They have 132 mentions and 81 responses respectively. So Oracle, they've got a positive net score of 16.7%, and IBM is in a negative 6.2%. Now, remember this is for their cloud offerings, as the respondents in the data set see them. So what does this mean? It says that among the 132 survey respondents answering that they use Oracle cloud, 16.7% more customers are spending more on Oracle's cloud than are spending less. In the case of IBM, it says more customers are spending less than spending more. Both companies are in the red zone, and show far less momentum than the leaders. Look, I've said many times that the good news is, that Oracle and IBM at least have clouds. But they're not direct competitors of the big four in our view, there just not. They have a large software business, and they can migrate their customers, to their respective clouds and market hybrid cloud services. Their definition of cloud is most certainly different than that of AWS, which is fine, but both companies use what I call a kitchen sink method of reporting their cloud business. Oracle includes, cloud and license support, often with revenue recognition at the time of contract, With a term that's renewable and, it also includes on-prem fees, for things like database and middleware, and if, you want to call that cloud, fine. IBM is just as bad, maybe they're worse and includes so much legacy stuff and its cloud number to hide the ball. It's just not even worth trying to unpack for this episode, I have previously and frankly, it's just not a good use of time. Now, as I've said before, both companies they're in the game that can make good money provisioning infrastructure to support their respective software businesses. I just don't consider them hyperscale class clouds which are defined by the big four, and really only those four. And I'm sure I'll get hate mail about that statement, and I'm happy to defend that position, so please reach out. Okay, but one other important thing that we want to discuss is something that came up this week in our Twitter conversation. Here's a tweet from Matt Baker who had strategic planning for Dell. He was responding to someone who commented on our cloud data, basically saying that, with all that cloud revenue who took the hit, which pockets did it come out of, and Matt was saying, look, it's coming out of customer pockets, but can we please end this zero sum game narrative. In other words, it's not a dollar for cloud that doesn't translate into a lost dollar from on-prem for the legacy companies. So let's take a look at that. For first I would agree, with Matt Baker, it's not a one for one swap of spend but there's definitely been an impact. And here's some data from ETR that can, maybe give us some insight here. What this chart shows is a cut of 915 hyperscale cloud accounts. So within those big four, and within those accounts we show the spending velocity or net score cut within further sectors representative of these on-prem players. So servers, storage and networking, so we cut the data on those three segments. And we're looking here at, VMware, Cisco, Dell, HPE, and IBM, for 2020 and into 2021. It's kind of an interesting picture, it shows the net scores for the January of 20 April, July and October 20 surveys and the January 21 surveys. Now all the on-prem players, they were of course impacted by COVID, IBM seems to be that counter trend line. Not that they weren't impacted, but they have this notable mainframe cycle thing going on. And you know, they're in a down cycle now. So it's kind of opposite of the other guys in terms of the survey momentum. And you can see pretty much, all the others are showing upticks headed into 2021, Cisco, you know kind of flattish, but stable and held up a bit. So to Matt Baker's point, despite the 35% or so growth expected for the big four and 2021 the on-prem leaders are showing some signs of positive spending momentum. So let's dig into this a little bit further, 'cause we're not saying cloud hasn't hurt on prem spending. You know, of course it has. Here's that same picture, over a 10 year view. So you're seeing this long, slow, decline occur, and it's no surprise. If you think about the prevailing model for servers, storage, and networking, on prem in particular. Servers have been perpetually under utilized, even with virtualization. You know, with the exception of like backup jobs, there aren't many workloads that can max out server utilization. So we kept buying more servers to give us performance headroom and ran at 20, 30% utilization, you know in a good day. Yes I know some folks can get up over 50%, but generally speaking servers are well under utilized in storage my gosh, it's kind of the same story, maybe even worse. Because for years it was powered by a mechanical system. So more spindles are required to gain performance, lots of copying going on, lots of, you know, pre-flash waste. And in networking it was a story of got to buy more ports. You've got to buy more ports. In the case of these segments, customers will just defense essentially, forced in this endless cycle of planning, procuring, you know, first planning. They got to get the secure the CapEx, and then they procure, and then they over-provision, and then they manage, you know, ongoing. So then along comes AWS, and says, try this on for size and you can see from that chart, the impact of cloud on those bellwether on-prem infrastructure players. Now, just to give you a little bit more insight on this topic, here's a picture of the wheel charts from the ETR data set. For AWS Microsoft, Google, and we brought in VMware to compare them. A wheel chart shows the percent of customers saying they'll either add a platform new that's the lime green. Increased spending by more than 5%, that's the forest green spend flat relative to last year. That's the gray spend less by more than 5% down, that's the pinkish or leave the platform, that's the Bright red. You subtract the red from the green and you get a percentage that represents net score, AWS with a net score of 60% is off the charts good. Microsoft remember, this includes the entire Microsoft business portfolio, not just Azure, so it's still really strong. Google, frankly, we'd like to see higher net scores and VMware's, you know, so there's a gold standard for on-prem. So we include them, so you can see for reference the strong, but notice they got a much, much bigger flat spending, which is what you would expect from some of these more mature players. Now let's compare these scores to the other, on-prem Kings. So this is not surprising to see, but the greens, they go down, the flats that gray area goes up compared to the cloud guys and the red which is virtually non-existent within AWS, goes into the high teens with the exception of Cisco which despite its exposure to virtually all industries including those hard hit by COVID shows pretty low read scores. So that's, that's good. And I got to share one other, look at this wheel chart for pure storage. We're not really not sure what's happening here, but this is impressive. We're seeing a huge rebound, and you can see we've superimposed as candlestick over comparing previous quarters surveys and, look at the huge up check in the January survey for pure that blue line. That's highlighted in that red dot at ellipse, jumps to a 63% net score from below 20% last quarter. You know, we'll see, I've never seen that kind of uptick before for an established company. And, you know, maybe it's pent up demand or some other anomaly in the data. We'll find out when pure reports in 2021, because remember these are forward looking surveys. But the point is, you still see action going on in hybrid and on-prem, and despite the freight train that is cloud, coming at the legacy players. You know, not that pure is legacy, but it's, you know, it's no longer a lanky teenager. And I think the bottom line, coming back to Matt Baker's point, is there are opportunities that the on-prem players can pursue in hybrid and multi-cloud, and we've talked about this a lot where you're building abstraction layer, on top of the hyperscale clouds and letting them build out their data center presence worldwide, spend on capex, they're going to outspend everybody. And these guys, these on-prem, and hybrid and multi-cloud folks they're going to have to add value on top of that. Now if they move fast, you no doubt there'll be acquiring startups to make that happen. They're going to have to put forth the value proposition and execute on that, in a way that adds clear value above and beyond what the hyperscalers are going to do. Now, the challenge, is picking those right spots, moving fast enough and balancing wall street promises with innovation. There's that same old dilemma. Let's face It. Amazon for years could lose tons of money and not get killed in the street. Google, they got so much cash, they can't spend it fast enough and Microsoft after years of going sideways is finally figured out and the some. Alibaba they're new to our analysis, but it's looking like you know, it's the Amazon of China, Plus ANT despite its regulatory challenges with the Chinese government. So all four of these players, are in the driver's seat in our view. And they're leading in not only cloud, but AI. And of course the data keeps flowing into their cloud. So they're really are in a strong position. Bottom line is we're still early into the cloud platform era and it's morphing. It's from a collection of remote cloud services, into this ubiquitous, sensing, thinking, anticipatory system, that's increasingly automated and working towards full automation. It's intelligent and it's hyper decentralizing toward the edge. One thing's for sure, the next 10 years, they're not going to be the same as the past 10. Okay, that's it for now. Remember I publish each week on Wikibond.com and siliconANGLE.com, these episodes they're all available as podcasts just search for breaking analysis podcast. You can always connect on Twitter. I'm @dvellante or email me at david.Vellante@siliconANGLE.com. I love the comments on LinkedIn and of course in clubhouse the new social app. So please follow me, so that you can get notified when we start a room and riff on these topics. And don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey action. This is Dave Vellante for the cube insights powered by ETR be well, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

from the cube studios in palo alto in boston bringing you data driven insights from the cube and etr this is breaking analysis with dave vellante as we watch an historic election unfold before our eyes we look back at the early days of the millennium with the memorable presidential race of 2000 that decade of course was defined by 911 which permanently reshaped our thinking and we exited that decade at the tail end of a massive financial crisis only to enter the 2010s with the hope and the momentum of fiscal stimulus a flat globe job growth and very importantly the ascendancy of the cloud cloud computing unquestionably powered the innovation engine over the last 10 years and the pandemic marks a new era where adoption of cloud data and ai have been accelerated by at least two to three years and that's what's going to shape the future of the technology industry and frankly all businesses and organizations hello everyone and welcome to this week's episode of thecube insights powered by etr in this breaking analysis we're going to update you on our latest cloud market share and dig in to some fresh october survey data from our partners over at etr let me start just with a brief summary of the latest action that's going on in cloud now quite interestingly each of the big three cloud players they showed nearly identical year-on-year growth rates in q3 as they did in q2 now we're going to dig into that in a moment but our data suggests that these three companies combined will account for more than 75 billion dollars in infrastructure as a service and platform as a service revenue in 2020 and they're potentially on track to hit 100 billion in 2021. customer survey data indicates that cio's top two infrastructure priorities remain security and cloud migration now that said as we previously reported the cloud it's not immune to the pandemic the remote worker pivot well it's a positive for cloud hasn't completely eradicated certain headwinds now what i mean here is that because the cloud vendors are now so large they're somewhat exposed to the softness in the overall i.t spending climate and also industries that have been hit hardest by the pandemic now would the cloud growth have been better if the pandemic didn't hit we'll never know for sure but our data suggests no covet has definitely been a benefactor to cloud in our view cloud will remain at the center of technological innovation for the foreseeable future the economics of cloud are becoming so compelling that we think the power of the big cloud companies will only increase this decade now importantly we're talking about the costs of running hyper-distributed systems we're not commenting here on what they charge customers that's a different story we believe the cost structure for the hyperscalers is superior to alternative approaches and we believe this advantage will only accelerate over the next several years we also believe that competition is going to continue to drive competitive pricing and innovation all right let's look at our latest market share numbers for the big three this chart shows our estimates of aws azure and the google cloud platform now viewers of this program know that these are is and pass figures and you also know that aws is the only company that provides clean numbers on that sector whereas azure and gcp are estimates that we make based on tidbits of guidance that the companies give us and survey data that we capture and other modeling that we do now as we've said we'll end this year it's about 75 billion in revenue or maybe even a little bit more note that for these three note that we've we've slightly restated some of our earlier estimates for azure to reconcile some differences that we had between constant currency and actual growth we try to keep things in constant currency where possible sorry for that but sometimes that happens azure according to our estimates as we reported last week is now 18 of microsoft's overall revenue number we had it at 19 that last week but when i dug in we made some adjustments so we toned it down a bit aws represents a much smaller percentage of course of amazon's revenues at about 12 percent but it represents 56 percent of amazon's profits gcp on the other hand accounts for less than five percent of google's overall revenue which as we've stated a few weeks ago needs more attention from google but look at the growth rates for these three platforms and the respective size of their is and pass businesses hear all this talk about repatriation i.e that what i mean by that is people go to the cloud but they're unhappy or the bill is too high it's too expensive so then they come back on prem well you just don't see that in the numbers so you gotta be careful when vendor a vendor tries to sell you on that trend i don't buy it except for selective situations now let's bring in some of the etr data and compare the spending momentum for each of the big three you've seen these wheel graphs before they show the breakdown of net score for aws microsoft and google now one note these figures represent these three companies overall within the etr technology taxonomy so for example they don't include amazon's retail business of course but they do include for example microsoft's entire tech portfolio not just the cloud the green portion of the wheel represents increases in spending via new adoptions and increased spending whereas the red sections show decreases via lower spending and defections net score which i've highlighted in the orange is calculated by subtracting the two reds from the two true greens in other words adoptions and increase minus decrease and replacements the takeaway here is these are all pretty strong with aws leading the pack microsoft is exceptionally strong as we pointed out last last week because they're so huge and they still have net scores comparable to aws which is a pure play gcp is a laggard and is showing softness in the data despite a sanguine outlook that we had back in 2019 based on survey data i don't know perhaps google's smaller presence muted their customers ability to take advantage of the platform the thinking there is the customers maybe needed to pivot to the cloud so quickly and aws and azure were the incumbents and that was maybe the most expedient path hence the higher increases in the spend more category but you do see gcp um they had 13 new adoptions which is pretty good so we'll keep looking at that regardless again these are not pure play cloud comparisons but they give a good indication of spending momentum i'd also note that all three show very low defections well each is showing solid increases in new adoptions especially google as i mentioned so that's kind of interesting to see but again google much much smaller you would expect that now i want to turn our attention to one of the hottest areas in cloud which is serverless and this is a pure play comparison so serverless let me start there it's a strange term because it's not really accurate but it's stuck serverless computing is a model where the cloud platform dynamically delivers services as the application requires so so you don't have to configure the compute and the containers for example rather when an application needs resources it goes and gets them and you only pay for when the services are actually invoked and in use so it's really good for workloads that spin up and spin down very frequently it kind of reminds me in concept anyway of the component tree that we saw in the days of soa if you remember that services oriented architecture but now this is cloud it's cloud native it's a whole new world and it's increasingly a popular model and as we'll show in a moment there's a lot of spending momentum in this area but before we do that i want to share some comments made by andy jassy a while back about serverless take a listen it's a good question and you know i really the comment i made was really about um directionally what amazon would do you know in this in the very earliest days of aws jeff used to say a lot if i were starting amazon today i'd have built it on top of aws we didn't have all the capability and all the functionality at that very moment but he knew what was coming and he saw what people were still able to accomplish even with where the services were at that point i think the same thing is true here with lambda which is i think if amazon were starting today it's a given they would build it on the cloud and i think with a lot of the applications that comprise amazon's consumer business we would build those on on our serverless capabilities now now lambda of course jesse referring to lambda that's amazon's serverless offering and if you think about amazon's retail business and take for example the frequent spin up and spin down of resources for something like black monday serverless would be a much more cost effective approach same for a managed data warehouse service for example where you know you don't want to pay for the compute if it's idle the app just calls for the compute when it's needed so it's a very popular model and it's got increased momentum today and you see that in this slide it shows the net score breakdown for serverless for azure aws is lambda which is again is their serverless offering and google cloud functions again you're shipping functions to the application that's why it's called functions look at the net scores azure functions nearly 70 aws at 65 google again lagging and that's a bit of a concern because this is a really really hot space all right let's move on and look at the competitive landscape as we like to do often and update you on that this xy graph is one of our favorites and it shows net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis and market share on the horizontal market share is a measure of pervasiveness in the data set in the upper right you also see a table that ranks each vendor my net score and it includes the shared n in other words the number of mentions in this sector for each vendor now you can you can see up top in the middle i've selected on the cloud computing category so this represents only the cloud businesses for each of these players there's a little bit of nuance here and that we've selected on microsoft azure there's a category in the etr taxonomy for that and we're comparing that with aws overall so there's there are things in the aws overall number that fit into the other parts of the taxonomy like maybe ai collaboration etc whereas azures and gcp are just the cloud segments so i i know it's a bit strange because aws is all cloud but don't get caught up in the taxonomical nuance the point is it's good to be azure in aws it's shown there when you look at the upper right of the chart here they stand out and they stand alone in cloud leadership google cloud is they have nice elevated levels but they're much much smaller they don't have the presence in the market now look at that hybrid cloud zone emerging we've talked about this sometimes in the past and and i want to call it vmware cloud on aws red hat open shift and vmware cloud itself like vmware cloud foundation and their other cloud services all of these appear to be gaining traction and you can see in the number of occurrences in the upper right that shared end that i talked about we're starting to see real numbers that are meaningful in this space vmware cloud on aws for example has a net score of 53 percent with 116 accounts within that total respondent sample that you see there in the middle left of 1438 that's how many cios and technology buyers responded to the etr survey in october you look at open shift at 45 net score and that's with 82 accounts now openshift is in beta with what looked to be some really strong offerings on aws and you can see for context i've added dell emc's cloud offerings hpe's cloud offerings and the oracle cloud and ibm cloud and also rackspace dell actually pretty strong with a net score of 20 and 185 shared accounts much much higher than dell overall which is kind of in the red zone oracle ibm you see those rackspace you know organizing not killing it rackspace is kind of in the big negative so that's a concern but anyway we'd like for these guys we'd like to see the data match the marketing rhetoric for the the guys that are in the red and look alibaba is starting to to show up in the server there's only 26 shared ends but we thought we'd we'd put it in there those three key points again aws and microsoft keep on trucking google needs to do better hybrid is becoming real and that bodes well for multi-cloud and the legacy on-prem guys they got a lot of work to do they're under a lot of pressure the pivot to cloud has not been easy for them uh and it's still a case where they're i've talked about this a lot they're they're declines in their on-premises offerings they're not being offset by the new stuff the cloud momentum all right i want to close out by sharing some of the conversations and thoughts that we've had in the community around sas and its impact on cloud we really have been focusing on ias and pass of the sas layer obviously up the stack so let me first share that there's a lot of talk around and has been for years about aws they're slowing growth rates and whether or not they'll have to enter the sas market to expand their total available market and i've said consistently while i never say never about aws i don't think so at least not yet this chart plots the big three cloud players note aws is a bigger piece of this pie now that i've turned off the cloud computing filter and i know more nuances but the data wonks will will find you know see this and they'll ask me about it this is all of aws portfolio and again it's only the microsoft azure portfolio so you see it aws now overtakes azure on the x-axis i.e market share now we've plotted some of the major sas vendors and you can see servicenow and salesforce both very large and they have really strong spending momentum and servicenow's you know pushing 100 billion dollars in market value they've surpassed workday quite some time ago workday's got less presence but they've got really really solid net score and i got to say i'm impressed with sap despite some of the earnings challenges that they've been having they're right up there with splunk and tableau splunk has softened in recent surveys and i've i've also plotted in there netsuite and oracle fusion which are just okay and that is i think for now anyway aws is going to position as the best place and the most friendly and highest quality cloud in which to run your sas for example workday runs on aws aws is salesforce's preferred infrastructure platform so my premise here is just like retail companies might want not want to run on aws a number of sas companies that compete with microsoft they might think twice about running on azure so aws would be better off for now trying to attract those sas players and drive their services and sticking to infrastructure and the pass layer snowflake is actually kind of interesting and i've added them for context because their netscore is always kind of a bellwether it's really off the charts and they're an isv running on the cloud they're different from some of the other sas players and the snowflake is a database okay and most of snowflake's business runs on aws and aws competes with snowflake with redshift but aws has the best cloud and drives a lot of business for snowflake and vice versa so it's kind of interesting snow snowflake to redshift and a much smaller example is kind of like netflix to amazon prime video to compete they both thrive so i think aws is going to continue to grow by attracting sas players as the preferred platform and they'll also attract developers and try to disrupt sas players like servicenow which runs on its own cloud i remember years ago david floyer and i said that servicenow was it was awesome but at some point its infrastructure cost structure its infrastructure cost structure is going to be less competitive than those companies that are running on hyperscale clouds certainly the hyperscale clouds themselves and servicenow they have this multi-instance architecture which just can't easily port over to the cloud but it can charge a lot which it does now at some point some sharp developers are going to look at all this and say whoa see that service now i can build this for less and they'll attack servicenow and their seat base license model maybe with the consumption pricing model and a platform that's perhaps or a set of services that are perhaps less expensive you're seeing this to a you know a certain degree with like elastic inside the application performance management space so there's some some things to watch there but there are those who firmly believe that aws will and must enter the sas space directly we talked last week about how beneficial microsoft's application business is for azure and what a flywheel that is but for me i think we're not there yet let's give it some time i think maybe four to five years before aws may even start to think about filling some of the space up the stack now maybe they'll find some unique opportunities to do that for instance at the edge but i think that's way off okay so bottom line it's good to be in tech these days it's even better to be in the cloud and it's best if you're aws and microsoft and i don't see that changing for a while now remember these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen i publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com you can get in touch with me through email it's david at siliconangle.com feel free to dm me on twitter at d vallante i post on linkedin love your comments there thank you and don't forget to check out etr plus for all the survey action thanks for watching this episode of thecube insights powered by etr this is dave vellante stay safe stay sane and we'll see you next time you

>> From The Cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube Conversation. >> The isolation economy has created substantial momentum for certain cybersecurity companies, notably, as of the big stock market sell off on June 11th, relative to our last cyber report, which we did in February, the S and P 500, and the NASDAQ are off 11% and 3% respectively. But the valuations of three companies that we cited as four-star firms in our February cyber report are up significantly. In particular, Okta's valuation is up 34% since our last look in February. CrowdStrike, almost 50%, and Zscaler over 60%. Yet several other companies that were named as four-star players have really either tracked the S and P or even performed more poorly, despite still showing decent strength and spending momentum based on survey data from ETR. Welcome, everybody, to this week's Wickibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. My name is Dave Vellante and in this breaking analysis, we want to update you on our cybersecurity outlook and try to answer several questions, such as what has changed in the cybersecurity landscape. since our last report. Much has, as you know, Has the isolation economy created a permanent shift in security spend, or are these upticks just anomalies? What can we learn from the ETR spending data, and is the divergence and valuations amongst security leaders justified? Let's start by taking a look at what has changed since our last cyber report. Now, we produce this just ahead of the RSA conference in February, and one of the last physical conferences. So there's some big changes going on in the market. We really want to understand, are they systematic? In other words, are there fundamental changes to the system and its underlying principles, and by many accounts, the answer appears to be yes. Recently I listened in to a number of CSOs. of it was a call with ETR's Eric Bradley. And we heard the executives echo some of the themes that we've been discussing previously. It was notion of the work-from-home pivot, creating a focus on things like zero trust networks, changes in identity and access management, and way more focus on cloud, and of course, as a service, really reducing reliance on traditional firewalls and appliances that would reside in organizations' data centers. You know, we've gone from a world where digital transformation was an important strategic initiative to one where if you weren't digital, you largely couldn't transact business. Now, people are, the question they have is that is the longterm viability of VPNs makes sense? And even things like SD-WAN are being called into question, as corporate offices are empty and the internet is becoming the new private network. Now, one thing that hasn't changed is there are still a lot of technologies in this space. And that seems to be continuing as buyers need solutions to problems quickly to plug holes, and on balance IT budgets, they are contracting, so most companies still have to justify security spending based on the amount of risk reduction versus the cost. Of course, it's easier to justify for securing remote workers. So what I want to do now is take a pause and let's look back at some of the ETR data that we shared back in February. Now remember, this data is from the January ETR survey, ETR surveys organizations once every quarter. And if you recall, we keyed on two key metrics, some of our favorite metrics. Net Score, which is a measure of spending momentum, and Market Share, which measures pervasive per, sorry, pervasiveness in the dataset. Now, as you might recall, the left most chart here shows the cyber players and we sorted them by Net Score. The right hand side, that sorts those companies on Shared N, which measures the number of mentions of that company within the cybersecurity sector. Now, at the time, we named several four-star companies, actually we started this last year when we initiated coverage in the security space. These four-star security firms, really based on their rankings within both of those metrics, Net Score and Shared N. So you could see the four stars, Microsoft, Splunk, Palo Alto Networks, Proofpoint, Okta, CrowdStrike, and we added Zscaler as new, and then CyberArk. And we gave Cisco and Fortinet two stars, as they were kind of on the cusp. Now let's look at some of these companies from the April survey that ETR did. So this chart shows a subset of the vendors that we showed before. Now remember, this survey was taken at the height of the lockdown, from kind of early part of March to the early part of April. Budgets were under immense pressure. Nonetheless, look at Microsoft, Cisco, Palo Alto, Fortinet, and Zscaler all held up pretty evenly. CrowdStrike also held steadily and maintain a very high level. Okta dipped somewhat, but from a pretty high level as well. Only Proofpoint is one of the ones that showed decline notably from 48% to a 40% Net Score relative to the chart I showed earlier. Now, SailPoint didn't make the four-star cut because it doesn't have the presence in the dataset, but it's Net Score is solid, and the Shared N jumped from 66 last survey to 88 in the latest checkpoint. So this identity and access management player, it seems to be one to watch. We'll come back to that in future episodes. Now let's plot some of these players in context, you know, using this two-dimensional axis that we often show. This chart shows that that view that we like to share. It plots Net Score, or spending velocity, on the Y axis, and then market share on the X axis. Remember, our market share is calculated by dividing the number of mentions for a company by the total number of mentions within that sector. So it's not like true IDC market share, it's market share within the survey. So you can see here a continued theme of Microsoft momentum, very high Net Score, or high Net Score and big presence. We plotted IBM and Dell EMC, which is really the legacy RSA business, just for context. And these are two companies with strong security brands, but as you can see, they're really not the giants that they used to be in cybersecurity software. So a couple of points on this graphic. CrowdStrike really jumps out as the momentum play on this chart. And that's really no surprise given its focus on endpoint security and the pivot to work-from-home. Okta has a focus on cloud-based identity management and they continue to show very strong. And CyberArk, with a focus on privileged access is also very important in this remote worker environment. We'll talk about that some more later. And you can see Zscaler, quite strong and steady from the last survey, but that company saw some of the biggest action in the stock market, which we're going to try to explain in a moment. Proofpoint, we talked about a deceleration in Net Score, but they're right in the mix as is Fortinet. Now finally, Palo Alto, you know, they remain strong. And Cisco, like many of its businesses, very credible with a Net Score that's decent and a large market presence as always. Now, as we've reported, security is one of the brightest spots in that Cisco portfolio. So the big takeaway from the ETR data is that despite the pandemic, cybersecurity software has held up very well from a spending standpoint. But now let's look a little bit deeper into what's happening in the stock market with these firms. And first as we know, there's a clear disconnect between what's happening in financial markets and the fundamentals of the economy. You know, Wall Street versus Main Street is kind of that narrative. And within the security sector, there's also a dissonance between companies, and we want to discuss that next. Here's an updated chart that we showed in February from our last cybersecurity episode. It compares the performance of the S and P 500 and the NASDAQ as of February 19th, with the performance of four-star cyber players from that date to Thursday, June 11th, the day that saw an 1800 point drop in the Dow. So some of the steam has been let out of the market, but the story really isn't going to change that much. First, the S and P is off 11% since that time, but the NAS is only off of 3%, tech heavy. But look at the deltas of our four-star companies. Let me start with Splunk. I didn't show Splunk earlier on the charts, but the value metrics of Splunk, they really haven't moved much since our February report. Splunk's Net Score was down somewhat in the sector, but remember, Splunk does more than just security. It's really becoming a critical big data player in analytics. I think people maybe don't like the tepid 2% revenue growth that Splunk showed, but remember Splunk is transitioning to an ARR model, an annual recurring revenue model, and that's going to take some time. It acquired SignalFx late last year to give it a stronger SaaS play in monitoring, and of course the analytics. I like Splunk, just like Adobe and Tableau had to make a similar transition, and ultimately they powered through it because they're great companies with really loyal customers, and I think that really does apply to Splunk. Let's take a look now at Palo Alto Networks and Fortinet. Now, you might remember in our last security update, we spent a fair amount of time explaining the valuation divergence between Palo Alto and Fortinet due to some of the cloud challenges that Palo Alto was facing, even some of the sales motions. So we said Fortinet at the time had done a better job transitioning to a cloud, but Palo Alto really had a good quarter. It beat earnings revenue, and it gave guidance, and the stock moved up very nicely. But then it ran into resistance, and you can see it's a tracking about what the S and P 500 over this period of time. And you can see the revenue multiples show the valuations divergence between those two companies. It's even more stark. So you've got Fortinet's kind of holding firm, and Palo Alto, dipping a little bit. Now, let me make some comments here. I mean, I like Palo Alto Networks. Not only are they solid in the ETR dataset, despite the COVID pandemic, but anecdotal evidence in discussions with IT leaders suggests that organizations want to do business with Palo Alto. They're really considered a thought leader in the space. And I personally, I think they're going to do very well this decade. So now maybe there's some technical aspects going on with the stock. I'm not really qualified to address that. But they clearly saw some resistance despite bouncing on the strong quarter. Just couldn't hold. Now, let me skip over the green box, and I want to quickly comment on the last two here. I'm going to start with CyberArk. They are underperforming, this group, even though you would think with the focus on privileged access security, they'd do well in this environment. And they beat last quarter, but they suspended guidance, and they cited exposure to some hard hit industries on their earnings call. And as well, it just is interesting, the company is aggressively hiring. And so that increased op ex substantially. The thing in management is confidence, you know, what do they know that the street doesn't know? And they're just being cautious, you know, but they are taking a valuation hit as a result. We'll see how that plays out. Now, Proofpoint has also taken a valuation hit in our period of analysis back from February to now, despite beating estimates last quarter. You know, maybe not as strong as a work-from-home play, but again, a beat in this environment is definitely a positive. Now I want to come back to the three key companies highlighted in the green, Okta, CrowdStrike and Zscaler. Zscaler, remember, we added new in February to our four-star list, which we initiated last year. The valuation of these three companies has soared since the pandemic, and they've reported tailwinds as a result of the new reality. Okta with its identity management focus, CrowdStrike with endpoint, and Zscaler with its security cloud, are all seeing momentum. And it makes sense that these three are very focused and they're aligned with our remote worker economy, and of course, a shift to the cloud. As well, they all beat earnings and management had a pretty sanguine outlook going forward. But I want to call your attention to the revenue multiples of these three companies and take a look and compare them to their peers. You know, are these justified? Well, as I said before, there's really a difference between the stock market and what's happening in the real world today. So I would say, you know, I want to see these companies continue to outperform their estimates, and their strong guidance. And frankly, at these revenue multiples, I'd expect, you know, even higher growth rates of, especially from Okta and Zscaler. So we'll see. The point is, the market's exuberance, it's really based on future expectations. And I do think there was a bit of, you know, FOMO, fear of missing out, at play here with investors hopping on the bandwagon. Remember, look, the data from ETR shows that these companies are pretty strong, and of course, much of the stock action is based on performance relative to earnings estimates. So we'll see if this can continue. I mean, to me, it does feel a little frothy even after that recent sell off. All right, let's wrap up. So the disconnect between financial markets and the real world economy, it creates uncertainty in the market. So you got to be cautious, really, if, especially if you're chasing momentum. I just want to say, I know a lot of young investors who reach out to me and they comment to me in these segments. And look, I'm not qualified to tell you where to invest. I just report on the fundamentals and I try to tie in financial trends, and market trends, of course, But you got to do your own research, you know, be patient, do your dollar cost averaging thing. You got a long life to live. Now, the after COVID AC economy and the remote work-from-home momentum will not be a rising tide that's going to lift all ships in this segment. But there's no doubt that CSOs are rethinking cyber. We've said for years that protecting the perimeter was going to change as the main focus. And it has to a degree. But I'll tell ya, I think the mindset has changed more in the last 90 days than in the previous three years. The scourge of VPNs, and even the efficacy of SD-WAN are being called into question as security technologies that exploit the internet and cloud appear to be very sensible to CSOs and have momentum. You know, we're also seeing more collaboration between organizational boundaries, and even many CIOs are becoming much more involved in security as their line of business tends. And even some CSOs reporting it to CIO's. As we've said many times, cyber has become and will continue to be a board level agenda item and topic. On near term, we really don't see the fragmentation of the products that we've talked about for years changing. If anything, the shiny new security tools, you know, might even increase granularity in the marketplaces organizations, they can't just unplug their legacy infrastructure as much as they they'd like to. But longer term, there will be more consolidation in this market, as the whales are going to buy companies to fill holes in their lines. I mean, look at VMware, there's a good example of a company we really haven't talked about trying to elbow its way into the security space. And the cloud, as well, was going to attack some of the problems of complexity, which in part stems from too many tools, and that will foster some of this collaboration expectation. Okay, well, that's it for this week. Remember, these episodes are all available as podcasts. So please subscribe. I publish weekly on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. So check that out and please do comment on my LinkedIn posts. You can email me as well, at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. This is Dave Vellante for The Cube Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, everyone. We'll see you next time. (mellow digital music)

(enlightening music) >> From theCUBE's studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> As we've been reporting, there's a new class of workloads emerging in the cloud. Early cloud was all about IaaS, spinning up storage, compute, and networking infrastructure to support startups, SaaS, easy experimentation, dev test, and increasingly moving business workloads into the cloud. Modern cloud workloads are combining data. They're infusing machine intelligence into application's AI. They're simplifying analytics and scaling with the cloud to deliver business insights in near real time. And at the center of this mega trend is a new class of data stores and analytic databases, what some called data warehouses, a term that I think is outdated really for today's speed of doing business. Welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights, powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we update our view of the emerging cloud native analytic database market. Today, we want to do three things. First, we'll update you on the basics of this market, what you really need to know in the space. The next thing we're going to do, take a look into the competitive environment, and as always, we'll dig into the ETR spending data to see which companies have the momentum in the market, and maybe, ahead of some of the others. Finally, we're going to close with some thoughts on how the competitive landscape is likely to evolve. And we want to answer the question will the cloud giants overwhelm the upstarts, or will the specialists continue to thrive? Let's take a look at some of the basics of this market. We're seeing the evolution of the enterprise data warehouse market space. It's an area that has been critical to supporting reporting and governance requirements for companies, especially post Sarbanes-Oxley, right? However, historically, as I've said many times, EDW has failed to deliver on its promises of a 360-degree view of the business and real-time customer insights. Classic enterprise data warehouses are too cumbersome, they're too complicated, they're too slow, and don't keep pace with the speed of the business. Now, EDW is about a $20 billion market, but the analytic database opportunity in the cloud, we think is much larger, why is that? It's because cloud computing unlocks the ability to rapidly combine multiple data sources, bring data science tooling into the mix, very quickly analyze data, and deliver insights to the business. More importantly, even more importantly, allow a line of business pros to access data in a self service mode. It's a new paradigm that uses the notion of DevOps as applied to the data pipeline, agile data or what we sometimes called DataOps. This is a highly competitive marketplace. In the early part of last decade, you saw Google bring BigQuery to market, Snowflake was founded, AWS did a one-time license deal to acquire the IP to ParAccel, an MPP database, on which it built Redshift. In the latter part of the decade, Microsoft threw his hat in the ring with SQL DW, which Microsoft has now evolved into Azure Synapse. They did so at the Build conference, a few weeks ago. There are other players as well like IBM. So you can see, there's a lot at stake here. The cloud vendors want your data, because they understand this is one of the key ingredients of the next decade of innovation. No longer is Moore's Law, the mainspring of growth. We've said this many times. Rather today, it's data driven, and AI to push insights and scale with the cloud. Here's the interesting dynamic that is emerging in the space. Snowflake is a cloud specialist in this field, having raised more than a billion dollars in venture, a billion four, a billion five. And it's up against the big cloud players, who are moving fast and often stealing moves from Snowflake and driving customers to their respective platforms. Here's an example that we reported on at last year's re:Invent. It's an article by Tony Baer. He wrote this on ZDNet talking about how AWS RA3 separates compute from storage, and of course, this was a founding architectural principle for Snowflake. Here's another example from the information. They were reporting on Microsoft here turning up the heat on Snowflake. And you can see the highlighted text, where the author talks about Microsoft trying to divert customers to its database. So you got this weird dynamic going on. Snowflake doesn't run on-prem, it only runs in the cloud. Runs on AWS, runs on Azure, runs on GCP. The cloud players again, they all want your data to go into their database. So they want you to put their data into their respective platforms. At the same time, they need SaaS ISVs to run in the cloud because it sells infrastructure services. So, is Snowflake, are they going to pivot to run on-prem to try to differentiate from the cloud giants? I asked Frank Slootman, Snowflake's CEO, about the on-prem opportunity, and his perspective earlier this year. Let's listen to what he said. >> Okay, we're not doing this endless hedging that people have done for 20 years, sort of keeping a leg in both worlds. Forget it, this will only work in the public cloud because this is how the utility model works, right? I think everybody is coming to this realization, right? I mean the excuses are running out at this point. We think that it'll, people will come to the public cloud a lot sooner than we will ever come to the private cloud. It's not that we can't run a private cloud, it just diminishes the potential and the value that we that we bring. >> Okay, so pretty definitive statements by Slootman. Now, the question I want to pose today is can Snowflake compete, given the conventional wisdom that we saw in the media articles that the cloud players are going to hurt Snowflake in this market. And if so, how will they compete? Well, let's see what the customers are saying and bring in some ETR survey data. This chart shows two of our favorite metrics from the ETR data set. That is Net Score, which is on the y-axis. Net Score, remember is a measure of spending momentum and market share, which is on the x-axis. Market share is a measure of pervasiveness in the data set. And what we show here are some of the key players in the EDW and cloud native analytic database market. I'll make a couple of points, and we'll dig into this a little bit further. First thing I want to share is you can see from this data, this is the April ETR survey, which was taken at the height of the US lockdown for the pandemic. The survey captured respondents from more than 1,200 CIOs and IT buyers, asking about their spending intentions for analytic databases for the companies that we show here on this kind of x-y chart. So the higher the company is on the vertical axis, the stronger the spending momentum relative to last year, and you could see Snowflake has a 77% Net Score. It leaves all players with AWS Redshift showing very strong, as well. Now in the box in the lower right, you see a chart. Those are the exact Net Scores for all the vendors in the Shared N. A Shared N is a number of citations for that vendor within the N of the 1,269. So you can see the N's are quite large, certainly large enough to feel comfortable with some of the conclusions that we're going to make today. Microsoft, they have a huge footprint. And they somewhat skew the data with its very high market share due to its volume. And you could see where Google sits, it's at good momentum, not as much presence in the marketplace. We've also added a couple of on-prem vendors, Teradata and Oracle primarily on-prem, just for context. They're two companies that compete, they obviously have some cloud offerings, but again, most of their base is on-prem. So what I want to do now is drill into this a little bit more by looking at Snowflake within the individual clouds. So let's look at Snowflake inside of AWS. That's what this next chart shows. So it's customer spending momentum Net Score inside of AWS accounts. And we cut the data to isolate those ETR survey respondents running AWS, so there's an N there of 672 that you can see. The bars show the Net Score granularity for Snowflake and Amazon Redshift. Now, note that we show 96 Shared N responses for Snowflake and 213 for Redshift within the overall N of 672 AWS accounts. The colors show 2020 spending intentions relative to 2019. So let's read left to right here. The replacements are red. And then, the bright red, then, you see spending less by 6% or more, that's the pinkish, and then, flat spending, the gray, increasing spending by more than 6%, that's the forest green, and then, adding to the platform new, that's the lime green. Now, remember Net Score is derived by subtracting the reds from the greens. And you can see that Snowflake has more spending momentum in the AWS cloud than Amazon Redshift, by a small margin, but look at, 80% of the AWS accounts plan to spend more on Snowflake with 35%, they're adding new. Very strong, 76% of AWS customers plan to spend more in 2020 relative to 2019 on Redshift with only 12% adding the platform new. But nonetheless, both are very, very strong, and you can see here, the key point is minimal red and pink, but not a lot of people leaving, not a lot of people spending less. It's going to be critical to see in the June ETR survey, which is in the field this month, if Snowflake is able to hold on to these new accounts that it's gained in the last couple of months. Now, let's look at how Snowflake is doing inside of Azure and compare it to Microsoft. So here's the data from the ETR survey, same view of the data here except we isolate on Azure accounts. The N there is 677 Azure accounts. And we show Snowflake and Microsoft cuts for analytic databases with 83 and 393 Shared N responses respectively. So again, enough I feel to draw some conclusions from this data. Now, note the Net Scores. Snowflake again, winning with 78% versus 51% from Microsoft. 51% is strong but 78% is there's a meaningful lead for Snowflake within the Microsoft base, very interesting. And once again, you see massive new ads, 41% for Snowflake, whereas Microsoft's Net Score is being powered really by growth from existing customers, that forest green. And again, very little red for both companies. So super positive there. Okay, let's take a look now at how Snowflake's doing inside of Google accounts, GCP, Google Cloud Platform. So here's the ETR data, same view of that data, but now, we isolate on GCP accounts. There are fewer, 298 running, then, you got those running Snowflake and Google Analytic databases, largely BigQuery, but could be some others in there but the Snowflake Shared N is 49, it's smaller than on the other clouds, because the company just announced support for GCP, just about a year ago. I think it was last June, but still large enough to draw conclusions from the data. I feel pretty comfortable with that. We're not slicing and dicing it too finely. And you could see Google Shared N at 147. Look at the story. I sound like a broken record. Snowflake is again winning by a meaningful margin if you measure this Net Score or spending momentum. So 77.6% Net Score versus Google at 54%, with Snowflake at 80% in the green. Both companies, very little red. So this is pretty impressive. Snowflake has greater spending momentum than the captive cloud providers in all three of the big US-based clouds. So the big question is can Snowflake hold serve, and continue to grow, and how are they going to to be able to do that? Look, as I said before, this is a very competitive market. We reported that how Snowflake is taking share from some of the legacy on-prem data warehouse players like Teradata and IBM, and from what our data suggests, Lumen and Oracle too. I've reported how IBM is stretched thin on its research and development budget, spends about $6 billion a year, but it's got to spend it across a lot of different lines. Oracle's got more targeted spending R&D. They can target more toward database and direct more of its free cash flow to database than IBM can. But Amazon, and Microsoft, and Google, they don't have that problem. They spend a ton of dough on R&D. And here's an example of the challenge that Snowflake faces. Take a look at this partial list that I drew together of recent innovations. And we show here a set of features that Snowflake has launched in 2020, and AWS since re:Invent last year. I don't have time to go into these, but we do know this that AWS is no slouch at adding features. Amazon, as a company, spends two x more on research and development than Snowflake is worth as a company. So why do I like Snowflake's chances. Well, there are several reasons. First, every dime that Snowflake spends on R&D, go-to market, and ecosystem, goes into making its databases better for its customers. Now, I asked Frank Slootman in the middle of the lockdown how he was allocating precious capital during the pandemic. Let's listen to his response. I've said, there's no layoffs on our radar, number one. Number two, we are hiring. And number three is, we have a higher level of scrutiny on the hires that we're making. And I am very transparent. In other words, I tell people, "Look, I prioritize the roles that are closest "to the drivetrain of the business." Right, it's kind of common sense. But I wanted to make sure that this is how we're thinking about this. There are some roles that are more postponable than others. I'm hiring in engineering, without any reservation because that is the long term, strategic interest of the company. >> But you know, that's only part of the story. And so I want to spend a moment here on some other differentiation, which is multi-cloud. Now, as many of you know, I've been sort of cynical of multi-cloud up until recently. I've said that multi-cloud is a symptom, more of a symptom of multi-vendor and largely, a bunch of vendor marketing hooey today. But that's beginning to change. I see multi-cloud as increasingly viable and important to organizations, not only because CIOs are being asked to clean up the crime scene, as I've often joked, but also because it's increasingly becoming a strategy, right cloud for the right workload. So first, let me reiterate what I said at the top. New workloads are emerging in the cloud, real-time AI, insights extraction, and real-time inferencing is going to be a competitive differentiator. It's all about the data. The new innovation cocktail stems from machine intelligence applied to that data with data science tooling and simplified interfaces that enable scaling with the cloud. You got to have simplicity if you're going to scale and cloud is the best way to scale. It's really the only way to scale globally. So as such, we see cross-cloud exploitation is a real differentiator for Snowflake and others that build high quality cloud native capabilities from multiple clouds, and I want to spend a minute on this topic generally and talk about what it means for Snowflake specifically. Now, we've been pounding the table lately saying that building capabilities natively for the cloud versus putting a wrapper around your stack and making it run in the cloud is key. It's a big difference, why is this? Because cloud native means taking advantage of the primitive capabilities within respective clouds to create the highest performance, the lowest latency, the most efficient services, for that cloud, and the most secure, really exploiting that cloud. And this is enabled only by natively building in the cloud, and that's why Slootman is so dogmatic on this issue. Multi-cloud can be a differentiator for Snowflake. We can think about data lives everywhere. And you want to keep data, where it lives ideally, you don't want to have to move it, whether it's on AWS, Azure, whatever cloud is holding that data. If the answer to your query requires tapping data that lives in multiple clouds across a data network, and the app needs fast answers, then, you need low latency access to that data. So here's what I think. I think Snowflake's game is to automate by extracting, abstracting, sorry, the complexity around the data location, of course, latency is a part of that, metadata, bandwidth concerns, the time to get to query and answers. All those factors that build complexity into the data pipeline and then optimizing that to get insights, irrespective of data location. So a differentiating formula is really to not only be the best analytic database but be cloud agnostic. AWS, for example, they got a cloud agenda, as do Azure and GCP. Their number one answer to multi-cloud is put everything on our cloud. Yeah, Microsoft and Google Anthos, they would argue against that but we know that behind the scenes, that's what they want. They got offerings across clouds but Snowflake is going to make this a top priority. They can lead with that, and they must be best at it. And if Snowflake can do this, it's going to have a very successful future, in our opinion. And by all accounts, and the data that we shared, Snowflake is executing well. All right, so that's a wrap for this week's CUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Don't forget, all these breaking analysis segments are available as podcasts, just Google breaking analysis with Dave Vellante. I publish every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. Check out etr.plus. That's where all the survey data is and reach out to me, I'm @dvellante on Twitter, or you can hit me up on my LinkedIn posts, or email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. Thanks for watching, everyone. We'll see you next time. (enlightening music)

from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host David on tape hello everyone and welcome to this week's episode of the cube insights powered by ETR you know this past week we attended the Dell technologies Industry Analysts event and in this breaking analysis I want to summarize the key takeaways and discuss some of the macro trends in the industry that are affecting Dell I'll also discuss some of the fundamental assumptions that Dell is making in its operating model and I'll talk about some of the challenges that I see for the company going forward and hopefully what is a frank manner now let me start with the event itself it was held in Austin Texas and it's clear that Austin Texas is becoming the epicenter of Dell post-acquisition of EMC it's shifting strongly back to Texas while the legacy of EMC remains what is the most critical part of Dells portfolio thanks to vmware the energy of Dell emanates from its founder Michael Dell the event was attended by about 250 press and analysts over a two-day period it was very well run with strong levels of executive access which is always very important to the analysts and lots of transparency and I thought clarity of message now the number one takeaway on this is Dell in four years the company has gone from irrelevance to a dominant and highly relevant player in the enterprise tech especially the CIOs and it's one of the most amazing transformations of a company that personally I've ever seen and I've seen several there were four other key takeaways for me that I'll show on this first slide of Alex if you bring it up first Michael Dell has put forth a set of moonshot goals for 2030 let me give you some examples by 2030 Dell says that for every product that they sell they're going to recycle an equivalent product by 2030 50 percent of the global workforce of Dell will be women and 40 percent of the managers of people will be women 25 percent of the u.s. workforce will be either Hispanic or African now most tech stories today are negative and this is a great positive message I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on this because in there's much more that Dell laid out but kudos for Dell to make for making these initiatives a priority you know particularly the women in tech and the diversity in the minorities I think it's excellent the second takeaway is Dell for Dell is the Dell is being driven by Jeff Clark and this guy is on a mission to simplify the portfolio Dell claims its reduced its product portfolio from 88 platforms down to 20 of that power platforms that powers a new brand now the reality is Dell really hasn't deprecated 68 products many if not most are still around but the RMD energy is all going into the new stuff now the third takeaway was a big announcement around power one power one is Dells new platform for the next generation of converged infrastructure now a lot of people might look at this and say well this is converged infrastructure without Cisco well it is actually and while that's true power one according to Dell is a much more of a developer friendly API and micro services based platform with a lot of automation software built in it's essentially going to be Dells go forward platform for customers that don't want to roll their own infrastructure the expectation or inference that that we took away was that power one will integrate most if not all future storage networking and server products Adela's positioning this as a complement to HCI or hyper-converged infrastructure which comprises VX rail VX flex which is the scale i/o and of course the OEM Nutanix so you can see Dell still got some work to do in terms of streamlining its portfolio and here's my lock of the day is that they'll be phasing out the Nutanix OEM relationship you could take that one to the bank now the fourth takeaway was the Dells cloud strategy is really coming into focus is it a winning strategy I honestly can't say at this point but in my view it's the only option that Dell has and and because of VMware they have a fighting chance Dell is in a much better position than other suppliers that that rely on you know Prem install bases because of VMware VMware is not only Dells piggy bank it is but it also gives Dell strategic levers with with CIOs and partners like for instance AWS now later on I'm going to share some ETR data that will give you some context but the bottom line is that the cloud is having an impact on everyone's business including Dells and I mean let me add the Dells cloud strategy in addition to relying on VMware is completely dependent on the assumptions that the world is going to be hybrid which is a good assumption and that multi cloud is going to evolve from what today I've said as a symptom of multi-vendor to a fundamental priority for CIOs again not a bad assumption but because of VMware adele has more than a fighting chance to compete for share now finally that that adele is going to be able to capitalize on the edge personally I think this is the biggest wildcard what I do think is that developers are going to be a crucial part of the edge and at this point in time Dell and VMware are not really top of mine in the developer community now the event involved keynotes from Michael Dell and other execs including including the CFO it was Tom sweet and and many other breakout sessions you know the normal one-on-ones as well now I don't have time to go into all this but there are some things that I want to share about Jeff Clark's presentation specifically he's the person that took over from David David Gordon a couple years ago he's been at Dell for more than 30 years and he was there when I think it was called pcs limited so a long time he's a trusted operational executive of Michael Dell's I'm very impressed with this guy he doesn't use a cheap prompter when he talks and in fact he has some notes but he's got these facts and figures at the in his head that he rattles off like a staccato pace he's an OBS exec and so let me summarize the his discussion now to bring up this slide the the big picture is the data sphere is gonna grow to 175 zettabytes and half of that is going to be created at the edge of that 30% is gonna require real-time processing now he talked about the mandate for simplification and he called this staying the easy button now in QA I asked him like why did it take you guys so long to figure out something so obvious which is kind of a snarky analyst question not his credit he didn't throw his predecessors under the bus rather what he did is he focused on the future and sit he said you know they shared the figures that I stated earlier about you know taking 88 platforms down to 20 and he focused on the priorities of the future so he didn't say it but I'm gonna say it for him he inherited a very messy portfolio and he had to clean up the crime scene me tell let me tell you what a buyer said about EMC back in 2018 this is from the ETR Venn survey when they go out and they probe you know specific customers and they talk to them this guy says NetApp has done a really good job of advertising and positioning itself within the cloud and within data centers themselves they've got a broad portfolio and I don't want to make comments about NetApp but so just I'm not sure I agree with all this but okay come back to his statements and and they've they've integrated fairly well here's what's relevant what he said was EMC on the other hand is not as well integrated they've got a broad portfolio but it's not necessarily - easy easy to pick and choose from the different categories okay so I agree with that you know look the mega launch product dujour worked for EMC it allowed them to carry on for another five or six years after the downturn but the lack of integration eventually caught up to that minute and it will always you know caught up catch up to large companies who rely on either lots of M&A or spinning out new products with lots of overlap anyway I digress the third thing that Clarke talked about was the big market size and the share gains pcs are a 200 billion dollar market servers are an 80 billion dollar market an external storage is a 26 billion dollar market Della's gains 600 basis points according to Clarke in pcs over the last six years 400 came in the last three years 375 basis points in storage in the past two years now of course what he didn't mention that was after a dismal performance a few years earlier so they had a pretty easy compare but my point is this when you talk to Michael Dell you talked to Tom sweet you talked to Jeff Clark and all the people folks in the company share gains are critical to Dells strategy especially because the cloud is taking so much share of wallet in the enterprise I'll make some other comments on that now finally there are two fundamental beliefs that dell has that i want to share with you one is that they can be a consolidator of these core markets in a downturn deltax they can hold their breath you know so to speak longer than the competitors and of course in an up market they think they can accelerate their leverage points which leads to the second belief that jeff clark talked about which is how dell will deliver differentiation and value so he decided four items there one is they got 40,000 direct sellers so they got a big go-to market presence they got 35,000 service professionals a 66 billion-dollar supply chain and then Dell financial services arm which you know forces Dell to carry a lot of debt but that debt throws off cash and it's not really part of Dells core debt from EMC acquisition now others have that too but but Dells got you know big presents there all right so I want to pivot to the ETR data and let's see how Dell looks in the spending survey and since market share is so important to Dell why don't we take a look at how they're doing so Alex this slide that I'm showing here what each er refers to as market share market share is defined by you TR as vendor citations in the survey excluding replacements so customers that are adding spending the same or spending more as spending less divided by the total number of respondents in the survey so it's a measure of how pervasive the vendor is in the data set what I'm showing in this slide is Dells market share and its three most important business lines namely VMware Delhi MC and Adele's laptop business and I'm showing this from the January 17 survey to October 19 now notice the survey sample overall is 960 for respondents and the three brands they show 800 and said six hundred and twenty two and three hundred and two shared ends within that 964 so there's two points one else doing pretty well I mean I'd say it's better than holding serve and as you can see it's steadily gaining now the second point is that look at the net scores here you know they're okay especially for vmware intel's laptop but Dell EMC for instance specifically their server and storage and networking business you know not so much so there's there's a mixed story here so let me make some comments on the macro and things that I've discussed with with ETR and and my narrative on demand overall some things that I've said you shared with you before as we've discussed in past breaking analyses spending is reverting back to pre eighteen levels but it's not falling off a cliff we're seeing fewer adoptions of new tech and more replacements of old tech so combine this with lower levels of spending and more citations overall we're seeing net score go down relative to previous surveys so here's what we think is happening there's less experimentation going on with the digital initiatives which started you know back in 2016 so you're seeing fewer adoptions of new tech as customers are start placing their bets and they're retiring leggy legacy systems that they were keeping on as a hedge and they're narrowing their spend on the new stuff and unplugging the stuff they don't need anymore and they're going at the serious production mode with the pocs so that means overall spending is softer it's not a disaster but it's lower than expected then coming into this year storage is on the back burner in a lot of accounts because of cloud and the big flash injection that I've talked about giving him more Headroom servers are really soft for Dell especially because they have a tough compared with previous with last year PC is actually pretty good all things being considered so where is the spending action well it's in the cloud now q how many vendors tell me that there's a big rebate repatriation trend happening ie people have cloud remorse and they're all moving back on pram not all but many M say it doesn't happen but at the macro-level its noise compared to the spending that's happening in the cloud just do the math all you got to do is look at AWS and Microsoft and what they report and compare it to any enterprise company that relies on on-prem selling I mean I don't want to argue about it you believe what you want but I would much prefer to look at the data so let's do that so here's a slide that shows ETR data on customer spending on the cloud so you got a AWS Azure and Google spenders and how their spending patterns have changed over time for dell emc servers so you got six hundred and thirty six cloud accounts 175 to 200 shared dell emc server accounts over the past three periods and yet net scores of 24% down to 16% so look at the gray bar versus the yellow bar gray is October 18 yellow is October 19 okay you get the picture the next slide is the same view for Dell EMC storage the gray bar is last year yellow bar is this year's survey so look at it 22% down to 5% that's not good so storage is getting hit by cloud and that's going to continue all right so let me conclude with some comments in general overall I like to tell strategy you know honestly without VMware I'm probably not gonna fly to Austin this week just being honest but with VMware Dell is far more important to our community so I pay more attention to it I haven't shared many thoughts on Dells financials but I think they have some upside here as they continue to pay down their debt by the way every five billion of dollars that they retire in debt it drops twenty five cents right to earnings per share Dell throws off a lot of cash it's a very well-run company they got an excellent management team we talked about their share gain lever they'll have a public cloud so they got to make on Prem as simple as possible and ideally is cloud like as they can you know the on-premise experience frankly is well behind that of the cloud but but cloud you know getting less simple and it's not cheap so on Prem in my view doesn't have to be exactly cloud it's just got to be good enough now Dell this week also refreshed its on demand pricing but it's good and it's obviously relevant to cloud not have time to go into all the detail but suffice to say that near-term there on-demand stuff it's it's going to be a small factor in their business but longer-term I think it's going to play in it's particularly to the cloud model Dell is also betting on hybrid and multi cloud they have to and but they're up against several competitors Microsoft is the is really strong in this space Microsoft's also a partner of course but you got IBM and Red Hat Cisco Google sort of and some others but VMware it gives Dell an advantage and that is the key the big hole that I see in Dell I'm going to come back to innovation you know Dell spends billions of dollars on R&D I think it's the numbers 20 billion over the last four years so that's good but you know innovation this industry is being delivered delivered by developers no those are the drivers and and it's they're taking advantage of data applying machine intelligence and cloud for scale and Dell is clearly well positioned for the data trend you know could partner for cloud it can certainly play an AI but what it lacks in my opinion is appeal to the developer community and just as Dell has become relevant to CIOs it needs this a similar type of relevance with the devs and that's a different ballgame so it's hopes are leaning on VMware and is of course its acquisition of pivotal but if I were Dell I would not sit back and wait for pivotal and VMware to figure it out here's what I would do if I were Dell I would deploy at least a thousand engineers they got twenty thousand engineers take a thousand or fifteen hundred them and point them toward developing open source tools and build applications and tools around all these hot emerging trends that we hear about multi-cloud multi cloud management edge all the innovations going on at edge autonomous vehicles etc AI workloads machine intelligence machine learning I would open-source that work and make a big commitment to the developer community big contributions and that would build hooks in from my hardware into these tools to make my hardware run better faster cheaper on these systems I want to thank my friend Peter burrows for forgiving me that idea but I think it's a great idea I think it's radical but it makes sense in this world that is really being driven by developers okay this is Dave Volante signing out from this episode of cube insights powered by ETR thanks for watching we'll see you next time

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hello, everyone, and welcome to this week's Cube Insights, powered by ETR. Today is November 8, 2019 and I'd like to address one of the most important topics in the minds of a lot of executives. I'm talking about CEOs, CIOs, Chief Information Security Officers, Boards of Directors, governments and virtually every business around the world. And that's the topic of cyber security. The state of cyber security has changed really dramatically over the last 10 years. I mean, as a cyber security observer I've always been obsessed with Stuxnet, which the broader community discovered the same year that theCUBE started in 2010. It was that milestone that opened my eyes. Think about this. It's estimated that Stuxnet cost a million dollars to create. That's it. Compare that to an F-35 fighter jet. It costs about $85-$100 million to build one. And that's on top of many billions of dollars in R&D. So Stuxnet, I mean, it hit me like a ton of bricks. That the future of war was all about cyber, not about tanks. And the barriers to entry were very, very low. Here's my point. We've gone from an era where thwarting hacktivists was our biggest cyber challenge to one where we're now fighting nation states and highly skilled organized criminals. And of course, cyber crime and monetary theft is the number one objective behind most of these security breaches that we see in the press everyday. It's estimated that by 2021 cyber crime is going to cost society $6 trillion in theft, lost productivity, recovery costs. I mean, that's just a staggeringly large number. It's even hard to fathom. Now, the other C-change is how organizations have had to respond to the bad guys. It used to be pretty simple. I got a castle and the queen is inside. We need to protect her, so what do we do? We built a mote, put it around the perimeter. Now, think of the queen as data. Well, what's happened? The queen has cloned herself a zillion times. She's left the castle. She's gone up to the sky with the clouds. She's gone to the edge of the kingdom and beyond. She's also making visits to machines and the factories and hanging out with the commoners. She's totally exposed. Listen, by 2020, there's going to be hundreds of billions of IP addresses. These are going to be endpoints and phones, TVs, cameras, tablets, automobiles, factory machines, and all these represent opportunities for the bad guys to infiltrate. This explosion of endpoints that I'm talking about is created massive exposures, and we're seeing it manifest itself in the form of phishing, malware, and of course the weaponization of social media. You know, if you think that 2016 was nuts, wait 'til you see how the 2020 presidential election plays out. And of course, there's always the threat of ransomware. It's on everybody's minds these days. So I want to try to put some of this in context and share with you some insights that we've learned from the experts on theCUBE. And then let's drill into some of the ETR data and assess the state of security, the spending patterns. We're going to try to identify some of those companies with momentum and maybe some of those that are a little bit exposed. Let me start with the macro and the challenged faced by organization and that's complexity. Here's Robert Herjavec on theCUBE. Now, you know him from the Shark Tank, but he's also a security industry executive. Herjavec told me in 2017 at the Splunk.com Conference that he thought the industry was overly complex. Let's take a look and listen. >> I think that the industry continues to be extremely complicated. There's a lot of vendors. There's a lot of products. The average Fortune 500 company has 72 security products. There's a stat that RSA this year, that there's 1500 new security start-ups every year. Every single year. How are they going to survive? And which ones do you have to buy because they're critical and provide valuable insights? And which ones are going to be around for a year or two and you're never going to hear about again? So it's a extremely challenging complex environment. >> So it's that complexity that had led people like Pat Gelsinger to say security is a do-over, and that cyber security is broken. He told me this years ago on theCUBE. And this past VM World we talked to Pat Gelsinger and remember, VMware bought Carbon Black, which is an endpoint security specialist, for $2.1 billion. And he said that he's basically creating a cloud security division to be run by Patrick Morley, who is the Carbon Black CEO. Now, many have sort of questioned and been skeptical about VMware's entrance into the space. But here's a clip that Pat Gelsinger shared with us on theCUBE this past VM World. Let's listen and we'll come back and talk about it. >> And this move in security, I am just passionate about this, and as I've said to my team, if this is the last I do in my career is I want to change security. We just not are satisfying our customers. They shouldn't put more stuff on our platforms. >> National defense issues, huge problems. >> It's just terrible. And I said, if it kills me, right, I'm going to get this done. And they says, "It might kill you, Pat." >> So this brings forth an interesting dynamic in the industry today. Specifically, Steven Smith, the CISO of AWS, at this year's Reinforce, which is their security conference, Amazon's big cloud security conference, said that this narrative that security is broken, it's just not true, he said. It's destructive and it's counterproductive. His and AWS's perspective is that the state of cloud security is actually strong. Kind of reminded me of a heavily messaged State of the Union address by the President of the United States. At the same time, in many ways, AWS is doing security over. It's coming at it from the standpoint of a clean slate called cloud and infrastructure as a surface. Here's my take. The state of security in this union is not good. Every year we spend more, we lose more, and we feel less safe. So why does AWS, the security czar, see if differently? Well, Amazon uses this notion of a shared responsibility security model. In other words, they secure the S3 buckets, maybe the EC2 infrastructure, not maybe, the EC2 infrastructure. But it's up to the customer to make sure that she is enforcing the policies and configuring systems that adhere to the EDIX of the corporation. So I think the shared security model is a bit misunderstood by a lot of people. What do I mean by that? I think sometimes people feel like well, my data's in the cloud, and AWS has better security than I do. Here I go, I'm good. Well, AWS probably does have better security than you do. Here's the problem with that. You still have all these endpoints and databases and file servers that you're managing, and that you have to make sure comply with your security policies. Even if you're all on the cloud, ultimately, you are responsible for securing your data. Let's take a listen to Katie Jenkins, the CISO of Liberty Mutual, on this topic and we'll come back. >> Yeah, so the shared responsibility model is, I think that's an important speaking point to this whole ecosystem. At the end of the day, Liberty Mutual, our duty is to protect policyholder data. It doesn't matter if it's in the cloud, if it's in our data centers, we have that duty to protect. >> It's on you. >> All right, so there you have it from a leading security practitioner. The cloud is not a silver bullet. Bad user behavior is going to trump good security every time. So unfortunately the battle goes on. And here's where it gets tricky. Security practitioners are drowning in a sea of incidents. They have to prioritize and respond to, and as you heard Robert Herjavec say, the average large company has 75 security products installed. Now, we recently talked to another CISO, Brian Lozada, and asked him what's the number one challenge for security pros. Here's what he said. >> Lack of talent. I mean, we're starving for talent. Cyber security's the only field in the world with negative unemployment. We just don't have the actual bodies to actually fill the gaps that we have. And in that lack of talent CISOs are starving. We're looking for the right things or tools to actually patch these holes and we just don't have it. Again, we have to force the industry to patch all of those resource gaps with innovation and automation. I think CISOs really need to start asking for more automation and innovation within their programs. >> So bottom line is we can't keep throwing humans at the problem. Can't keep throwing tools at the problem. Automation is the only way in which we're going to be able to keep up. All right, so let's pivot and dig in to some of the ETR data. First, I want to share with you what ETR is saying overall, what their narrative looks like around spending. So in the overall security space, it's pretty interesting what ETR says, and it dovetails into some of the macro trends that I've just shared with you. Let's talk about CIOs and CISOs. ETR is right on when they tell me that these executives no longer have a blank check to spend on security. They realize they can't keep throwing tools and people at the problem. They don't have the bodies, and as we heard from Brian Lozada. And so what you're seeing is a slowdown in the growth, somewhat of a slowdown, in security spending. It's still a priority. But there's less redundancy. In other words, less experimentation with new vendors and less running systems in parallel with legacy products. So there's a slowdown adoption of new tools and more replacement of legacy stuff is what we're seeing. As a result, ETR has identified this bifurcation between those vendors that are very well positioned and those that are losing wallet share. Let me just mention a few that have the momentum, and we're going to dig into this data in more detail. Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike, Okta, which does identity management, Cisco, who's coming at the problem from its networking strength. Microsoft, which recently announced Sentinel for Azure. These are the players, and some of them that are best positioned, I'll mention some others, from the standpoint spending momentum in the ETR dataset. Now, here's a few of those that are losing momentum. Checkpoint, SonicWall, ArcSight, Dell EMC, which is RSA, is kind of mixed. We'll talk about that a little bit. IBM, Symantec, even FireEye is seeing somewhat higher citations of decreased spending in the ETR surveys and dataset. So there's a little bit of a cause for concern. Now, let's remember the methodology here. Every quarter ETR asks are you green, meaning adopting this vendor as new or spending more? Are you neutral, which is gray, are you spending the same? Or are you red, meaning that you're spending less or retiring? You subtract the red from the green and you get what's called a net score. The higher the net score, the better. So here's a chart that shows a ranking of security players and their net scores. The bars show survey data from October '18, July '19, and October '19. In here, you see strength from CrowdStrike, Okta, Twistlock, which was acquired by Palo Alto Networks. You see Elastic, Microsoft, Illumio, the core, Palo Alto Classic, Splunk looking strong, Cisco, Fortinet, Zscaler is starting to show somewhat slowing net score momentum. Look at Carbon Black. Carbon Black is showing a meaningful drop in net score. So VMware has some work to do. But generally, the companies to the left are showing spending momentum in the ETR dataset. And I'll show another view on net score in a moment. But I want to show a chart here that shows replacement spending and decreased spending citations. Notice the yellow. That's the ETR October '19 survey of spending intentions. And the bigger the yellow bar, the more negative. So Sagar, the director of research at ETR, pointed this out to me, that, look at this. There are about a dozen companies where 20%, a fifth of the customer base is decreasing spend or ripping them out heading into the year end. So you can see SonicWall, CA, ArcSight, Symantec, Carbon Black, again, a big negative jump. IBM, same thing. Dell EMC, which is RSA, slight uptick. That's a bit of a concern. So you can see this bifurcation that ETR has been talking about for awhile. Now, here's a really interesting kind of net score. What I'm showing here is the ETR data sorted by net score, again, higher is better, and shared N, which is the number of shared accounts in the survey, essentially the number of mentions in that October survey with 1,336 IT buyers responded. So how many of that 1,300 identified these companies? So essentially it's a proxy for the size of the install base. So showing up on both charts is really good. So look, CrowdStrike has a 62% net score with a 133 shared account. So a fairly sizable install base and a very high net score. Okta, similar. Palo Alto Networks and Splunk, both large, continue to show strength. They got net scores of 44% and 313 shared N. Fortinet shows up in both. Proofpoint. Look at Microsoft and Cisco. With 521 and 385 respectively on the right hand side. So big install bases with very solid net scores. Now look at the flip side. Go down to the bottom right to IBM. 132 shared accounts with a 14.4% net score. That's very low. Check Point similarly. Same with Symantec. Again, bifurcation that ETR has been citing. Really stark in this chart. All right, so I want to wrap. In some respects from a practitioner perspective, the sky erectus is falling. You got increased attack surface. You've got exploding number of IP addresses. You got data distributed all over the place, tool creep. You got sloppy user behavior, overwork security op staff, and a scarcity of skills. And oh, by the way, we're all turning into a digital business, which is all about data. So it's a very, very dangerous time for companies. And it's somewhat chaotic. Now, chaos, of course, can mean cash for cyber security companies and investors. This is still a very vibrant space. So just by the way of comparison and looking at some of the ETR data, check this out. What I'm showing is companies in two sectors, security and storage, which I've said in previous episodes of breaking analysis, storage, and especially traditional storage disk arrays are on the back burner spending wise for many, many shops. This chart shows the number of companies in the ETR dataset with a net score greater than a specific target. So look, security has seven companies with a 49% net score or higher. Storage has one. Security has 18 above 39%. Storage has five. Security has 31 companies in the ETR dataset with a net score higher than 30%. Storage only has nine. And I like to think of 30% as kind of that the point at which you want to be above that 30%. So as you can see, relatively speaking, security is an extremely vibrant space. But in many ways it is broken. Pat Gelsinger called it a do-over and is affecting a strategy to fix it. Personally, I don't think one company can solve this problem. Certainly not VMware, or even AWS, or even Microsoft. It's too complicated, it's moving too fast. It's so lucrative for the bad guys with very low barriers to entry, as I mentioned, and as the saying goes, the good guys have to win every single day. The bad guys, they only have to win once. And those are just impossible odds. So in my view, Brian Lozada, the CISO that we interviewed, nailed it. The focus really has to be on automation. You know, we can't just keep using brute force and throwing tools at the problem. Machine intelligence and analytics are definitely going to be part of the answer. But the reality is AI is still really complicated too. How do you operationalize AI? Talk to companies trying to do that. It's very, very tricky. Talk about lack of skills, that's one area that is a real challenge. So I predict the more things change the more you're going to see this industry remain a game of perpetual whack a mole. There's certainly going to be continued consolidation, and unquestionably M&A is going to be robust in this space. So I would expect to see continued storage in the trade press of breaches. And you're going to hear scare tactics by the vendor community that want to take advantage of the train wrecks. Now, I wish I had better news for practitioners. But frankly, this is great news for investors if they can follow the trends and find the right opportunities. This is Dave Vellante for Cube Insights powered by ETR. Connect with me at David.Vellante@siliconangle.com, or @dvellante on Twitter, or please comment on what you're seeing in the marketplace in my LinkedIn post. Thanks for watching. Thank you for watching this breaking analysis. We'll see you next time. (energetic music)

(smooth music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hello and welcome to theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto, California, for another CUBE Conversation where we go in-depth with thought leaders driving innovation across the tech industry. I'm your host Peter Burris. This is going to be the second in our series of demystifying cloud native that we've undertaken with some of the thought leaders at Cisco. The basic thrust of this conversation, the basic thrust of the series is to have developers learn something about what it means to build increasingly distributed applications utilizing cloud native services that will work, scale, and serve enterprise need. Now to have that conversation we've got Dominik Tornow, who is a principal engineer of the office of the CTO at Cisco. Dominik, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Hey, thank you very much for having me again. >> Okay, so upfront I said we're going to continue in our series of demystifying cloud native, but before we do let's review what do we mean by cloud native? >> So in our last installment we talked about cloud native and defined cloud native applications as applications that are scalable and reliable by construction, and in order to be scalable and reliable by construction an application has to be able to detect and mitigate load and failure. >> So if we think about detecting and mitigating load and failure it's a very, very simple definition but very powerful, as all good definitions are. What types of technologies are available today that allow us to actually instantiate this notion of cloud native as you've defined it? >> So you want to look under the umbrella term of operation automation, and there are multiple solutions available that you'll find either proprietary on clouds like AWS, Google, or Azure, or you'll also find solutions in the opensource space, and the most prominent solution of that nowadays is obviously Kubernetes. >> And so microservices is kind of an architectural approach that people can start thinking about. >> And microservices is an approach people can start thinking about, because microservices are, especially when they are stateless microservices, scalable and reliable by construction by themselves. Now you have a very good foundation to build a scalable and reliable application out of scalable and reliable components. >> Look, I've been around in the IT industry for a long time. Worked inside IT, run IT organizations, been an analyst, and I know from experience that you can take great technology and nonetheless create crap applications with it, so what is it about microservices that increases the likelihood of success with cloud native, but also very importantly what must developers stay cognizant of to ensure that they stay within the good guardrails and don't drift out to junk applications? >> So first let's look at what microservice application architecture actually is, because when we contrast it to a traditional, also called monolithic application architecture, we see that on the boundaries looking from the outside in we are still talking about one coherent application, right? From an end user's perspective we are not looking at a loose assortment of services. We are still looking at one coherent application performing a task, but looking into the inside we see significant differences. So for a traditional application all components of the application run within one process and one machine local network, so to say. However, when we move to a microservice application, through microservice application, the individual components, and actually the individual component instances, run in their own processes, and they communicate via an actual network. Now having your individual component instances run in individual processes allow you to easily meet scalability and reliability. You can easily scale up more component instances, or in case of failure you can easily scale up replacements for them, but as you said, you have to keep in mind this does not come for free because you are throwing a few challenges the developer's way. On a workload level the challenge is now partial failure. One of these component instances may have experienced a crash fault at any point in time, whereas in a traditional application the application as a whole would experience a crash fault, but not part of the application. And when we move to the network level then it looks actually even more bleak because now messages may get lost, messages may get duplicated, messages may experience delay, so latency, and with all of that this is something the developer has to face and has to work around. This is-- >> Well, let's dig into this a little bit. So the monolithic application basically you have a single process so all the resources are bind, or bind together inside a single memory space or inside a single shared state, and when one of them fails that brings them all down, so the user knows explicitly it's up or it's down. >> Correct. >> But when you start building some of these microservices where each of these individual components, the loss of a particular, perhaps critical, perhaps not, like but let's say a security feature within the cluster could go down, but the rest of it might feel like it's still working, which could dramatically increase the likelihood of exposure on any number of different levels, have I got that right? >> You got that right, and especially if we talk about state, dreaded state, but the one that we actually all need in our applications. If we talk about state we're talking about inconsistencies, and that is obviously the nightmare of every application developer and application operator. >> So we've got message loss, message deduplication, message reordering, and we're introducing latency because we're putting a stateless network as the mechanism through which we get the communication amongst the different components, have I got that right? >> That is absolutely correct, and let me throw in one more caveat in that case. We were talking about workload level partial failure and network level message loss or message duplication. Unfortunately there is actually no way to reliably detect has the request not been sent, was it lost? Did the process, the receiving process experience a partial failure? Or has response not been received, was it lost? So you cannot reliably detect any of these conditions, which leads us to the point that we cannot guarantee exactly once message delivery. We can only guarantee at most once or at least once, but as developers all we ever want is one service consumer call a service provider exactly once. However, we have to work around these terms, and this is what makes our application development very, very complex. >> Yeah, we want that consistency and that ability to discretely say what is or is not isolated in the overall notion of what constitutes a transaction. >> Very correct. Bottom line that is a good takeaway. Microservices, one way or another, will kill your transaction. (laughs) >> If you don't do them right. So from a developer standpoint, as you, you know, you're within Cisco, but you spend a lot of time thinking about the developer role, thinking about what developers need to do differently to fully exploit these cloud native capabilities. How do you communicate or see developers and infrastructure people doing a better job of communicating so that they can each be aware of the realities that the other is facing? >> So personally I strongly believe in strong, accurate, and tangible definitions in order to have a solid basis and foundation for good communication, because our responsibilities in a cloud native world, whether it's application developer, application operator, or infrastructure operator, are only going to get more complex. So we rely on solid and precise technical communication to A, identify the challenges and communicate solutions for these challenges effectively. >> Now one of the things that's interesting about the cloud native microservices sets of technologies is that they're starting to be paired with other classes of technologies for doing a better job of going beyond just simply orchestrating the communication amongst various resources in a cluster. Where do you see some of these new technologies, like Istio and whatnot, starting to assert themselves to help developers do a better job of building cloud native applications? >> So let me state the following hypothesis, for cloud native we got the workload management right. We didn't get the network right just yet. And when it comes to workload management solutions like Kubernetes do a fantastic job for the application developer and the application operator and provide solid primitives to build your applications on top of it. However, we are still suffering from problems not within a Kubernetes cluster but across Kubernetes clusters, so when we look at, for example, the Kubernetes networking model communication within the cluster, we are set, we're good. Communication across clusters we still have some challenges. And we do see emerging solutions in the space, like for example Istio and other service meshes that increasingly do not only address the situation within the cluster but also across clusters, but we still need to make a leap forward into a different kind of cloud native networking, and I do believe that cloud native networking will show itself or define itself as a workload to workload connectivity. So eventually we will separate the runtime domain, the cluster from the connectivity domain, and then enable a workload on one cluster to talk to a workload on another cluster seamlessly without opening about 15 or 25 tickets. >> Yeah, exactly. (chuckles) And so the communications becomes natural to each of the workloads. >> Correct. The communication becomes natural to each of the workloads, which is a prerequisite for efficient development. Of course I quipped a bit with the tickets, but it is an actual reality that as soon as you leave one cluster and you, for example, need to reach workloads that are on-premise or you need to reach workloads in a different cloud, sometimes even just a different availability zone, you will encounter communication processes with infrastructure folks in your department. The communication is heavily around tickets. It will slow you down a lot, and in our agile world that is not sustainable. >> Well look, as you said earlier, there are four things you have to worry about as you request services from the network, latency, loss, deduplication, partial, et cetera. As you increase the latency the other three are absolutely going to create problems for you. >> Oh yes, absolutely. >> And so I think that's kind of what you're saying is even within a single cloud provider if you start changing reasons and you start introducing distances you start introducing latency, the issues of partial message delivery, deduplication of messages, message loss, et cetera, will assert themselves and become a bigger challenge for developers. >> You know the heisenbug theorem, right? In distributed applications the heisenbug is a bug that will disappear as soon as you look at it. (laughs) So-- (chuckles) >> I didn't know that. >> So a distributed-- (chuckles) >> But now I'm thinking about it. (chuckles) >> In distributed applications when you test your system on a local machine or even a set of local machines, right, you have a very good chance that the actual corner cases will never show up in your test cases, but as you said, when you introduce latency the heisenbug from an alt outsider will become a surefire thing. So as soon as you roll your application in production and then roll it out across geographical regions introducing the latency you will see a lot of that. >> Heisenbug. >> The heisenbug. >> I like that. (chuckles) All right, Dominik Tornow, the principal engineer in office of the CTO at Cisco talking about demystifying cloud native. I want to thank you once again for being on theCUBE. We look forward to seeing you again. >> Thank you very much, me too. >> And once again, thanks for joining us for another CUBE Conversation. I'm Peter Burris, see you next time. (smooth music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCube. (techno music) Now here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante and welcome to this special Cube Insights, powered by ETR. We've been running these Breaking Analysis Segments and today we're going to talk about some spending data that shows that there's continued interest in hyperconverged infrastructure. So we've been running these segments over the last several weeks with our partner ETR. They've got a database of about 4,500 IT Practitioners and CIOs. They go out quarterly and ask spending intentions. So we've been sharing that, along with our opinions. These are completely independent segments. I want to disclose that a number of the companies that we're talking about today: Nutanix, VMware, Dell EMC, Cisco, HPE. They sponsor theCube, but they have absolutely no input into editorial. They don't affect our opinion in any way, shape or form. So let's get into it. I'm here with Stu Miniman. Stu is an expert in this field. He's covered the space. Stu, let's look at some of the fundamentals. What do people need to know... Alex, if ya put up the slide, Stu, maybe you could talk to it. >> Yeah. Dave, thanks. I've been watching you have some fun with this. I enjoyed swimming in some of the data here and as you know, Dave, we've been watching since before hyperconverged infrastructure, or HCI, was a term that everybody talked about. We've been looking at how these hyperscale trends are going to impact the Enterprise. We put out our server SAN research years and years ago, so we know all these companies really well. And despite the latest AI and cloud and everything, the data shows, HCI, the simplification of the data center, building out what we would call True Private Cloud is important today. So right, we wanted to know when you look at the data, first of all, how are the vendors doing? Who are the leaders in this space here? There were a whole number of startups that came in this space. When we first analyzed the market it was companies like Microsoft and VMware that owned the operating system we thought would be hugely important. If you look in the big names this environment: Dell partnered with everyone, of course they bought Dell, bought EMC, which included a stake in VMware. What's that relationship with Nutanix? How is that shaping the market? As well as how is cloud impacting things? Both from a spending standpoint, has cloud sucked away revenue from HCI as that specter has overhung everybody in the IT space? And also, how does HCI fit into multicloud and how does that fit? >> Okay, great. So thanks for that setup, Stu, now let's get into some of the data. Alex, if you bring up the slide, the next slide. This is spending intentions for Nutanix, VMware and some other vendors. I'll go through that. But it's basically showing Nutanix and VMware are fighting it out. You know they're in this internecine battle and in social, and (chuckles) there's a war goin' on, because there's big money to be made here. So for those of you who are familiar with these segments, this is data from Enterprise Technology Research, from their July 2019 Spending Intentions Survey. So they're asking about spending intentions for the second half of 2019. The end of the survey, out of the 4,500 people in the panel, 1,068 responded to this survey. So on the left hand side you see the vendors: Nutanix, VMware with vSAN, Dell EMC with VxRail, specifically. Then SimpliVity, and then Springpath, or Cisco. So what the chart shows is what we call, Net Score. And net score is calculated by taking the red, on the bar, which is, we're going to leave the platform, that's the dark red. The lighter red, which is, we're going to spend less in the second half. The gray, which their spending's going to be flat. The dark green, or the evergreen, which says, we're going to increase spending. And the lime green, which I'm going to add to the platform. You take the green, minus the red, you get net score. Higher the net score, the better. You can see, Nutanix and VMware with vSAN are leading the pack. And then we'll go through that. But then you see, Shared Accounts. That's the number of indications for spending that they received out of those 1068. So Stu, what is this data telling you? >> So first of all, Dave, it confirmed kind of the general market share numbers that we hear out there. The vendors that track that on quarterly. VMware has the most customers, has the largest revenue, and their largest partner for that, of course, is Dell. VMware and Dell go to market, joint product development, joint engineering, joint go to market and it's the biggest piece of vSAN, so that's where we specifically wanted to look at the VxRail. And vSAN and VxRail, doing very well. They're adding new customers; was interesting to me that you saw VxRail kind of ramping up a little more on the, attracting new companies, but also looked to be losing some on the tail end of the dark red. As opposed to vSAN in general, is a little bit more stable. We know how many thousands of customers they have out there, and Vmware's a software story as opposed to VxRail is that full appliance. Nutanix is the second horse in this two-horse race that we're really talking about here, from HCI. There's some discussion in the marketplace after two quarters being down, is Nutanix showing weakness? What's happening there? The most recent quarter announcement was that Nutanix is doing well, seems to... They had a little bit of change as they're going through their move to a software model and sorting things out with sales and marketing in their channel. The data here shows that the second half of the year looks good for Nutanix. So to some of the questions I asked in the first slide, Dave, Nutanix and VMware, of course the clear leaders in this space. SimpliVity, which was of course bought be HP, Springpath which is the hyperflex from Cisco, are far behind those two out there. And it seems that even though Dell and VMware are fighting, very much with Nutanix, that is not heavily dampening Nutanix's from the respondents in this survey. >> Okay, and just a word on the data, so you see 184 shared accounts for Nutanix, 174 for VMware and down the line. Only 42 for SimpliVity and only 18 for Springpath, and Cisco. It's an indication of the size of the install base, obviously the more shared accounts, the more mentions, the larger the install base. Again, they're statistically significant; ETR does a very good job of that. Let's look Stu, at... Oh, actually I want to make another point here. So how are these net scores? Well let's put 'em in context. The hottest net scores we've seen recently are: Snowflake, and UiPath, with 80% plus, net score. Okay, so that's really, they're off the charts, they're growing like crazy. We saw Salesforce with 55%, so, and Workday sort of in there as well. Companies that are growing share. So SAP in the 30% range, and so you see the Dell EMC, VxRail, that's kind of holding serve. It's not like, dramatically gaining share, but they're growing a little bit and then-- >> And I think it's a lot, Dave, it shows to the maturity of this market. HCI is not new, both Nutanix and VMware have thousands of customers, specifically with V's then we're talking VMware. So it was more, when I saw some of your charts, Microsoft has a similar net score. >> Right >> Well liked, good install based, still growing and the like. And brings in the discussion of when we did some cross section of the analysis looking at cloud companies and how does this impact their public cloud spend; is this detracting if this customer's also doing public cloud? And the long and the short of it is VMware and Nutanix are pretty much the same if not actually a little bit better when you talk about a customer that's looking at their overall cloud spend. So to me that really signals that both VMware and Nutanix are doing a good job into how their solution fits into the customer's overall hybrid cloud strategy. >> All right, let's take a look at the next slide, which talks to time series. So this is hyperconverged infrastructure spending intentions again, for the second half of 2019, over time. So the July '19 Survey you can see is the most recent one. We go all the way back to January '17 and you can see Nutanix on the top, VMware or vSAN on the bottom. We just selected those two. We're just repeating the net score and the shared accounts. And you can see these things tend to bounce around a little bit. You can see Nutanix maintains a lead, but the market's startin' to converge. These two companies are coming together. We hear a lot about vSAN doing very well, it's kind of held on. You can see a slight downward pressure in July, in the July survey. It's unclear what that means. That could be an indication of just some uncertainty in the marketplace. Some economic macro concerns. Tariffs, potential headwinds there, so there could be some uncertainty there. But what do you takeaway from this slide, Stu? >> Yeah, first of all right. As you show, Dave, VMware is a bit more steady, Nutanix gone up for bit and come down. Both of them stayed relatively stable. Somewhere between kind of the 45 and 55 lately. A little bit, if you look at the overall trend, Nutanix is down. VMware could surpass them from the net score in the future, if this trend holds. But both of them doing quite well. When you looked at all the other vendors in there, of course the scale is just showing 40-70%, if you put all the others, which are down much lower, you can see once again, that kind of the clear leadership. These two companies, just strong lead. Does not look like there any challengers in this space that are ready to be a clear number three yet, in the market. >> But Nutanix at one point had no competition. >> Yeah. >> Okay, now vSAN comes in and of course-- >> Oh no, absolutely. So no, SimpliVity and Scale Computing, and there were a whole host of startups. There's all the brand new startups in the space. Everything from little companies like Diamante, Pivot3, who was around doing this before it came. So there's always been a lot there, but Nutanix is the one that separated from the pack. The only one in this space that's gone IPO. But VMware's there, Microsoft won that, they rebranded their Azure Stack HCI for what they put in the data center last year. So expect Microsoft partnering with all of the big server manufacturers to push farther into HCI, but really has not directly impacted this market too much, just yet. >> But there's definitely been some pressure on Nutanix from an earning standpoint, the stock's been hit. You've had some executive departures. There's some rumors about acquisition with Google. Your thoughts on-- >> Yeah, definitely. So John Furrier just had Dheeraj Pandey, the CEO of Nutanix, in our Palo Alto studio, leading up to the Copenhagen show for Nutanix that I will be at. Sure. Sunil Potti who was basically the number two at Nutanix, is now working for Thomas Kurian, TK, over at Google Cloud. My indication from what I hear, he is not over there to help broker a deal. Sunil had a great run at Nutanix, there was a clean break there, but there is a mostly new executive team at Nutanix. Now a couple of years past the IPO and the team at Nutanix, they have their platform. The have a bunch of SaaS offerings that they're doing there. Do they have a relationship with Google? Absolutely! They had Diane Greene at one of their events a couple of years ago. They did joint engineering. But I actually saw that engineering effort cool off a little bit in the last year or so since the new regime came on in Google Cloud. So does Nutanix have a lot of Enterprise accounts and know how to work with the Enterprise and could that be a boon to Google? Absolutely! But the personnel of a Nutanix executive over at Google, and Brian Stevens who's the CTO of Google Cloud being on the Board of Nutanix? I do not think that that is telegraphing that an acquisition is going to happen. It could. We see lots of big acquisitions. Nine or 10 billion dollars from Nutanix could be interesting for Nutanix and help them get in a lot of places and help Google. But Dave, I goin' on record say, I don't think it's going to happen. I don't think Cisco is going to buy Nutanix. Infrastructure's not the real push for Chuck Robbins and that team. And at the Google Cloud event, Dave, that we were at, we saw Sanjay Poonen from VMware up on stage touting how deeply VMware was going to partner. So both VMware and Nutanix are partnering with all of the clouds. VMware of course has a very deep relationship with VMware. They're going deeper with Google, they are even partnering with the old enemy of Microsoft, so I would give VMware definitely has a deeper and more public relationship with all the public cloud providers but Nutanix is also partnering and expanding their portfolio to give themselves good growth beyond just the core HCI market. >> HP's another one. So Nutanix and HPE are workin' together. Kind of the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Nutanix was not at VMworld this year; they're kind of booted out. So they belly up to HP. >> Yeah, HP loves having, they have their, "As a service offerings," and Nutanix is one of those as well as Nutanix can sell the HP. So as the, right, the Dell relationship is likely going to die down over time, as Michael Dell on the team, want to sell more Dell hardware with VMware software. HPE is another... And they also partner with Lenovo on the Nutanix side. >> All right, Stu, bring it home. What are the key takeaways on this cube Insights. >> Okay, so HCI, who is a two-horse race right now. There are interesting companies to look at beyond the two, but if you want to understand who the leaders are in the space it is: VMware, especially with their VxRail and Nutanix, are the two leaders in that space. Really looking and understanding how they're expanding into multicloud and hybrid cloud solutions. VMware very much with their VCF offering, which packages vSAN to go into the VMware cloud offerings. And Nutanix with an interesting strategy, both with how they really spread some of their services like what they're doing with Xi Cloud, as well as some SaaS offerings, which some of them really have a disconnect. Not in a bad way, but just are not tied directly to the hardware. What the infrastructure companies have tried to do for years. Both of them, VMware's done tons of acquisitions. Nutanix has done quite a few acquisitions too. >> So your second point here, what's the impact of Dell VMware versus the Nutanix battle? You say not a significant impact on spending intentions yet. I mean there's clearly some evidence that those two markets are comin' together, that VMware's pressuring Nutanix. But why do you say, yet? What do you expect? I mean is it the OEM deal with Dell? >> It's the OAM relationship. There is huge pipeline of Dell hardware with Nutanix software and they're at loggerheads. So absolutely, the Dell family: Dell, EMC and VMware are doing all they can to dial that down. So they put pressure on the channel. And even some of the most loyal Nutanix channel partners that work with Dell, have had pressure to do more and more VxRail. So I expect it to have impact, but just as, Dave, I'll dial back the clock. You probably remember when EMC had a relationship with HP and HP killed the OEM of EMC storage. EMC stormed back and got a lot of those accounts. Same thing happened when EMC and Dell broke up a couple of years before the acquisition. So Nutanix is storming to go with HPE as one of their server partners, and (mumbles). So can Nutanix keep their growth and momentum going as Dell is no longer their biggest partner? >> Well, they're fighting a two-front war. They've got one with Dell VMware and they're also fighting the war with the public cloud guys, even though they're partnering with the public cloud guys. All right, they're sort of taking that cloud model but of course it's on prim. So you say how this public cloud affects HCI spending; not a significant impact on spending intentions yet. Can I infer from that that you do expect there to be pressure on that second front? >> Yeah, so as I've talked about before Dave, when we look at VMware and VMware gives the VMware cloud in AWS. Some say, "Great, that gives me a nice path to be able to use public cloud. But maybe I don't need some of this VMware licensing and software in there." The question for Nutanix is very similar. What services do they have? How do they become more sticky in customer environments? And absolutely, they're driving a roadmap for that in working with their customers. >> Well the thing about Nutanix is that customer's really happy. The customer's really like Nutanix. They like the simplicity. I've talked to a number of Nutanix customers that are very happy in that regard. And they have a leading product in that regard. But they're aiming at the multicloud space and can they play there? >> And Dave, you make a really good point. The killer use case, what did HCI deliver? It delivered simplicity. Today, if you talk about public cloud in general or even hybrid or multicloud, (chuckles) simplicity is not how you would describe this. So can the customers, the companies that did HCI, so, VMware, Nutanix, HPE and Cisco, they're all fighting for that hybrid and multicloud environment. And if they can help deliver simplicity of management, simplicity of leveraging my data, they can be successful in that space. >> Okay, so you're sort of positive on the multicloud, their position in multicloud. Even though they're not one of the big five. >> Yeah, and the good news for a Nutanix is that they're growing off of a much smaller base then say VMware, when you say they have five or 600,000 customers. Hey, how big of an impact will public cloud have on them? >> All right, so we don't pick stocks. We're not making recommendations. (laughs) But, do you feel like it's overdone, that it's undervalued? Independent of the macro. Do you feel like the pressure on Nutanix is warranted, or do you feel like it's got legs? >> So I feel Wall Street tends to over adjust when they go through things. When I talk to my friends on the Wall Street stuff. Definitely Nutanix took more of a beating probably then they should have. But they had two quarters that weren't great. And some of that was the management changes, they blamed that they couldn't hire sales and marketing fast enough. Something we'd asked, if you're a company in the Valley and you've gone from a few hundred people to a few thousand people. How do you keep adding good quality people? That's challenging. So yes, I think we've actually seen Dave, in the last week, or so Nutanix has been one of the fastest growing stocks in the tech market. So they're adjusting some. So I still think Nutanix has plenty of room for growth. The question is, what's their path to say, two billion dollars? Or is it an exit for 9-10 billion dollars down the road? >> All right, Stu, some great stuff. Thank you for that analysis. And thank you for watching this episode of theCube Insights, powered by ETR. This is Dave Vellante, for Stu Miniman, we'll see ya next time. (techno music)

>> from the Silicon Angle Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts. It's the cue now Here's your host Day Volonte >> Hybrid. Welcome to this special edition of Cube Insights. This is the Cubes 10th year at VM World and leading up >> to V M World. >> We wanted to provide some data in some analysis to you all, and we're working with our partners at E. T. R Enterprise Technology Research. We first introduced you to them when IBM consummated the Red Hat acquisition and they provided some data. E T. R is affirmed. That does really detailed and fast ongoing data. They have, ah, large panel of end customers that they talked to about spending intentions, covering virtually every company in the Enterprise. It's it's great stuff. We reached out to them and came up with a number of questions that we wanted to address around Of'em World and VM where, so let me just start by showing you the questions that we ask them to help us with. And we did essentially what I call drill down survey. So we took their existing data sets. They just did a survey. They completed one in July on spending intentions for the second half of the year combined that, with all the time Siri's data that they had. So these are the questions that really are top of mind for I t decision makers in our community. First of all, what's the appetite for VM? We're spending the second half of 2019. We'll share some data on that. There's a second point is there's narrative out there that that containers are going to kill the M. Where, well, is that true? What is the day to say? How about Multi Cloud? It's the hot topic who was best positioned in multi cloud not only within the VM, where ecosystem but overall, obviously, the M, where has designs on multi cloud and is considered an early potential leader? How about NSX when VM wear but nice era? It changed the game on networking, changed their relationship with Cisco. How is Ennis Ex impacting spending on Cisco? Particularly, obviously a networking. The fifth question that we wanted to address is how is public cloud affecting the M where spend we know public cloud is growing faster than on Prem. What's the impact on the M wear? And then finally it was announced in the press that VM wear was going to acquire Pivotal. Why would that be all right? So let's get into it. The first thing that I want to address is the first question in spending intention. So this slide really shows the results of the second half survey. It's 600 >> and >> 93 respondents representing almost $300 billion in spending power. And so it's actually they were asked what you're spending intention intentions For the second half of 2019 you could see 41% of the respondents said they're going to spend Maur, and only 7% said they're gonna spend less. About 45% said >> they gonna hold firm >> small number 5%. So we're gonna add new and only a tiny infant testable. 2% said they were gonna replace the anywhere, so that's pretty good for an incumbent. And essentially it Sze holding serve and maybe doing a little bit. But even better than holding serve on. So So we saw. That is very positive. The next question that we want to address is the narrative of containers will kill the M, where we asked Pat Gelsinger about that on the Cube years ago, he said, Hey, we're gonna use this as a tail wind. We're gonna embrace containers. So the bottom line is there's very little evidence that containers are hurting the M where let alone killing the end. Where this is a portion of the survey, about 461 respondents on you can see that you know, the big big blip early on back in July 27. Dean. Big uptick in spending, and since then it's been relatively stable. But the important point here is the number of shared accounts that we went to essentially container customers and asked them about their VM wear. Spend. I say we eat. TR did. This is what they do on an ongoing basis, and you could see the number of shared accounts back in 17 was only eight. But as you go to the right hand side, the more recent surveys you're talking about 361 shared accounts of the data sample got much bigger. No evidence that the M where is being negatively impacted by containers kind of affirming the assertion of Pat Gelsinger. Let's talk about multi club. I have said that multi cloud to date has largely been a symptom of multi vendor It's cos acquiring Cloud Technologies for specific workloads. Its shadow i t. It's pockets of cloud activity versus a coherent strategy to manage across multiple clouds. True Hybrid Cloud. We're in the early stages, so the data here, in our view, shows that multi cloud really is jump ball. Um, Interestingly, however, Microsoft and Google is showing momentum. So with this slide shows is the cloud spending intentions. And we picked, you know, the top five players there, that air sort of angling around multi cloud ghoul with Antos. Clearly Microsoft coming from its large software estate of V M. Where, of course, which many believer are early favorite Red Hat with the IBM acquisition and Cisco. So what's interesting here is Google and Microsoft clearly have a lot of momentum kind of mind share in the market place, and not a lot of hard core spending going on and multi cloud. Everybody has multi clouds, but in terms of spending on specific products, does like Antos, for instance, from Google, designed for to support multi cloud. That's where in the early stages there, but you can see the sentiment that buyers have around multi cloud Google and Microsoft showing momentum. Interestingly, VM wear Red Hat and Cisco kind of, you know, bunched up as the big enterprise player. So that's why we call a jump. Oh, we see it is wide open. You know, Cisco might surprise some people, but it really doesn't surprise us. Cisco's coming at multi cloud from a position of networking strength of each of these players you know has their strength. Google with Antos Microsoft from its software state Veum, where clearly as the data center operating system red hat with open shift Now with IBM service is capability. And, of course, Sisko coming at it from networking and security. So so hard to conclude you know who wins out of this data but wanted to share that with you just in terms of what customers are thinking around multi cloud. Okay, big conversation in the community around networking generally specifically NSX. When VM wear beats us, go to the punch and acquired nice era. It stated that we want to do to networking in storage what we did for servers. Well, what did the end? Where do the servers they really co opted the marketplace changed the game and really became, you know, these central point of server management, and that's what they want to do with with networking. VM where is trying to de position Cisco as, ah, hardware vendor, Cisco is responding with its own software defined capabilities and is an interesting battle going on. What is the data show? This shows that network networking spend intentions for Cisco, the Red Line and the M Wear the Blue Line. You can see VM where NSX is sort of bouncing around but has very high mindshare. Where Cisco it's showing a holding firm, but a very gradual decline, I've said many times. Cisco very impressive company, 60 plus percent market share. They've held that for a long, long time, despite some of the successes that you've seen you by the likes of a risk juniper and F five et cetera. Cisco has held its dominant share, but nonetheless, it's clear that NSX is impacting Cisco's dominance. Certainly from a marketing standpoint, and you're seeing also, from a spending standpoint that NSX is really challenging Cisco. It'll be very interesting to see how that plays out over time. Okay, next question was okay. What about cloud. How is that affecting VM? Where we see the cloud numbers, we see the growth. What does that mean for VM wear? And you can see here this'll cloud customers of'em were spend about 718 respondents, and you can see the number of shared accounts in the sample is substantial. 3 94 3 79 for 69. It obviously changes by by the frequency that e t. R does these surveys and they do, you know, several times a year, as you can see, but, you know, large sample of shared accounts. And there's no question that Cloud customers continue to shift Maur. They're spending to the public cloud and potentially at the expense of the end, where you can see the gradual decline here and somewhat precipitous decline. VM. We're still very strong. Stock price is doing great, but there's a little question in our mind that long term VM where, despite cleaning up its cloud strategy with first the AWS Partnership and also now partnerships with Google and Microsoft, and of course, I'd be Emma's Well, they were first, but having public cloud partners nonetheless, we see that over time there's a riel tension there. That on Prem is not going to grab the market, share that growth that the cloud has. And that is a challenge for VM, where that we continue to watch finally pivotal. Why would a V M where acquire? Pivotal? Well, first of all, this is why Pivotal is not work. It doesn't have the momentum that it wants in the marketplace. You can see it's it's pretty steep decline over the last couple of years. On Dhe, it's precipitous. Ah, drop in stock price. Essentially, Del and the governance structure of Del Technologies, which course owns VM, wear a large portion of pivotal saying, Look, let's let's roll this back in. Let's give the stock price of boost. The stock went up 70 plus percent of the day that thou went down 800 points. And so this is why the M, where would buy Pivotal? You know, it's a forcing function, we believe, from from Del. It also makes sense, del in its family del technologies that has these software assets VM where is the mother ship of the Del software operation? So why not folded in personally? I think they should do it with some other software assets as well. Secureworks del Bumi, Arcee. All candidates to roll in potentially overtime to Vienna where at least portions of it, anyway. Okay, so let's summarize. What are the key takeaways? What's the appetite for Veum warrants in the second half of 2019? Pretty solid, we'd say. Well, containers kill VM where there's no evidence, certainly in the theater. But there are threats. Think about sass. How many SAS providers are actually running? VM where so, as SAS continues to grow in prominence of that is a potential blind spot for VM. Where that we're watching Who's best position in multi cloud? It's wide open. Microsoft look strong. Google clearly has some momentum. Cisco maybe surprises many, but I think it's not gonna be a winner. Take all we feel is, though there's a lot of opportunities, but number one is going to make the most money. And so it's a very important space that we're watching. House NSX impacting Cisco Spend. It's a battle, but NSX is clearly negatively pressuring, pressuring Cisco. How about Public Cloud? How is that affecting the M we're spend? We think it's slowly eating away at on print on Prem including the end, where I want to share with you a quote from one of the customers that E. T. R talked to its ahead of, ah, retail consumer organisation in North America. A long time I t practitioner says Veum wears everywhere that I've ever been. I've been a customer. Longtime VM were customer hair. She means it's the standard, but it's interesting situation to see what's their next step. How do they keep themselves relevant? I think they're always going to be a need for Veum where, especially because the ability to have the privacy of an extended network is key. However, with the cloud based environment and encrypted data, it's gonna be interesting to see how that all plays out how Veum wear deals with that approach. I think their next strategic steps are going to be crucial. I think that VM where has to be thinking long term. Okay, what do we do about Cloud? Remember VM, where early on tried to get into cloud and with its own public cloud option, became the cloud air. It failed. They got rid of it, cleaned up their cloud strategy. But why did VM where originally want to get into that business because they know that's world of growth is so yes, hybrid and multi cloud gives VM wear a lot of runway. The partnership with Amazon has a lot of momentum. I didn't share that data, but it's very clear that AWS uh Veum, where on AWS has strong momentum. And so that's certainly what the e t. Our data shows nonetheless, long term, you gotta ask what strategic moves will Michael Dell make to secure their position in the public cloud? Okay, lastly, whywould whywould vm will require pivotal. That's a duh. Okay, we gonna stated why So So that's the deal, thanks to our friends at E T. R. Really appreciate them sharing the data enterprise technology research If you wanted this, there's so many cuts on the data, it's it's unbelievable. You can cut it by large companies, small company industry applications and every company on the planet. You can compare companies together. It's really a powerful set of data, but also access tools that they have developed very, very nice, really modern version of survey panels. And so follow up with us. Follow up with them if you want more information and watch us at VM World will be covering these and many other issues that are tent year at VM World. All the key execs are gonna be on practitioners, customers, partners on, of course, analysts and the broader ecosystem technologists and John Ferrier stew Minuteman myself on the entire Cube team will be there to celebrate. So check it out, cube dot net and we'll see you next week. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE covering UiPath Forward Americas, brought to you by UiPath. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Miami Beach, everybody. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. This is UiPathForward Americas. We're talking about robotic process automation. We're seeing the ascendancy of a new marketplace. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Let's see, let's get into it. So Param Kahlon is here. He's the UiPath's Chief Product Officer. Welcome, so we're going to get into some of the product stuff. We haven't really dug down deep today, so that's great. >> Thank you. >> Jairo Quiros is here. He's the Vice President of Global Shared Services, an RPA COE, center of excellence, leader at Equifax. Welcome, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you, thank you. >> Jairo, let's start with you. Tell us about your role. I love the title. (Jairo laughs) You got automation in your title. Do people embrace you when they see you coming or run? >> No, no, no. Actually, that's very interesting. I've been with the company for 20 years now, so I'm responsible to lead Global Shared Services all across from business operations, financing, accounting, you name it, IT security, right? So, coming along with automation has been quite a journey for us. First of all, we love the product so thank you, Param for everything you guys do at the service, as well. But truly, automation, what it means to us is pushing our workforce to do stuff that is of more valued added to our customers, removing the but out of the human which is critical to us, so no fear of buts anymore. And it's been two years. >> The product's at the tip of the iceberg, I'm hearing. There's a whole lot of other stuff beneath it, culture, obviously process, mindset. >> Jairo: Yeah, correct. >> We will get into some of that. But Param, tell us about your role as Chief Product Officer. You make it all happen. (Param laughs) >> I'm responsible for making sure we can listen to what our customers want, what the market wants, translate that into requirements, and deliver that in the form of products. That's all I do, it's very simple. >> You're a translator. >> We translate it, transform it into requirements that can be given to the product team, their development team that can go write software for it. >> Kind of like that AI layer in UiPath that translates all this data into something that's actionable, right? >> Param: Absolutely. >> Jairo, you were saying you liked the product before. I mean, our personal experience is we could actually download it and play with it, and we're not ultra technical, some of our guys are. What do you like about the product? >> Well, I think many things. I mean, first of all, I think it's very easy to use, right? So, it's built for execution, right? For instance, in our case, we're having a lot of junior engineers coming on board. So we go out to colleges and recruit people that are passionate about process. So what UiPath offer us is a way for them to entry our operation and actually perform tasks and do, and realize results pretty easily. So then, they can see the work being done and appreciate it. >> So who are the users in your organization? Is it a spectrum? You got the sort of RPA developers and then you got business users, as well? Describe that. >> Well, it's a combination, right? So we built the COE over the past couple years. It's inclusive of not only configurators, but also analysts and people that can understand the business. So when you look at through the process, start thinking about how do you design for automation? So this tool allows a very comprehensive very easy to use and we see they make progress release after release, so it's very exciting. >> Alright, Param, why don't you walk us through the announcements that you made? What's new to the platform? Some enhancement to the community. >> Yeah, so we've done some really key announcements in this event today. The first one that we're very excited about is UiPath Go, which is our marketplace that enables broad innovation across our entire ecosystem of customers and partners. We can create on a platform or we can put it in a marketplace and then everybody else can easily access the innovation that's available there. We also released 2018.3 which is the third release we've done this year, but probably the most comprehensive release that we've done 'til date in the history of Enterprise Automation. So we're very excited about launching that release today, as well. And third, we've announced a $20 million fund that will fund our partners that will co-innovate together with us in bringing out new RPA capabilities, new machine learning and AI capabilities into the marketplace. Those are three key announcements. >> What are the-- >> I'm just-- Sorry, but from my understanding, you run on a quarterly cadence for the release of the primary product, correct? >> We're in a quarterly cadence, yes. >> What are the critical aspects of the new release? >> So, there's a few things we've done in the main release. One of the first things we've done is we've allowed for re-usability of the software. So if you're using a lot of components, if you've built a way to automate a certain process, it could be as simple as, here's how I log into a application, a financial application. The rest of the people in my organization don't have to go reinvent that thing themselves. They can reuse the component, the way I've built it, so they can be reused to process every single aspect of the customer, as well. We've made it very easy for our customers to upgrade to new versions of the software, as we're releasing very rapidly, we want to make sure that the upgrades are easy, but the upgrades are also seamless as in they don't affect any of the existing processes that are running in production. So we support version management and package management so we make it easier for people to manage that. There's some other capabilities that we've done. We've supported internationalization of the platform, so now customers in Japan can use our product in Japanese, customers can use it in Spanish, they can use it in Deutsche, German, so we've allowed that in this release, as well. Another cool thing we've done is allowing humans to provide input to what the robots need to do by putting a form that they can use to provide input to them, so it can provide a better symbiosis of humans working together with robots to achieve more processes and more automation in the ecosystems. There's a lot of stuff, this is some of the highlights. >> So what do you think? I mean, what of those, what of that compendium is of interest to you? >> I think, you know, I've been a member for a year now, from, of their customer advisory board, so they truly listen to what we need to say, right? Because the robotic aspect of it is critical, but there's so many other aspects, such as the analytics. So, understanding the business outcome, right? What's the bot producing? Not necessarily the bot that's up and running, but really, what's the impact to the business? I think that's part of the feedback that we've been given in UiPath, they're really working hard on that. The other aspect which is important also is how do you move forward from simple RPA to more complex automations? So, the human in the loop approach to things is important. We call that those small black boxes, you know people with 20 years of experience, they understand how to make decisions but those aren't documented, right? So, now we're giving the opportunity for that human to become part of the process, right? So that is very powerful to us. >> So one of the aspects we've been looking at, the marketplace seems interesting. I'm wondering if you've had a chance to look at that, are there things that you would consider using, and anything that you might even consider contributing in the future? >> I think so. I think this is a whole movement, it's a community today, so no matter where you are, developers, they love it. My guys are telling me, "When is this out?" Because, you know, they have I mean, they're so much hungry to get stuff done and to share what they can do, it makes a difference not only for our company, but for the world, right? So it means something. >> That's interesting. Your company's been around for a long time. You're not worried about, I mean, this open mindset is really intriguing to us, you're not worried about putting your IP in there? Or do you feel like, this open community, we're going to get back as much as we give? >> No, of course. Of course, there are controls in place, and of course, there'll be a protocol in place, but you know, at the end, you're making a difference in the world. So if someone wants to, for instance, have a mortgage because they're wanting to buy a house, you want to make it easy, right? At the end, that's the end goal. You know, for EquiFax and for all the institutions that are in the same sector. >> So from a product standpoint, we just have Craig LeClair on, he couldn't directly call out UiPath. It's not cool, right? I mean, he has to be independent. But, look, he wrote the report, UiPath went from third on the list to first on the list, out of I don't know, 10, 15 vendors. It's like the Gardiner magic quadrants, all these rating systems, right? We don't do 'em, but we read them because they're good, and they're informative. He said in there that last year's features have become this year's table stakes. And some of the things that are differentiating companies, and obviously UiPath won so I presume you have the differentiation ears. Analytics and governance. Those are two big areas, I see the heads nodding. Maybe you guys could each talk about that, Jairo let's start with you, why are those things important? You address the analytics, you kind of address governance, as well, but maybe you can summarize. >> I mean, we address governance as the get-go, and it's an evolution. So for instance, you know, really, truly when we're looking into RPA, it's not only so much about a tactical approach to a specific problem, but it's really turned into a strategy, right? So if you want to scale, you need to have the proper controls in place. So, these guys have done an amazing job integrating with tools such as Cyberart, for instance which is reall important for many companies. They're trying to secure their systems and make sure that the bots are operating on their very secure environment. >> So you guys not only you were in the place position, now you're in the lead. Now the pressure's really on. It's like the Red Sox, Stu. (laughs) So, how'd you get there? What is that enables that? Architecture? Mindset? Culture? You know, give us the insights there. >> Yeah, first of all, let's say we're super excited about being in the first place. I think it's really good, it's a really good testament to the hard work the team is putting in there, so we're super excited about that. We believe that our success and the product roadmap depends upon hearing a lot from customers and making sure that we're responding to their customers. So I think that's what we have done for the most part is ensuring that if there are things that our customers need, if there are things that our customers think our platform and technology is moving toward, we're actually doing the kinds of things that'll actually take us there. So a lot of the innovation that we've done on the platform has come from a direct result of engagement and working with customers and bringing their success into there. Specifically, the governance and analytics, those are very important aspects of what we're doing on a product. Most of our customers are very large corporations like Equifax, other corporations. They will not use our technology if we couldn't support the level of governance and compliance that they need from the ability to run those processes, especially when they're running autonomously without having a human look over what's happening. So that was a core part of what we've invested in. Analytics is also something that we've invested but we'll continue to make more investments there. We're now hearing from Equifax and other customers that people don't want to just get analytics that is responding to what the robots are doing but they want to understand what sort of business impact the robots are having on the corporation. So we want to build an analytics platform that is ingesting not just the robot workloads but bringing in information about line of business systems, as well, to be able to give the reports and perspectives that somebody can look at that and say the robots have done so much for me. Not just in terms of number of hours, but in terms of the business outcomes that I've achieved through the work the robots are executing. >> Jairo, I want to ask you about innovation at Equifax. We've observed many times in theCUBE that innovation in the tech industry used to march at the cadence of Moore's Law. Oh, new chip's out! We've got to do, we can now put better, faster data warehouse. You know, more storage, whatever it was. The innovation model is changing dramatically. And we've observed that it's a combination now, it seems, of data plus AI plus cloud, for scale. So, what do you think about that sort of innovation sandwich? Do you buy into it? How are you guys applying innovation in your business? >> I mean, I'll tell you I got a similar question the other day, you know. It's about, you know, I live in Costa Rica, right? So we surf all the time, right? So it's about riding, you know, the wave, right? So it's not about riding it, right? If you don't ride it, then you're going to drop, right? And then you're going to fall behind. >> Dave: You're going to be driftwood. >> So, yeah, innovation is there, you know. It's that demand for all companies. For us, innovating not only about how do we approach customers and consumers and we put them first in everything we do, but in how we operate internally. Creating a culture that drives automation, right? So giving time for people to think about stuff, you know, that makes a difference, right? I think that's how I can summarize innovation as of this moment. >> So, Stu had a question. >> So, if I understand this right now, we can blame the robots if our credit score isn't good enough now, right? (laughs) >> What do you think? Blame the robots, right? >> Blame the robots, always. >> Blame the innocent, as we say. Well, guys, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. >> Param: Thank you. >> Param and Jairo, it was great to have you, appreciate it. >> Thank you again. >> Alright, keep it right there. Stu and I will be back with our next guest from UiPath Forward Americas. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

(techno music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering Service Now Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by Service Now. >> Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of Service Now Knowledge 18 here in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. I'm joined by Pat Wadors. She is the Chief Talent Officer of Service Now, and Pat Tourigney who is the Senior Vice President HR Global Shared Services at Magellan Health. Pat and Pat, thanks so much for coming on the show. >> Pat Wadors: Thank you for having us. We're excited. >> Pat Tigourney: It's so great to be here Rebecca, thank you. >> Rebecca: Well you were both on the main stage this morning talking about Magellan's, Magellan Health Service Now journey. We started talking about a personal health scare that you had Pat, that really changed the way you think about the world of work, and the employers' role in that. Can you tell our viewers a little more about it? >> Pat: I'd be happy to Rebecca. So, obviously I had been working and had taken some time off to start and raise my family. And when I went back to work I started to feel unwell. And it took about two and a half years for me to finally get an answer. I had searched for many doctors, et cetera. But literally one day I was rushed to a hospital emergency room. After a few days I was diagnosed with stage three B colon cancer, and I was told I had probably about a three percent survival chance. So at that time I faced four years of surgery, and hospitalizations, and chemo and radiation. And of course during all this time you're hearing the probably outcomes and the statistics. But what I truly focused on was my purpose. Which was my family. I had two small children and they needed me, and I needed to be there for them. And so I learned a lot of lessons during that time, and I think anyone who goes through that would say that. But the two things that have really stuck with me is knowing my purpose, and leading with empathy. And it's truly changed how I live, how I work, how I interact with other people. And I think its made a huge difference in what I do every day. >> Rebecca: What Pat was just talking about, the leading with empathy, and the finding your purpose, these are two of the things that are central to the culture at Service Now. Can you describe a little bit more for our viewers, how you view this sort of purpose driven life? >> Pat Wadors: For me and for the company, its as essential to our success as our customers. So I know that purpose driven companies outperform those that don't have a purpose. And I know from a talent brand, and how we recruit and retain talent, if their personal purpose is aligned with the company purpose, not only do you get higher engagement and higher productivity, but that impacts our customers. And they have higher engagement and higher sat. So its great business. It's something that I think creates a competitive differentiation, and its something that our employees seek as an employer. So it's just something that I totally believe in and so does our company. >> Rebecca: So talk a little bit about VERN. First of all, what does VERN stand for? >> Pat: Oh I love VERN. (laughing) >> Pat: Everyone loves VERN. VERN stands for the Virtual Employee Resource Network. And a couple things that I would probably want to say about that is number one, you don't see HR in there at all. Because it's about the employee. This is a way that we are helping our employees fundamentally change how they work and how they engage with us. The reason I think VERN works is our employees voted on that name. So we had a whole campaign to launch VERN, and we offered up four different names, and our employees voted. And when VERN won we created a VERN persona, and everything else that goes with that. And he's just become part of our team. >> Rebecca: So what does VERN do? >> Pat: Well VERN is really sort of the, it took the place of our call center. VERN is a way for our employees to learn information, and answer their basic questions, and learn to work in new ways. And it helps, it's basically a consumerized HR product. If an employee can use google or shop online, they can use VERN. Its' very simple, it's easy and fun. And truly VERN has become a part of our team. So we don't have a call center anymore. We don't use email to answer questions. Our employees know that VERN is there for them twenty four seven. >> Rebecca: They have a question and ask VERN. >> Pat: Exactly. Turn to VERN, that's our motto. >> Rebecca: (laughing) I love it. So Pat, thinking about this empathic way of leading, how would you describe what it really means when it comes to HR? You had said before it really is a competitive differentiator, and that if you're happier at work, you're going to do better at work, you're going to be more energized, you're going to then provide better service to your customers. But how can companies, how can they build a culture of empathy? >> Pat: By listening. I think that when Pat and I were talking over dinner and I talked to my peers, companies that win listen. And they listen to their customers, and they reverse engineer back to their products and services. Great cultures listen. And our employees are going to tell us what's working what's not working. And if we capture those data sets, those moments, we give them the information, we give them the tools. They are joyful, they are more productive, there's a stickiness that I can not only survive there I'll thrive. And so by being empathetic, by seeing where the pain points are, by seeing what gets you joyful, and measuring those things and turning my dials accordingly, that to me is a winning situation. >> Rebecca: We're at a point in time where we have five generations in the workforce all at once. Can you describe what that's like, from your company perspective, from talent management and HR, and how catering to these very different segments of people who their comfort with technology is one thing, but also their phase of life. How do you do that? >> Pat: Well I think, honestly, there's this joyfulness, you used that word and I love that word, of how all these different generations really do work together and help one another. In a way we're all learning from each other. And we're not afraid to learn in front of each other. And that really makes a difference I think. And I think there's just this mutual respect of, we're all there to help each other and do the right thing for the company. And I think the empathy piece of it really comes across because, when you truly understand one another in a way that you care and you're showing that, it's not about age anymore or anything else, it's that we're all people working together trying to do our best work and we're there for each other. To me that's what it means. >> Pat: The only thing I would add to that is, when you look at consumerization of the enterprise, when you look at seamless, what they call frictionless solutions, it demystifies the technology. So if you have the older generation going "I've not used a bot" or "I don't know what machine learning is" I'm like can you type in your question? I can do that. And if I serve you knowledge bites that I can digest that answers my question and move on with my life, that's a gift. And so I think that if you make it more human, if you make it more approachable, then every generation appreciates that. And I also know that from my studies and from working in the valley for a long time in tech, is that every generation wants the same thing. They want to be heard, they want to be appreciated, treated respectfully, and know that they can do their best work. That they matter. >> Rebecca: So Pat you are relatively new to Service Now. You're from LinkedIn. You are so committed to the company you dyed your hair to match the brand identity. What drew you to Service Now? >> Pat: I was a customer of Service Now while at LinkedIn. And my goldilocks is a growth company. I'm a builder. I love creating culture and leading through change. And I also love geeking out with my peeps in HR. And so Service Now has a talent place, they are helping HR solve problems, and I get to geek out with them. I get to meet people like Pat, and have a wonderful dinner and a great conversation. That feeds my soul. I don't think I am unique in the problems I'm facing, and I copy shamelessly. I'm trying to steal VERN from her. (Pat laughing) I think that's awesome, I want a VERN button. >> Pat: I'm going to get you one. >> Pat: And then the added sauce for me where I fell in love, is when John Donahoe became the CEO and wanted my partnership to build an enduring high performing healthy company. And I'm like, sign me up. >> Rebecca: Talking about the culture of Service Now and Magellan Health, culture is so hard. It's just one of those things that, or maybe its not, maybe I'm making it out to be, but when you have large companies dispersed employees, i'ts sort of hard to always stay on message and to have everyone pulling in the same direction. How do you do it? What would you say you do at Magellan? I'm interested in how you do it at Service Now too. >> Pat: Want to go first? >> Pat: I'll take a stab. So, you got to think about where you're going. So what's your purpose? I'm going back to purpose. How do you serve the customer? What are those four key milestones that matter? And repeat, and I say rinse, and then repeat. So everyone hears it. You know the top five goals in the company. And we talk about it all hands, we refer to them in our internal portal, we talk about them, we measure them. We tell the employees this is what we wanted to do, this is what we did or didn't do. This is what we do next. And we're as transparent as we possibly can be. And the magic comes when every employee can look up and say I made that goal happen. And when they start seeing those dots connect, they can't wait to connect more dots. And that's when the journey starts accelerating. That's when you get more flywheel going in the organization where what I do is actually impacting profit, impacting customer success, impacting joy. >> Rebecca: And taking some ownership of it. >> Pat: I agree. I think that when everyone sort of shares in that purpose, and they understand what they do, how it affects that, it makes a huge difference. But I also think as an organization from a leadership perspective, if you model the behavior that you're seeking, and you set your expectations really high for that, and that in a very sort of respectful way when you see things that aren't right you say something about it, the culture does start to shift. And you start to build this feeling of we're there, we're together, we have each other's backs, we treat each other with dignity and respect, and honesty and openness, and you can really start to just shift it almost organically. >> Rebecca: Pat Tourigney, Pat Wadors, thanks so much for coming on the Cube. It was a great conversation. >> Pat: Oh thank you Rebecca. It's been great. >> Pat: Thank you for having us. >> Rebecca: We'll have more with the Cube's live coverage of Service Now just after this. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE covering ServiceNow Knowledge17 brought to you by ServiceNow. >> We're back this is Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick Rob McDonnell is here he's the head of Enterprise Products at Air New Zealand Rob thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> My pleasure thanks for having me. >> So Air New Zealand you know energy costs are down that's good for the airline business isn't it. >> Anything that's good for the barrel price of oil. >> It's priced like a tax cut to the consumer, we all go traveling. Tell us a little about the organization and your role. So we're in New Zealand headquartered out of Auckland in New Zealand Asia Pacific based but we have routed that travel to London as well. Asia Pacific is our core business. I'm part of the Digital Leadership team in the Enterprise Products, that's products like a typical IT function would run, like a CIO would run. So we have a product organization which we've had in place for the last year and a half. One of the product managers looks after our customers. So for online booking, mobile app and customer experience, one of my colleagues looks after the operational products another colleague looks after air points products with the frequent flier program. And I look after everything else internally so you've got HR products, you've got finance, help desk, incident management, we've got mobility, offices, workspace and collaboration, so there's really quite a bit in there. >> So what are the big drivers in your business that are affecting those things that you look after. >> Probably the primary one now is the new focus and a renewed focus on the internal customer. Since we started in this role a year and a half ago I've been mandating and championing the cause of the internal customer. Typically, it's about the revenue and the external customer but for me it's about the internal customer. And I've got 12 and a half thousand Air New Zealanders that I consider my customers. Those guys are the ones that wake up in the morning, they look at their Apple watch and check a message, or they login in the morning and that experience has to be correct, it has to be right when they walk into the office and when they swipe in with a badge or want to do something like get a payroll slip or something. That experience is my primary driver. So, we're looking at typifying what we have so fixing the pain-points is probably my first thing. Remove all the pain points out of the way of my customers my users, make sure they can operate. Make the job the challenge, not the tools they are using. Focusing on mobility, so focusing on the more mobile workforce that we have. I'd reckon about 60% of my user base is considered mobile. We got crew and pilots that you wouldn't see in the head office from one day to the next. A big push on cloud for obvious reasons, and then future workspace. >> So tell us about your ServiceNow journey, when did that start? >> So our ServiceNow journey started just over a year and a half ago. We had quite a frustrating environment where we had a bad reputation for digital services. People weren't too happy calling our help desk. The name of the product we had was called assist an internally branded product, people called it Cease and desist, the reputation was, we had a bad reputation. So one of our primary goals was to get that reputation back, earn it back and really try and delight out customers. So we had gone through some product selection and ServiceNow came right on top and was the product of choice for us to implement. So we were able to replace four platforms with ServiceNow. We had one platform we buying parts off the internet a couple things to keep it going, so was a bit of a shaky situation. Bad user experience, so implementing ServiceNow we made sure that we took a, when we did the reorganization for digital, we stopped the project and changed it to be a business organizational change project not an IT project. So it wasn't IT delivering a product to the business it was a business choice and a business decision so we changed, stopped the project, introduced and implemented change management as part of the project, we brought in different skills in terms of Agile ways of working and we changed the product structure as well to suit. We went live with an MVP last year, we pushed out redesigned platform January last year, was about 70% ready, so again it was a new feeling for Air New Zealand staff having a product that wasn't perfect, but just suited for going live. And then we went live with the full suite of what we were doing in June, July last year. It's been an awesome journey. >> So you made the decision to sweep the floor of these four other platforms. At the point at which you made that decision you did a contract with ServiceNow. What happened, how long did it take you to get to that MVP, what did you have to do. I mean the old saying is God created the world in six days but he didn't have an install base. You had to deal with that existing infrastructure how did you go from that point to the MVP how long did it take? >> Our approach was to, we were trying to de-risk or learn more about what the experience is going to be for our customers, so we went live, onboard in Helsinki so one of the first customers to go live on the Helsinki product. In the interim, we took the existing platform and we reskinned it with a brand new look and feel. The brand new look and feel was around how we wanted our customers to experience service management. So we followed them in terms of their role rather than just rolling out the product. So we reskinned the existing product and we reiterated and reiterated on what they wanted. Changing the features in the screen and rolling that one out. So we knew we had a really really good product and on the day we went live, we just basically flipped the switch. We didn't carry over any existing tickets, migrated hardly any of the data, started from scratch basically by flicking a switch. The product we went live with on the ServiceNow platform looked exactly like the one we reskinned in preparation for when we de-risked it. >> How long did that take to get to MVP? >> MVP was about two months and we included design. Then the remainder was about three months. >> What are some of the things you're measuring in terms of the customer satisfaction? Obviously nobody is saying cease and desist anymore. But what are some of the things you are measuring getting feedback from your internal customers? >> People like the product they like the platform. They like the fact that we can access it on a mobile phone. Which again, is a new thing for internal staff and Air New Zealanders. Along side the digital changes we were making some physical changes too. So we introduced a new help desk along side both at the airport and in the city offices. So again, people were getting physical and digital experience when we went live. And like I said I like the product, I like the simplicity and our business partners enjoy the speed that they can get catalog items up and get their teams more efficient and more effective. The ability to do pre-approved changes has driven a lot of efficiency, I think we have over 75% of pre-approved changes. We had things like I think 26% of our calls to the help desk were for password resets we're using this took to help reduce those numbers. We introduced a new MPS score as well or a digital happiness score for our internal customers. So we have it for external, so we've introduced that for internal. We promote that on the front of our portal as well so people can give us feedback in terms of what they like and what they don't like. So it's fairly responsive in how we react to what they want in the product. >> You avoided custom modules or did you do some custom modification to the platform? >> Mainly configuration to get it where we wanted to go. The look and feel in the portal was fairly custom but using code components available on the platform. >> Yeah, so when you upgrade you don't have to do the heavy wrestling with the modules. >> No it was an easy journey. >> And then how about a single CMDB is that something that you guys have adopted. >> So CMDB we delayed until this year. We're actually starting it next month. >> What's the conversation like internally around CMDB? Is it, you got a lot of different parts of the organization and is it going to be a single CMDB for the entire organization or are there going to be multiple CMDB's? >> So it's a big, scary topic, and the lady we're getting on, we're talking about it in iterative approach start small and build out. Primarily it will be the core enterprise stack, shared services stack, then we need to look at, and again it's wonderful being here at Knowledge and learning how far people are pushing it in terms of their external customers, so I'm looking at operations, I'll be looking at IoT and figuring how I can use that platform to be more effective. Having the CMDB will be a good starting block for that. >> You said IoT. >> So opportunities for us are around, we're an airline we have plans, we have power machines, we have engines on planes so you would have heard GE being mentioned quite a bit here. So what's the opportunity with those products and how can we use service management for event management of those stacks? When we think about the digital workplace environment and the connected devices, how do we use ServiceNow in that environment and how do we use it effectively? I think there's a great opportunity for us there. >> Can you take us back into the discussions internally when you had to sell the project internally to the management. Who did you have to involve, what was the business case? >> I think the business case was primarily lead by IT. Or the old IT because it was our product. All the onus on the project resided in IT, so I think the sale around the cost of the platform the duration on implementation, it wasn't too hard to sell in terms of the risk we were carrying on the legacy platforms. I think the opportunity if you flip it around the other side it was an easier conversation to our customers to say this is what you're getting and they were quite keen and quite eager to get involved in the implementation. >> What have you seen so far, it's early days but what kind of results have you seen? Can you share any metrics with us? >> I'll give you some indications early on about pre-approved changes and we have a bit of a, I'll defer on the exact numbers on our desk, we have so many parameters going on in New Zealand it wouldn't be fair to anybody. >> Well so just generally the business impact how would you describe that? >> Very positive, so we use it in the GSS area so Group Shared Services, so they're finding it far more effective to engage with their teams allocating work and automating the workflow. We have quite a queue, quite a backlog of other areas that want to get involved and automate and optimize. >> Where do you see this platform going? Do you see it driving into different parts of the business? We hear a lot about that at this conference is that something that you guys are looking at? >> Yeah, we rolled out to a group, our ground service equipment team, so they use it for example, a rampload or someone on the tarmac notifying a vendor that there is something wrong with a piece of equipment. So that optimizes that flow. So we're saving them hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. So that's quite an efficiency gain. So looking to push into again, more HR and finance, Group Shared Services. Looking to optimize against our work day implementation in July, so make sure those two platforms work together very well and build a platform appropriately. >> OK, so you'll bring in the HR piece, is that right? >> Yeah, we'll need to find a, I've been having lots of conversations the last few days around how those two behemoth products fit together how you use them effectively and that's where we need to get to. So how do you use a portal on the front end to make it easier for the customer or the user to do what they want without having to think about what platform they need to go to. >> How about the show? You mentioned it's great being here, as a quasi-noob. Is this your first? >> This is my first Knowledge. I think it's fantastic. >> Things you've learned? What kinds of things are exciting you here? >> I like the ServiceNow people amazing, passionate, including the guys back in Australia and New Zealand a few of them are here, I can see the passion back there and I can see it here so it's quite collegial and it's amazing to see. I think the event's awesome, it's massive. Keynote was fantastic, it was really good. And just the energy with the vendors and the passion that people have for their customers and the business value they can get from this product, that's one of the key things I'm hearing from all the conversations. >> It sounds like you're getting what's been talked about over and over which is such the peer input in terms of helping you figure out where you're going to go next. >> Yeah, lot's of people are here to learn, but also lots of people are here to share and I'm learning that time and time again. Which is great. >> Rob thanks very much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your story. >> Thanks for having me. >> You're welcome. >> Alright keep it right there everybody we'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from Knowledge17. Be right back.

(electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE, covering DockercCon 2017. Brought to you by Docker and support from Asseco System Partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, I'm Stu Mittleman, with my co-host, Jim Kobielus. Happy to have on the program, I'm shocked to say a first time guest. Someone that I've known in the community here for many years, but Michael Ducy, who is Director of Product Marketing at Chef Software. Not a chef. Maybe you might-- >> Not a chef, although I do cook at home (laughing). >> Maybe in Chef. Not a puppeteer. >> Not a puppeteer. >> But you work for Chef Software. So thank you so much for joining us. >> Yes, thanks for having me. >> Alright, so Michael, for the audience that doesn't know you... I think a lot of people here in the community would know you. I've known you through Twitter for many years. What's your role at Chef? What do you work on? What's your passion? >> Sure, so right now I do product marketing for our open source projects. So Chef Software actually has a commercial product, and then we also have three open source projects that we maintain. The first was the original one that we're named after, which is Chef, which is open source automation or configuration management. The second one being Inspect, which is all about how do you basically write compliance rules as code. And then third one, as you can see from my shirt, is called Habitat. So Habitat is a new way of thinking about how do you package up automation for your application. And then how can you easily export that application and the automation into something like a container. I've had various roles at Chef though over the four years that I've worked for them. My passion's always kind of been open source communities, an involvement in open source communities and helping grow those communities. >> Yeah, and people send you lots of stuff about goats. >> People send me lots of stuff about goats (laughing). There was a joke that was made at a conference about waking up next to a goat. This was a conference in Amsterdam, which is I'm sure I wouldn't be the first one that woke up next to a goat in Amsterdam (laughing). But since then, the whole goat thing kind of took off after that. >> Yeah, so, Chef, you understand many things about Docker. So one of the things, we come in and we talk about there's Docker, the company, there's Docker, the community. A lot of what was talked about in the keynote today was about open source. >> Umm-hmm. >> So how's Docker doing? What interested you in the keynote? How do you as an individual in Chef see what's going on in the Docker ecosystem? And what do you think? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> So we've been put in a little bit of an interesting position as Chef, the company. And not only has Chef, the company, been put in this position, but all of our competitors have as well. So there's been a movement as Docker and containers got more popular that the idea that configuration management is no longer needed. And from a inside the container perspective, configuration management really isn't needed. But what you do end up realizing is that there's this whole idea of what you need to actually run a container in production effectively, that still needs to go into that container. And we kind of call it The Learning Cliff of Containers. And I tweeted out an image about... that why co-worker draw on a whiteboard. That shows in development you just have Docker and it's really easy, but then when you move it to production there's this whole other stack of concerns. And Docker or your container runtime is just one of them. And so, we've been focusing more on kind of shifting into those ideas of how do you actually run containers effectively in production. What we saw in the keynote today is more of an emphasis on things like security, right. That's definitely been an area that we're interested in, especially from a compliance perspective, and doing work around having our open source projects, being able to scan containers for compliance. >> Yeah, it's funny before the keynote they have this fun little thing. They have this 8-bit video game playing. >> Right. >> And it was like they were collecting coins and they were leveling up, but they kept hitting lots of bombs (laughing) and things were exploding all the time. And everybody was joking online. It was like, Oh, it's like putting Docker in production. I will level up (laughing) and I will get past everything, but, Boy, I'm going to have lots of bombs going off and things-- >> Sure. >> And things that I'll have to deal with, and there were lots of fun little comments that they threw out there. It's like, Checking documentation. Oh, documentation says you don't have documentation. (laughing) So just fun stuff like that. But it's challenging. Solomon says, We want this put in deployment, but as we know it's not quite there yet. There's lots of things, that's where you guys fit in. >> Umm-hmm. >> A lot of the ecosystem helps to solidify that about you here. >> Michael, what are those concerns that you allude to? There's security, and what other concerns are there for containers in production that need to be represented in the configuration management portfolio or profile you're describing? >> Sure, so there's the security aspects of it is focused on what vulnerabilities are in your container. >> Yeah. >> And there's been some interesting studies recently that showed 24% of the official images are shipping with some sort of a vulnerability. Some of that you have to accept, and then also realize can you do risk mitigation around that vulnerability. There's concerns about how the application is actually configured when you ship it as well. So am I doing things like storing secrets in config files. Am I disabling versions of ISOCELL that's no longer a best practice anymore because it's actually broken. And then there's other aspects around how do you things like service discovery, how do you do credentials or secrets. And how do you get them into the container securely. There's networking aspects. There's last malconfiguration of the application, so-- >> Right. >> If you take a container from one environment to another environment and kind of work it through a lifecycle. There are things at runtime that you have to change in its configuration to make it run in that particular environment. >> Right. >> So it's all of those little knobs that you still have to turn. And that's why-- >> The entire DevOps lifecycle essentially there's all those little knobs and... >> There's all these little knobs and this has always been a little bit of a frustration for me, in that PaaS sounds great, platform as a service sounds great. And this idea that you can just take this blob and go run it. But What people don't realize is there still are tons of knobs that you have to turn, and there are tons of concerns that you have to worry about as an operations person or as a DevOps person or as a developer when you actually are taking that code into production. >> Right. >> Michael, we've seen the cloud providers and some of the other open source providers kind of chipping away. Red Hat bought Ansible, every time I go to Amazon re:Invent or Google, it seems like they're trying to build more things up the stack and into their platforms. >> Umm-hmm. >> So what is Chef's position here? How do you guys play across all these environments and kind of maintain and grow what you're doing? >> Yeah, so we've started to take a little bit more of a different focus and... Well, not a different focus... A different focus for us. Traditionally, we focus on infrastructure and operations people and then as we moved up the stack and DevOps became more popular. We definitely focused on that because that's kind of our bread and butter. But what we started to do with Habitat is focus more on building a developer experience. So how can a developer take their code-- >> Yeah. >> Easily wrap automation around it, and then ship it out into production. And this is the new world for us, as coming from the operations side of things. And really starting to think about what does the developer tooling look like and the developer experience look like. We're taking source code, building that source code, and then deploying that source code to production. >> Yeah, and it's interesting, it sounds... We talk about Docker. They very much started out in the developer world, and then they're kind of moving to kind of the Op side more. >> Umm-hmm. >> And to the enterprise side more. You're almost going-- >> Michael: And we're kind of-- >> A little bit in reverse, huh. >> Yeah, going a little bit in reverse, yeah. >> Yeah, it's interesting because usually it's like, Okay, I start with developers, get them excited and then figure out to monetize. So, yeah, what are you seeing in your customer base? >> Sure. >> Who do you sell to in that aspect? Yeah, I'm just curiosity at some of the buyers. >> Well, so, traditionally, a tool like Chef or, even some of our competitors would be bought by what's called the Shared Services Team, right. And that Shared Services Team is going to take that and try and work economies of scale, right. And try and deploy that across all of the different BMs or machines that they have to manage, right. And we've seen this shift as we moved more up the stack and as the industry's shifted more up the stack. Of what the Shared Services Team actually needs to transform themselves into is more of a developer services team. So how can I offer the services that a developer can get via an API, to quickly deploy the application services that they need. And when I say application services, I'm thinking about all of the things that you need to actually go and persist the data. The business logic side of things are very easy to do in containers or PaaS. But when you're actually having to go and persist data in something like Red-S are Mongo or MySQL, that's a whole other area of concern that you have to worry about. So what we've actually had started to do is the core team that actually works on Habitat has a very, very big background in distributive systems. So what we've started to do is bake a lot of that foundational ideas about how you effectively run large-scale distributive systems into Habitat, which makes it very easy to then go and take that developer, take their source code, and deploy it using Habitat, using this knowledge that we have from distributive systems. So we actually see it as a benefit that we come from this infrastructure background because we have experience of actually running things in production, right. >> Umm-hmm, what do you see as some of the challenges that we still need to face in this kind of container ecosystem? I know one of the questions I have coming in is you talked about stateful applications. We know storage still needs some time to mature. Networking seems to be a little bit further along in what they're doing. >> Umm-hmm. >> What's your take as to what's doing well? What still needs some more work? >> Yeah, storage is one of those areas that... And persisting data is one of those areas that we're not able to get around, right. And if you look at some people's recommendations, so Pivotal, for example, recommends running persistent services on BMs, right. If you look at the Google approach or the Cuber-netee's approach, they actually recommend that you use a cloud provider services to go and run those data services for you, until you think you're good enough to actually go and run it like Google. (laughing) And they're also hedging on the fact that you'll probably never be good enough to run it like Google. >> Yeah, yeah. >> So, kind of building that expertise of running those distributive systems in an effective way is kind of the area in running those persistent data services in a highly scalable way is kind of the big challenge that operations still hasn't figured out. And developers also need work to... Need help to help figure that out as well. >> Yeah, the big theme this morning was really about scalability. When you talked to customers, what does scale mean to them? What are the limitations they're having? I loved when you talked about what you're doing with Habitat. Helping customers, so that they don't have to have the expertise to build distributive systems because that's the software challenge of our time-- >> Yeah. >> Is moving to that. What we talk at Wicky-bon, it's moving from the old enterprise where it was like kind of baked in the hardware to a distributive, where the software model, anything had failed, there's no single point of failure, I can scale. >> Yeah. >> What do you think? >> Well, to kind of paraphrase our CTO, Adam Jacob, he always likes to say ignore scaling problems because you don't have a scaling problem. (laughing) And you don't have a scaling problem until you have a scaling problem, right. So if you kind of look at where your time's most effectively spent, your time is more effectively spent at actually building an application that people want to use, and worry about the scaling problem when the scaling problem comes up, right. And the other thing is that you might never hit that scaling problem, so everyone wants to be the next Uber, everyone wants to be the next Netflix, and so forth. And so, if you go in as a startup or, even a startup inside of a large enterprise trying to do a new application. If you start by trying to solve the scaling problem out the door, then what you end up losing is a lot of development cycles that you could actually be spending on building something that people actually want to use. And then worrying about the scaling problem when you hit the scaling problem. >> So, Mike, last question I have for you. A month from now, you're going to be back in Austin. >> A month from now, I'm going to be back in Austin. >> So tell us about ChefConf. >> Yes. >> What can people expect? Give us a compare and contrast to kind of the communities, the type of people that attend. I expect we'll see more shorts because it's going to be a little bit warmer and more humid here in Austin (laughing). >> Yes, so we're back at Austin for the second ChefConf in Austin. We were here also last year. We were in Austin in July last year. >> Ooooh. >> Which was not a fun experience (laughing). The air conditioning was very nice. The pool was also very nice. (laughing) But what you can expect is more practical advice to how to actually run these things in production. We have a lot of talks about Habitat. I think we're going to have a lot... Nine talks on Habitat. We have a lot of talks from the Chef community about running actual systems in production in a lot of real world experience, which is something that we always try and hover into our conferences. We also have a day that's going to be focused on our open source community as well, so where our open source and contributors can get together to talk about problems that they're trying to solve in our open source communities as well. And then on the last day, of course, as every conference does we're going to have a hack day, where you can contribute to open source, our open source, or we can help you get started solving a problem that you have, but there'll be a lot of people there that can answer questions for you about the problems that you're trying to solve in running distributive systems. >> Alright, well, Michael Ducy, happy to welcoming you into the ranks of theCUBE alumni, finally. >> Yes, finally, thank you very much. >> And thank you for sharing all the updates with us. And thank you for watching theCUBE. (electronic music) >> I remember...