(upbeat music) >> From San Mateo, it's theCUBE, covering Scalyr Innovation Day, brought to you by Scalyr. >> Hello and welcome to the special Cube Innovation Day here in Silicon Valley in San Mateo, California at Scalyr's Headquarters. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. John Hart's the Tech Lead Back End Engineering here at Scalyr. Thanks for having us. >> Thanks for having me John. >> So what's the secret sauce at Scalyr? You guys have unique differentiate as we have covered with some of your peers and the founders are all talking about it. But, you guys have a unique secret sauce. Take a minute to explain that. >> I think, yeah, it's a few different things. First of all, you've got just the design level, which is we don't use keyword indexes. So that's a big one right there off the top. On top of that, you've got a couple of different implementation paths. We've got our own custom written data store. So we're able to really control all the way down to the bytes on disk, how we lay things out, optimize for speed. We have a novel kind of scatter-gather approach for fanning out a query, to make sure we can get all of our nodes involved as quickly as possible. Then, finally, and this is just kind of being smart, which is we have a time series database for repetitive queries and that's on demand. You don't have to do anything, but we're going to speed up your queries in the background if we know it's a good idea. >> Talk about the time series. I think that's interesting because that comes to play. We hear about real time a lot. We talk a lot about in cyber security that time series has been beneficial. Where does time series fit for you guys in here? >> That's a good question. I think one of the big differences with Scalyr versus other uses of time series database is with Scalyr you're outputting your logs, there's all kinds of information in your logs. Some of that might be a good thing to put in a time series database, but I think with a lot of other products, you would have to decide that ahead of time. Like, hey, let's get this metric into the database. With Scalyr, the moment you have anything in your logs that you might want to put into a time series you just start querying it. You put in a dashboard (snaps) you've got a time series. So we're going to back propagate that for everything you've already given us. So all of those queries are fast from there on out. >> So it's built in from the beginning. >> Exactly, and you don't have to do anything. It's just on demand. >> So keywords been what other people have been used for years. That's been standard for these log management software packages and indexes. Indexes can slow things down. We've got a tutorial on that. Why is those two areas, haven't been innovated in awhile? When people just haven't figured it out, you guys have first? What's the differentiation for you guys? Why'd you guys get there? >> I think the main reason is that log data is just fundamentally different than most other things that you might use a database for. There's a couple of different reasons for that. So with log data, you're not in control of it. You can't design it. You know, an index is great if you're making a relational database. You've got control of your columns. You know what you're going to join on. You know what you want to index. Nobody designs their logs like they design their database tables. It's just a bunch of stuff. It's from systems you don't control. It's changing all the time. So just the number of distinct fields that you would have to index is really, really high. So if your system depends on indexing for good performance, you're going to have to make a lot of indexes. And indexes, of course, they're right amplifying. If you've got one gigabyte of raw data, then you've got to put five or six hundred indexes on top of it. You're going to have five or ten gigabytes of raw plus index data. That means you got to do a lot more IO, and at the end of the day, how much you have to read from disk, determines how fast your query's going to be. >> So, in essence indexes creates a lot of overhead. You shouldn't even need to do because of the nature of log files. >> Because the nature of log data, it's overhead that doesn't serve log data very well, yeah. >> And what about the log data that's changing? Cause one of the things we're seeing, Internet of Things, more connected devices, imagine the Teslas that are going to be connecting in, with all their data. >> Right >> All this stuff, cameras. You've got a huge amount of new kind of data. Up, down, status. This is going to be a tsunami of new types of log data. >> Yeah, and none of it are you going to have a ton of control over. Right, it's going to be changing a ton. Maybe you've got 20 different versions of devices out there that are all sending you different versions of logs. You've got to be able to handle all of it. So you want a system that is adaptive to your needs as they come up, as opposed to something you have to plan out with indexes ahead of time. >> So if someone asks you, say you guys say you're faster. Why? Is that true? Is the statement you're faster than others, and if so why? >> It is true. (laughs) And that really comes down to the secret sauce. The brute force, the key to brute force, and I think we've talked about this a little bit today, is you got to bring a lot of force, as quickly as you possibly can. And we do that. We've got a lot of custom code. We're not using off-the-shelf components. We're trying to get that time quick as we can. So I think our median performance is still better than 100 milliseconds. That might be for a query that's talking to two or three hundred machines, or maybe even more. All of which, to get, maybe it's going to scan a terabyte of data. All of that is going to come back within 100 milliseconds. It's extremely fast. >> Talk about why log data is different from other data types, for folks that are in these cloud native environments. Their time is precious. They are looking at a lot of different data. How is log data different? >> I think the fact that it's dynamic in terms of what's coming out is something new. It changes so rapidly. The other really big thing too is the way you query it changes from day to day. Most of the time you're going to your logs, you're trying to troubleshoot a problem. Today's problems are different than yesterdays problems. So every time you go in, you're using it in a different way. So it has to be very fast. It has to be exploratory. And that's one of the big things about Scalyr's speed. Is it enables this really exploratory. You can kind of move through the data quickly, as opposed to making a query, getting a cup of coffee, waiting for the query, and then deciding what you're going to do next. I'm kind of dating myself here, but it's like the first time you ever used Google. You're like, "Whoa, how did that happen?" That's what it's like the first time you use Scalyr. >> And you guys have a unique architecture, we talked about that. You guys have certain speeds. But it's not just the query speed. It's the time it takes to do the query. So you factor in a much bigger perspective than if someone has to build a query and then takes 15 minutes. >> Right. >> Game's over. >> Yeah, and instead you're just clicking on things. We're trying to make it very easy for you to move from oh here's an alert. Well here are the log files that caused that alert. Oh, what's the thread stack for that particular lock. Oh, I can go and look at everything else that happened in that thread. That's five or 10 seconds of Scalyr tops. >> You guys have unique engineering culture, that targets engineers, products built by engineers, for engineers. >> Yep. >> Great story. And it's real, and you guys building it everyday. What is the engineer threshold of pain when it comes to locked data? Have you seen any anecdotal, I mean, 'cause engineers that are in this space, they need access to it. There's SLAs now tied to it. People are sharing data. There's all kind of new ways, reasons why you need to have the Scalyr solution. But what's the pain point for most people to tolerate an inferior solution? >> Well for me, I actually have an answer for this. Right, because before I was Scalyr employee, I was a Scalyr customer and before I was a Scalyr customer, I was a Splunk customer. I used Splunk for about five years before I think Scalyr even necessarily existed and I was really happy with it because I needed it. Right? I had my own company. We were generating tons of logs. My support guys needed to use those logs. And, prior to using something like a Splunk, I was SSHing it to servers to check the log files, which is of course, not scalable. So I was really happy with the product as an idea existed, but it just kept gnawing at us. You know, every time we would query, sometimes it would be fast, sometimes it would be really slow. Sometimes the results would be down because an indexing server was down. It was just. >> You mean the Splunk solution? >> Yeah, the Splunk solution. Yeah, it was just extremely painful. So I read, actually, one of the blog posts written by Steve Newman and thought, that's a great idea. That is how you should attack this problem. No indexes. Brute forces. All the flexibility you get from that. I loved it and then I forgot about it for like six months. (laughs) Because I was busy, right. But then six months later I was really frustrated again with Splunk again being really, really slow, and I thought, what was the name of that company again? I looked them up. I installed it. And within, certainly within a day, I was blown away by the performance. Within a week, I had uninstalled Scalyr, excuse me, Splunk, from every single one of my servers and switched to Scalyr instead. >> And you're happy with that? Does it work for you? Came to join the company? >> Yeah, exactly. In kind of conversations with the support team here, I was one of their early customers to use Windows, so I had a lot of questions, they had questions for me, how did I get it working, it wasn't a supported platform. And all of my emails were responded to by two guys named Steve. So I figured that was probably the support team. Pretty funny they've got a support team of two people, both named Steve. And then at one point, in one email, Steve Newman said to me, "You may have realized there's only two of us here." And that's when I kind of went, "Oh wait, so there's two people total." And two guys I assumed in a basement. They weren't in a basement, but I assumed they were in a basement. They had software that was way better for my needs than Splunk, which at the time was worth probably eight, ten billion dollars. It's a public company. Thousands of engineers. So that's when I thought, "Huh. When I get a chance, "Maybe I should go work with these guys." >> You know it's interesting. Maybe create a new category, brute force as a service. >> Yeah. >> This is what they're doing. They're bringing in the right tool at the right time. >> Yep. >> For the right problem, for speed, and to solve the problem, no? >> Yeah. >> They care how it gets done. >> Get as much data as you can and get that answer back as quickly as you can. >> So this is the big challenge. Final question for you is obviously, you know, a lot of people we talked to in the DevOps world they're really fickle. On one hand, they'll try anything. If they like it, they'll stay with it. But if they don't, you'll know about it. Where's the value point for people to start thinking about Scalyr. Is it ingest to value, ingesting is one part, that's kind of a trial. Where's the value immediately come in? Where do you see, what's the first sign of light value, once the ingestion happens. >> So part of it is this, it's a very short period of time from the ingestion to the time you're querying on it is very, very short. So you got a real time view of what's happening on your servers not a five minutes ago view. That by itself can pay for it right there. If you're a DevOps person and you've got some alarm pinging. If that alarm is from 10 minutes ago, that means your customers are already annoyed. If you're going to have to wait another 10 minutes just to even see what's happening, you've got a really big problem, right. So being able to have the alarm, and you know that's triggering on something that happened a second or two ago, and then immediately being able to dive in with no interruption to your work flow, no reason not to dive in, that's a pretty big one right there. >> So pretty immediate impact. >> Yeah. >> So okay, for people that don't know Scalyr, what should they know about Scalyr as a company from a value proposition as a former customer now, key employee in the back end, and engineering. What is the key things they should know about? >> So speed, we keep talking about it, right? We have a really really good cost basis. Because we're not making those indexes, we don't have to store as much data. It's just generally cheaper for it to run. Right, so we actually have a really good cost point. And we get you from the alerts. You don't have to decide stuff ahead of time. You can do it all on the fly, ad hoc, we get you from the alerts, to your answers as quickly as you possibly can. That's pretty good. >> Every culture has its own unique kind of feature. What's Scalyr's culture here? I mean Intel was Moore's law, Cadence was Moore's law. What's the culture here, at Scalyr like? >> That's a good question. I guess I would say I'm just tremendously proud to be working with these engineers. Right? We're all here because we want to get better and we want to work on really, really hard problems writing our own code, not just running and kind of patching together open source systems that already exist. We want to be doing something cutting edge. So that's I would say the biggest one. >> And big problem's behind that, you've got AI right around the corner. Applying AI is going to be a natural extension. >> Yeah, 'cause we got the data. And can deal with the data. >> Ciao, thanks for the insight. Appreciate it. >> Thank you. Good talking to you. >> John Furrier here. Innovation Day with theCUBE here in Silicon Valley in San Mateo, at Scalyr's headquarters. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering NetApp Insight 2018, brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, live in Las Vegas at Mandalay Bay at NetApp Insight 2018, the third annual with customers, partners, endless press, NetAppians. We're excited to welcome two alumni back to theCUBE. We have Nancy Hart, Head of Marketing for Cloud Infrastructure at NetApp, and Dale Degen, Cloud Infrastructure Business Director. Guys, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you so much. It's so great to see you guys again. >> Likewise. So we got back from a standing room only keynote, thousands of people here, and one of the interesting things, Nancy, that Stu and I both observed were today no product announcements. It was really about concepts. The first time we heard anything architecture related was really the Data Fabric, but George Kurian, the CEO of NetApp, talked about the four principles of digital transformation. >> Nancy: Right >> I wonder if we can unpack those with you guys. >> Nancy: Yes >> The first one talking about digital transformation requires IT transformation. >> Nancy: Yes >> Talk to us about that speed as the new scale. What does that mean for NetAPP as a company that needs transformed... >> Nancy: Right >> and to your customers? >> So it means for our customers the idea is that speed is the new scale, right. That to create new businesses, to create new opportunities, to create new revenues, there has to be a lot more agile and agilent on their ITs. Right. So, NetApp will really focus on doing is how to break down the barriers between Dev and Ops. The days of silos, months of provisioning all of that is now gone. Because companies need to now help their teams build faster, build better, and that's really what George was talking about, in this idea that the speed is the new scale. And if our customers are not driving IT agile... Agile IT operations on their own data centers, their competitors certainly are. >> How does... NetApp talks a lot about being driven, the data authority and hybrid cloud. George also said hybrid clouds do in multi-cloud or the defacto architecture. >> Yes >> When you talk with customers, how do they digest "NetApp's going to help "me be data driven?" >> Nancy: Right >> What's that conversation like? >> So, looks like a lot these days, we have our customers, they have their own users, their own internal DevOps team who have gotten very used to taking their Corporate AMEX and running up the Amazon, setting up a new compute shape or storage. The thing is we see customers are trying to rebalance where they put their data cap with data, where they put their applications. Do somethings being, belong in public cloud? Absolutely, but there is also this natural rebalance, that not every application should be in the cloud. For reasons of data governance, perhaps cost, whatever it is, when they build that next new application, it may be in the data center. So, to make that work is the idea of a hybrid multi-cloud experience, and the key part of that is the experience. It's not a management experience. It's a consumption experience. It's a very seamless, simple consumption experience if you've got up in the public cloud, but in a private cloud in your data center. >> Stu: Nancy, I like that. We've always, we've been saying on theCUBE for a couple of years now, cloud is not a destination, it's an operating model. >> Yes It's the way we need to think things, but Dale, when I talk to customers, we talk about their cloud strategy, we talk about what they want, every single one of them, totally different. How much they're doing SaaS , versus how many mulvic public lines they're doing, and of course, they're still figuring out what they've got in their traditional data centers. And its that certain companies have been selling them multiple products, they've got their data all spread out, so, are we getting away from silos, how architecturally do we build this? There's so much differentiation out in the marketplace today. It'd be lovely to have a magic wand and say "Oh, everything's, "you know, simple." But that really hasn't been the case in an enterprise IT. >> Dale: I think you nailed it the way you described it right there You have an enterprises that have built up a collection of applications, some of them have been given a cloud mandate. And so, that means something different to everyone. Sometimes they're going out all SaaS, sometimes they're saying, "I want to put everything, "all my storage in the cloud." We're seeing an interesting moment in time where, there's almost a reaction to that, and finding out maybe there's silos within different public cloud service providers, maybe the monthly cost is a little bit larger than what people might have expected on that. At NetApp, we've been working with our customers, I kind of love being here because the last couple years has just been this huge transformation of the company around that, taking a lot of our customers have viewed us as number one in storage the trusted provider on that. I really, expanding out to a more data driven solution on there. And things we've done internally to address side is really focused on different business imperatives there. Because I think each of our customers has their data center that they need their rock solid applications on. They're thinking about this journey to the cloud. They're trying to innovate with acceleration in the cloud with different services with the cloud public... the biggest public clouds and along the way they're also saying "I need some of that agility internally." And so we've, we've really built that, to build out your kind of a hybrid multi cloud experience. And the company strategy is coming together. We're seeing investments, we're seeing growth and announcements and all of those. >> So one of the interesting things that I observed in the keynote this morning was NetApp being 26 year old, 26 years young company, right? Massive install base. You've got a lot of customers who were not born in the digital age and George Kurian your CEO seems to kind of address them almost right out of the gate. >> Nancy: Yes. >> So let's talk about the data fabric a little bit more. Let's unpack that because some of the messaging seems to be reflecting that, that, and I think Anthony liked talked about this a little bit this morning in the keynote as well. It, it's, it's transforming from a vision to an architecture for your customers, your incumbent enterprise customers who were not born in the cloud, what does being data driven mean to them? How are they embracing this architecture idea of the data fabric and using it to use their data to identify new customer touchpoints, deliver new services, increased revenue? >> Dale: So we're seeing a lot of our customers really transform their business to take advantage of these new services in the cloud. The value that a lot of them are bringing to us is they have a massive amount of institutional data that maybe was in different silos. May be they had different as a service offerings touching it. We're able to bring it together with the data fabric. So now they can consolidate this into a large amount of tangible data. You can have multiple as a service solutions and services coming from public cloud service providers to do analytics on data. For example, we have energy companies that have seismic data from 50 years ago that is sitting on tapes. It's better than anything they could even get today. They bring it all together and now they're doing data analytics on this and they're finding new ways to really take advantage of that. So we're seeing that across the board and we're, Our goal is to try to move them along that journey. >> Nancy: Yes >> Stu: Nancy, could you give us a little insight as to who you're selling to? >> Yes Where is NetApp getting involved in kind of those strategic discussions? As I said, >> Great >> you know everybody's got a cloud strategy, but I said usually the external still drawing and it's something you need to revisit often so you know where is NetApp seat at that table? You've got a lot of partners here >> Nancy: Yes >> and how are things changing? >> Nancy: So, a lot of things are changing a lot of ways for Netapp and the companies that we're selling to and who we're selling to at those companies. We certainly see a lot of new buyers and it's interesting to see now that the decision making, the who's sitting at the decision table when they make that decision of what kind of infrastructure to purchase, is it getting larger and larger group and now we're really seeing the Dev teams, their internal Dev ops teams have a seat at that table who are and they're having significant influence on the infrastructure and operations teams on what kind of investments that companies should be making. Right, so, working with partners, going to market through the largest public hyper scalers and reaching these new buyers and new and existing accounts as well. So even if there is a traditional part of the data center, I guarantee you somewhere in every company there's a new Dev team working on new business models. And so we want to attend (mumbles) >> Lisa: Does the conversation Nancy, start at the business outcomes level? >> Nancy: Absolutely. >> And, and your perspective, how are you seeing some of the more technical folks in an organization participating in a business outcomes driven conversation where it's more about these are the things we need to do to, to compete to increase our revenue. What, how is that persona based conversation changing? So actually I have a story from a customer meeting earlier this week, right? And so we were talking with the customer about data fabric and what we can do and how we can deliver a seamless experience between public and private clouds. And we walked out of their room and the gentleman from the customer who's I walked in that room as a storage admin and I walked out as a data fabric architect. Right. >> Lisa: It's pretty good validation >> It's pretty good validation. It's happening right now like the personas, even personas that we've traditionally known are certainly changing. What do yo say? >> So that point we're seeing some of the attributes that service providers are offering. We're seeing enterprises at the same time trying to build those up scale. And it's really been amazing as we're seeing you, you spoke about speed is the new agility on here and it's really the agility to be kind of build those infrastructures quickly and take advantage of that at a business advantage level. And a lot of the most technical customers of ours are saying now they're kind of at a, they have a seat at the table to kind of inspire some of those business innovations. They, they see how they could make the company more efficient and all of a sudden they're getting a lot more attention at the C level. >> Stu: Alright. So a few years ago there was the wave of big data, you know, it was really what I summed it up. One of the key findings was it was that bit flip of saying, oh my gosh, I have so much data to, Oh yes, yes, I've got so much data and I can take advantage of it. What I want you to help connect us is when you talk about being data driven, NetApp at its core is you know, there's storage, there's infrastructure, there's software. How do I then get the insights and the value out of the data, the data that I've helped my customers get to? >> Nancy: So let me give you an example of what NetApp is doing around this very issue, right? So we have a very large install base like you talked about. We have a new product called the active IQ. And what it does is based on community wisdom pulled from 30,000 or more installed systems across our entire customer base. And what we do is we use AI ML to extract value and intelligent insights and then actionable plans for our customers. So even if a customer doesn't have 30,000 units installed, they can take advantage of all of that knowledge themselves. So we drink our own champagne and we apply the things that we learned, but we can also help customers do the same thing in their own business as an extract value from their own data. >> Lisa: I'm curious too, from a company as as history does NetApp, formerly network appliance, how is NetApp drinking our own champagne example? How does that influence customers perspective on NetApp's transformation and convince a customer to trust NetApp and go, "yes, this is a partner "that I want to work with "to help us be able "to just do point, "not just a mass, "a tonne of data "and the silo, "but extract insights that are "essential to try this, this change." >> Dale: So we actually have some breakout sessions here where NetApp IT is speaking to that a talking about how we have NetApp on NetApp. You know we've got the active IQ data coming in, so an all flash fas tier being teared down through east series to object storage to a giant data lake of active IQ doing analytics on that. And so that's a great reference for us. We're able to have them speak to our customers directly, eye to eye in our executive briefing center, and oftentimes that pushes them over the edge on that one. >> Nancy: Because we're living the dream and we're making our own mistakes along the way and so when we have folks from our NetApp's own IT department come speak with customers, it's very credible about we did this at work, we did this. It didn't work so much. Right? But we're in that same transformation journey as our customers as well. >> Well, the failure I always say is my, It's not a bad word. It's part of that journey. >> Nancy: Yes. Well, finishing up Nancy with you. Talk to us about the media customer example that really articulates the value that NetApp is delivering as an enabler of the data driven company. >> So one of my favorites these days as we work with a company called Children's Mercy Hospital, Kansas City, right? And they brought us new Ciox and he was really interested in transforming the IT experience for his clinicians. Right. These are the people that work with kids in the hospital, sick kids, they're stressed out families. And I love this story because it's very easy for me to imagine if my child was in the hospital, how stressed out I would be to have a clinician walk in fast, easy access, the latest data about my child, a happy clinician. That would be such an impact to me. And so to see what our customers are doing at children's mercy and they'll also multi cloud they've got their own private clouds are accelerating their VDI, they're working with public clouds all through NetApp product in the end to help those kids and to help maybe some moms on wherever you are, just a smidge less. >> Lisa: Are you helping them to use some of the emerging technologies, IoT AI to drive faster, better outcomes and decision making for these in these critical literally life and death situations? >> So the first project we're working on them as about accelerating their VDI. How does he get a virtual desktop to all his clinician? So whatever room that clinician is in, he has access. So she has access to the latest data about that child. Right. And to make the overall just a better experience so that the new ciox is very keen on just delivering a better experience, not better technology, but a better experience for his clinicians and for his patients. >> Nancy, Dale, thanks so much for stopping by on day one of insight. We appreciate your time. Got to give you some cubes stickers because you're doubling the alumni now. Real. Exactly. We want to thank you. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman for watching the cube. Again, we're live all day at NetApp Insight 2018. Stick around. Stu and I will be right back with our next guest.

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

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Orlando Florida, it's theCUBE covering PentahoWorld 2017. Brought to you by Hitachi Vantara. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of PentahoWorld, brought to you of course by Hitachi Vantara. My name is Rebecca Knight, and I'm here with Dave Vellante, my co-host. We are joined by Nathan Hart, he is the Development Manager at NextGear Capital. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, Nathan. >> Thanks for having me. >> So let's start by telling our viewers a little bit about what NextGear Capital is, and what you do there. >> Sure, NextGear Capital is a, we do auto financing for auto dealerships, so if a dealer goes to an auction and wants to buy some inventory, we're going to be the ones who actually finance that and purchase it for them, and then they pay us back. >> Great, and your role as a development manager. >> Yep, I am over our integrations team, so we are responsible for basically getting data in and out of the company, a lot of that is getting data to and from our sister companies, all under Cox Automotive. >> And the data we're talking about is? >> Uh, it's a whole lot of things, obviously it's a lot of financial data, as we are a finance company, but a lot of things like inventory, unit statuses, where a car is located, we have credit scores, and that sort of work as well, so all kinds of data are coming in and out and then into our systems. >> So, are the cars instrumented to the point where you can kind of track where they are in an automated way, or is it? >> Yes, we do have some GPS units, not on all that inventory, just because we have quite a few open floor plans, about 500,000 I believe. But yes, we do have some select units that are GPS'd that we can track that way, or we have inspectors that go to lots. >> Okay so as a developer you know this story well, back in the day if you had a big data problem, you'd buy a Unix box and you'd stuff all the data in there and then you'd buy a bunch of Oracle licenses, and if you had any money left over, you could maybe do something, maybe buy a little storage, or conduct business. Okay that changed, quite dramatically. I wonder, if you could tell us your version of that story and how it's affected your business. >> Sure, so, uh. (laughter) >> Dave: Is it a fair representation? >> Not, not... >> Dave: Is the old world, was it a big data warehouse world? >> Yeah, so. >> Where it's sort of expensive to get stuff in and get stuff out and has that changed? Or is that sort of? >> Yeah, it has changed greatly, we're not quite that bad, but we do currently have an older monolithic database system that we are trying to get away from. >> Dave: It's hard. >> Yeah, exactly. And so a lot of our processes right now, go in and come out of this so obviously, if anything in that breaks, it hurts everywhere. >> Dave: Right. >> So yes. >> Dave: Sort of a chain reaction. >> Exactly. >> Okay, but so how have you, talk about the journey of bringing in Pentaho and how that has affected you. >> Sure, Pentaho has been great for us, just in terms of being able to be really flexible with our data. Like I said, we're trying to get away from this monolithic service, so we have, in Pentaho, we can easily branch off and say, go to the monolithic database, but also talk to another service that is going to replace it. And then it's just one click of a button, and now this is off, this is on, or we can do both and have some replication going, just so we have that flexibility, and that kind of adaptability around those changes. >> So why Pentaho, I mean, a lot of tools out there, there's open source, you could roll your own, you could do everything in the cloud, why Pentaho? >> We liked Pentaho because of the, I guess the freedom and independence it kind of offers, in the sense that it allows us to have a large set of steps and tools that are already prebuilt, that we can just use right out of the box, and, it's just a massive library, far greater than most of the competition that we looked at. And then it also is just built on this great Java platform that we can, if we need to, write a custom Java class, pop it in, and then that can do what we need to, if we don't have something out of the box. >> Dave: So it's integrated, >> Yep >> but it's customizable. >> Nathan: Exactly. >> If you need it to be. >> Nathan: Yep. >> Okay, and one of the things that customers like you tell us about Pentaho is that they like the sort of end-to-end integration. >> Nathan: Yep. >> We were talking off camera, you had mentioned that you've got an initiative to move toward the cloud. Maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, so right now, just Cox, as a whole, is kind of investigating the cloud. I definitely don't want to speak out of turn, or say we're definitely going there, but that is the current initiatives are to start experimenting with how we can leverage this more. I know one of the, kind of the first steps that we're taking towards that is we have large archives, we keep all of the files we've ever received or sent out, and we don't access them much, we don't need them much, but we want to keep them, just so we have this history, and we can always look back if we need to. So using the cloud for something like that, where's it's just like a deep storage, where we can just upload it and forget it, and if we ever need it, it's there and easily accessible, and this way we don't have to pay for as much storage on print. >> Very workload specific, cheap storage. >> Nathan: Yep. >> Probably a lot of test and dev. >> Nathan: Exactly. >> So going back to the Pentaho, and why Pentaho, and you mentioned the freedom and the flexibility that it provides, can you talk about some of the best practices that you've discovered that could help some other Hitachi Vantara customers? >> Absolutely, the biggest change, learning curve that we went through, my first introduction was Pentaho when I started at NextGear, and it was a real huge learning curve for the whole team. We all started within about a month of each other, and there were only three of us to start. So, it was a real learning curve of, okay, here's how we do this, here's how we do this. So, once we kind of got the workflow going and understanding what we were trying to do, the next step was figuring out okay we can make this very modular, we can build a sub job that does a very specific task, and we can use it everywhere. And we just did that again and again and again, so now we have a library of about 118 different utilities that we can just plug and drop anywhere and they just do what they need to do, we don't need to re-test them, we don't need to think about them ever. And of course, if we update one of those, it updates every single job that it touches. As soon as we kind of unlocked that and figured we didn't have to make a custom solution for every single job, that we could use a lot of reuseability. It really sped up our development, and how we do things. >> Could you talk about data sources, have they or how have they evolved over the last decade? >> Sure, I can't speak for the whole decade, I haven't actually been in the industry that long, but a lot of what we came into and inherited when I came in, were flat files, just everything is CSV, TXT, either in or out, and we still do a lot of that, that's still kind of our bread and butter, just by the nature of our current role, but as it's changing we are interacting more and more with APIs. We're shifting away from this monolithic database into micro services so we're having to interact with those a lot more and figure out how we can get that real time communication and get the data where it needs to go so it's all in its happy place. >> One of the things that Brian Householder, the CEO, got up on the main stage and talked about how, for companies, the two most important assets are the people and the data. I want to talk to you about the people aspect. >> Nathan: Okay. >> We're hearing so much about the shortage, the tech shortage of data scientists, and other kinds of talent in this industry. How hard is it for you to recruit? Your company, as you said, is based in Carmel, Indiana is that right? >> Nathan: Yep. >> What are you finding out there? >> The greater Indianapolis area, like many other places, is very starved for tech talent. It's very, very easy as a developer to throw a stone and get an interview. It's definitely a challenge. We actually currently have two openings on my team. Just, do less with more and do what we can. So, it's definitely a challenge, but I think that there's a lot of really great young talent coming out of colleges right now that are coming in, they've grown up with this right? They're a lot further along than necessarily I was when I came out of school and some of our other developers. So they can step in and already understand a lot of these complex architectures that we're dealing with and can just hit the ground running. >> So at least 10 times a week, I get somebody hitting me on LinkedIn about hey do you need development resources? (Nathan laughing) As a developer, it must happen to you 100 times a week, but there's obviously challenges of off-shoring and managing that remotely. I'm sure you've thought about it. What are your thoughts on off-shoring? You want someone there in a bee hive effect? Maybe talk about that a little bit. So, at NextGear we've been fairly rigid about butts in the seats, in the office, real collaborative environment, where you're at the morning stand up, you're there in the meetings, and it's a very present environment. And we are being a little bit more adaptable with that, just as time changes and other companies, obviously do offer more remote from home or what have you, so that is shifting a little bit, as far as necessarily off-shoring, that's way above my pay grade to even make that call, I have worked in previous environments where that was a large part of it. In a previously life we had a US based team and then we had a Malaysia based team, and I thought it was a really great experience cause we basically all had our own counterparts over there, so at the end of your day, you just email your notes, here's what I did today, here's where I left off, and they pick it up and do the same, then we had about a weekly meeting. So I think it definitely can work, I'm all for the global tech community all coming up together, when appropriate and when it works. >> But you've got to have the right infrastructure and processes in place, >> Nathan: Absolutely. >> Or it's just, it sucks all your productivity out. >> Nathan: Absolutely, if you spend half your day trying to figure out what the other person did, then you've lost your day. >> Yeah, right. And you follow the sun, yes and no right, you've got to wait for the sun sometimes. Pentaho, back to Pentaho, what are the things that, as a customer, you want them to do. What's on their to-do list, you know, when you're talking to Donna Prlich and her team, what are you pushing them for? >> So, the biggest things kind of on our wish list and that we're seeing is interacting more natively with those microservices like I mentioned and I was really glad that that came up in the keynote as something that they're focusing on and it's something that is going to come up in 8.0, at least the kind of stepping stones to go in that direction. So, that's really exciting stuff for us, just it answers a lot of questions we're currently having of how are we going to interact with those, and the answer can still be Pentaho moving forward. >> I was struck in the keynote, when Brian was asking hands up please, how many people are doing business with Hitachi outside of Pentaho, and just a smattering, right, I presume your hand was down. >> Nathan: My hand was down. >> And then, had you heard of Hitachi Vantara? >> I read the press release when they first announced Vantara, but that's about the extent of it. Obviously I knew about Hitachi from when they purchased Pentaho. We actually were having a week long, kind of a tech support get together that week that it happened, so I think on the Tuesday or something, our rep was like I now work for Hitachi. It was a fun thing, but yeah I'm not terribly familiar with Hitachi's products or, obviously I know where they're going with the Vantara concept, but. >> As a developer in a very focused area, >> Yep. >> Cox Automotive, obviously has some IOT initiatives, I'm sure, >> Absolutely. >> And some process automation, but I presume you haven't really dug into that yet, but when you think about the messaging that you heard this morning. What does it mean to you? Do you say, okay, nice, but I've got other problems? Or do you see the potential to leverage some of the technologies down the road? I definitely see the potential to start, at least exploring that direction, and figuring out what can we get out of this, right. It makes a lot more sense to play in a singular ecosystem and have all those tools at our hand just in one bucket instead of trying to figure out how does this play nice with this, how does this play nice over here, if we just can have a singular ecosystem that does it all together, that definitely makes our jobs a lot easier. >> How about the event, is this your first PentahoWorld? >> Yep, this is my first PentahoWorld. >> So it's early, but why do you come to events like this, and what do you hope to take away? >> Sure, I came to this event, cause I was specifically invited to. That's really it. It was nothing more than that, but I definitely come to kind of, see what's next and learn about the new technologies, and get that chance to visit some of the booths and some of the breakout sessions for maybe things that I don't get to do in my day to day life. We're very heads down in PDI so I don't get to spend too much time learning about the analytics and playing with those tools. So it's a lot of fun to come here and kind of see what's out there and be like, oh could we leverage this, or how could I adapt, or what are some of the other professionals doing that maybe I can bring back and improve our processes. >> And it's early days, but what are your thoughts on 8.0? >> I liked what I saw, and then I stopped by the booth and got another demo and I can definitely already see a couple of use cases where we can improve existing jobs with some of the new streaming features that they have in play, so I'm excited for that to come out and for us to start working with that. >> So that, the integration of streaming, Kafka, and the like was appealing to you? >> Yep, absolutely, and that'll be something that we can probably use right out of the gate, so excited for that. >> Well great, Nathan thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Nathan: Yeah, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante, we will have more from PentahoWorld just after this. (upbeat music)

>>It's my pleasure to be one of the hosts of the cube on cloud and the startup showcase brought to you by AWS. This is Dave Vellante and for years, the cube has been following the trail of data. And with the relentless March of data growth, this idea of a single version of the truth has become more and more elusive. Moreover data has become the lifeblood of a digital business. And if there's one thing that we've learned throughout the pandemic, if you're not digital, you're in trouble. So we've seen firsthand the critical importance of reliable and trusted data. And with me to talk about his company and the trends in the market is many sued as the CTO and co-founder of Reltio Maneesh. Welcome to the program. >>Thank you, Dave. It's a pleasure to be here. >>Okay. Let's start with, let's go back to you and your co-founders when you started Reltio it was back in the early days of the big data movement cloud was kind of just starting to take off, but what problems did you see then and what are enterprises struggling with today, especially with, with data as a source of digital innovation. >>They, if you look at the changes that have taken place in the landscape over the course of the last 10 years, when we started Reltio in 2011, there were a few secular trends that were coming to life. One was a cloud compute type of capabilities being provided by vendors like AWS. It was starting to pick up steam where making, uh, compute capabilities available at scale to solve large data problems was becoming real impossible. The second thing that we saw was, uh, this big trend of, uh, you know, you can not have a wall to wall, one single application that solves your entire business problem. Those visions have come and gone. And, uh, we are seeing more of the best of breed application type of a landscape where even if you look within a specific function, let's say sales or marketing, you have more than a dozen applications that any company is using today. >>And that trend was starting to emerge where we knew very well, that the number of systems that we would have to work with would continue to increase. And, uh, that created a problem of where would you get the single source of truth or the single best version of a customer, a supplier, a product that you're trying to sell those types of critical pieces of information that are core to any business that's out there today. And, um, you know, that created the opportunity for us at Reltio to think about the problem at scale for every company out there, every business who needed this kind of a capability and for us to provide this capability in the cloud as a software, as a service, uh, uh, offering. So that's where, uh, you know, the foundation of Reltio started. And the core problem that we wanted to solve was to bridge the gap that was created by all these data silos and create a unified view of the core critical information that these companies run on. >>Yeah. I mean, the cloud is this giant, you know, hyper distributed system data by its very nature is distributed. It's interesting what you were sort of implying about, you know, the days of the monolithic app are gone by my business partner years ago, John furrier and the cube said data is going to become the new development kit. And we've certainly seen that with the, the pandemic, but tell us more about Reltio and how you help customers deal with that notion of data, silo, data silos, data fragmentation, how do you solve that problem? >>So, data fragmentation is what exists today. And, um, you know, with the Reltio, uh, software as a service offering that we provide, we allow customers to stitch together and unify the data coming from these different fragmented, siloed, uh, applications or data sources that they have within their enterprise at the same time. Um, there's a lot of dependence on the third party data. You know, when you think about, uh, different problems that you're trying to solve, you have, uh, for B2B type of information that in Bradstreet type of data providers in life sciences, you have IQ via type of data providers. Um, you know, as you look at other verticals, there is a specialized third-party data provider for any, and every kind of information that most of the enterprise businesses want to combine with their in-house data or first party data to get the best view of who they're dealing with, who are they working with, you know, who are the customers that they're serving and use that information also as a starting point for the digital transformation that they want to get to. >>Um, and that's where Reltio fits in as the only platform that can help stitch together, this kind of, uh, information and create a 360 degree view that spans all the data silos and provides that for real-time use for BI and analytics to benefit from, for data science to benefit from. And then this emerging notion of, uh, data in itself is a, um, you know, key starting point that is used by us, uh, in order to make any decisions, just like, uh, we go, you know, if I, they wanted to look at information about you, I would go to places like LinkedIn, look up the information. And then our, my next set of decisions with that information, if somebody wanted to look up information on Reltio, they would go to, let's say Crunchbase as an example, and look up, uh, who are the investors? How much money have we raised all those details that are available? It's not a CRM system by itself, but it is an information application that can aid and assist in the decision-making process as a starting point. And that user experience on top of the data becomes an important vehicle for us to provide, uh, as a part of the Reltio platform capabilities. >>Awesome. Thank you. And I want to get into the, to the tech, but before we do, maybe we just cut to the chase and maybe you can talk about some of the examples of, of Reltio and action. Some of the customers that you can talk about, maybe the industries that are, that are really adopting this. W what can you tell us there, Maneesh, >>Um, we work across a few different verticals, some of the key verticals that we work in our life sciences, um, and travel and hospitality and financial services, insurance, um, S uh, retail, as an example, those are some of the key verticals for us, but, uh, to give you some examples of, uh, the type of problems that customers are solving with Reltio as the data unification platform, um, let's take CarMax as an example, CarMax is a customer who's in the business of, uh, buying used cars, selling used cars, servicing those used cars. And then, um, you know, you as a customer, don't just transact with them. Once you, you know, you've had a car for three years, you go back and look at what can you trade in that car for, but in order for CarMax to provide a service to you that, uh, goes across all the different touch points, whether you are visiting them at their store location, uh, trying to test drive a car or viewing, uh, information about the various vehicles on their website, or just, uh, you know, punching in the registration number of your car, just to see what is the appraisal from them in terms of how much will they pay for your car? >>This requires a lot of data behind the scenes for them to provide a seamless journey across all touch points and the type of information that they use, uh Reltio for aggregating, unifying, and then making available across all these touch points is all of the information about the customers, all of the information about, uh, the, uh, household, uh, you know, the understanding that they're trying to achieve because, uh, life events can, uh, be buying signals, uh, for, uh, consumers like uni, as well as, uh, who was the, um, associate who helped you either in the selling of a car buying of a car, because business is all about building relationships for the longer term lifetime value that they want to capture. And in that process, um, making sure that they're providing continuity of relationship, they need to keep track of that data. And then the vehicle itself, the vehicle that you buy yourself, uh, there is a lot of information in order to price it, right, that needs to be gathered, uh, from multiple sources. So the continuum of data all the way from consumer to the vehicle is aggregated from multiple sources, unified inside Reltio, and then made available, uh, through API APIs or through other methods, and means to the various applications can be either built on top of that information, or can consume that information in order to better aid and assist the processes, business processes that those applications have to run end to end. Well, it sounds like >>That's come along. Sorry. >>I was just going to say it that's one example and, uh, you know, across other verticals that are other similar examples of how companies are leveraging, Reltio >>Just say, can come a long way from simple linear clickstream analysis of a website. I mean, you're talking about really rich information and, and, you know, happy to dig into some other examples, but, but I wonder how does it work? I mean, what's the magic behind it? What's the, the tech look like, I mean, obviously you leveraging AWS, maybe you could talk about how so, and maybe some of the services there and some of your unique IP. >>Yeah. Um, you know, so the unique opportunity for us when we started in 2011 was really to leverage the power of the cloud. We started building out this capability on top of AWS back in 2011. And, uh, you know, if you think about, uh, the problem itself, uh, the problem has been around as long as you have had more than one system to run your business, but the magnitude of the problem has expanded several fold. Um, you know, for example, I have been in this area was, uh, responsible for creating some of the previous generation capabilities and, uh, most of the friction in those previous generation MDM or master data management type of solutions, um, as the, you know, the technical term that is used to refer to this area, uh, was that those systems could not keep pace with the increasing number of sources or the depth and breadth of the information that, uh, customers want to capture, whether it is, uh, you know, about a patient or a product, or let's say a supplier that you're working well. >>Uh, there is always additional information that you can capture and, uh, you know, use to better inform the decisions for the next engagement and, uh, that kind of model where the number of sources we're always going to increase the depth and breadth of information was always going to increase. The previous generation systems were not geared to handle that. So we decided that not only would we use at scale compute capabilities in the cloud, um, with the products like AWS as the backbone, but also solve some of the core problems around how more sources of information can be unified at scale. And then the last mile, which is the ability to consume such rich information, just locking it in a data warehouse has been sort of the problem in the past. And you talked about the clickstream analysis, uh, analytics has a place, but most of the analytics is a rear view mirror picture of the, uh, you know, work that you have to do, versus everybody that we talked to, uh, as a potential customer, wanted to solve the problem of what can we do at the point of engagement, how can we influence decisions? >>So, you know, I'll give you an example. I think, uh, everybody's familiar with Quicken loans, um, as the mortgage lender and, uh, in the mortgage lending business, uh, Quicken loans is the customer who's using Reltio as the customer data, um, unification platform behind the scenes. But every interaction that takes place, their goal is that they have a very narrow time window, um, you know, anywhere from 10 minutes to about an hour, where if somebody expresses an interest in refinancing or getting a mortgage, they have to close that, uh, business within that, uh, Hart window, the conversion ratios are exponentially better in that hot window versus waiting for 48 hours to come back with the answer of what will you be able to refinance your mortgage, uh, at. And, uh, they've been able to use this notion of real time data, where as soon as you come in through the website, or if you come in through the rocket mortgage app, or you're talking to a broker by calling the one 800 number, they are able to triangulate that it's the same person coming from any of these different channels and respond to that person, whether an offer, uh, ASAP so that, uh, there is no opportunity for the competition to get in and present you with a better offer. >>So those are the types of things where the time to, uh, conversion or the time to action is being looked at. And everybody's trying to shrink that time down, uh, that ability to respond in real time with the capabilities was sort of the last mile missing out of this equation, which didn't exist with previous generation capabilities. And now customers are able to benefit from that. >>That is an awesome example. I know at firsthand, I'm a customer of Quicken and rocket, and when you experience that environment, it's totally different than anything you've ever seen before. So it's helpful to hear you explain, like what's behind that because it's, it's truly disruptive. And I, and I'll tell you, the other thing that, that sort of triggered a thought was that we use the word realtime a lot, and we try to develop years ago. We said, what does real-time really mean? And the, the answer we CA we landed on was before you lose the customer, and that's kind of what you just described. Uh, and that is what gives as an example, a quick and a real advantage again, having experienced it firsthand. It's, it's pretty, pretty tremendous. So that's a nice, that's a, that's a nice reference. Um, so, and the other thing that struck me is that what I wanted to ask you, how it's different from sort of legacy master data management solutions, and you sort of described that they've seized to me, they got to take their, their traditional on-prem stack, rip it out, stick it in the cloud is okay, we got our stack in the cloud. >>Now your technical approach is dramatically different. You had the advantage of having a clean sheet of paper, right? I mean, from a, from an CTO's perspective, what's your, >>Yeah. The clean sheet of paper is the luxury that we have, you know, having seen this movie before having, um, you know, looked at solving this problem with previous generation technologies, it was really the opportunity to start with a clean sheet of paper and define a cloud native architecture for solving the problem at scale. So just to give you an example, um, you know, across all of our customers, we are today managing, um, uh, about 6.5 billion consolidated profiles of people, organizations, product locations, um, you know, assets, uh, those kinds of details. And these are, these are the types of, uh, crown jewels of the business that every business runs on. You know, for example, if you wanted to, um, let's say you're a large company, like, uh, you know, Ford and you wanted to figure out how much business are you doing, where the, uh, you know, another large company, because the other large company could be a global organization, could be spread across multiple geographies, could have multiple subsidiaries associated with it. >>It's been a very difficult answer to understand what is the total book of business that they have with that other, um, big, uh, customer and, uh, you know, being able to have the right, uh, unified, uh, relevant, rich clean as the starting point that gives you visibility to that data, and then allows you to run precise analytics on top of that data, or, uh, you know, drive, uh, any kind of, uh, conclusions out of the data science type of algorithms or MLAI algorithms that you're trying to run. Um, you have to have that foundation of clean data to work with in order to get to those answers. >>Nice. Uh, and then I had questions on just the model is this, it's a SAS model. I presume, how, how is it priced? Do you have a, do you have a freemium? How do I get started? Maybe you could give us some color. >>Yeah, we are a SAS provider. We do everything in the cloud, uh, offer it as a SAS offering, um, for customers to leverage and benefit from our pricing is based on the volume of, uh, uh, consolidated profiles. And the, I use the word profiles because this is not the traditional, uh, data model where you have rows columns, foreign keys. This is a, you know, a profile of a customer, regardless of attribution or any other details that you want to capture. And, um, you know, that just as an example is what we consider as a profile. So number of consolidated profiles under management is the key vector of pricing. Uh, customers can start small and they can grow from there. We have customers who manage anywhere from a few hundred thousand profiles, uh, you know, off these different types of data domains, customer, patient provider, uh, product, uh, asset, those types of details. But, uh, then they grow and some of the customers, uh, HP Inc, as a customer is managing close to 1.5 billion profiles of B2B businesses at a global scale of B2C consumers at global scale. And they continue to expand that footprint as they look at other opportunities to use the single source of truth capabilities provided by Reltio. >>And your relationship with AWS you're, you're obviously building on top of AWS, you're taking advantage of the cloud native capabilities. Are you in the AWS marketplace? Maybe you could talk about AWS relationship a bit. >>Yeah. AWS has been a key partner for us, uh, since the very beginning, uh, we are now on the marketplace. Uh, customers can start with the free version of the product, um, and start to play with the product, understand it better, uh, and then move into the paid tier, um, you know, as they bring in more data, uh, into Reltio. And, uh, you know, we also, uh, have, uh, the partnership with AWS where, uh, you know, customers can benefit from the relationship where they are able to, um, uh, use the, the spend against Reltio to offset the commitment credits that they have for AWS, um, you know, as a cloud provider. So, uh, you know, we are working closely with AWS on key verticals, like life sciences, travel and hospitality as a starting point. >>Nice that love, love, those credits, um, company update, uh, you know, head count funding, revenue trajectory, what kind of metrics are you comfortable sharing? >>So, uh, we are currently, uh, at about, um, you know, slightly North of 300 people, uh, overall at rail queue, we will, uh, grow from 300 to about 400 people this year, uh, itself. Uh, we are, uh, uh, you know, we just put out a press release, uh, where we mentioned some of the subscription ARR we finished last year at about $74 million in ARR. And we are, uh, looking at, uh, crossing the a hundred million dollar ARR, um, uh, threshold, uh, later this year. So we're on a great growth trajectory and, uh, the businesses, uh, performing really well. And we are, uh, looking at working with more customers and helping them solve this, uh, uh, you know, data silo, fragmentation of data problem by having them leverage the Reltio capability at scale across their enterprise. >>That's some impressive growth. Congratulations, w w we're, I'm sure adding a hundred people you're hiring all over the place, but where we get some of your priorities. >>So, um, you know, the, as the business is growing, we are spending equally both on the R and D side of the house, uh, investing more there, but at the same time, also on our go to market, uh, so that we can extend our reach, make sure that, uh, more people know about, uh, Reltio and can start leveraging the benefit of, uh, the technology that we have built on top of, uh, AWS. >>Yeah. I mean, it sounds like you've obviously nailed product market fit, and now you're, you know, scaling and scaling the go to market. You moved from CEO into the CTO role. Maybe you could talk about that a little bit. Why, why, what was prompted that move >>Problems of luxury, uh, you know, as I like to call them, uh, once you know, that you're on a great growth trajectory and, uh, the business is performing well, it's all about, uh, figuring out ways of, uh, you know, making sure that you can drive harder and faster towards that growth, uh, milestones, uh, that you want to achieve. And, uh, you know, for us, uh, the story is no different. Uh, the team has done a wonderful job of, uh, making sure that we can build the right platform, um, you know, work towards this opportunity, that PC, which by the way, um, they just to share with you, uh, MDM or master data management has always been underestimated as a, uh, you know, yes, there is a problem that needs to be solved, but the market sizing was, uh, in a, not as clear, but some of the most recent, uh, estimates from analysts like Gartner, but the, uh, you know, sort of the new incarnation of, uh, data unification and master data management at about a $30 billion, uh, you know, uh, Tam or this market. >>So with that comes the responsibility that we have to really make sure that we are able to bring this capability to a wide array of customers. And with that, uh, I looked at, uh, you know, how could we scale the business faster and have the right team to work, uh, help us maximize the opportunity. And that's why, uh, you know, we decided, uh, that it was the right point in time for me to bring in somebody who's, uh, worked, uh, at, uh, the stretch of, you know, taking a company from just a a hundred million dollars in ARR to, uh, you know, half a billion dollars in ARR and doing it at a global scale. So Chris Highland, uh, you know, has had that experience and having him take on the CEO role, uh, really puts us on a tremendous, uh, our path to tremendous growth and achieving that, uh, with the right team. >>Yeah. And I think I appreciate your comments on the Tam. I love to look at the Tam and to do a lot of Tam analysis. And I think a lot of times when you define the future Tam based on sort of historical categories, you sometimes under count them. I mean, to me, you guys are in the, the, the digital business business. I mean, the data transformation, the company transformation business, I mean, that could be order of magnitude even bigger. So I think the future is bright for your company. Reltio Maneesh. And thank you so much for coming on the program really appreciate. >>Well, thanks for having me, uh, really enjoyed it. Thank you. >>Okay. Thank you for watching. You're watching the cubes startup showcase. We'll be right back.

(upbeat music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to this special CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here in our Palo Alto studio with two great guests from Cisco as we talk about a content series around cloud, cloud management, cloud orchestration, and interesting cloud native. It's a cloud native world, hybrid multicloud. Two great guests, Matt Ferguson, director of cloud management orchestration at Cisco, and Ali G, technical leader in software engineering. Guys, thanks for coming on, good to see you. >> Thank you for having us. >> Yeah, tanks for having us. >> Sporting the nice Kubernetes shirt there. Of course I'm jealous. (laughs) Great shirt because we'll be at KubeCon, so looking forward to that. >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> We'll be there, too. >> So thanks. Matt, first start with you. You're the director of product management. You see the whole portfolio. What makes up the Cloud Center Suite? What are the components, let's get that out. >> Yeah, no, thanks, I appreciate that. Cloud Center is really our cloud management platform. It's a suite of products, quite candidly, and in the suite we have a Workload Manager module that is about taking workloads and modeling them out in blueprints, and then actually targeting them to very specific infrastructures, whether that's on-prem or in a public cloud, so that's module number one. The second module is our Action Orchestrator product, and this is an orchestration platform that can take various elements of code, of script, and take functions and actually sort of apply those with various different sort of capabilities to either set up infrastructure, or you know, do other sort of capabilities. And the third product in the suite is Cost Optimizer, and this is about understanding how much you're spending. It's understanding budgets, it's trying to categorize that in the public space. We can also apply that into an on-prem and how much you might want to sort of target that. We have, so that's the suite, and the suite is a combination of either self-hosted, so you can actually sort of like download the software and then self-host it on-prem, or we also have a SaaS platform, or SaaS-hosted capabilities for the Cloud Center. >> And the market's growing like crazy. You guys are doing a lot of product work. We've done a great interview with Ryan Hart from your team on the business benefits, but there's a lot of technical product managers out there, or cloud architects, people who are actually in the trenches, who need to look under the hood and figure out if this kind of is going to fit their environment. Ali, you've been, you know, a developer, you are a developer. At the end of the day all the talk on the marketing side is about the benefits. When they come in to you and they say, "Okay, implement this." >> Right. >> Does it work together, can it work by itself, I mean, can you mix and match? Take us through what it means for the folks who have to implement or design around the platform. >> Absolutely, so (clears throat) as a developer, you know, when we're coding it's key that we take our thoughts and ideas and as soon as we can bring it up to a POC, because normally we're working in an Agile fashion, and in two-week sprints at the end of the sprint you have to do a demo. So in order to achieve that this suite gives the capability of taking away any blockers that a developer may have, so a lot of times the developers and the teams already set up their tools around Jenkins and different CI components that they have, which is great but you know, me being in that part of the work and we hit roadblocks where failures happened, right, and we have to have our eye on the builds. And unfortunately there are manual, you know, interactions that we have to do retries. It would be great if the system was fault tolerant. Now that doesn't mean that we have to completely remove what we've done inside our CICDs, right? We've spent so much time, however if we can bring item potent commands and loose couple them a little bit and use the suite in order for us to do some of the work and give us that fault tolerancy, that'll be great, and that's what Cloud Center Suite has to offer, right? As Matt pointed out, you know, there are different components to it. You have the Workload Manager which sets up the infrastructure, but then you have AO, Action Orchestrator, which is the orchestration engine. Where I strongly believe that picking out an orchestration engine, either for you CICD and devops work, or even at the application level for development, becomes challenging, right? Does it support all the features that I have, does it have the patterns that does fault tolerancy, does threshold settings and retries? Does it do circuit breaker patterns, you know, does it take care of everything? So having that AO being your center of orchestration, both for your devops and your application, I feel that plays a strong role as a developer, right? >> So talk about the orchestration engines. I want to unpack, there's a lot there. I want to just kind of-- >> Yeah. >> Unpack it a little bit. Okay, so I'm a developer, I'm like, okay. I'm working hard, I've got the cloud architecture, I've got some cloud native, and every single day a new thing comes over the transit. "Try this new tool, it's going to be killer." Orchestration you mentioned is a buzzword that's been kicked around a lot. Obviously some people try to say, "Orchestration's about Kubernetes." Some people say no, orchestration's about a lot of other things within the enterprise, so IT is starting to get this orchestration fatigue of meaning. What is, when you say orchestration engine, what is it specifically applying to, because certainly there's orchestration within containers with Kubernetes-- >> Absolutely. >> And you're wearing, supporting the shirt. >> Right. >> But it's more than that, what does that mean for me? I'm the person in the trenches, I'm making it happen. >> No, that's a great question. The reason it's a great question is because orchestration means different things at different levels, and you brought up a good point, like Kubernetes. Kubernetes is an orchestration, but it's a container orchestrator, correct? But I'm looking at Action Orchestrator acting as the orchestration for your devops activity, as part of your CICD. Not everything needs to be inside our CIs, whether as if they're command patterns that are item potent and designed, that could move into the Action Orchestrator so that we can leverage retries and have the system be fault tolerant, that's one thing. The other thing is if you're building an application that requires orchestration, that has a workflow, that requires some requests that are given to the application to be processed at the backend, right? That could also leverage this Action Orchestrator engine as well, so you're absolutely right that orchestration is there, for example, in Kubernetes, but that falls into the context of containers, whether as this falls into the context of developers. Does that-- >> Yeah, makes total sense. I mean, fault tolerance you mentioned, you mentioned loosely coupled. >> Right. >> What do you mean by that, because I get loosely coupled. Anyone that designs OSs knows. You want to couple things and make things highly cohesive. Great practice in a systems architecture. What do you mean by loosely coupled, what's the impact of me as I'm trying to figure out my devops, I've got developers pipelining. What does that mean, loosely coupled? >> So when it goes to keeping loosely coupled is if you look at today how let's say I would have done it in my team, and we've done this before, right, is that we'd set up a pipeline in our CI environment where we're performing unit testing and then we're performing integration testing, but then we're also building, packaging, pushing the containers up to the registries, right? What happens where the endpoint registry is down, there is no retries, right, there is no capability of the system knowing how to heal itself. Okay, so keeping loosely coupled in this sense is why not I keep a lot of my UT and integration testing remaining inside Jenkins, which I've done already a lot of investment in, right? I don't want to remove it, right? However, if I bring those third party connection calls that we're doing inside the orchestration which the system heals itself, that's where I see the loose coupleness that can definitely benefit us here. >> Talk about third party. Matt, you talk about it first from a product perspective because you have the roadmap to deal with. Obviously Cisco has legacy positions in the enterprise. You guys are number one in networking, in other areas. Now the cloud native world, so you got to deal with third parties. You guys have done that, been multivendor in the past. There's a business and technical impact in connecting. >> Right. >> As the world's getting faster and more microservice-oriented, what does that mean, third party? What does it mean to be third party connected? >> Yeah, it's a great question. So we're going through this, you know, transition as well where we have to enable the development community as they're going through their proof of concepts, as they're becoming more Agile, as they're actually doing the true continuous integration, the continuous delivery of that proof of concept that ultimately will land into production. So what we want to provide is the tools in order to, you know, provide either the line of business owner or the business element of the IT organization of, you know, maybe the cost associated with, you know, how much it's, you know, that particular development effort is taking, you know, by looking at how much their, you know, that public cloud provider's charging. We might be able to leverage different infrastructures, so you could leverage the, you know, on-prem and in the cloud, the public cloud, and so with Cloud Center you're able to actually take either, in Workload Manager you're able to actually set up, you know, that infrastructure and place that workload there. You're able to use Action Orchestrator to glue a variety of different either scripts or languages, or you know, whatever element that the developer is friendly or familiar with, and then you're also to actually leverage the cost associated. So I get an update on how much this is costing me as the developer is going through their cycle. >> All right, Ali, let's attack that statement. Glue, who doesn't like a glue layer? But at the expense of throwing away what I got is not cool. Like people don't want-- >> Absolutely. >> They want to be, I love to create more opportunities to glue things together, make it more integrated with data modeling going back and forth, I love that. How does your customer, in this case a devops or a developer or a technical architect, get the best of a glue layer-like feature at the same time not compromising any disruption to how they do their business? >> Perfect, so a lot of the work that they already invested inside their devops work could be there. However, like I mentioned about the orchestration section is that the ability to introduce any custom adapters are also available, correct, so there are out-of-the-box adapters for Ansible, Terraform, and many more, for RESTful API calls, and if a team requires to do a custom adapter creation via an SDK that they have inside they can simply implement it because of the interface that's available. So that's where I feel that the glue is where it comes to the orchestration level. Now where Matt pointed out on the Cost Optimizer this is very key because the realtime data that Cost Optimizer is providing from the underlying clusters that we have our services running provides us, if you tie that, and ending out I want to use the word 'glue' here, if you tie that with the orchestration engine you can do realtime system decision making on knowing that the next service that you're introducing, now think about it, when we're talking about huge companies, right, 200-plus microservices, you know, we're not talking about one or two, and there are out there, and when we're talking about those number of microservices cost becomes important. Where should I be able to push the next service? Should I push it, if it's in my public cloud should I go to Azure or should I go to AWS, right? And cost is a key factor there as well, right? >> Explain cost, I mean cost is cash, but there's also cost in code, there's cost in operations. Do you mean cost in terms of actually hard dollars, are you talking about cost of the service, impact to the system, or both? I mean, why do I care if I'm a technical person? Hey, someone else is paying the bills. >> Correct, so a couple of things as a technical person's concerned is that when it comes down to, costs aside, but where the orchestrator actually plays a role and when it comes to where deployment needs to happen on which cloud is key. As a technical person sometimes our environments and our persistence layers that we have services connecting to require only access to private data, so it cannot go into the public sector. So that service needs to be deployed onto the private cloud. Whereas you have other services that have to live on the edge because they communicate with the internal cloud, so those services need to be pushed onto that public. So it's here that the suite basically gives you the opportunity to do all of that automatically without any, you know, interference at all. >> And you know, and I'll just dive in. I mean, I think the thing that, you know, if I was a line of business owner, right, I'm really looking for my developer community, my team to move faster. I don't want to necessarily slow them down, so I want to be able to say, "Hey, if there is a service within Azure, "if there is something within Google Cloud "that really helps you develop either faster "or provides a service that makes "the functionality of the experience better," I want the developer to be able to use that as a target infrastructure. At the same time, you know, I also want to go, "Okay, so as we're building out this application "or this service, is it growing out of bounds in cost, "is this something that I can actually "sort of take to production," and then I have an awareness of exactly when they go through the unit test, the integration test, how much this is actually going to cost. >> It's a fascinating conversation, certainly on our next segment when we do more of these interviews I'd love to drill into technical debt, but I'll ask you guys while you're here, technical debt is something that developers are used to dealing with, especially when they want to go from idea to POC, you take chances, there's technical debt and people have a good form for balancing debt. Cost also factors into things like that, and we add microservices to the equation, there's services going up and down, you don't know what's happening. So automation comes into a big part of this. So this idea of getting from point A to point B, whether it's idea to POC or POC to production, there's sometimes technical debt involved, there's sometimes thinking around that. How does the platform help there? Is that something that you guys help developers with? Because that's some, I'll take a chance. If I want to get a POC up and running maybe I take some technical debt to try to get it going, then I'll fill it in after. (laughs) >> Right, so I think like Matt mentioned about the different components that play inside the suite, you know, you have the infrastructure handled by Workload Manager, you have your orchestration again by AO, you have Cost Optimizer providing cost. The ability to set up your system inside these components and then creating a template out of it so that later when you want to challenge technical debt you're not reinventing things, so you already have templates created. So going back and dealing with technical debt is about how you can take your templates to the next version. >> And that's in line with devops thinking, iteration. >> Exactly. >> You know, just keep it Agile, keep it going. What's your guy's take on automation? Obviously when you look at the biggest trends in multicloud and hybrid cloud you have two things pop up in this new cloud architecture, observability and automation are two hot trends, which is essentially, observability's just network management on steroids and automation's configuration management on steroids, (chuckles) so the world's kind of the same but evolving. I mean this is in your, both are in your wheelhouse for Cisco as a company. >> Yeah, and another element that I think we haven't really talked about was, you know, we have a container platform that actually will leverage the APIs to either the public cloud or on-prem to like an ESXi host on VMware, and what that provides is to leverage the best of where that particular service would reside. If it's on-prem because of particular use cases, of data sovereignty or just locality, you know, hey, put your workload there. If you want to leverage something that's in the public cloud because of a service or something, we're not actually putting a cluster on AWS, we're leveraging EKS, we're connecting via APIs. You know, the cluster that you are controlling from the control plane all the way to the workload or the worker node, it would actually be spun up within EKS. So we're trying to bridge that on-prem world to the public cloud, so very much hybrid cloud, the connectivity piece and being able then to understand, you know, the connectivity and the workloads that go there. >> Bridge, an old school term. >> Bridge, yes. >> It means something. >> Yes. >> Bridge. >> Yes. >> Gateways. >> Yes. >> Internetworking. >> Yes. >> Cloud, same movie, different generation, isn't it? >> Yeah. (laughs) (laughs) >> You got it. >> I mean they're moving up the stack a bit. >> Yeah. >> But this is serious, this is going on. People want to have things move around. It takes a lot of networking knowledge, but it's all being done now with software with a lot of automation abstraction. This is why I think the devops and the net devops world, whatever we're calling it, is really creating this new abstraction layer. So great conversation, let's bring it all together and end this up. Bottom line I'm a technical person. I have responsibility, my boss is saying, "Go faster, be Agile, be devops," but we've got all this legacy to deal with. Why Cisco platform, what's the bottom line? >> With the container platform what we're trying to do is enable IT to have the tools that they can actually enable the speed and agility for their developers, and that's really the bottom line. And we're trying to, you know, just basically empower and move at the speed of Agile, so IT is now a part of the process of innovation and proof of concepting. I know the challenge though is governance, policy, security, all the things, the connectivity. Those are the elements that we're bringing to the table for the IT, you know, ops organization that can also sort of like go, "I am able to provide that for their developers." >> And Ali, your perspective, you're one of us. You're a technical brother. What's the bottom line, why should I take a chance, why should I implement this platform? >> Because developers really want to code at the end of the day, and they want to just focus on their business logic. They want the system to be automated. They want the system to be self-healed, and just like what Matt said, right, this suite basically gives you that so that you just focus on your code and your business logic, nothing else. >> Awesome, guys, great conversation. Looking forward to following up. I think there's a lot to unpack. I think as this cloud 2.0 world, or whatever it's being called, is about modernization of the enterprise, and it's going to be around for a long, long time. Thanks for sharing your expert opinions and commentary, appreciate it. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks for having us. >> This is theCUBE here in Palo Alto for a CUBE conversation. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering del Technologies. World twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Del Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome on board technologies World. Lisa Martin with Rebecca Night for the first time hosting together. And I have to say this is probably one of my favorite times of del technologies world because we have dogs on the Cube joining us for Michael Angel Pause. We've got Alicia Halloran. She's back. She's a Q. Pietro's here last year. Your Fallen here, Here's OD and Gracie and holding Creasy is Denise Michael's Cox Global Experiential marketing from Del Technologies. Tony's Thank you for joining us as well. Certainly a lot of female power. You right out. He's just letting a male hanging out. Alicia, it's so good to have you back Way have enjoyed being having our set Next. Tio Michael's age. Applause again. This year. It's so great to hear barking. Yeah, when you're talking about, I think I'm at home so true. Talk to us a little bit about Michael's Angel. Pause your experience as a volunteer out. Yeah, D'Oh well, first of all, Michael Angel paused >> is was a static to nonprofit established in Las Vegas, and they have three main programs. They have a community dog program, which really strengthens the bonds between people and their animals. And they have a therapy dog program, which is what these lovelies air part of, and we just love to bring joy and delight everywhere we go. And then they also have a service dog training, which allows people with autism or with their mobility issues or any kind of medical alert. So that's the main process of what Michael Angel paused does way air volunteers with them. We have loved being volunteers with them. Uh, OD is blind, and we managed to get him through the therapy dog program, and we love to come to conferences and just really help people feel better. And Gracie, of course, is just a little beauties. So, >> yeah, so Denise, tell me a little bit about why Dell has partnered with this with this organ, which is a great organization. And why might people need to feel better when they're out of touch? Honor. That's been may be related to this morning's kid note address with the anxiety, sometimes technology way. You do like >> to say we think of everything for Del Technologies world. So what is one more thing? How to surprise and delight our costumers? Air attendees here. And also it's really important for us as Del Technologies to give back to the community. And so it's a great opportunity to give back to great organization like Michael's Angels. Pause and surprise and delight our guests with the with several dogs to pet. Because you know, when you go to a conference when you travel, you miss your pets a lot. A lot of people miss their dogs, and so we're here for them to get a dog fix or maybe just come in for a few minutes. Distress. Er, jetsam dogs come out happy. Everyone who walks in, walks in, smiling and walks out, smiling bigger. So it's a great place. Tio work here, too. >> We were hearing last year that Michael Age, a PAS exhibit exhibit, was one of the most popular places for Get fourteen fifteen thousand people to congregate. Ru. Do you experience the same thing this year? Yes, >> definitely, definitely didn't really. It's been really busy, like these little ebbs and flows like you just catch a breath and then twenty five people are there and they're all like, Oh, it's so great. It's so great to see people relax and be able to kind of sit down and take a breath, which I think is really hard in a conference like this. >> It is, and it's also STD. So you mentioned it's nice to recognize that they're all people. They all have families, a lot of them, whether their pet owners or not. It's just a nice way to just sort of get back to reality, maybe come down from the cloud right on and actually have a little bit of something that just brings a just a smile to your heart. Yes, >> bring some joy even without technology. >> So we know the humans love it. But here, the Toups, how are they doing? Because, as you said, they usually you're going toe spills There. You told each home write and write and how are they handling? They >> handle it. Amazingly, they love to come. You know, the energy is very, very different, so they can be a little bit more rambunctious. They could move a little bit more because they're not working with somebody that is in hospice or you know has an illness. So it's people who are exactly feeling sad that they don't have their animals with them, and they get to get cuddled and squeezed and they love it. So it's a wonderful experience for them. They love to do it. She kind of looks a little sleepy, but that's kind of her way of being like >> he's himself. You're >> yeah, Just loves it. What is some of the reactions elation that you've experience out in the field like, for example, in the hospital or a hospice organization or in firemen's Yeah, that you see patients. Oh, yeah, they light owns, >> they light up. I mean, when you go to a hospital, people are in a hospital, and so everything is very regimented, their way woken up in the middle of the night to do whatever needs to be done. And people are kind of like talking about them, but not actually to them, and that animals don't differentiate there just like we want to sit with you, and that's what we're going to do. We're just going to sit with you, so it gives them a moment to just relax again and not have to think about. When's the next blood draw? When's the next thing that's gonna happen? So it's a really wonderful, relaxing experience for them. It's it's it's and and the joy that it brings. And I think there's a lot of healing in that that when your feel good, you feel good, you have the ability to heal better. And so I think therapy dogs are so important in a in a hospital environment, and >> this is a two step sort of certification program. They become a therapy dog first, and then they would become a service dog. Or can they go into a hospital as a therapy dog to >> go in as a therapy dog? Yes, so that's That's the work that these guys do service dogs or more about if you have something on illness, or that you have some mobility issues that you need balance or you need if you have PTSD that you need to have a dog with you all the time just to kind of keep you keep you together, which I think everybody understands that it feels good to have an animal with you. So these guys are therapy dogs, which is not the service dogs. >> Got it? Yeah. >> Denise, this is your baby. This thing, The show. Congratulations. It was a great show. Fifteen thousand attendees. Eso money partners. So money. A lot of great energy and a great vibe. Can you just talk a little bit? About what? This year's event This this dull world technologies has meant to you. This has >> been a great event every year. It's a great about. But this year, Thea Energy is even higher, so positive it's always really positive. Be here anyway. And so many more people this year, too. It's just a constant Gogo energy all the time. And it's It's wonderful. It's so fun. I love being part of the organization and proud to be able to say that I helped and some a little bit put this together. And so I'm just happy to be here and proud to be a part of Del Technologies to >> Denise before we let you go and get some well deserved. This's also a charity and philanthropy that's close, and Michael Dell's Hart Can you explain a little bit about that? And how he helps veterans in this way? >> Well, how Michael helps veterans or Michael's Angels pause veterans because they both do. >> Michael, let's talk about Michael Dell for since this is kind of his thing, yeah, well, it's, >> um, like for Del itself, a Michael Dell to is very important to him. To give back to the community is is important to us all. And that's a big part of what we dio and this opportunity to that now contribute event. Veterans like these guys go to that veteran homes and help with, um now Del itself. And Michael Dell also contributes Teo many veteran organizations helping veterans with PTSD. And we saw that last year at Del World talking a lot about continue working with veterans, working through PTSD with the art art for veterans. And so there's many organizations like that we work with our Del Technologies and Michael Dell works with, and that give that >> exit was we heard that maybe there was some support financial support for dogs that go through service training to become service dogs for veterans, which is a pretty extensive process and quite expensive. So nice to hear how much it really doesn't mean to the heart of Adele Denise Alicia. Thank you. Someone like you, but I mean, of course, Odeon, Gracie. Humans think they are. Thanks, guys. Really brought a smile to my heart and I got to go home to my dog with first. She's yet, right? Yeah. Like for Rebecca Knight. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube live from Dale Technologies World twenty nineteen. Thanks so much for watching.