>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is breaking analysis with Dave Vellante >> Enterprise tech practitioners, like most of us they want to make their lives easier so they can focus on delivering more value to their businesses. And to do so, they want to tap best of breed services in the public cloud, but at the same time connect their on-prem intellectual property to emerging applications which drive top line revenue and bottom line profits. But creating a consistent experience across clouds and on-prem estates has been an elusive capability for most organizations, forcing trade-offs and injecting friction into the system. The need to create seamless experiences is clear and the technology industry is starting to respond with platforms, architectures, and visions of what we've called the Supercloud. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis we give you a preview of Supercloud 2, the second event of its kind that we've had on the topic. Yes, folks that's right Supercloud 2 is here. As of this recording, it's just about four days away 33 guests, 21 sessions, combining live discussions and fireside chats from theCUBE's Palo Alto Studio with prerecorded conversations on the future of cloud and data. You can register for free at supercloud.world. And we are super excited about the Supercloud 2 lineup of guests whereas Supercloud 22 in August, was all about refining the definition of Supercloud testing its technical feasibility and understanding various deployment models. Supercloud 2 features practitioners, technologists and analysts discussing what customers need with real-world examples of Supercloud and will expose thinking around a new breed of cross-cloud apps, data apps, if you will that change the way machines and humans interact with each other. Now the example we'd use if you think about applications today, say a CRM system, sales reps, what are they doing? They're entering data into opportunities they're choosing products they're importing contacts, et cetera. And sure the machine can then take all that data and spit out a forecast by rep, by region, by product, et cetera. But today's applications are largely about filling in forms and or codifying processes. In the future, the Supercloud community sees a new breed of applications emerging where data resides on different clouds, in different data storages, databases, Lakehouse, et cetera. And the machine uses AI to inspect the e-commerce system the inventory data, supply chain information and other systems, and puts together a plan without any human intervention whatsoever. Think about a system that orchestrates people, places and things like an Uber for business. So at Supercloud 2, you'll hear about this vision along with some of today's challenges facing practitioners. Zhamak Dehghani, the founder of Data Mesh is a headliner. Kit Colbert also is headlining. He laid out at the first Supercloud an initial architecture for what that's going to look like. That was last August. And he's going to present his most current thinking on the topic. Veronika Durgin of Sachs will be featured and talk about data sharing across clouds and you know what she needs in the future. One of the main highlights of Supercloud 2 is a dive into Walmart's Supercloud. Other featured practitioners include Western Union Ionis Pharmaceuticals, Warner Media. We've got deep, deep technology dives with folks like Bob Muglia, David Flynn Tristan Handy of DBT Labs, Nir Zuk, the founder of Palo Alto Networks focused on security. Thomas Hazel, who's going to talk about a new type of database for Supercloud. It's several analysts including Keith Townsend Maribel Lopez, George Gilbert, Sanjeev Mohan and so many more guests, we don't have time to list them all. They're all up on supercloud.world with a full agenda, so you can check that out. Now let's take a look at some of the things that we're exploring in more detail starting with the Walmart Cloud native platform, they call it WCNP. We definitely see this as a Supercloud and we dig into it with Jack Greenfield. He's the head of architecture at Walmart. Here's a quote from Jack. "WCNP is an implementation of Kubernetes for the Walmart ecosystem. We've taken Kubernetes off the shelf as open source." By the way, they do the same thing with OpenStack. "And we have integrated it with a number of foundational services that provide other aspects of our computational environment. Kubernetes off the shelf doesn't do everything." And so what Walmart chose to do, they took a do-it-yourself approach to build a Supercloud for a variety of reasons that Jack will explain, along with Walmart's so-called triplet architecture connecting on-prem, Azure and GCP. No surprise, there's no Amazon at Walmart for obvious reasons. And what they do is they create a common experience for devs across clouds. Jack is going to talk about how Walmart is evolving its Supercloud in the future. You don't want to miss that. Now, next, let's take a look at how Veronica Durgin of SAKS thinks about data sharing across clouds. Data sharing we think is a potential killer use case for Supercloud. In fact, let's hear it in Veronica's own words. Please play the clip. >> How do we talk to each other? And more importantly, how do we data share? You know, I work with data, you know this is what I do. So if you know I want to get data from a company that's using, say Google, how do we share it in a smooth way where it doesn't have to be this crazy I don't know, SFTP file moving? So that's where I think Supercloud comes to me in my mind, is like practical applications. How do we create that mesh, that network that we can easily share data with each other? >> Now data mesh is a possible architectural approach that will enable more facile data sharing and the monetization of data products. You'll hear Zhamak Dehghani live in studio talking about what standards are missing to make this vision a reality across the Supercloud. Now one of the other things that we're really excited about is digging deeper into the right approach for Supercloud adoption. And we're going to share a preview of a debate that's going on right now in the community. Bob Muglia, former CEO of Snowflake and Microsoft Exec was kind enough to spend some time looking at the community's supercloud definition and he felt that it needed to be simplified. So in near real time he came up with the following definition that we're showing here. I'll read it. "A Supercloud is a platform that provides programmatically consistent services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers." So not only did Bob simplify the initial definition he's stressed that the Supercloud is a platform versus an architecture implying that the platform provider eg Snowflake, VMware, Databricks, Cohesity, et cetera is responsible for determining the architecture. Now interestingly in the shared Google doc that the working group uses to collaborate on the supercloud de definition, Dr. Nelu Mihai who is actually building a Supercloud responded as follows to Bob's assertion "We need to avoid creating many Supercloud platforms with their own architectures. If we do that, then we create other proprietary clouds on top of existing ones. We need to define an architecture of how Supercloud interfaces with all other clouds. What is the information model? What is the execution model and how users will interact with Supercloud?" What does this seemingly nuanced point tell us and why does it matter? Well, history suggests that de facto standards will emerge more quickly to resolve real world practitioner problems and catch on more quickly than consensus-based architectures and standards-based architectures. But in the long run, the ladder may serve customers better. So we'll be exploring this topic in more detail in Supercloud 2, and of course we'd love to hear what you think platform, architecture, both? Now one of the real technical gurus that we'll have in studio at Supercloud two is David Flynn. He's one of the people behind the the movement that enabled enterprise flash adoption, that craze. And he did that with Fusion IO and he is now working on a system to enable read write data access to any user in any application in any data center or on any cloud anywhere. So think of this company as a Supercloud enabler. Allow me to share an excerpt from a conversation David Flore and I had with David Flynn last year. He as well gave a lot of thought to the Supercloud definition and was really helpful with an opinionated point of view. He said something to us that was, we thought relevant. "What is the operating system for a decentralized cloud? The main two functions of an operating system or an operating environment are one the process scheduler and two, the file system. The strongest argument for supercloud is made when you go down to the platform layer and talk about it as an operating environment on which you can run all forms of applications." So a couple of implications here that will be exploring with David Flynn in studio. First we're inferring from his comment that he's in the platform camp where the platform owner is responsible for the architecture and there are obviously trade-offs there and benefits but we'll have to clarify that with him. And second, he's basically saying, you kill the concept the further you move up the stack. So the weak, the further you move the stack the weaker the supercloud argument becomes because it's just becoming SaaS. Now this is something we're going to explore to better understand is thinking on this, but also whether the existing notion of SaaS is changing and whether or not a new breed of Supercloud apps will emerge. Which brings us to this really interesting fellow that George Gilbert and I RIFed with ahead of Supercloud two. Tristan Handy, he's the founder and CEO of DBT Labs and he has a highly opinionated and technical mind. Here's what he said, "One of the things that we still don't know how to API-ify is concepts that live inside of your data warehouse inside of your data lake. These are core concepts that the business should be able to create applications around very easily. In fact, that's not the case because it involves a lot of data engineering pipeline and other work to make these available. So if you really want to make it easy to create these data experiences for users you need to have an ability to describe these metrics and then to turn them into APIs to make them accessible to application developers who have literally no idea how they're calculated behind the scenes and they don't need to." A lot of implications to this statement that will explore at Supercloud two versus Jamma Dani's data mesh comes into play here with her critique of hyper specialized data pipeline experts with little or no domain knowledge. Also the need for simplified self-service infrastructure which Kit Colbert is likely going to touch upon. Veronica Durgin of SAKS and her ideal state for data shearing along with Harveer Singh of Western Union. They got to deal with 200 locations around the world in data privacy issues, data sovereignty how do you share data safely? Same with Nick Taylor of Ionis Pharmaceutical. And not to blow your mind but Thomas Hazel and Bob Muglia deposit that to make data apps a reality across the Supercloud you have to rethink everything. You can't just let in memory databases and caching architectures take care of everything in a brute force manner. Rather you have to get down to really detailed levels even things like how data is laid out on disk, ie flash and think about rewriting applications for the Supercloud and the MLAI era. All of this and more at Supercloud two which wouldn't be complete without some data. So we pinged our friends from ETR Eric Bradley and Darren Bramberm to see if they had any data on Supercloud that we could tap. And so we're going to be analyzing a number of the players as well at Supercloud two. Now, many of you are familiar with this graphic here we show some of the players involved in delivering or enabling Supercloud-like capabilities. On the Y axis is spending momentum and on the horizontal accesses market presence or pervasiveness in the data. So netscore versus what they call overlap or end in the data. And the table insert shows how the dots are plotted now not to steal ETR's thunder but the first point is you really can't have supercloud without the hyperscale cloud platforms which is shown on this graphic. But the exciting aspect of Supercloud is the opportunity to build value on top of that hyperscale infrastructure. Snowflake here continues to show strong spending velocity as those Databricks, Hashi, Rubrik. VMware Tanzu, which we all put under the magnifying glass after the Broadcom announcements, is also showing momentum. Unfortunately due to a scheduling conflict we weren't able to get Red Hat on the program but they're clearly a player here. And we've put Cohesity and Veeam on the chart as well because backup is a likely use case across clouds and on-premises. And now one other call out that we drill down on at Supercloud two is CloudFlare, which actually uses the term supercloud maybe in a different way. They look at Supercloud really as you know, serverless on steroids. And so the data brains at ETR will have more to say on this topic at Supercloud two along with many others. Okay, so why should you attend Supercloud two? What's in it for me kind of thing? So first of all, if you're a practitioner and you want to understand what the possibilities are for doing cross-cloud services for monetizing data how your peers are doing data sharing, how some of your peers are actually building out a Supercloud you're going to get real world input from practitioners. If you're a technologist, you're trying to figure out various ways to solve problems around data, data sharing, cross-cloud service deployment there's going to be a number of deep technology experts that are going to share how they're doing it. We're also going to drill down with Walmart into a practical example of Supercloud with some other examples of how practitioners are dealing with cross-cloud complexity. Some of them, by the way, are kind of thrown up their hands and saying, Hey, we're going mono cloud. And we'll talk about the potential implications and dangers and risks of doing that. And also some of the benefits. You know, there's a question, right? Is Supercloud the same wine new bottle or is it truly something different that can drive substantive business value? So look, go to Supercloud.world it's January 17th at 9:00 AM Pacific. You can register for free and participate directly in the program. Okay, that's a wrap. I want to give a shout out to the Supercloud supporters. VMware has been a great partner as our anchor sponsor Chaos Search Proximo, and Alura as well. For contributing to the effort I want to thank Alex Myerson who's on production and manages the podcast. Ken Schiffman is his supporting cast as well. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight to help get the word out on social media and at our newsletters. And Rob Ho is our editor-in-chief over at Silicon Angle. Thank you all. Remember, these episodes are all available as podcast. Wherever you listen we really appreciate the support that you've given. We just saw some stats from from Buzz Sprout, we hit the top 25% we're almost at 400,000 downloads last year. So really appreciate your participation. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcast and you'll find those I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. Or if you want to get ahold of me you can email me directly at David.Vellante@siliconangle.com or dm me DVellante or comment on our LinkedIn post. I want you to check out etr.ai. They've got the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next week at Supercloud two or next time on breaking analysis. (light music)

Hello and welcome back to Supercloud 2 where we examine the intersection of cloud and data in the 2020s. My name is Dave Vellante. Our Supercloud panel, our power panel is back. Maribel Lopez is the founder and principal analyst at Lopez Research. Sanjeev Mohan is former Gartner analyst and principal at Sanjeev Mohan. And Keith Townsend is the CTO advisor. Folks, welcome back and thanks for your participation today. Good to see you. >> Okay, great. >> Great to see you. >> Thanks. Let me start, Maribel, with you. Bob Muglia, we had a conversation as part of Supercloud the other day. And he said, "Dave, I like the work, you got to simplify this a little bit." So he said, quote, "A Supercloud is a platform." He said, "Think of it as a platform that provides programmatically consistent services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers." And then Nelu Mihai said, "Well, wait a minute. This is just going to create more stove pipes. We need more standards in an architecture," which is kind of what Berkeley Sky Computing initiative is all about. So there's a sort of a debate going on. Is supercloud an architecture, a platform? Or maybe it's just another buzzword. Maribel, do you have a thought on this? >> Well, the easy answer would be to say it's just a buzzword. And then we could just kill the conversation and be done with it. But I think the term, it's more than that, right? The term actually isn't new. You can go back to at least 2016 and find references to supercloud in Cornell University or assist in other documents. So, having said this, I think we've been talking about Supercloud for a while, so I assume it's more than just a fancy buzzword. But I think it really speaks to that undeniable trend of moving towards an abstraction layer to deal with the chaos of what we consider managing multiple public and private clouds today, right? So one definition of the technology platform speaks to a set of services that allows companies to build and run that technology smoothly without worrying about the underlying infrastructure, which really gets back to something that Bob said. And some of the question is where that lives. And you could call that an abstraction layer. You could call it cross-cloud services, hybrid cloud management. So I see momentum there, like legitimate momentum with enterprise IT buyers that are trying to deal with the fact that they have multiple clouds now. So where I think we're moving is trying to define what are the specific attributes and frameworks of that that would make it so that it could be consistent across clouds. What is that layer? And maybe that's what the supercloud is. But one of the things I struggle with with supercloud is. What are we really trying to do here? Are we trying to create differentiated services in the supercloud layer? Is a supercloud just another variant of what AWS, GCP, or others do? You spoken to Walmart about its cloud native platform, and that's an example of somebody deciding to do it themselves because they need to deal with this today and not wait for some big standards thing to happen. So whatever it is, I do think it's something. I think we're trying to maybe create an architecture out of it would be a better way of saying it so that it does get to those set of principles, but it also needs to be edge aware. I think whenever we talk about supercloud, we're always talking about like the big centralized cloud. And I think we need to think about all the distributed clouds that we're looking at in edge as well. So that might be one of the ways that supercloud evolves. >> So thank you, Maribel. Keith, Brian Gracely, Gracely's law, things kind of repeat themselves. We've seen it all before. And so what Muglia brought to the forefront is this idea of a platform where the platform provider is really responsible for the architecture. Of course, the drawback is then you get a a bunch of stove pipes architectures. But practically speaking, that's kind of the way the industry has always evolved, right? >> So if we look at this from the practitioner's perspective and we talk about platforms, traditionally vendors have provided the platforms for us, whether it's distribution of lineage managed by or provided by Red Hat, Windows, servers, .NET, databases, Oracle. We think of those as platforms, things that are fundamental we can build on top. Supercloud isn't today that. It is a framework or idea, kind of a visionary goal to get to a point that we can have a platform or a framework. But what we're seeing repeated throughout the industry in customers, whether it's the Walmarts that's kind of supersized the idea of supercloud, or if it's regular end user organizations that are coming out with platform groups, groups who normalize cloud native infrastructure, AWS multi-cloud, VMware resources to look like one thing internally to their developers. We're seeing this trend that there's a desire for a platform that provides the capabilities of a supercloud. >> Thank you for that. Sanjeev, we often use Snowflake as a supercloud example, and now would presumably would be a platform with an architecture that's determined by the vendor. Maybe Databricks is pushing for a more open architecture, maybe more of that nirvana that we were talking about before to solve for supercloud. But regardless, the practitioner discussions show. At least currently, there's not a lot of cross-cloud data sharing. I think it could be a killer use case, egress charges or a barrier. But how do you see it? Will that change? Will we hide that underlying complexity and start sharing data across cloud? Is that something that you think Snowflake or others will be able to achieve? >> So I think we are already starting to see some of that happen. Snowflake is definitely one example that gets cited a lot. But even we don't talk about MongoDB in this like, but you could have a MongoDB cluster, for instance, with nodes sitting in different cloud providers. So there are companies that are starting to do it. The advantage that these companies have, let's take Snowflake as an example, it's a centralized proprietary platform. And they are building the capabilities that are needed for supercloud. So they're building things like you can push down your data transformations. They have the entire security and privacy suite. Data ops, they're adding those capabilities. And if I'm not mistaken, it'll be very soon, we will see them offer data observability. So it's all works great as long as you are in one platform. And if you want resilience, then Snowflake, Supercloud, great example. But if your primary goal is to choose the most cost-effective service irrespective of which cloud it sits in, then things start falling sideways. For example, I may be a very big Snowflake user. And I like Snowflake's resilience. I can move from one cloud to another cloud. Snowflake does it for me. But what if I want to train a very large model? Maybe Databricks is a better platform for that. So how do I do move my workload from one platform to another platform? That tooling does not exist. So we need server hybrid, cross-cloud, data ops platform. Walmart has done a great job, but they built it by themselves. Not every company is Walmart. Like Maribel and Keith said, we need standards, we need reference architectures, we need some sort of a cost control. I was just reading recently, Accenture has been public about their AWS bill. Every time they get the bill is tens of millions of lines, tens of millions 'cause there are over thousand teams using AWS. If we have not been able to corral a usage of a single cloud, now we're talking about supercloud, we've got multiple clouds, and hybrid, on-prem, and edge. So till we've got some cross-platform tooling in place, I think this will still take quite some time for it to take shape. >> It's interesting. Maribel, Walmart would tell you that their on-prem infrastructure is cheaper to run than the stuff in the cloud. but at the same time, they want the flexibility and the resiliency of their three-legged stool model. So the point as Sanjeev was making about hybrid. It's an interesting balance, isn't it, between getting your lowest cost and at the same time having best of breed and scale? >> It's basically what you're trying to optimize for, as you said, right? And by the way, to the earlier point, not everybody is at Walmart's scale, so it's not actually cheaper for everybody to have the purchasing power to make the cloud cheaper to have it on-prem. But I think what you see almost every company, large or small, moving towards is this concept of like, where do I find the agility? And is the agility in building the infrastructure for me? And typically, the thing that gives you outside advantage as an organization is not how you constructed your cloud computing infrastructure. It might be how you structured your data analytics as an example, which cloud is related to that. But how do you marry those two things? And getting back to sort of Sanjeev's point. We're in a real struggle now where one hand we want to have best of breed services and on the other hand we want it to be really easy to manage, secure, do data governance. And those two things are really at odds with each other right now. So if you want all the knobs and switches of a service like geospatial analytics and big query, you're going to have to use Google tools, right? Whereas if you want visibility across all the clouds for your application of state and understand the security and governance of that, you're kind of looking for something that's more cross-cloud tooling at that point. But whenever you talk to somebody about cross-cloud tooling, they look at you like that's not really possible. So it's a very interesting time in the market. Now, we're kind of layering this concept of supercloud on it. And some people think supercloud's about basically multi-cloud tooling, and some people think it's about a whole new architectural stack. So we're just not there yet. But it's not all about cost. I mean, cloud has not been about cost for a very, very long time. Cloud has been about how do you really make the most of your data. And this gets back to cross-cloud services like Snowflake. Why did they even exist? They existed because we had data everywhere, but we need to treat data as a unified object so that we can analyze it and get insight from it. And so that's where some of the benefit of these cross-cloud services are moving today. Still a long way to go, though, Dave. >> Keith, I reached out to my friends at ETR given the macro headwinds, And you're right, Maribel, cloud hasn't really been about just about cost savings. But I reached out to the ETR, guys, what's your data show in terms of how customers are dealing with the economic headwinds? And they said, by far, their number one strategy to cut cost is consolidating redundant vendors. And a distant second, but still notable was optimizing cloud costs. Maybe using reserve instances, or using more volume buying. Nowhere in there. And I asked them to, "Could you go look and see if you can find it?" Do we see repatriation? And you hear this a lot. You hear people whispering as analysts, "You better look into that repatriation trend." It's pretty big. You can't find it. But some of the Walmarts in the world, maybe even not repatriating, but they maybe have better cost structure on-prem. Keith, what are you seeing from the practitioners that you talk to in terms of how they're dealing with these headwinds? >> Yeah, I just got into a conversation about this just this morning with (indistinct) who is an analyst over at GigaHome. He's reading the same headlines. Repatriation is happening at large scale. I think this is kind of, we have these quiet terms now. We have quiet quitting, we have quiet hiring. I think we have quiet repatriation. Most people haven't done away with their data centers. They're still there. Whether they're completely on-premises data centers, and they own assets, or they're partnerships with QTX, Equinix, et cetera, they have these private cloud resources. What I'm seeing practically is a rebalancing of workloads. Do I really need to pay AWS for this instance of SAP that's on 24 hours a day versus just having it on-prem, moving it back to my data center? I've talked to quite a few customers who were early on to moving their static SAP workloads onto the public cloud, and they simply moved them back. Surprising, I was at VMware Explore. And we can talk about this a little bit later on. But our customers, net new, not a lot that were born in the cloud. And they get to this point where their workloads are static. And they look at something like a Kubernetes, or a OpenShift, or VMware Tanzu. And they ask the question, "Do I need the scalability of cloud?" I might consider being a net new VMware customer to deliver this base capability. So are we seeing repatriation as the number one reason? No, I think internal IT operations are just naturally come to this realization. Hey, I have these resources on premises. The private cloud technologies have moved far along enough that I can just simply move this workload back. I'm not calling it repatriation, I'm calling it rightsizing for the operating model that I have. >> Makes sense. Yeah. >> Go ahead. >> If I missed something, Dave, why we are on this topic of repatriation. I'm actually surprised that we are talking about repatriation as a very big thing. I think repatriation is happening, no doubt, but it's such a small percentage of cloud migration that to me it's a rounding error in my opinion. I think there's a bigger problem. The problem is that people don't know where the cost is. If they knew where the cost was being wasted in the cloud, they could do something about it. But if you don't know, then the easy answer is cloud costs a lot and moving it back to on-premises. I mean, take like Capital One as an example. They got rid of all the data centers. Where are they going to repatriate to? They're all in the cloud at this point. So I think my point is that data observability is one of the places that has seen a lot of traction is because of cost. Data observability, when it first came into existence, it was all about data quality. Then it was all about data pipeline reliability. And now, the number one killer use case is FinOps. >> Maribel, you had a comment? >> Yeah, I'm kind of in violent agreement with both Sanjeev and Keith. So what are we seeing here? So the first thing that we see is that many people wildly overspent in the big public cloud. They had stranded cloud credits, so to speak. The second thing is, some of them still had infrastructure that was useful. So why not use it if you find the right workloads to what Keith was talking about, if they were more static workloads, if it was already there? So there is a balancing that's going on. And then I think fundamentally, from a trend standpoint, these things aren't binary. Everybody, for a while, everything was going to go to the public cloud and then people are like, "Oh, it's kind of expensive." Then they're like, "Oh no, they're going to bring it all on-prem 'cause it's really expensive." And it's like, "Well, that doesn't necessarily get me some of the new features and functionalities I might want for some of my new workloads." So I'm going to put the workloads that have a certain set of characteristics that require cloud in the cloud. And if I have enough capability on-prem and enough IT resources to manage certain things on site, then I'm going to do that there 'cause that's a more cost-effective thing for me to do. It's not binary. That's why we went to hybrid. And then we went to multi just to describe the fact that people added multiple public clouds. And now we're talking about super, right? So I don't look at it as a one-size-fits-all for any of this. >> A a number of practitioners leading up to Supercloud2 have told us that they're solving their cloud complexity by going in monocloud. So they're putting on the blinders. Even though across the organization, there's other groups using other clouds. You're like, "In my group, we use AWS, or my group, we use Azure. And those guys over there, they use Google. We just kind of keep it separate." Are you guys hearing this in your view? Is that risky? Are they missing out on some potential to tap best of breed? What do you guys think about that? >> Everybody thinks they're monocloud. Is anybody really monocloud? It's like a group is monocloud, right? >> Right. >> This genie is out of the bottle. We're not putting the genie back in the bottle. You might think your monocloud and you go like three doors down and figure out the guy or gal is on a fundamentally different cloud, running some analytics workload that you didn't know about. So, to Sanjeev's earlier point, they don't even know where their cloud spend is. So I think the concept of monocloud, how that's actually really realized by practitioners is primary and then secondary sources. So they have a primary cloud that they run most of their stuff on, and that they try to optimize. And we still have forked workloads. Somebody decides, "Okay, this SAP runs really well on this, or these analytics workloads run really well on that cloud." And maybe that's how they parse it. But if you really looked at it, there's very few companies, if you really peaked under the hood and did an analysis that you could find an actual monocloud structure. They just want to pull it back in and make it more manageable. And I respect that. You want to do what you can to try to streamline the complexity of that. >> Yeah, we're- >> Sorry, go ahead, Keith. >> Yeah, we're doing this thing where we review AWS service every day. Just in your inbox, learn about a new AWS service cursory. There's 238 AWS products just on the AWS cloud itself. Some of them are redundant, but you get the idea. So the concept of monocloud, I'm in filing agreement with Maribel on this that, yes, a group might say I want a primary cloud. And that primary cloud may be the AWS. But have you tried the licensed Oracle database on AWS? It is really tempting to license Oracle on Oracle Cloud, Microsoft on Microsoft. And I can't get RDS anywhere but Amazon. So while I'm driven to desire the simplicity, the reality is whether be it M&A, licensing, data sovereignty. I am forced into a multi-cloud management style. But I do agree most people kind of do this one, this primary cloud, secondary cloud. And I guarantee you're going to have a third cloud or a fourth cloud whether you want to or not via shadow IT, latency, technical reasons, et cetera. >> Thank you. Sanjeev, you had a comment? >> Yeah, so I just wanted to mention, as an organization, I'm complete agreement, no organization is monocloud, at least if it's a large organization. Large organizations use all kinds of combinations of cloud providers. But when you talk about a single workload, that's where the program arises. As Keith said, the 238 services in AWS. How in the world am I going to be an expert in AWS, but then say let me bring GCP or Azure into a single workload? And that's where I think we probably will still see monocloud as being predominant because the team has developed its expertise on a particular cloud provider, and they just don't have the time of the day to go learn yet another stack. However, there are some interesting things that are happening. For example, if you look at a multi-cloud example where Oracle and Microsoft Azure have that interconnect, so that's a beautiful thing that they've done because now in the newest iteration, it's literally a few clicks. And then behind the scene, your .NET application and your Oracle database in OCI will be configured, the identities in active directory are federated. And you can just start using a database in one cloud, which is OCI, and an application, your .NET in Azure. So till we see this kind of a solution coming out of the providers, I think it's is unrealistic to expect the end users to be able to figure out multiple clouds. >> Well, I have to share with you. I can't remember if he said this on camera or if it was off camera so I'll hold off. I won't tell you who it is, but this individual was sort of complaining a little bit saying, "With AWS, I can take their best AI tools like SageMaker and I can run them on my Snowflake." He said, "I can't do that in Google. Google forces me to go to BigQuery if I want their excellent AI tools." So he was sort of pushing, kind of tweaking a little bit. Some of the vendor talked that, "Oh yeah, we're so customer-focused." Not to pick on Google, but I mean everybody will say that. And then you say, "If you're so customer-focused, why wouldn't you do a ABC?" So it's going to be interesting to see who leads that integration and how broadly it's applied. But I digress. Keith, at our first supercloud event, that was on August 9th. And it was only a few months after Broadcom announced the VMware acquisition. A lot of people, myself included said, "All right, cuts are coming." Generally, Tanzu is probably going to be under the radar, but it's Supercloud 22 and presumably VMware Explore, the company really... Well, certainly the US touted its Tanzu capabilities. I wasn't at VMware Explore Europe, but I bet you heard similar things. Hawk Tan has been blogging and very vocal about cross-cloud services and multi-cloud, which doesn't happen without Tanzu. So what did you hear, Keith, in Europe? What's your latest thinking on VMware's prospects in cross-cloud services/supercloud? >> So I think our friend and Cube, along host still be even more offended at this statement than he was when I sat in the Cube. This was maybe five years ago. There's no company better suited to help industries or companies, cross-cloud chasm than VMware. That's not a compliment. That's a reality of the industry. This is a very difficult, almost intractable problem. What I heard that VMware Europe were customers serious about this problem, even more so than the US data sovereignty is a real problem in the EU. Try being a company in Switzerland and having the Swiss data solvency issues. And there's no local cloud presence there large enough to accommodate your data needs. They had very serious questions about this. I talked to open source project leaders. Open source project leaders were asking me, why should I use the public cloud to host Kubernetes-based workloads, my projects that are building around Kubernetes, and the CNCF infrastructure? Why should I use AWS, Google, or even Azure to host these projects when that's undifferentiated? I know how to run Kubernetes, so why not run it on-premises? I don't want to deal with the hardware problems. So again, really great questions. And then there was always the specter of the problem, I think, we all had with the acquisition of VMware by Broadcom potentially. 4.5 billion in increased profitability in three years is a unbelievable amount of money when you look at the size of the problem. So a lot of the conversation in Europe was about industry at large. How do we do what regulators are asking us to do in a practical way from a true technology sense? Is VMware cross-cloud great? >> Yeah. So, VMware, obviously, to your point. OpenStack is another way of it. Actually, OpenStack, uptake is still alive and well, especially in those regions where there may not be a public cloud, or there's public policy dictating that. Walmart's using OpenStack. As you know in IT, some things never die. Question for Sanjeev. And it relates to this new breed of data apps. And Bob Muglia and Tristan Handy from DBT Labs who are participating in this program really got us thinking about this. You got data that resides in different clouds, it maybe even on-prem. And the machine polls data from different systems. No humans involved, e-commerce, ERP, et cetera. It creates a plan, outcomes. No human involvement. Today, you're on a CRM system, you're inputting, you're doing forms, you're, you're automating processes. We're talking about a new breed of apps. What are your thoughts on this? Is it real? Is it just way off in the distance? How does machine intelligence fit in? And how does supercloud fit? >> So great point. In fact, the data apps that you're talking about, I call them data products. Data products first came into limelight in the last couple of years when Jamal Duggan started talking about data mesh. I am taking data products out of the data mesh concept because data mesh, whether data mesh happens or not is analogous to data products. Data products, basically, are taking a product management view of bringing data from different sources based on what the consumer needs. We were talking earlier today about maybe it's my vacation rentals, or it may be a retail data product, it may be an investment data product. So it's a pre-packaged extraction of data from different sources. But now I have a product that has a whole lifecycle. I can version it. I have new features that get added. And it's a very business data consumer centric. It uses machine learning. For instance, I may be able to tell whether this data product has stale data. Who is using that data? Based on the usage of the data, I may have a new data products that get allocated. I may even have the ability to take existing data products, mash them up into something that I need. So if I'm going to have that kind of power to create a data product, then having a common substrate underneath, it can be very useful. And that could be supercloud where I am making API calls. I don't care where the ERP, the CRM, the survey data, the pricing engine where they sit. For me, there's a logical abstraction. And then I'm building my data product on top of that. So I see a new breed of data products coming out. To answer your question, how early we are or is this even possible? My prediction is that in 2023, we will start seeing more of data products. And then it'll take maybe two to three years for data products to become mainstream. But it's starting this year. >> A subprime mortgages were a data product, definitely were humans involved. All right, let's talk about some of the supercloud, multi-cloud players and what their future looks like. You can kind of pick your favorites. VMware, Snowflake, Databricks, Red Hat, Cisco, Dell, HP, Hashi, IBM, CloudFlare. There's many others. cohesive rubric. Keith, I wanted to start with CloudFlare because they actually use the term supercloud. and just simplifying what they said. They look at it as taking serverless to the max. You write your code and then you can deploy it in seconds worldwide, of course, across the CloudFlare infrastructure. You don't have to spin up containers, you don't go to provision instances. CloudFlare worries about all that infrastructure. What are your thoughts on CloudFlare this approach and their chances to disrupt the current cloud landscape? >> As Larry Ellison said famously once before, the network is the computer, right? I thought that was Scott McNeley. >> It wasn't Scott McNeley. I knew it was on Oracle Align. >> Oracle owns that now, owns that line. >> By purpose or acquisition. >> They should have just called it cloud. >> Yeah, they should have just called it cloud. >> Easier. >> Get ahead. >> But if you think about the CloudFlare capability, CloudFlare in its own right is becoming a decent sized cloud provider. If you have compute out at the edge, when we talk about edge in the sense of CloudFlare and points of presence, literally across the globe, you have all of this excess computer, what do you do with it? First offering, let's disrupt data in the cloud. We can't start the conversation talking about data. When they say we're going to give you object-oriented or object storage in the cloud without egress charges, that's disruptive. That we can start to think about supercloud capability of having compute EC2 run in AWS, pushing and pulling data from CloudFlare. And now, I've disrupted this roach motel data structure, and that I'm freely giving away bandwidth, basically. Well, the next layer is not that much more difficult. And I think part of CloudFlare's serverless approach or supercloud approaches so that they don't have to commit to a certain type of compute. It is advantageous. It is a feature for me to be able to go to EC2 and pick a memory heavy model, or a compute heavy model, or a network heavy model, CloudFlare is taken away those knobs. and I'm just giving code and allowing that to run. CloudFlare has a massive network. If I can put the code closest using the CloudFlare workers, if I can put that code closest to where the data is at or residing, super compelling observation. The question is, does it scale? I don't get the 238 services. While Server List is great, I have to know what I'm going to build. I don't have a Cognito, or RDS, or all these other services that make AWS, GCP, and Azure appealing from a builder's perspective. So it is a very interesting nascent start. It's great because now they can hide compute. If they don't have the capacity, they can outsource that maybe at a cost to one of the other cloud providers, but kind of hiding the compute behind the surplus architecture is a really unique approach. >> Yeah. And they're dipping their toe in the water. And they've announced an object store and a database platform and more to come. We got to wrap. So I wonder, Sanjeev and Maribel, if you could maybe pick some of your favorites from a competitive standpoint. Sanjeev, I felt like just watching Snowflake, I said, okay, in my opinion, they had the right strategy, which was to run on all the clouds, and then try to create that abstraction layer and data sharing across clouds. Even though, let's face it, most of it might be happening across regions if it's happening, but certainly outside of an individual account. But I felt like just observing them that anybody who's traditional on-prem player moving into the clouds or anybody who's a cloud native, it just makes total sense to write to the various clouds. And to the extent that you can simplify that for users, it seems to be a logical strategy. Maybe as I said before, what multi-cloud should have been. But are there companies that you're watching that you think are ahead in the game , or ones that you think are a good model for the future? >> Yes, Snowflake, definitely. In fact, one of the things we have not touched upon very much, and Keith mentioned a little bit, was data sovereignty. Data residency rules can require that certain data should be written into certain region of a certain cloud. And if my cloud provider can abstract that or my database provider, then that's perfect for me. So right now, I see Snowflake is way ahead of this pack. I would not put MongoDB too far behind. They don't really talk about this thing. They are in a different space, but now they have a lakehouse, and they've got all of these other SQL access and new capabilities that they're announcing. So I think they would be quite good with that. Oracle is always a dark forest. Oracle seems to have revived its Cloud Mojo to some extent. And it's doing some interesting stuff. Databricks is the other one. I have not seen Databricks. They've been very focused on lakehouse, unity, data catalog, and some of those pieces. But they would be the obvious challenger. And if they come into this space of supercloud, then they may bring some open source technologies that others can rely on like Delta Lake as a table format. >> Yeah. One of these infrastructure players, Dell, HPE, Cisco, even IBM. I mean, I would be making my infrastructure as programmable and cloud friendly as possible. That seems like table stakes. But Maribel, any companies that stand out to you that we should be paying attention to? >> Well, we already mentioned a bunch of them, so maybe I'll go a slightly different route. I'm watching two companies pretty closely to see what kind of traction they get in their established companies. One we already talked about, which is VMware. And the thing that's interesting about VMware is they're everywhere. And they also have the benefit of having a foot in both camps. If you want to do it the old way, the way you've always done it with VMware, they got all that going on. If you want to try to do a more cross-cloud, multi-cloud native style thing, they're really trying to build tools for that. So I think they have really good access to buyers. And that's one of the reasons why I'm interested in them to see how they progress. The other thing, I think, could be a sleeping horse oddly enough is Google Cloud. They've spent a lot of work and time on Anthos. They really need to create a certain set of differentiators. Well, it's not necessarily in their best interest to be the best multi-cloud player. If they decide that they want to differentiate on a different layer of the stack, let's say they want to be like the person that is really transformative, they talk about transformation cloud with analytics workloads, then maybe they do spend a good deal of time trying to help people abstract all of the other underlying infrastructure and make sure that they get the sexiest, most meaningful workloads into their cloud. So those are two people that you might not have expected me to go with, but I think it's interesting to see not just on the things that might be considered, either startups or more established independent companies, but how some of the traditional providers are trying to reinvent themselves as well. >> I'm glad you brought that up because if you think about what Google's done with Kubernetes. I mean, would Google even be relevant in the cloud without Kubernetes? I could argue both sides of that. But it was quite a gift to the industry. And there's a motivation there to do something unique and different from maybe the other cloud providers. And I'd throw in Red Hat as well. They're obviously a key player and Kubernetes. And Hashi Corp seems to be becoming the standard for application deployment, and terraform, or cross-clouds, and there are many, many others. I know we're leaving lots out, but we're out of time. Folks, I got to thank you so much for your insights and your participation in Supercloud2. Really appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> This is Dave Vellante for John Furrier and the entire Cube community. Keep it right there for more content from Supercloud2.

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: TheCUBE presents Ignite '22 brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas guys and girls. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. This is day one of the cube's two day coverage of Palo Alto Networks Ignite at the MGM Grand. Dave, we've been having some great conversations today, we have a great two day lineup execs from Palo Alto, it's partner network, customers, et cetera. Going to be talking about infrastructure as code. We talk about that a lot, how Palo is partnering with its partner ecosystem to really help customers deliver security across the organization. >> We do a predictions post every year. Hopefully you can hear me. So we do this predictions post every year. I've done it for a number of years, and I want to say it was either 2018 or 2019, we predicted that HashiCorp was one of these companies to watch. And then last August, on August 9th, we had supercloud event in Palo Alto. We had David McJannet in, who is the CEO of HashiCorp. And we really see Hashi as a key player in terms of affecting multicloud consistency. Sometimes we call it supercloud, you building on top of the hyperscale cloud. So super excited to have HashiCorp on. >> Really an important conversation. We've got an alumni back with us. Asvin Ramesh is here the senior director of Alliances at HashiCorp. Welcome back. >> Yeah, thank you. Good to be back. >> Great to have you. Talk to us a little bit about what's going on at HashiCorp, your relationship with Palo Alto Networks, and what's in it for customers. >> Yeah, no, no, great question. So, Palo Alto has been a fantastic partner of ours for many years now. We started way back in 2018, 2019 focusing on the basics, putting integrations in place that customers can be using together. And so it's been a great journey. Both are very synergistic. Palo Alto is focused on multicloud, so are we, we focus on cloud infrastructure automation, and ensuring that customers are able to bring in agility, reliability, security, and be able to deliver to their business. And then Palo Alto brings in great security components to that multicloud story. So it's a great story altogether. >> Some of the challenges that organizations have been facing. Palo Alto just released a survey, I think this morning if I can find it here what's next in cyber organizations facing massive headwinds ransomware becoming a household word, business email compromise being a challenge. But also in the last couple of years the massive shift to multi-club or organizations are living an operating need to do so securely. It's no longer nice to have anymore. It's absolutely table stakes for survival, and being able to thrive and grow for any business. >> Yeah, no, I think it's almost a sort of rethinking of how you would build your infrastructure up. So the more times you do it right the better you are built to scale. That's been one of the bedrocks of how we've been working with Palo Alto, which is rethinking how should IT be building their infrastructure in a multicloud world. And I think the market timing is right for both of us in terms of the progress that we've been able to make. >> So, I mean Terraform has really become sort of a key ingredient to the cloud operating model, especially across clouds. Kind of describe how partners, and customers are are implementing that cross-cloud capability. What's that journey look like? What's the level of maturity today? >> Yeah, great question, Dave. So we sort of see customers in three buckets. The first bucket is when customers are in the initial phases of their cloud journey. So they have disparate teams in their business units try out clouds themselves. Typically there is some event that occurs either some sort of a security scare or a a cloud cost event that triggers a rethinking of how they should be thinking about this in a scalable way. So that leads to where the cloud operating model which is a framework that HashiCorp has. And we use that successfully with customers to talk them through how they should be thinking about their process, about how they should be standardizing how people operate, and then the products they should be including, but then you come to that stage, and you start to think about a centralized platform team that is putting in golden workflows, that is putting in as a service mindset for their business units thinking through policies at a corporate level. And then that is a second stage. And then, but this is also in some customers more around public clouds. But then the third stage that we see is when they start embracing their private cloud or the on-prem data center, and have the same principles address across both public clouds, and the on-prem data center, and then Terraform scale for any infrastructure. So, once you start to put these practices in place not just from a technology standpoint, but from a process, and product standpoint, you're easily able to scale with that central platform organization. >> So, it's all about that consistency across your estate irrespective of whether it's on-prem in AWS, Azure, Google, the Edge, maybe. I mean, that's starting, right? >> Asvin: Yes. >> And so when you talk about the... Break it down a little bit process and product, where do you and Palo Alto sort of partner and add value? What's that experience like? >> Yeah, so, I think as I mentioned earlier the bedrock is having ways in which customers are able to use our products together, right? And then being able to evangelize the usage of that product. So one example I'll give you is with Prisma Cloud, and Terraform Cloud to your point about Terraform earlier. So customers can be using Prisma Cloud with Terraform Cloud in a way that you can get security context telemetry during an infrastructure run, and then use policies that you have in Prisma Cloud to be able to get or run or to implement or run or make sure essentially it is adhering to your security policy or any other audits that you want to create or any other cost that you want to be able to control. >> Where are your customer conversations these days? We know that security is a board level conversation. Interestingly, in that same survey that Palo Alto released this morning that I mentioned they found that there's a big lack of alignment between the board and the C-suite staff, the executive suite in terms of security. Where are your conversations, and how are you maybe facilitating that alignment that needs to be there? Because security it's not a nice to have. >> Yeah, I think in our experience, the alignment is there. I think especially with the macro environment it's more about where where do you allocate those resources. I think those are conversations that we're just starting to see happen, but I think it's the natural progression of how the environment is moving, and maybe another quarter or two, I think we'll see greater alignment there. >> So, and I saw some data that said I guess it was a study you guys did 90% of customer say multicloud is working for them. That surprised me 'cause you hear all this negativity around multicloud, I've been kind of negative about multicloud to be honest. Like that's a symptom of MNA, and a or multi-vendor. But how do you interpret that? When they say multicloud is working? How so? >> Yeah, I think the maturity of customers are varied as I mentioned through the stages, right? So, there are customers who even in the initial phases of their journey where they have different business units using different clouds, and from a C standpoint that might still look like multicloud, right? Though the way we think about it is you should be really in stage two, and stage three to real leverage the real power of multicloud. But I think it's that initial hump that you need to go through, and being able to get oriented towards it, have the right set of skillsets, the thought process, the product, the process in place. And once you have that then you'll start reaping the benefits over a period of time, especially when some other environments events happen, and you're able to easily adjust to that because you're leveraging this multicloud environment, and you have a clear policy of where you'll use which cloud. >> So I interpreted that data as, okay, multicloud is working from the standpoint of we are multicloud, okay? So, and our business is working, but when I talk to customers, they want more to your point, they want that consistent experience. And so it's been by, to use somebody else's term, by default. Chuck Whitten I think came up with that term versus by design. And now I think they have an objective of, okay, let's make multicloud work even better. Maybe I can say that. And so what does that experience look like? That means a common experience all the way through my stack, my infrastructure stack, which is that's going to be interesting to see how that goes down 'cause you got three separate clouds, and are doing their own APIs. But certainly from a security standpoint, the PaaS layer, even as I go up the stack, how do you see that outcome, and say the next two to five years? >> Yeah, so, we go back to our customers, and they're very successful ones who've used the cloud operating model. And for us the cloud operating model for us includes four layers. So on the infrastructure layer, we have Terraform and Packer, on the security layer we have Vault and Boundary, on the networking layer we have Consul, and then on applications we have Nomad and Waypoint. But then you really look at, from a people process, and product standpoint, for people it's how do you standardize the workflows that they're able to use, right? So if you have a central platform team in place that is looking at common use cases that multiple business units are using. and then creates a golden workflow, for example, right? For these various business units to be able to use or creates what we call a system of record for cloud adoption it helps multiple business units then latch onto this work that this central platform team is doing. And they need to have a product mindset, right? So not like a project that you just start and end with. You have this continuous improvement mindset within that platform team. And they build these processes, they build these golden workflows, they build these policies in place, and then they offer that as a service to the business units to be able to use. So that increases the adoption of multicloud. And also more importantly, you can then allow that multicloud usage to be governed in the way that aligns with your overall corporate objectives. And obviously in self-interest, you'd use Terraform or Vault because you can then use it across multiple clouds. >> Well, let's say I buy into that. Okay, great. So I want that common experience 'cause so when you talk about infrastructure, take us through an example. So when I hear infrastructure, I say, okay if I'm using an S3 bucket over here an Azure blob over there, they got different APIs, they got different primitives. I want you to abstract that away. Is that what you do? >> Yeah, so I think we've seen different use cases being used across different clouds too. So I don't think it's sort of as simple as, hey, should I use this or that? It is ensuring that the common tool that you use to be able to leverage safer provisioning, right? Is Terraform. So the central team is then trained in not only just usage of Terraform open source, but their Terraform cloud, which is our managed service, and Terraform enterprise which is the self-managed, but on-prem product, it's them being qualified to be able to build these consistent workflows using whatever tool that they have or whatever skew that they have from Terraform. And then applying business logic on top of that to your point about, hey, we'd like to use AWS for these kind of workloads. We'd like to use GCP, for example, on data or use Microsoft Azure for some other type of- >> Collaboration >> Right? But the common tooling, right? Remains around the usage of Terraform, and they've trained their teams there's a standard workflow, there's standard process around it. >> Asvin, I was looking at that survey the HashiCorp state of cloud strategy survey, and it talked about skill shortages as being the number one barrier to multicloud. We talk about the cyber skills gap all the time. It's huge. It's obviously a huge issue. I saw some numbers just the other day that there's 26 million developers but there's less than 3 million cybersecurity professionals. How does HashiCorp and Palo Alto Networks, how do you help customers address that skills gap so that they that they can leverage multicloud as a driver of the business? >> Yeah, another great question. So I think I'd say in two or three different ways. One is be able to provide greater documentation for our customers to be able to self use the product so that with the existing people, for example, you build out a known example, right? You're trying to achieve this goal here is how you use our products together. And so they'll be able to self-service, right? So that's one. Second is obviously both of us have great services partners, so we are always working with these services partners to get their teams trained and scaled up around these skill gaps. And I think I'd say the third which is where we see a lot of adoption is around usage of the managed services that we have. If you take Palo Alto's example in this Palo Alto will speak better to it, but they have SOC services, right? That you can consume. So, they're performing that service for you. Similarly, on our side we have a HashiCorp Cloud Platform, HCP, where you can consume Vault as a service, you can consume Consul as a service. Terraform cloud is a managed service, so you don't need as many people to be able to run that service. And we abstract all the complexity associated with that by ourselves, right? So I'd say these are the three ways that we address it. >> So Zero Trust across big buzzword. We heard this in this morning keynotes, AWS is always saying, well, we'll talk about it too, but, okay, customers are starting to talk about Zero Trust. You talk to CISOs, they're like, yes, we're adopting this mentality of unless you're trusted, we don't trust you. So, okay, cool. So you think about the cloud you've got the shared responsibility model, and then you've got the application developers are being asked to do more, secure the code. You got the CISO now has to deal with not only the shared responsibility model, but shared responsibility models across clouds, and got to bring his or her security ethos to the app dev team, and then you got to audit kind of making sure they're like the last line of defense. So my question is when you think about code security and Zero Trust in that new environment the problem with a lot of the clouds is they don't make the CISOs life any easier. So I got to believe that your objective with Palo Alto is to actually make the organization's lives easier. So, how do you deal with all that complexity in specifically in a Zero Trust multicloud environment? >> Yeah, so I'll give you a specific example. So, on code to cloud security which is one of Palo Alto's sort of key focus area is that Prisma Cloud and Terraform Cloud example that I gave, right? Where you'd be able to use what we call run tasks essentially, web hook integrations to be able to get a run or provide some telemetry back to Prisma Cloud for customers to be able to make a decision. On the Zero Trust side, we partner both on the Prisma Cloud side, and the Cortex XSOAR side around our products of Vault and and Consul. So what Vault does is it allows you to control secrets, it allows you to store secrets. So a Prisma Cloud or a Cortex customer can be using secrets from Vault familiarly for that particular transaction or workflow itself, right? Rather than, and so it's based on identity, and not on the basis of just the secret sort of lying around. Same thing with console helps you with discovery, and management of services. So, Cortex and you can automate, a lot of this work can get automated using the product that I talked about from Zero Trust. I think the key thing for Zero Trust in our view is it is a end destination, right? So it'll take certain time, depends on the enterprise, depends on where things are. It's a question of specifically focusing on value that Palo Alto and HashiCorp's products bring to solve specific use cases within that Zero Trust bucket, and solve one problem at a time rather than try to say that, hey, only Palo Alto, and only HashiCorp or whatever will solve everything in Zero Trust, right? Because that is not going to be- >> And to your point, it's never going to end, right? I mean you're talk about Cortex bringing a lot of automation. You guys bring a lot of automation now Palo Alto just bought Cider Security. Now we're getting into supply chain. I mean it going to hit it at the edge and IoT, the people don't want another IoT stove pipe. >> Lisa: No. >> Right? They want that to be part of the whole picture. So, you're never done. >> Yeah, no, but it is this continuous journey, right? And again, different companies are different parts of that journey, and then you go and rinse and repeat, you maybe acquire another company, and then they have a different maturity, so you get them on board on this. And so we see this as a multi-generational shift as Dave like to call it. And we're happy to be in the middle of it with Palo Alto Networks. >> It's definitely a multi-generational shift. Asvin, it's been great having you back on theCUBE. Thank you for giving us the update on what Hashi and Palo Alto are doing, the value in it for customers, the cloud operating model. And we should mention that HashiCorp yesterday just won a Technology Partner of the Year award. Congratulations. Yes. >> We're very, very thrilled with the recognition from Palo Alto Networks for the Technology Partner of the Year. >> Congrats. >> Thank you Keep up the great partnership. Thank you so much. We appreciate your insights. >> Thank you so much. >> For our guest, and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, live in Las Vegas. You watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>>From the Cube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from the cube and etr. This is breaking analysis with Dave Ante. >>Have you ever been driving on the highway and traffic suddenly slows way down and then after a little while it picks up again and you're cruising along and you're thinking, Okay, hey, that was weird. But it's clear sailing now. Off we go, only to find out in a bit that the traffic is building up ahead again, forcing you to pump the brakes as the traffic pattern ebbs and flows well. Welcome to the Seesaw economy. The fed induced fire that prompted an unprecedented rally in tech is being purposefully extinguished now by that same fed. And virtually every sector of the tech industry is having to reset its expectations, including the cloud segment. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by etr. In this breaking analysis will review the implications of the earnings announcements from the big three cloud players, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google who announced this week. >>And we'll update you on our quarterly IAS forecast and share the latest from ETR with a focus on cloud computing. Now, before we get into the new data, we wanna review something we shared with you on October 14th, just a couple weeks back, this is sort of a, we told you it was coming slide. It's an XY graph that shows ET R'S proprietary net score methodology on the vertical axis. That's a measure of spending momentum, spending velocity, and an overlap or presence in the dataset that's on the X axis. That's really a measure of pervasiveness. In the survey, the table, you see that table insert there that shows Wiki Bond's Q2 estimates of IAS revenue for the big four hyperscalers with their year on year growth rates. Now we told you at the time, this is data from the July TW 22 ETR survey and the ETR hadn't released its October survey results at that time. >>This was just a couple weeks ago. And while we couldn't share the specific data from the October survey, we were able to get a glimpse and we depicted the slowdown that we saw in the October data with those dotted arrows kind of down into the right, we said at the time that we were seeing and across the board slowdown even for the big three cloud vendors. Now, fast forward to this past week and we saw earnings releases from Alphabet, Microsoft, and just last night Amazon. Now you may be thinking, okay, big deal. The ETR survey data didn't really tell us anything we didn't already know. But judging from the negative reaction in the stock market to these earnings announcements, the degree of softness surprised a lot of investors. Now, at the time we didn't update our forecast, it doesn't make sense for us to do that when we're that close to earning season. >>And now that all the big three ha with all the big four with the exception of Alibaba have announced we've, we've updated. And so here's that data. This chart lays out our view of the IS and PAs worldwide revenue. Basically it's cloud infrastructure with an attempt to exclude any SaaS revenue so we can make an apples to apples comparison across all the clouds. Now the reason that actual is in quotes is because Microsoft and Google don't report IAS revenue, but they do give us clues and kind of directional commentary, which we then triangulate with other data that we have from the channel and ETR surveys and just our own intelligence. Now the second column there after the vendor name shows our previous estimates for q3, and then next to that we show our actuals. Same with the growth rates. And then we round out the chart with that lighter blue color highlights, the full year estimates for revenue and growth. >>So the key takeaways are that we shaved about $4 billion in revenue and roughly 300 basis points of growth off of our full year estimates. AWS had a strong July but exited Q3 in the mid 20% growth rate year over year. So we're using that guidance, you know, for our Q4 estimates. Azure came in below our earlier estimates, but Google actually exceeded our expectations. Now the compression in the numbers is in our view of function of the macro demand climate, we've made every attempt to adjust for constant currency. So FX should not be a factor in this data, but it's sure you know that that ma the the, the currency effects are weighing on those companies income statements. And so look, this is the fundamental dynamic of a cloud model where you can dial down consumption when you need to and dial it up when you need to. >>Now you may be thinking that many big cloud customers have a committed level of spending in order to get better discounts. And that's true. But what's happening we think is they'll reallocate that spend toward, let's say for example, lower cost storage tiers or they may take advantage of better price performance processors like Graviton for example. That is a clear trend that we're seeing and smaller companies that were perhaps paying by the drink just on demand, they're moving to reserve instance models to lower their monthly bill. So instead of taking the easy way out and just spending more companies are reallocating their reserve capacity toward lower cost. So those sort of lower cost services, so they're spending time and effort optimizing to get more for, for less whereas, or get more for the same is really how we should, should, should phrase it. Whereas during the pandemic, many companies were, you know, they perhaps were not as focused on doing that because business was booming and they had a response. >>So they just, you know, spend more dial it up. So in general, as they say, customers are are doing more with, with the same. Now let's look at the growth dynamic and spend some time on that. I think this is important. This data shows worldwide quarterly revenue growth rates back to Q1 2019 for the big four. So a couple of interesting things. The data tells us during the pandemic, you saw both AWS and Azure, but the law of large numbers and actually accelerate growth. AWS especially saw progressively increasing growth rates throughout 2021 for each quarter. Now that trend, as you can see is reversed in 2022 for aws. Now we saw Azure come down a bit, but it's still in the low forties in terms of percentage growth. While Google actually saw an uptick in growth this last quarter for GCP by our estimates as GCP is becoming an increasingly large portion of Google's overall cloud business. >>Now, unfortunately Google Cloud continues to lose north of 850 million per quarter, whereas AWS and Azure are profitable cloud businesses even though Alibaba is suffering its woes from China. And we'll see how they come in when they report in mid-November. The overall hyperscale market grew at 32% in Q3 in terms of worldwide revenue. So the slowdown isn't due to the repatriation or competition from on-prem vendors in our view, it's a macro related trend. And cloud will continue to significantly outperform other sectors despite its massive size. You know, on the repatriation point, it just still doesn't show up in the data. The A 16 Z article from Sarah Wong and Martin Martin Kasa claiming that repatriation was inevitable as a means to lower cost of good sold for SaaS companies. You know, while that was thought provoking, it hasn't shown up in the numbers. And if you read the financial statements of both AWS and its partners like Snowflake and you dig into the, to the, to the quarterly reports, you'll see little notes and comments with their ongoing negotiations to lower cloud costs for customers. >>AWS and no doubt execs at Azure and GCP understand that the lifetime value of a customer is worth much more than near term gross margin. And you can expect the cloud vendors to strike a balance between profitability, near term profitability anyway and customer attention. Now, even though Google Cloud platform saw accelerated growth, we need to put that in context for you. So GCP, by our estimate, has now crossed over the $3 billion for quarter market actually did so last quarter, but its growth rate accelerated to 42% this quarter. And so that's a good sign in our view. But let's do a quick little comparison with when AWS and Azure crossed the $3 billion mark and compare their growth rates at the time. So if you go back to to Q2 2016, as we're showing in this chart, that's around the time that AWS hit 3 billion per quarter and at the same time was growing at 58%. >>Azure by our estimates crossed that mark in Q4 2018 and at that time was growing at 67%. Again, compare that to Google's 42%. So one would expect Google's growth rate would be higher than its competitors at this point in the MO in the maturity of its cloud, which it's, you know, it's really not when you compared to to Azure. I mean they're kind of con, you know, comparable now but today, but, but you'll go back, you know, to that $3 billion mark. But more so looking at history, you'd like to see its growth rate at this point of a maturity model at least over 50%, which we don't believe it is. And one other point on this topic, you know, my business friend Matt Baker from Dell often says it's not a zero sum game, meaning there's plenty of opportunity exists to build value on top of hyperscalers. >>And I would totally agree it's not a dollar for dollar swap if you can continue to innovate. But history will show that the first company in makes the most money. Number two can do really well and number three tends to break even. Now maybe cloud is different because you have Microsoft software estate and the power behind that and that's driving its IAS business and Google ads are funding technology buildouts for, for for Google and gcp. So you know, we'll see how that plays out. But right now by this one measurement, Google is four years behind Microsoft in six years behind aws. Now to the point that cloud will continue to outpace other markets, let's, let's break this down a bit in spending terms and see why this claim holds water. This is data from ET r's latest October survey that shows the granularity of its net score or spending velocity metric. >>The lime green is new adoptions, so they're adding the platform, the forest green is spending more 6% or more. The gray bars spending is flat plus or minus, you know, 5%. The pinkish colors represent spending less down 6% or worse. And the bright red shows defections or churn of the platform. You subtract the reds from the greens and you get what's called net score, which is that blue dot that you can see on each of the bars. So what you see in the table insert is that all three have net scores above 40%, which is a highly elevated measure. Microsoft's net scores above 60% AWS well into the fifties and GCP in the mid forties. So all good. Now what's happening with all three is more customers are keep keeping their spending flat. So a higher percentage of customers are saying, our spending is now flat than it was in previous quarters and that's what's accounting for the compression. >>But the churn of all three, even gcp, which we reported, you know, last quarter from last quarter survey was was five x. The other two is actually very low in the single digits. So that might have been an anomaly. So that's a very good sign in our view. You know, again, customers aren't repatriating in droves, it's just not a trend that we would bet on, maybe makes for a FUD or you know, good marketing head, but it's just not a big deal. And you can't help but be impressed with both Microsoft and AWS's performance in the survey. And as we mentioned before, these companies aren't going to give up customers to try and preserve a little bit of gross margin. They'll do what it takes to keep people on their platforms cuz they'll make up for it over time with added services and improved offerings. >>Now, once these companies acquire a customer, they'll be very aggressive about keeping them. So customers take note, you have negotiating leverage, so use it. Okay, let's look at another cut at the cloud market from the ETR data set. Here's the two dimensional view, again, it's back, it's one of our favorites. Net score or spending momentum plotted against presence. And the data set, that's the x axis net score on the, on the vertical axis, this is a view of et r's cloud computing sector sector. You can see we put that magic 40% dotted red line in the table showing and, and then that the table inserts shows how the data are plotted with net score against presence. I e n in the survey, notably only the big three are above the 40% line of the names that we're showing here. The oth there, there are others. >>I mean if you put Snowflake on there, it'd be higher than any of these names, but we'll dig into that name in a later breaking analysis episode. Now this is just another way of quantifying the dominance of AWS and Azure, not only relative to Google, but the other cloud platforms out there. So we've, we've taken the opportunity here to plot IBM and Oracle, which both own a public cloud. Their performance is largely a reflection of them migrating their install bases to their respective public clouds and or hybrid clouds. And you know, that's fine, they're in the game. That's a point that we've made, you know, a number of times they're able to make it through the cloud, not whole and they at least have one, but they simply don't have the business momentum of AWS and Azure, which is actually quite impressive because AWS and Azure are now as large or larger than IBM and Oracle. >>And to show this type of continued growth that that that Azure and AWS show at their size is quite remarkable and customers are starting to recognize the viability of on-prem hi, you know, hybrid clouds like HPE GreenLake and Dell's apex. You know, you may say, well that's not cloud, but if the customer thinks it is and it was reporting in the survey that it is, we're gonna continue to report this view. You know, I don't know what's happening with H P E, They had a big down tick this quarter and I, and I don't read too much into that because their end is still pretty small at 53. So big fluctuations are not uncommon with those types of smaller ends, but it's over 50. So, you know, we did notice a a a negative within a giant public and private sector, which is often a, a bellwether giant public private is big public companies and large private companies like, like a Mars for example. >>So it, you know, it looks like for HPE it could be an outlier. We saw within the Fortune 1000 HPE E'S cloud looked actually really good and it had good spending momentum in that sector. When you di dig into the industry data within ETR dataset, obviously we're not showing that here, but we'll continue to monitor that. Okay, so where's this Leave us. Well look, this is really a tactical story of currency and macro headwinds as you can see. You know, we've laid out some of the points on this slide. The action in the stock market today, which is Friday after some of the soft earnings reports is really robust. You know, we'll see how it ends up in the day. So maybe this is a sign that the worst is over, but we don't think so. The visibility from tech companies is murky right now as most are guiding down, which indicates that their conservative outlook last quarter was still too optimistic. >>But as it relates to cloud, that platform is not going anywhere anytime soon. Sure, there are potential disruptors on the horizon, especially at the edge, but we're still a long ways off from, from the possibility that a new economic model emerges from the edge to disrupt the cloud and the opportunities in the cloud remain strong. I mean, what other path is there? Really private cloud. It was kind of a bandaid until the on-prem guys could get their a as a service models rolled out, which is just now happening. The hybrid thing is real, but it's, you know, defensive for the incumbents until they can get their super cloud investments going. Super cloud implying, capturing value above the hyperscaler CapEx, you know, call it what you want multi what multi-cloud should have been, the metacloud, the Uber cloud, whatever you like. But there are opportunities to play offense and that's clearly happening in the cloud ecosystem with the likes of Snowflake, Mongo, Hashi Corp. >>Hammer Spaces is a startup in this area. Aviatrix, CrowdStrike, Zeke Scaler, Okta, many, many more. And even the projects we see coming out of enterprise players like Dell, like with Project Alpine and what Pure Storage is doing along with a number of other of the backup vendors. So Q4 should be really interesting, but the real story is the investments that that companies are making now to leverage the cloud for digital transformations will be paying off down the road. This is not 1999. We had, you know, May might have had some good ideas and admittedly at a lot of bad ones too, but you didn't have the infrastructure to service customers at a low enough cost like you do today. The cloud is that infrastructure and so far it's been transformative, but it's likely the best is yet to come. Okay, let's call this a rap. >>Many thanks to Alex Morrison who does production and manages the podcast. Also Can Schiffman is our newest edition to the Boston Studio. Kristin Martin and Cheryl Knight helped get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Ho is our editor in chief over@siliconangle.com, who does some wonderful editing for us. Thank you. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts. Wherever you listen, just search breaking analysis podcast. I publish each week on wiki bond.com at silicon angle.com. And you can email me at David dot valante@siliconangle.com or DM me at Dante or comment on my LinkedIn posts. And please do checkout etr.ai. They got the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Valante for the Cube Insights powered by etr. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time on breaking analysis.

>>Okay, welcome back everyone to super cloud 22 here in our live studio performance. You're on stage in Palo Alto. I'm Sean fur. You're host with the queue with Dave ante. My co it's got a great industry ecosystem panel to discuss whether it's realer hype, David MC Janet CEO of Hashi Corp, hugely successful company as will LA forest field CTO, Colu and Victoria over yourgo from VMware guys. Thanks for coming on the queue. Appreciate it. Thanks for having us. So realer, hype, super cloud David. >>Well, I think it depends on the definition. >>Okay. How do you define super cloud start there? So I think we have a, >>I think we have a, like an inherently pragmatic view of super cloud of the idea of super cloud as you talk about it, which is, you know, for those of us that have been in the infrastructure world for a long time, we know there are really only six or seven categories of infrastructure. There's sort of the infrastructure security, networking databases, middleware, and, and, and, and really the message queuing aspects. And I think our view is that if the steady state of the world is multi-cloud, what you've seen is sort of some modicum of standardization across those different elements, you know, take, you know, take confluent. You know, I, I worked in the middleware world years ago, MQ series, and typical multicast was how you did message queuing. Well, you don't do that anymore. All the different cloud providers have their own message, queuing tech, there's, Google pub sub, and the equivalents across the different, different clouds. Kafka has provided a consistent way to do that. And they're not trying to project that. You can run everything connected. They're saying, Hey, you should standardize on Kafka for message cuing is that way you can have operational consistency. So I think to me, that's more how we think about it is sort of, there is sort of layer by layer of sort of de facto standardization for the lingo Franco. >>So a streaming super cloud is how you would think of it, or no, I just, or a component of >>Cloud that could be a super cloud. >>I just, I just think that there are like, if I'm gonna build an application message, queuing is gonna be a necessary element of it. I'm gonna use Kafka, not, you know, a native pub sub engine on one of the clouds, because operationally that's just the only way I can do it. So I think that's more, our view's much more pragmatic rather than trying to create like a single platform that you can run everywhere and deal with the networking realities of like network, you know, hops missing across those different worlds and have that be our responsibility. It's much more around, Hey, let's standardize each layer, operational >>Standardized layer that you can use to build a super cloud if that's in your, your intent or, yeah. Okay. >>And it reminds me of the web services days. You kind of go throwback there. I mean, we're kind of living the next gen of web services, the dream of that next level, because DevOps dev SecOps now is now gone mainstream. That's the big challenge we're hearing devs are doing great. Yep. But the ops teams and screen, they gotta go faster. This seems to be a core, I won't say blocker, but more of a drag to the innovation. >>Well, I I'll just get off, I'll hand it off to, to you guys. But I think the idea that like, you know, if I'm gonna have an app that's running on Amazon that needs to connect to a database that's running on, on the private data center, that's essentially the SOA notion, you know, w large that we're all trying to solve 20 years ago, but is much more complicated because you're brokering different identity models, different networking models. They're just much more complex. So that's where the ops bit is the constraint, you know, for me to build that app, not that complicated for the ops person to let it see traffic is another thing altogether. I think that's, that's the break point for so much of what looks easier to a developer is the operational reality of how you do that. And the good news is those are actually really well solved problems. They're just not broadly understood. >>Well, what's your take, you talk to customers all the time, field CTO, confluent, really doing well, streaming data. I mean, everyone's doing it now. They have to, yeah. These are new things that pop up that need solutions. You guys step up and doing more. What's your take on super cloud? >>Well, I mean, the way we address it honestly is we don't, it's gonna be honest. We don't think about super cloud much less is the fact that SAS is really being pushed down. Like if we rely on seven years ago and you took a look at SAS, like it was obvious if you were gonna build a product for an end consumer or business user, you'd do SAS. You'd be crazy not to. Right. But seven years ago, if you look at your average software company producing something for a developer that people building those apps, chances are you had an open source model. Yeah. Or, you know, self-managed, I think with the success of a lot of the companies that are here today, you know, snowflake data, bricks, Colu, it's, it's obvious that SaaS is the way to deliver software to the developers as well. And as such, because our product is provided that way to the developers across the clouds. That's, that's how they have a unifying data layer, right. They don't necessarily, you know, developers like many people don't necessarily wanna deal with the infrastructure. They just wanna consume cloud data services. Right. So that's how we help our customers span cloud. >>So we evenly that SAS was gonna be either built on a single cloud or in the case of service. Now they built their own cloud. Right. So increasingly we're seeing opportunities to build a Salesforce as well across clouds tap different, different, different services. So, so how does that evolve? Do you, some clouds have, you know, better capabilities in other clouds. So how does that all get sort of adjudicated, do you, do you devolve to the lowest common denominator? Or can you take the best of all of each? >>The whole point to that I think is that when you move from the business user and the personal consumer to the developer, you, you can no longer be on a cloud, right. There has to be locality to where applications are being developed. So we can't just deploy on a single cloud and have people send their data to that cloud. We have to be where the developer is. And our job is to make the most of each, an individual cloud to provide the same experience to them. Right. So yes, we're using the capabilities of each cloud, but we're hiding that to the developer. They don't shouldn't need to know or care. Right. >>Okay. And you're hiding that with the abstraction layer. We talked about this before Victoria, and that, that layer has what, some intelligence that has metadata knowledge that can adjudicate what, what, the best, where the best, you know, service is, or function of latency or data sovereignty. How do you see that? >>Well, I think as the, you need to instrument these applications so that you, you, you can get that data and then make the intelligent decision of where, where, where this, the deploy application. I think what Dave said is, is right. You know, the level of super cloud that they talking about is the standardization across messaging. And, and are you what's happening within the application, right? So you don't, you are not too dependent on the underlying, but then the application say that it takes the form of a, of a microservice, right. And you deploy that. There has to be a way for operator to say, okay, I see all these microservices running across clouds, and I can factor out how they're performing, how I, I, life lifecycle managed and all that. And so I think there is, there is, to me, there's the next level of the super cloud is how you factor this out. So an operator can actually keep up with the developers and make sense of all that and manage it. Like >>You guys that's time. Like its also like that's what Datadog does. So Datadog basically in allows you to instrument all those services, on-prem private data center, you know, all the different clouds to have a consistent view. I think that that's not a good example of a vendor that's created a, a sort of a level of standardization across a layer. And I think that's, that's more how we think about it. I think the notion of like a developer building an application, they can deploy and not have to worry where it exists. Yeah. Is more of a PAs kind of construct, you know, things like cloud Foundry have done a great job of, of doing that. But underneath that there's still infrastructure. There's still security. There's still networking underneath it. And I think that's where, you know, things like confluent and perhaps at the infrastructure layer have standardized, but >>You have off the shelf PAs, if I can call it that. Yeah. Kind of plain. And then, and then you have PAs and I think about, you mentioned snowflake, snowflake is with snow park, seems to be developing a PAs layer that's purpose built for their specific purpose of sharing data and governing data across multiple clouds call super paths. Is, is that a prerequisite of a super cloud you're building blocks. I'm hearing yeah. For super cloud. Is that a prerequisite for super cloud? That's different than PAs of 10 years ago. No, but I, >>But I think this is, there's just different layers. So it's like, I don't know how that the, the snowflake offering is built built, but I would guess it's probably built on Terraform and vault and cons underneath it. Cuz those are the ingredients with respect to how you would build a composite application that runs across multiple. And >>That's how Oracle that town that's how Oracle with the Microsoft announcement. They just, they just made if you saw that that was built on Terraform. Right. But, but they would claim that they, they did some special things within their past that were purpose built for, for sure. Low latency, for example, they're not gonna build that on, you know, open shift as an, as an example, they're gonna, you know, do their own little, you know, >>For sure, for sure. So I think what you're, you're pointing at and what Victoria was talking about is, Hey, can a vendor provided consistent experience across the application layer across these multiple clouds? And I would say, sure, just like, you know, you might build a mobile banking application that has a front end on Amazon in the back end running on vSphere on your private data center. Sure. But the ingredients you use to do that have to be, they can't be the cloud native aspects for how you do that. How do you think about, you know, the connectivity of, of like networking between that thing to this thing? Is it different on Amazon? Is it different on Azure? Is it different on, on Google? And so the, the, the, the companies that we all serve, that's what they're building, they're building composited applications. Snowflake is just an example of a company that we serve this building >>Composite. And, but, but, but don't those don't, you have to hide the complexity of that, those, those cloud native primitives that's your job, right. Is to actually it creates simplicity across clouds. Is it not? >>Why? Go ahead. You. >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean that in fact is what we're doing for developers that need to do event streaming, right. That need to process this data in real time. Now we're, we're doing the sort of things that Victoria was just talking about, like underneath the covers, of course, you know, we're using Kubernetes and we're managing the differences between the clouds, but we're hiding the, that, and we've become sort of a defacto standard across the cloud. So if I'm developing an app in any of those cloud, and I think we all know, and you were mentioning earlier every significant company's multi-cloud now all the large enterprises, I just got back from Brazil and like every single one of 'em have multiple clouds and on-prem right. So they need something that can span those. >>What's the challenge there. If you talk to those customers, because we're seeing the same thing, they have multiple clouds. Yeah. But it was kind of by default or they had some use case, either.net developers there with Azure, they'll do whatever cloud. And it kind of seems specialty relative to the cloud native that they're on what problems do they have because the complexity to run infrastructure risk code across clouds is hard. Right? So the trade up between native cloud and have better integration to complexity of multiple clouds seems to be a topic around super cloud. What are you seeing for, for issues that they might have or concerns? >>Yeah. I mean, honestly it is, it is hard to actually, so here's the thing that I think is kind of interesting though, by the way, is that I, I think we tend to, you know, if you're, if you're from a technical background, you tend to think of multicloud as a problem for the it organization. Like how do we solve this? How do we save money? But actually it's a business problem now, too, because every single one of these companies that have multiple clouds, they want to integrate their data, their products across these, and it it's inhibiting their innovation. It's hard to do, but that's where something like, you know, Hatchie Corp comes in right. Is to help solve that. So you can instrument it. It has to happen at each of these layers. And I suppose if it does happen at every single layer, then voila, we organically have something that amounts to Supercloud. Right. >>I love how you guys are representing each other's firms. And, but, but, and they also correct me if I'm a very similar, your customers want to, it is very similar, but your customers want to monetize, right. They want bring their tools, their software, their particular IP and their data and create, you know, every, every company's a software company, as you know, Andreesen says every company's becoming a cloud company to, to monetize in, in the future. Is that, is that a reasonable premise of super cloud? >>Yeah. I think, think everyone's trying to build composite applications to, to generate revenue. Like that's, that's why they're building applications. So yeah. One, 100%. I'm just gonna make it point cuz we see it as well. Like it's actually quite different by geography weirdly. So if you go to like different geographies, you see actually different cloud providers, more represented than others. So like in north America, Amazon's pretty dominant Japan. Amazon's pretty dominant. You go to Southeast Asia actually. It's not necessarily that way. Like it might be Google for, for whatever reason more hourly Bob. So this notion of multi's just the reality of one's everybody's dealing with. But yeah, I think everyone, everyone goes through the same process. What we've observed, they kind of go, there's like there's cloud V one and there's cloud V two. Yeah. Cloud V one is sort of the very tactical let's go build something on cloud cloud V two is like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. And I have some stuff on Amazon, some stuff on Azure, some stuff on, on vSphere and I need some operational consistency. How do I think about zero trust across that way in a consistent way. And that's where this conversation comes into being. It's sort of, it's not like the first version of cloud it's actually when people step back and say, Hey, Hey, I wanna build composite applications to monetize. How am I gonna do that in an industrialized way? And that's the problem that you were for. It's >>Not, it's not as, it's not a no brainer like it was with cloud, go to the cloud, write an app. You're good here. It's architectural systems thinking, you gotta think about regions. What's the latency, you know, >>It's step back and go. Like, how are we gonna do this, this exactly. Like it's wanted to do one app, but how we do this at scale >>Zero trust is a great example. I mean, Amazon kind of had, was forced to get into the zero trust, you know, discussion that, that wasn't, you know, even a term that they used and now sort of, they're starting to talk about it, but within their domain. And so how do you do zero trust trust across cost to your point? >>I, I wonder if we're limiting our conversation too much to the, the very technical set of developers, cuz I'm thinking back at again, my example of C plus plus libraries C plus plus libraries makes it easier. And then visual BA visual basic. Right. And right now we don't have enough developers to build the software that we want to build. And so I want, and we are like now debating, oh, can we, do we hide that AI API from Google versus that SQL server API from, from Microsoft. I wonder at some point who cares? Right. You know, we, I think if we want to get really economy scale, we need to get to a level of abstraction for developers that really allows them to say, I don't need, for most of most of the procedural application that I need to build as a developer, as a, as a procedural developer, I don't care about this. Some, some propeller had, has done that for me. I just like plug it in my ID and, and I use it. And so I don't, I don't know how far we are from that, but if we don't get to that level, it fits me that we never gonna get really the, the economy or the cost of building application to the level. >>I was gonna ask you in the previous segment about low code, no code expanding the number of developers out there and you talking about propel heads. That's, that's what you guys all do. Yeah. You're the technical geniuses, right. To solve that problem so that, so you can have low code development is that I >>Don't think we have the right here. Cause I, we, we are still, you know, trying to solve that problem at that level. But, but >>That problem has to be solved first, right before we can address what you're talking about. >>Yeah. I, I worked very closely with one of my biggest mentors was Adam Bosworth that built, you know, all the APIs for visual basics and, and the SQL API to visual basic and all that stuff. And he always was on that front. In fact that his last job was at my, at AWS building that no code environment. So I'm a little detached from that. It just hit me as we were discussing this. It's like, maybe we're just like >>Creating, but I would, I would argue that you kind of gotta separate the two layers. So you think about the application platform layer that a developer interfaces to, you know, Victoria and I worked together years ago and one of the products we created was cloud Foundry, right? So this is the idea of like just, you know, CF push, just push this app artifact and I don't care. That's how you get the developer community written large to adopt something complicated by hiding all the complexity. And I think that that is one model. Yeah. Turns out Kubernetes is actually become a peer to that and perhaps become more popular. And that's what folks like Tanza are trying to do. But there's another layer underneath that, which is the infrastructure that supports it. Right? Yeah. Cause that's only needs to run on something. And I think that's, that's the separation we have to do. Yes. We're talking a little bit about the plumbing, but you know, we just easily be talking about the app layer. You need, both of them. Our point of view is you need to standardize at this layer just like you need standardize at this layer. >>Well, this is, this is infrastructure. This is DevOps V two >>Dev >>Ops. Yeah. And this is where I think the ops piece with open source, I would argue that open source is blooming more than ever. So I think there's plenty of developers coming. The automation question becomes interesting because I think what we're seeing is shift left is proving that there's app developers out there that wanna stay in their pipelining. They don't want to get in under the hood. They just want infrastructure as code, but then you got supply chain software issues there. We talked about the Docker on big time. So developers at the top, I think are gonna be fine. The question is what's the blocker. What's holding them back. And I don't see the devs piece Victoria as much. What do you guys think? Is it, is the, is the blocker ops or is it the developer experience? That's the blocker. >>It's both. There are enough people truthfully. >>That's true. Yeah. I mean, I think I sort of view the developer as sort of the engine of the digital innovation. So, you know, if you talk about creative destruction, that's, that was the economic equivalent of softwares, eating the world. The developers are the ones that are doing that innovation. It's absolutely essential that you make it super easy for them to consume. Right. So I think, you know, they're nerds, they want to deal with infrastructure to some degree, but I think they understand the value of getting a bag of Legos that they can construct something new around. And I think that's the key because honestly, I mean, no code may help for some things. Maybe I'm just old >>School, >>But I, I went through this before with like Delphy and there were some other ones and, and I hated it. Like I just wanted a code. Yeah. Right. So I think making them more efficient is, is absolutely good. >>But I think what, where you're going with that question is that the, the developers, they tend to stay ahead. They, they just, they're just gear, you know, wired that way. Right. So I think right now where there is a big bottleneck in developers, I think the operation team needs to catch up. Cuz I, I talk to these, these, these people like our customers all the time and I see them still stuck in the old world. Right. Gimme a bunch of VMs and I'll, I know how to manage well that world, you know, although as lag is gonna be there forever, so managing mainframe. But so if they, the world is all about microservices and containers and if the operation team doesn't get on top of it and the security team that then that they're gonna be a bottleneck. >>Okay. I want to ask you guys if the, if the companies can get through that knothole of having their ops teams and the dev teams work well together, what's the benefits of a Supercloud. How do you see the, the outcome if you kind of architect it, right? You think the big picture you zoom as saying what's the end game look like for Supercloud? Is that >>What I would >>Say? Or what's the Nirvana >>To me Nirvana is that you don't care. You just don't don't care. You know, you just think when you running building application, let's go back to the on-prem days. You don't care if it runs on HP or Dell or, you know, I'm gonna make some enemies here with my old, old family, but you know, you don't really care, right. What you want is the application is up and running and people can use it. Right. And so I think that Nirvana is that, you know, there is some, some computing power out there, some pass layer that allows me to deploy, build application. And I just like build code and I deploy it and I get value at a reasonable cost. I think one of the things that the super cloud for as far as we're concerned is cost. How do you manage monitor the cost across all this cloud? >>Make sure that you don't, the economics don't get outta whack. Right? How many companies we know that have gone to the cloud only to realize that holy crap, now I, I got the bill and, and you know, I, as a vendor, when I was in my previous company, you know, we had a whole team figuring out how to lower our cost on the one hyperscaler that we were using. So these are, you know, the, once you have in the super cloud, you don't care just you, you, you go with the path of least the best economics is. >>So what about the open versus closed debate will you were mentioning that we had snowflake here and data bricks is both ends of the spectrum. Yeah. You guys are building open standards across clouds. Clearly even the CLO, the walled gardens are using O open standards, but historically de facto standards have emerged and solved these problems. So the super cloud as a defacto standard, versus what data bricks is trying to do super cloud kind of as an, as an open platform, what are you, what are your thoughts on that? Can you actually have an, an open set of standards that can be a super cloud for a specific purpose, or will it just be built on open source technologies? >>Well, I mean, I, I think open source continues to be an important part of innovation, but I will say from a business model perspective, like the days, like when we started off, we were an open source company. I think that's really done in my opinion, because if you wanna be successful nowadays, you need to provide a cloud native SAS oriented product. It doesn't matter. What's running underneath the covers could be commercial closed source, open source. They just wanna service and they want to use it quite frankly. Now it's nice to have open source cuz the developers can download it and run on their laptop. But I, I can imagine in 10 years time actually, and you see most companies that are in the cloud providing SAS, you know, free $500 credit, they may not even be doing that. They'll just, you know, go whatever cloud provider that their company is telling them to use. They'll spin up their SAS product, they'll start playing with it. And that's how adoption will grow. Right? >>Yeah. I, I think, I mean my personal view is that it's, that it's infrastructure is pervasive enough. It exists at the bottom of everything that the standards emerge out of open source in my view. And you think about how something like Terraform is built, just, just pick one of the layers there's Terraform core. And then there's a plugin for everything you integrate with all of those are open source. There are over 2000 of these. We don't build them. Right. That's and it's the same way that drove Linux standardization years ago, like someone had to build the drivers for every piece of hardware in the world. The market does not do that twice. The market does that once. And so I, I I'm deeply convicted that opensource is the only way that this works at the infrastructure layer, because everybody relies on it at the application layer, you may have different kinds of databases. You may have different kind of runtime environments. And that's just the nature of it. You can't to have two different ways of doing network, >>Right? Because the stakes are so high, basically. >>Yeah. Cuz there's, there's an infinite number of the surface areas are so large. So I actually worked in product development years ago for middleware. And the biggest challenge was how do you keep the adapter ecosystem up to date to integrate with everything in the world? And the only way to do it in our view is through open source. And I think that's a fundamental philosophical view that it we're just, you know, grounded in. I think when people are making infrastructure decisions that span 20 years at the customer base, this is what they think about. They go which standard it will emerge based on the model of the vendor. And I don't think my personal view is, is it's not possible to do in a, in >>A, do you think that's a defacto standard kind of psychological perspective or is there actual material work being done or both in >>There it's, it's, it's a network effect thing. Right? So, so, you know, before Google releases a new service service on Google cloud, as part of the release checklist is does it support Terraform? They do that work, not us. Why? Because every one of their customers uses Terraform to interface with them and that's how it works. So see, so the philosophical view of, of the customers, okay, what am I making a standardize on for this layer for the next 30 years? It's kind of a no brainer. Philosophically. >>I tend, >>I think the standards are organically created based upon adoption. I mean, for instance, Terraform, we have a provider we're again, we're at the data layer that we created for you. So like, I don't think there's a board out there. I mean there are that creating standards. I think those days are kind of done to be honest, >>The, the Terraform provider for vSphere has been downloaded five and a half million times this year. Yeah. Right. Like, so, I >>Mean, these are unifying moments. This are like the de facto standards are really important process in these structural changes. I think that's something that we're looking at here at Supercloud is what's next? What has to unify look what Kubernetes has done? I mean, that's essentially the easy thing to orchestra, but people get behind it. So I see this is a big part of this next, the two. Totally. What do you guys see that's needed? What's the rallying unification point? Is it the past layer? Is it more infrastructure? I guess that's the question we're trying to, >>I think every layer will need that open source or a major traction from one of the proprietary vendor. But I, I agree with David, it's gonna be open source for the most part, but you know, going back to the original question of the whole panel, if I may, if this is reality of hype, look at the roster of companies that are presenting or participating today, these are all companies that have some sort of multi-cloud cross cloud, super cloud play. They're either public have real revenue or about to go public. So the answer to the question. Yeah, it's real. Yeah. >>And so, and there's more too, we had couldn't fit him in, but we, >>We chose super cloud on purpose cuz it kind of fun, John and I kind came up with it and, and but, but do you think it's, it hurts the industry to have this, try to put forth this new term or is it helpful to actually try to push the industry to define this new term? Or should it just be multi-cloud 2.0, >>I mean, conceptually it's different than multi-cloud right. I mean, in my opinion, right? So in that, in that respect, it has value, right? Because it's talking about something greater than just multi-cloud everyone's got multi-cloud well, >>To me multi-cloud is the, the problem I should say the opportunity. Yeah. Super cloud or we call it cross cloud is the solution to that channel. Let's >>Not call again. And we're debating that we're debating that in our cloud already panel where we're talking about is multi-cloud a problem yet that needs to get solved or is it not yet ready for a market to your point? Is it, are we, are we in the front end of coming into the true problem set, >>Give you definitely answer to that. The answer is yes. If you look at the customers that are there, they won, they have gone through the euphoria phase. They're all like, holy something, what, what are we gonna do about this? Right. >>And, but they don't know what to do. >>Yeah. And the more advanced ones as the vendor look at the end of the day, markets are created by vendors that build ed that customers wanna buy. Yeah. Because they get value >>And it's nuance. David, we were sort talking about before, but Goldman Sachs has announced they're analysis software vendor, right? Capital one is a software vendor. I've been really interested Liberty what Cerner does with what Oracle does with Cerner and in terms of them becoming super cloud vendors and monetizing that to me is that is their digital transformation. Do you guys, do you guys see that in the customer base? Am I way too far out of my, of my skis there or >>I think it's two different things. I think, I think basically it's the idea of building applications. If they monetize yeah. There and Cerner's gonna build those. And you know, I think about like, you know, IOT companies that sell that sell or, or you think people that sell like, you know, thermostats, they sell an application that monetizes those thermostats. Some of that runs on Amazon. Some of that runs a private data center. So they're basically in composite applications and monetize monetizing them for the particular vertical. I think that's what we ation every day. That's what, >>Yeah. You can, you can argue. That's not, not anything new, but what's new is they're doing that on the cloud and taking across multiple clouds. Multiple. Exactly. That's what makes >>Edge. And I think what we all participate in is, Hey, in order to do that, you need to drive standardization of how you do provisioning, how you do networking, how you do security to underpin those applications. I think that's what we're all >>Talking about, guys. It's great stuff. And I really appreciate you taking the time outta your day to help us continue the conversation to put out in the open. We wanna keep it out in the open. So in the last minute we have left, let's go down the line from a hash core perspective, confluent and VMware. What's your position on super cloud? What's the outcome that you would like to see from your standpoint, going out five years, what's it look like they will start with you? >>I just think people like sort under understanding that there is a layer by layer of view of how to interact across cloud, to provide operational consistency and decomposing it that way. Thinking about that way is the best way to enable people to build and run apps. >>We wanna help our customers work with their data in real time, regardless of where they're on primer in the cloud and super cloud can enable them to build applications that do that more effectively. That's that's great for us >>For tour you. >>I, my Niana for us is customers don't care, just that's computing out there. And it's a, it's a, it's a tool that allows me to grow my business and we make it all, all the differences and all the, the challenges, you know, >>Disappear, dial up, compute utility infrastructure, ISN >>Code. I open up the thought there's this water coming out? Yeah, I don't care. I got how I got here. I don't wanna care. Well, >>Thank you guys so much and congratulations on all your success in the marketplace, both of you guys and VMware and your new journey, and it's gonna be great to watch. Thanks for participating. Really appreciate it. Thank you, sir. Okay. This is super cloud 22, our events, a pilot. We're gonna get it out there in the open. We're gonna get the data we're gonna share with everyone out in the open on Silicon angle.com in the cube.net. We'll be back with more live coverage here in Palo Alto. After this short break.

>>Hey, everyone. Welcome to the AWS partner, showcase women in tech. I'm Lisa Martin from the cube. And today we're gonna be looking into the exciting evolution of women in the tech industry. I'm going to be joined by Danielle GShock, the ISP PSA director at AWS. And we have the privilege of speaking with some wicked smart women from Teradata NetApp. JFI a 10th revolution group, company and honeycomb.io. We're gonna look at some of the challenges and biases that women face in the tech industry, especially in leadership roles. We're also gonna be exploring how are these tech companies addressing diversity, equity and inclusion across their organizations? How can we get more young girls into stem earlier in their careers? So many questions. So let's go ahead and get started. This is the AWS partner showcase women in tech. Hey, everyone. Welcome to the AWS partner showcase. This is season one, episode three. And I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got two great guests here with me to talk about women in tech. Hillary Ashton joins us the chief product officer at Terry data. And Danielle Greshaw is back with us, the ISV PSA director at AWS ladies. It's great to have you on the program talking through such an important topic, Hillary, let's go ahead and start with you. Give us a little bit of an intro into you, your background, and a little bit about Teradata. >>Yeah, absolutely. So I'm Hillary Ashton. I head up the products organization. So that's our engineering product management office of the CTO team. Um, at Teradata I've been with Terra data for just about three years and really have spent the last several decades. If I can say that in the data and analytics space, um, I spent time, uh, really focused on the value of, of analytics at scale, and I'm super excited to be here at Teradata. I'm also a mom of two teenage boys. And so as we talk about women in tech, I think there's, um, uh, lots of different dimensions and angles of that. Um, at Teradata, we are partnered very deeply with AWS and happy to talk a little bit more about that, um, throughout this discussion as well. >>Excellent. A busy mom of two teen boys. My goodness. I don't know how you do it. Let's now look, Atter data's views of diversity, equity and inclusion. It's a, the, it's a topic that's important to everyone, but give us a snapshot into some of the initiatives that Terra data has there. >>Yeah, I have to say, I am super proud to be working at Teradata. We have gone through, uh, a series of transformations, but I think it starts with culture and we are deeply committed to diversity, equity and inclusion. It's really more than just a statement here. It's just how we live our lives. Um, and we use, uh, data to back that up. Um, in fact, we were named one of the world's most ethical companies for the 13th year in a row. Um, and all of our executive leadership team has taken an oath around D E and I that's available on LinkedIn as well. So, um, in fact, our leadership team reporting into the CEO is just about 50 50, um, men and women, which is the first time I've worked in a company where that has been the case. And I think as individuals, we can probably appreciate what a huge difference that makes in terms of not just being a representative, but truly being on a, on a diverse and equitable, uh, team. And I think it really, uh, improves the behaviors that we can bring, um, to our office. >>There's so much value in that. It's I impressive to see about a 50 50 at the leadership level. That's not something that we see very often. Tell me how you, Hillary, how did you get into tech? Were you an engineering person by computer science, or did you have more of a zigzaggy path to where you are now? >>I'm gonna pick door number two and say more zigzaggy. Um, I started off thinking, um, that I started off as a political science major or a government major. Um, and I was probably destined to go into, um, the law field, but actually took a summer course at Harvard. I did not go to Harvard, but I took a summer course there and learned a lot about multimedia and some programming. And that really set me on a trajectory of how, um, data and analytics can truly provide value and, and outcomes to our customers. Um, and I have been living that life ever since. Um, I graduated from college, so, um, I was very excited and privileged in my early career to, uh, work in a company where I found after my first year that I was managing, um, uh, kids, people who had graduated from Harvard business school and from MIT Sloan school. Um, and that was super crazy, cuz I did not go to either of those schools, but I sort of have always had a natural knack for how do you take technology and, and the really cool things that technology can do, but because I'm not a programmer by training, I'm really focused on the value that I'm able to help, um, organizations really extract value, um, from the technology that we can create, which I think is fantastic. >>I think there's so much value in having a zigzag path into tech. You bring Danielle, you and I have talked about this many times you bring such breadth and such a wide perspective. That really is such a value. Add to teams. Danielle, talk to us from AWS's perspective about what can be done to encourage more young women to get and under and underrepresented groups as well, to get into stem and stay. >>Yeah, and this is definitely a challenge as we're trying to grow our organization and kind of shift the numbers. And the reality is, especially with the more senior folks in our organization, unless you bring folks with a zigzag path, the likelihood is you won't be able to change the numbers that you have. Um, but for me, it's really been about, uh, looking at that, uh, the folks who are just graduating college, maybe in other roles where they are adjacent to technology and to try to spark their interest and show that yes, they can do it because oftentimes it's really about believing in themselves and, and realizing that we need folks with all sorts of different perspectives to kind of come in, to be able to help really, um, provide both products and services and solutions for all types of people inside of technology, which requires all sorts of perspectives. >>Yeah, the diverse perspectives. There's so much value and there's a lot of data that demonstrates how much value revenue impact organizations can make by having diversity, especially at the leadership level. Hillary, let's go back to you. We talked about your career path. You talked about some of the importance of the focus on de and I at Tarana, but what are, what do you think can be done to encourage, to sorry, to recruit more young women and under groups into tech, any, any carrot there that you think are really important that we need to be dangling more of? >>Yeah, absolutely. And I'll build on what Danielle just said. I think the, um, bringing in diverse understandings, um, of, of customer outcomes, I mean, I, the we've really moved from technology for technology's sake and I know AWS and entirety to have had a lot of conversations on how do we drive customer outcomes that are differentiated in the market and really being customer centric and technology is wonderful. You can do wonderful things with it. You can do not so wonderful things with it as well, but unless you're really focused on the outcomes and what customers are seeking, um, technology is not hugely valuable. And so I think bringing in people who understand, um, voice of customer who understand those outcomes, and those are not necessarily the, the, the folks who are PhD in mathematics or statistics, um, those can be people who understand a day in the life of a data scientist or a day in the life of a citizen data scientist. And so really working to bridge the high impact technology with the practical kind of usability, usefulness of data and analytics in our cases, I think is something that we need more of in tech and sort of demystifying tech and freeing technology so that everybody can use it and having a really wide range of people who understand not just the bits and bites and, and how to program, but also the value in outcomes that technology through data and analytics can drive. >>Yeah. You know, we often talk about the hard skills, but this, their soft skills are equally, if not more important that even just being curious, being willing to ask questions, being not afraid to be vulnerable, being able to show those sides of your personality. I think those are important for, for young women and underrepresented groups to understand that those are just as important as some of the harder technical skills that can be taught. >>That's right. >>What do you think about from a bias perspective, Hillary, what have you seen in the tech industry and how do you think we can leverage culture as you talked about to help dial down some of the biases that are going on? >>Yeah. I mean, I think first of all, and, and there's some interesting data out there that says that 90% of the population, which includes a lot of women have some inherent bias in their day, day behaviors when it comes to to women in particular. But I'm sure that that is true across all kinds of, of, um, diverse and underrepresented folks in, in the world. And so I think acknowledging that we have bias and actually really learning how, what that can look like, how that can show up. We might be sitting here and thinking, oh, of course I don't have any bias. And then you realize that, um, as you, as you learn more about, um, different types of bias, that actually you do need to kind of, um, account for that and change behaviors. And so I think learning is sort of a fundamental, um, uh, grounding for all of us to really know what bias looks like, know how it shows up in each of us. >>Um, if we're leaders know how it shows up in our teams and make sure that we are constantly getting better, we're, we're not gonna be perfect anytime soon. But I think being on a path to improvement to overcoming bias, um, is really, is really critical. And part of that is really starting the dialogue, having the conversations, holding ourselves and each other accountable, um, when things aren't going in, in a, in a Coptic way and being able to talk openly about that, that felt, um, like maybe there was some bias in that interaction and how do we, um, how do we make good on that? How do we change our, our behavior? Fundamentally of course, data and analytics can have some bias in it as well. And so I think as we look at the, the technology aspect of bias, um, looking at at ethical AI, I think is a, a really important, uh, additional area. And I'm sure we could spend another 20 minutes talking about that, but I, I would be remiss if I didn't talk more about sort of the bias, um, and the over the opportunity to overcome bias in data and analytics as well. >>Yeah. The opportunity to overcome it is definitely there you bring up a couple of really good points, Hillary. It, it starts with awareness. We need to be aware that there are inherent biases in data in thought. And also to your other point, hold people accountable ourselves, our teammates, that's critical to being able to, to dial that back down, Daniel, I wanna get your perspective on, on your view of women in leadership roles. Do you think that we have good representation or we still have work to do in there? >>I definitely think in both technical and product roles, we definitely have some work to do. And, you know, when I think about, um, our partnership with Teradata, part of the reason why it's so important is, you know, Teradata solution is really the brains of a lot of companies. Um, you know, the what, how, what they differentiate on how they figure out insights into their business. And it's, it's all about the product itself and the data and the same is true at AWS. And, you know, we really could do some work to have some more women in these technical roles, as well as in the product, shaping the products. Uh, just for all the reasons that we just kind of talked about over the last 10 minutes, um, in order to, you know, move bias out of our, um, out of our solutions and also to just build better products and have, uh, better, you know, outcomes for customers. So I think there's a bit of work to do still. >>I agree. There's definitely a bit of work to do, and it's all about delivering those better outcomes for customers at the end of the day, we need to figure out what the right ways are of doing that and working together in a community. Um, we've had obviously a lot had changed in the last couple of years, Hillary, what's your, what have you seen in terms of the impact that the pandemic has had on this status of women in tech? Has it been a pro is silver lining the opposite? What are you seeing? >>Yeah, I mean, certainly there's data out there that tells us factually that it has been, um, very difficult for women during COVID 19. Um, women have, uh, dropped out of the workforce for a wide range of, of reasons. Um, and, and that I think is going to set us back all of us, the, the Royal us or the Royal we back, um, years and years. Um, and, and it's very unfortunate because I think we we're at a time when we're making great progress and now to see COVID, um, setting us back in, in such a powerful way. I think there's work to be done to understand how do we bring people back into the workforce. Um, how do we do that? Understanding work life balance, better understanding virtual and remote, working better. I think in the technology sector, um, we've really embraced, um, hybrid virtual work and are, are empowering people to bring their whole selves to work. >>And I think if anything, these, these zoom calls have, um, both for the men and the women on my team. In fact, I would say much more. So for the men on my team, I'm seeing, I was seeing more kids in the background, more kind of split childcare duties, more ability to start talking about, um, other responsibilities that maybe they had, uh, especially in the early days of COVID where maybe daycares were shut down. And, um, you had, you know, maybe a parent was sick. And so we saw quite a lot of, um, people bringing their whole selves to the office, which I think was, was really wonderful. Um, uh, even our CEO saw some of that. And I think, um, that that really changes the dialogue, right? It changes it to maybe scheduling meetings at a time when, um, people can do it after daycare drop off. >>Um, and really allowing that both for men and for women makes it better for, for women overall. So I would like to think that this hybrid working, um, environment and that this, um, uh, whole view into somebody's life that COVID has really provided for probably for white collar workers, if I'm being honest for, um, people who are in a, at a better point of privilege, they don't necessarily have to go into the office every day. I would like to think that tech can lead the way in, um, you know, coming out of the, the old COVID. I don't know if we have a new COVID coming, but the old COVID and really leading the way for women and for people, um, to transform how we do work, um, leveraging data and analytics, but also, um, overcoming some of the, the disparities that exist for women in particular in the workforce. >>Yeah, I think there's, there's like we say, there's a lot of opportunity there and I like your point of hopefully tech can be that guiding light that shows us this can be done. We're all humans at the end of the day. And ultimately if we're able to have some sort of work life balance, everything benefits, our work or more productive, higher performing teams impacts customers, right? There's so much value that can be gleaned from, from that hybrid model and embracing for humans. We need to be able to, to work when we can, we've learned that you don't have to be, you know, in an office 24, 7 commuting, crazy hours flying all around the world. We can get a lot of things done in a ways that fit people's lives rather than taking command over it. Wanna get your advice, Hillary, if you were to talk to your younger self, what would be some of the key pieces of advice you would say? And Danielle and I have talked about this before, and sometimes we, we would both agree on like, ask more questions. Don't be afraid to raise your hand, but what advice would you give your younger self and that younger generation in terms of being inspired to get into tech >>Oh, inspired and being in tech? You know, I think looking at technology as, in some ways, I feel like we do a disservice to, um, inclusion when we talk about stem, cuz I think stem can be kind of daunting. It can be a little scary for people for younger people. When I, when I go and talk to folks at schools, I think stem is like, oh, all the super smart kids are over there. They're all like maybe they're all men. And so, um, it's, it's a little, uh, intimidating. Um, and stem is actually, you know, especially for, um, people joining the workforce today. It's actually how you've been living your life since you were born. I mean, you know, stem inside and out because you walk around with a phone and you know how to get your internet working and like that is technology right. >>Fundamentally. And so demystifying stem as something that is around how we, um, actually make our, our lives useful and, and, and how we can change outcomes. Um, through technology I think is maybe a different lens to put on it. So, and there's absolutely for, for hard sciences, there's absolutely a, a great place in the world for folks who wanna pursue that and men and women can do that. So I, I don't want to be, um, uh, setting the wrong expectations, but I, I think stem is, is very holistic in, um, in the change that's happening globally for us today across economies, across global warming, across all kinds of impactful issues. And so I think everybody who's interested in, in some of that world change can participate in stem. It just may be through a different, through a different lens than how we classically talk about stem. >>So I think there's great opportunity to demystify stem. I think also, um, what I would tell my younger self is choose your bosses wisely. And that sounds really funny. That sounds like inside out almost, but I think choose the person that you're gonna work for in your first five to seven years. And it might be more than one person, but be, be selective, maybe be a little less selective about the exact company or the exact title. I think picking somebody that, you know, we talk about mentors and we talk about sponsors and those are important. Um, but the person you're gonna spend in your early career, a lot of your day with a lot, who's gonna influence a lot of the outcomes for you. That is the person that you, I think want to be more selective about, um, because that person can set you up for success and give you opportunities and set you on course to be, um, a standout or that person can hold you back. >>And that person can put you in the corner and not invite you to the meetings and not give you those opportunities. And so we're in an economy today where you actually can, um, be a little bit picky about who you go and work for. And I would encourage my younger self. I actually, I just lucked out actually, but I think that, um, my first boss really set me, um, up for success, gave me a lot of feedback and coaching. Um, and some of it was really hard to hear, but it really set me up for, for, um, the, the path that I've been on ever since. So it, that would be my advice. >>I love that advice. I it's brilliant. I didn't think it choose your bosses wisely. Isn't something that we primarily think about. I think a lot of people think about the big name companies that they wanna go after and put on a resume, but you bring up a great point. And Danielle and I have talked about this with other guests about mentors and sponsors. I think that is brilliant advice and also more work to do to demystify stem. But luckily we have great family leaders like the two of you helping us to do that. Ladies, I wanna thank you so much for joining me on the program today and talking through what you're seeing in de and I, what your companies are doing and the opportunities that we have to move the needle. Appreciate your time. >>Thank you so much. Great to see you, Danielle. Thank you Lisa, to see you. >>My pleasure for my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the AWS partner showcase season one, episode three. Hey everyone. Welcome to the AWS partner showcase. This is season one, episode three, with a focus on women in tech. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got two guests here with me, Sue Peretti, the EVP of global AWS strategic alliances at Jefferson Frank, a 10th revolution group company, and Danielle brushoff. One of our cube alumni joins us ISV PSA director, ladies. It's great to have you on the program talking about a, a topic that is near and dear to my heart at women in tech. >>Thank you, Lisa. >>So let's go ahead and start with you. Give the audience an understanding of Jefferson Frank, what does the company do and about the partnership with AWS? >>Sure. Um, so let's just start, uh, Jefferson Frank is a 10th revolution group company. And if you look at it, it's really talent as a service. So Jefferson Frank provides talent solutions all over the world for AWS clients, partners and users, et cetera. And we have a sister company called revelent, which is a talent creation company within the AWS ecosystem. So we create talent and put it out in the ecosystem. Usually underrepresented groups over half of them are women. And then we also have, uh, a company called rubra, which is a delivery model around AWS technology. So all three companies fall under the 10th revolution group organization. >>Got it. Danielle, talk to me a little bit about from AWS's perspective and the focus on hiring more women in technology and about the partnership. >>Yes. I mean, this has definitely been a focus ever since I joined eight years ago, but also just especially in the last few years we've grown exponentially and our customer base has changed. You know, we wanna have, uh, an organization interacting with them that reflects our customers, right. And, uh, we know that we need to keep pace with that even with our growth. And so we've very much focused on early career talent, um, bringing more women and underrepresented minorities into the organization, sponsoring those folks, promoting them, uh, giving them paths to growth, to grow inside of the organization. I'm an example of that. Of course I benefit benefited from it, but also I try to bring that into my organization as well. And it's super important. >>Tell me a little bit about how you benefited from that, Danielle. >>Um, I just think that, um, you know, I I've been able to get, you know, a seat at the table. I think that, um, I feel as though I have folks supporting me, uh, very deeply and wanna see me succeed. And also they put me forth as, um, you know, a, represent a representative, uh, to bring more women into the organization as well. And I think, um, they give me a platform, uh, in order to do that, um, like this, um, but also many other, uh, spots as well. Um, and I'm happy to do it because I feel that, you know, if you always wanna feel that you're making a difference in your job, and that is definitely a place where I get that time and space in order to be that representative to, um, bring more, more women into benefiting from having careers in technology, which there's a lot of value there, >>A lot of value. Absolutely. So back over to you, what are some of the trends that you are seeing from a gender diversity perspective in tech? We know the, the numbers of women in technical positions, uh, right. There's so much data out there that shows when girls start dropping up, but what are some of the trends that you are seeing? >>So it's, that's a really interesting question. And, and Lisa, I had a whole bunch of data points that I wanted to share with you, but just two weeks ago, uh, I was in San Francisco with AWS at the, at the summit. And we were talking about this. We were talking about how we can collectively together attract more women, not only to, uh, AWS, not only to technology, but to the AWS ecosystem in particular. And it was fascinating because I was talking about, uh, the challenges that women have and how hard to believe, but about 5% of women who were in the ecosystem have left in the past few years, which was really, really, uh, something that shocked everyone when we, when we were talking about it, because all of the things that we've been asking for, for instance, uh, working from home, um, better pay, uh, more flexibility, uh, better maternity leave seems like those things are happening. >>So we're getting what we want, but people are leaving. And it seemed like the feedback that we got was that a lot of women still felt very underrepresented. The number one thing was that they, they couldn't be, you can't be what you can't see. So because they, we feel collectively women, uh, people who identify as women just don't see enough women in leadership, they don't see enough mentors. Um, I think I've had great mentors, but, but just not enough. I'm lucky enough to have a pres a president of our company, the president of our company, Zoe Morris is a woman and she does lead by example. So I'm very lucky for that. And Jefferson, Frank really quickly, we put out a hiring a salary and hiring guide a career and hiring guide every year and the data points. And that's about 65 pages long. No one else does it. Uh, it gives an abundance of information around, uh, everything about the AWS ecosystem that a hiring manager might need to know. But there is what, what I thought was really unbelievable was that only 7% of the people that responded to it were women. So my goal, uh, being that we have such a very big global platform is to get more women to respond to that survey so we can get as much information and take action. So >>Absolutely 7%. So a long way to go there. Danielle, talk to me about AWS's focus on women in tech. I was watching, um, Sue, I saw that you shared on LinkedIn, the Ted talk that the CEO and founder of girls and co did. And one of the things that she said was that there was a, a survey that HP did some years back that showed that, um, 60%, that, that men will apply for jobs if they only meet 60% of the list of requirements. Whereas with females, it's far, far less, we've all been in that imposter syndrome, um, conundrum before. But Danielle, talk to us about AWS, a specific focus here to get these numbers up. >>I think it speaks to what Susan was talking about, how, you know, I think we're approaching it top and bottom, right? We're looking out at what are the, who are the women who are currently in technical positions and how can we make AWS an attractive place for them to work? And that's all a lot of the changes that we've had around maternity leave and, and those types of things, but then also, um, more flexible working, uh, can, you know, uh, arrangements, but then also, um, early, how can we actually impact early, um, career women and actually women who are still in school. Um, and our training and certification team is doing amazing things to get, um, more girls exposed to AWS, to technology, um, and make it a less intimidating place and have them look at employees from AWS and say like, oh, I can see myself in those people. >>Um, and kind of actually growing the viable pool of candidates. I think, you know, we're, we're limited with the viable pool of candidates, um, when you're talking about mid to late career. Um, but how can we, you know, help retrain women who are coming back into the workplace after, you know, having a child and how can we help with military women who want to, uh, or underrepresented minorities who wanna move into AWS, we have a great military program, but then also just that early high school, uh, career, you know, getting them in, in that trajectory. >>Sue, is that something that Jefferson Frank is also able to help with is, you know, getting those younger girls before they start to feel there's something wrong with me. I don't get this. Talk to us about how Jefferson Frank can help really drive up that in those younger girls. >>Uh, let me tell you one other thing to refer back to that summit that we did, uh, we had breakout sessions and that was one of the topics. What can cuz that's the goal, right? To make sure that, that there are ways to attract them. That's the goal? So some of the things that we talked about was mentoring programs, uh, from a very young age, some people said high school, but then we said even earlier, goes back to you. Can't be what you can't see. So, uh, getting mentoring programs, uh, established, uh, we also talked about some of the great ideas was being careful of how we speak to women using the right language to attract them. And some, there was a teachable moment for, for me there actually, it was really wonderful because, um, an African American woman said to me, Sue and I, I was talking about how you can't be what you can't see. >>And what she said was Sue, it's really different. Um, for me as an African American woman, uh, or she identified, uh, as nonbinary, but she was relating to African American women. She said, your white woman, your journey was very different than my journey. And I thought, this is how we're going to learn. I wasn't offended by her calling me out at all. It was a teachable moment. And I thought I understood that, but those are the things that we need to educate people on those, those moments where we think we're, we're saying and doing the right thing, but we really need to get that bias out there. So here at Jefferson, Frank, we're, we're trying really hard to get that careers and hiring guide out there. It's on our website to get more women, uh, to talk to it, but to make suggestions in partnership with AWS around how we can do this mentoring, we have a mentor me program. We go around the country and do things like this. We, we try to get the education out there in partnership with AWS. Uh, we have a, a women's group, a women's leadership group, uh, so much that, that we do, and we try to do it in partnership with AWS. >>Danielle, can you comment on the impact that AWS has made so far, um, regarding some of the trends and, and gender diversity that Sue was talking about? What's the impact that's been made so far with this partnership? >>Well, I mean, I think just being able to get more of the data and have awareness of leaders, uh, on how <laugh>, you know, it used to be a, a couple years back, I would feel like sometimes the, um, uh, solving to bring more women into the organization was kind of something that folks thought, oh, this is Danielle is gonna solve this. You know? And I think a lot of folks now realize, oh, this is something that we all need to solve for. And a lot of my colleagues who maybe a couple years ago, didn't have any awareness or didn't even have the tools to do what they needed to do in order to improve the statistics on their, or in their organizations. Now actually have those tools and are able to kind of work with, um, work with companies like Susan's work with Jefferson Frank in order to actually get the data and actually make good decisions and feel as though, you know, they, they often, these are not lived experiences for these folks, so they don't know what they don't know. And by providing data and providing awareness and providing tooling and then setting goals, I think all of those things have really turned, uh, things around in a very positive way. >>And so you bring up a great point about from a diversity perspective, what is Jefferson Frank doing to, to get those data points up, to get more women of, of all well, really underrepresented minorities to, to be able to provide that feedback so that you can, can have the data and gleamy insights from it to help companies like AWS on their strategic objectives. >>Right? So as I, when I go back to that higher that, uh, careers in hiring guide, that is my focus today, really because the more data that we have, I mean, the, and the data takes, uh, you know, we need people to participate in order to, to accurately, uh, get a hold of that data. So that's why we're asking, uh, we're taking the initiative to really expand our focus. We are a global organization with a very, very massive database all over the world, but if people don't take action, then we can't get the right. The, the, the data will not be as accurate as we'd like it to be. Therefore take better action. So what we're doing is we're asking people all over the, all over the world to participate on our website, Jefferson frank.com, the se the high, uh, in the survey. So we can learn as much as we can. >>7% is such a, you know, Danielle and I we're, we've got to partner on this just to sort of get that message out there, get more data so we can execute, uh, some of the other things that we're doing. We're, we're partnering in. As I mentioned, more of these events, uh, we're, we're doing around the summits, we're gonna be having more ed and I events and collecting more information from women. Um, like I said, internally, we do practice what we preach and we have our own programs that are, that are out there that are within our own company where the women who are talking to candidates and clients every single day are trying to get that message out there. So if I'm speaking to a client or one of our internal people are speaking to a client or a candidate, they're telling them, listen, you know, we really are trying to get these numbers up. >>We wanna attract as many people as we can. Would you mind going to this, uh, hiring guide and offering your own information? So we've gotta get that 7% up. We've gotta keep talking. We've gotta keep, uh, getting programs out there. One other thing I wanted to Danielle's point, she mentioned, uh, women in leadership, the number that we gathered was only 9% of women in leadership within the AWS ecosystem. We've gotta get that number up, uh, as well because, um, you know, I know for me, when I see people like Danielle or, or her peers, it inspires me. And I feel like, you know, I just wanna give back, make sure I send the elevator back to the first floor and bring more women in to this amazing ecosystem. >>Absolutely. That's not that metaphor I do too, but we, but to your point to get that those numbers up, not just at AWS, but everywhere else we need, it's a help me help use situation. So ladies underrepresented minorities, if you're watching go to the Jefferson Frank website, take the survey, help provide the data so that the woman here that are doing this amazing work, have it to help make decisions and have more of females and leadership roles or underrepresented minorities. So we can be what we can see. Ladies, thank you so much for joining me today and sharing what you guys are doing together to partner on this important. Cause >>Thank you for having me, Leah, Lisa, >>Thank you. My pleasure for my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of the AWS partner showcase. Thanks for your time. Hey everyone. Welcome to the AWS partner showcase season one, episode three women in tech. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. We've got two female rock stars here with me next. Stephanie Curry joins us the worldwide head of sales and go to market strategy for AWS at NetApp and Danielle GShock is back one of our QM ISV PSA director at AWS. Looking forward to a great conversation, ladies, about a great topic, Stephanie, let's go ahead and start with you. Give us an overview of your story, how you got into tech and what inspired you. >>Thanks so much, Lisa and Danielle. It's great to be on this show with you. Um, thank you for that. Uh, my name's Stephanie cur, as Lisa mentioned, I'm the worldwide head of sales for, uh, AWS at NetApp and run a global team of sales people that sell all things AWS, um, going back 25 years now, uh, when I first started my career in tech, it was kind of by accident. Um, I come from a different background. I have a business background and a technical background from school, um, but had been in a different career and I had an opportunity to try something new. Um, I had an ally really that reached out to me and said, Hey, you'd be great for this role. And I thought, I'd take a chance. I was curious. Um, and, uh, it, it turned out to be a 25 year career, um, that I'm really, really excited about and, and, um, really thankful for that person, for introducing me to the, to the industry >>25 years in counting. I'm sure Danielle, we've talked about your background before. So what I wanna focus on with you is the importance of diversity for high performance. I know what a machine AWS is, and Stephanie'll come back to you with the same question, but talk about that, Danielle, from your perspective, that importance, um, for diversity to drive the performance. >>Yeah. Yeah. I truly believe that, you know, in order to have high performing teams, that you have to have people from all different types of backgrounds and experiences. And we do find that oftentimes being, you know, field facing, if we're not reflecting our customers and connecting with them deeply, um, on, on the levels that they're at, we, we end up missing them. And so for us, it's very important to bring people of lots of different technical backgrounds experiences. And of course, both men, women, and underrepresented minorities and put that forth to our customers, um, in order to make that connection and to end up with better outcomes. So >>Definitely it's all about outcomes, Stephanie, your perspective and NetApp's perspective on diversity for creating highly performant teams and organizations. >>I really aligned with Danielle on the comment she made. And in addition to that, you know, just from building teams in my, um, career know, we've had three times as many women on my team since we started a year ago and our results are really showing in that as well. Um, we find the teams are stronger, they're more collaborative and to Danielle's point really reflective, not only our partners, but our customers themselves. So this really creates connections, which are really, really important to scale our businesses and, and really, uh, meet the customer where they're at as well. So huge proponent of that ourselves, and really finding that we have to be intentional in our hiring and intentional in how we attract diversity to our teams. >>So Stephanie let's stay with you. So a three X increase in women on the team in a year, especially the kind of last year that we've had is really incredible. I, I like your, I, your thoughts on there needs to be a, there needs to be focus and, and thought in how teams are hired. Let's talk about attracting and retaining those women now, especially in sales roles, we all know the number, the percentages of women in technical roles, but what are some of the things that, that you do Stephanie, that NetApp does to attract and retain women in those sales roles? >>The, the attracting part's really interesting. And we find that, you know, you, you read the stats and I'd say in my experience, they're also true in the fact that, um, a lot of women would look at a job description and say, I can't do a hundred percent of that, that, so I'm not even going to apply with the women that we've attracted to our team. We've actually intentionally reached out and targeted those people in a good way, um, to say, Hey, we think you've got what it takes. Some of the feedback I've got from those women are, gosh, I didn't think I could ever get this role. I didn't think I had the skills to do that. And they've been hired and they are doing a phenomenal job. In addition to that, I think a lot of the feedback I've got from these hires are, Hey, it's an aggressive sales is aggressive. Sales is competitive. It's not an environment that I think I can be successful in. And what we're showing them is bring those softer skills around collaboration, around connection, around building teams. And they do, they do bring a lot of that to the team. Then they see others like them there and they know they can be successful cuz they see others like them on the team, >>The whole concept of we can't be what we can't see, but we can be what we can't see is so important. You said a couple things, Stephanie, that really stuck with me. And one of them was an interview on the Cub I was doing, I think a couple weeks ago, um, about women in tech. And the stat that we talked about was that women will apply will not apply for a job unless they meet 100% of the skills and the requirements that it's listed, but men will, if they only meet 60. And I, that just shocked me that I thought, you know, I, I can understand that imposter syndrome is real. It's a huge challenge, but the softer skills, as you mentioned, especially in the last two years, plus the ability to communicate, the ability to collaborate are incredibly important to, to drive that performance of any team of any business. >>Absolutely. >>Danielle, talk to me about your perspective and AWS as well for attracting and retaining talent. And, and, and particularly in some of those challenging roles like sales that as Stephanie said, can be known as aggressive. >>Yeah, for sure. I mean, my team is focused on the technical aspect of the field and we definitely have an uphill battle for sure. Um, two things we are focused on first and foremost is looking at early career women and that how we, how can we bring them into this role, whether in they're in support functions, uh, cl like answering the phone for support calls, et cetera, and how, how can we bring them into this organization, which is a bit more strategic, more proactive. Um, and then the other thing that as far as retention goes, you know, sometimes there will be women who they're on a team and there are no other women on that team. And, and for me, it's about building community inside of AWS and being part of, you know, we have women on solution architecture organizations. We have, uh, you know, I just personally connect people as well and to like, oh, you should meet this person. Oh, you should talk to that person. Because again, sometimes they can't see someone on their team like them and they just need to feel anchored, especially as we've all been, you know, kind of stuck at home, um, during the pandemic, just being able to make those connections with women like them has been super important and just being a, a long tenured Amazonian. Um, that's definitely one thing I'm able to, to bring to the table as well. >>That's so important and impactful and spreads across organizations in a good way. Daniel let's stick with you. Let's talk about some of the allies that you've had sponsors, mentors that have really made a difference. And I said that in past tense, but I also mean in present tense, who are some of those folks now that really inspire you? >>Yeah. I mean, I definitely would say that one of my mentors and someone who, uh, ha has been a sponsor of my career has, uh, Matt YK, who is one of our control tower GMs. He has really sponsored my career and definitely been a supporter of mine and pushed me in positive ways, which has been super helpful. And then other of my business partners, you know, Sabina Joseph, who's a cube alum as well. She definitely has been, was a fabulous partner to work with. Um, and you know, between the two of us for a period of time, we definitely felt like we could, you know, conquer the world. It's very great to go in with a, with another strong woman, um, you know, and, and get things done, um, inside of an organization like AWS. >>Absolutely. And S I've, I've agreed here several times. So Stephanie, same question for you. You talked a little bit about your kind of, one of your, uh, original early allies in the tech industry, but talk to me about allies sponsors, mentors who have, and continue to make a difference in your life. >>Yeah. And, you know, I think it's a great differentiation as well, right? Because I think that mentors teach us sponsors show us the way and allies make room for us at the table. And that is really, really key difference. I think also as women leaders, we need to make room for others at the table too, and not forget those softer skills that we bring to the table. Some of the things that Danielle mentioned as well about making those connections for others, right. And making room for them at the table. Um, some of my allies, a lot of them are men. Brian ABI was my first mentor. Uh, he actually is in the distribution, was in distribution, uh, with advent tech data no longer there. Um, Corey Hutchinson, who's now at Hashi Corp. He's also another ally of mine and remains an ally of mine, even though we're not at the same company any longer. Um, so a lot of these people transcend careers and transcend, um, um, different positions that I've held as well and make room for us. And I think that's just really critical when we're looking for allies and when allies are looking for us, >>I love how you described allies, mentors and sponsors Stephanie. And the difference. I didn't understand the difference between a mentor and a sponsor until a couple of years ago. Do you talk with some of those younger females on your team so that when they come into the organization and maybe they're fresh outta college, or maybe they've transitioned into tech so that they can also learn from you and understand the importance and the difference between the allies and the sponsors and the mentors? >>Absolutely. And I think that's really interesting because I do take, uh, an extra, uh, approach an extra time to really reach out to the women that have joined the team. One. I wanna make sure they stay right. I don't want them feeling, Hey, I'm alone here and I need to, I need to go do something else. Um, and they are located around the world, on my team. They're also different age groups, so early in career, as well as more senior people and really reaching out, making sure they know that I'm there. But also as Danielle had mentioned, connecting them to other people in the community that they can reach out to for those same opportunities and making room for them >>Make room at the table. It's so important. And it can, you never know what a massive difference and impact you can make on someone's life. And I, and I bet there's probably a lot of mentors and sponsors and allies of mine that would be surprised to know, uh, the massive influence they've had Daniel back over. Let's talk about some of the techniques that you employ, that AWS employees to make the work environment, a great place for women to really thrive and, and be retained as Stephanie was saying. Of course that's so important. >>Yeah. I mean, definitely I think that the community building, as well as we have a bit more programmatic mentorship, um, we're trying to get to the point of having a more programmatic sponsorship as well. Um, but I think just making sure that, um, you know, both everything from, uh, recruit to onboard to ever boarding that, uh, they they're the women who come into the organization, whether it's they're coming in on the software engineering side or the field side or the sales side that they feel as that they have someone, uh, working with them to help them drive their career. Those are the key things that were, I think from an organizational perspective are happening across the board. Um, for me personally, when I run my organization, I'm really trying to make sure that people feel that they can come to me at any time open door policy, make sure that they're surfacing any times in which they are feeling excluded or anything like that, any challenges, whether it be with a customer, a partner or with a colleague. Um, and then also of course, just making sure that I'm being a good sponsor, uh, to, to people on my team. Um, that is key. You can talk about it, but you have to start with yourself as well. >>That's a great point. You you've got to, to start with yourself and really reflect on that. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and look, am I, am I embodying what it is that I need? And not that I know they need that focused, thoughtful intention on that is so importants, let's talk about some of the techniques that you use that NetApp uses to make the work environment a great place for those women are marginalized, um, communities to really thrive. >>Yeah. And I appreciate it and much like Danielle, uh, and much like AWS, we have some of those more structured programs, right around sponsorship and around mentorship. Um, probably some growth there, opportunities for allies, because I think that's more of a newer concept in really an informal structure around the allies, but something that we're growing into at NetApp, um, on my team personally, I think, um, leading by example's really key. And unfortunately, a lot of the, um, life stuffs still lands on the women, whether we like it or not. Uh, I have a very, uh, active husband in our household, but I still carry when it push comes to shove it's on me. Um, and I wanna make sure that my team knows it's okay to take some time and do the things you need to do with your family. Um, I'm I show up as myself authentically and I encourage them to do the same. >>So it's okay to say, Hey, I need to take a personal day. I need to focus on some stuff that's happening in my personal life this week now, obviously to make sure your job's covered, but just allowing some of that softer vulnerability to come into the team as well, so that others, um, men and women can feel they can do the same thing. And that it's okay to say, I need to balance my life and I need to do some other things alongside. Um, so it's the formal programs, making sure people have awareness on them. Um, I think it's also softly calling people out on biases and saying, Hey, I'm not sure if you know, this landed that way, but I just wanted to make you aware. And usually the feedback is, oh my gosh, I didn't know. And could you coach me on something that I could do better next time? So all of this is driven through our NetApp formal programs, but then it's also how you manifest it on the teams that we're leading. >>Absolutely. And sometimes having that mirror to reflect into can be really eye-opening and, and allow you to, to see things in a completely different light, which is great. Um, you both talked about, um, kind of being what you, uh, can see, and, and I know both companies are upset customer obsessed in a good way. Talk to me a little bit, Danielle, go back over to you about the AWS NetApp partnership. Um, some of that maybe alignment on, on performance on obviously you guys are very well aligned, uh, in terms of that, but also it sounds like you're quite aligned on diversity and inclusion. >>Well, we definitely do. We have the best partnerships with companies in which we have these value alignments. So I think that is a positive thing, of course, but just from a, from a partnership perspective, you know, from my five now plus years of being a part of the APN, this is, you know, one of the most significant years with our launch of FSX for NetApp. Um, with that, uh, key key service, which we're making available natively on AWS. I, I can't think of a better Testament to the, to the, um, partnership than that. And that's doing incredibly well and it really resonates with our customers. And of course it started with customers and their need for NetApp. Uh, so, you know, that is a reflection, I think, of the success that we're having together. >>And Stephanie talk to, uh, about the partnership from your perspective, NetApp, AWS, what you guys are doing together, cultural alignment, but also your alignment on really bringing diversity into drive performance. >>Yeah, I think it's a, a great question. And I have to say it's just been a phenomenal year. Our relationship has, uh, started before our first party service with FSX N but definitely just, um, uh, the trajectory, um, between the two companies since the announcement about nine months ago has just taken off to a, a new level. Um, we feel like an extended part of the family. We worked together seamlessly. A lot of the people in my team often say we feel like Amazonians. Um, and we're really part of this transformation at NetApp from being that storage hardware company into being an ISV and a cloud company. And we could not do this without the partnership with AWS and without the, uh, first party service of Fs XM that we've recently released. Um, I think that those joint values that Danielle referred to are critical to our success, um, starting with customer obsession and always making sure that we are doing the right thing for the customer. >>We coach our team teams all the time on if you are doing the right thing for the customers, you cannot do anything wrong. Just always put the customer at the, in the center of your decisions. And I think that there is, um, a lot of best practice sharing and collaboration as we go through this change. And I think a lot of it is led by the diverse backgrounds that are on the team, um, female, male, um, race and so forth, and just to really, uh, have different perspectives and different experiences about how we approach this change. Um, so we definitely feel like a part of the family. Uh, we are absolutely loving, uh, working with the AWS team and our team knows that we are the right place, the right time with the right people. >>I love that last question for each of you. And I wanna stick with you Stephanie advice to your younger self, think back five years. What advice would you seen what you've accomplished and maybe the thet route that you've taken along the way, what would you advise your youngest Stephanie self. >>Uh, I would say keep being curious, right? Keep being curious, keep asking questions. And sometimes when you get a no, it's not a bad thing, it just means not right now and find out why and, and try to get feedback as to why maybe that wasn't the right opportunity for you. But, you know, just go for what you want. Continue to be curious, continue to ask questions and find a support network of people around you that wanna help you because they are there and they, they wanna see you be successful too. So never be shy about that stuff. >><laugh> absolutely. And I always say failure does not have to be an, a bad F word. A no can be the beginning of something. Amazing. Danielle, same question for you. Thinking back to when you first started in your career, what advice would you give your younger self? >>Yeah, I think the advice I'd give my younger self would be, don't be afraid to put yourself out there. Um, it's certainly, you know, coming from an engineering background, maybe you wanna stay behind the scenes, not, not do a presentation, not do a public speaking event, those types of things, but back to what the community really needs, this thing. Um, you know, I genuinely now, uh, took me a while to realize it, but I realized I needed to put myself out there in order to, um, you know, allow younger women to see what they could be. So that would be the advice I would give. Don't be afraid to put yourself out there. >>Absolutely. That advice that you both gave are, is so fantastic, so important and so applicable to everybody. Um, don't be afraid to put yourself out there, ask questions. Don't be afraid of a, no, that it's all gonna happen at some point or many points along the way. That can also be good. So thank you ladies. You inspired me. I appreciate you sharing what AWS and NetApp are doing together to strengthen diversity, to strengthen performance and the advice that you both shared for your younger selves was brilliant. Thank you. >>Thank you. >>Thank you >>For my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the AWS partner showcase. See you next time. Hey everyone. Welcome to the AWS partner showcase season one, episode three women in tech. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got two female rock stars joining me. Next Vero Reynolds is here engineering manager, telemetry at honeycomb, and one of our cube alumni, Danielle Ock ISV PSA director at AWS. Join us as well. Ladies. It's great to have you talking about a very important topic today. >>Thanks for having us. >>Yeah, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. >>Of course, Vera, let's go ahead and start with you. Tell me about your background and tech. You're coming up on your 10th anniversary. Happy anniversary. >>Thank you. That's right. I can't believe it's been 10 years. Um, but yeah, I started in tech in 2012. Um, I was an engineer for most of that time. Uh, and just recently as a March, switched to engineering management here at honeycomb and, um, you know, throughout my career, I was very much interested in all the things, right. And it was a big FOMO as far as trying a few different, um, companies and products. And I've done things from web development to mobile to platforms. Um, it would be apt to call me a generalist. Um, and in the more recent years I was sort of gravitating more towards developer tool space. And for me that, uh, came in the form of cloud Foundry circle CI and now honeycomb. Um, I actually had my eye on honeycomb for a while before joining, I came across a blog post by charity majors. >>Who's one of our founders and she was actually talking about management and how to pursue that and whether or not it's right, uh, for your career. And so I was like, who is this person? I really like her, uh, found the company. They were pretty small at the time. So I was sort of keeping my eye on them. And then when the time came around for me to look again, I did a little bit more digging, uh, found a lot of talks about the product. And on the one hand they really spoke to me as the solution. They talked about developers owning their coding production and answering questions about what is happening, what are your users seeing? And I felt that pain, I got what they were trying to do. And also on the other hand, every talk I saw at the time was from, uh, an amazing woman <laugh>, which I haven't seen before. Uh, so I came across charity majors again, Christine Y our other founder, and then Liz Jones, who's our principal developer advocate. And that really sealed the deal for me as far as wanting to work here. >>Yeah. Honeycomb is interesting. This is a female founded company. You're two leaders. You mentioned that you like the technology, but you were also attracted because you saw females in the leadership position. Talk to me a little bit about what that's like working for a female led organization at honeycomb. >>Yeah. You know, historically, um, we have tried not to over index on that because there was this, uh, maybe fear awareness of, um, it taking away from our legitimacy as an engineering organization, from our success as a company. Um, but I'm seeing that, uh, rhetoric shift recently because we believe that with great responsibility, uh, with great power comes great responsibility, and we're trying to be more intentional as far as using that attribute of our company. Um, so I would say that for me, it was, um, a choice between a few offers, right. And that was a selling point for sure, because again, I've never experienced it and I've really seen how much they walk that walk. Um, even me being here and me moving into management, I think were both, um, ways in which they really put a lot of trust and support in me. And so, um, I it's been a great ride. >>Excellent. Sounds like it. Before we bring Danielle in to talk about the partnership. I do wanna have you there talk to the audience a little bit about honeycomb, what technology it's delivering and what are its differentiators. >>Yeah, absolutely. Um, so honeycomb is an observability tool, uh, that enables engineers to answer questions about the code that runs in production. And, um, we work with a number of various customers. Some of them are Vanguards, slack. Hello, fresh, just to name a couple, if you're not familiar with observability tooling, it's akin to traditional application performance monitoring, but we believe that observability is succeeding APM because, uh, APM tools were built at the time of monoliths and they just weren't designed to help us answer questions about complex distributed systems that we work with today, where things can go wrong anywhere in that chain. And you can't predict what you're gonna need to ask ahead of time. So some of the ways that we are different is our ability to store and query really rich data, which we believe is the key to understanding those complex systems. >>What I mean by rich data is, um, something that has a lot of attributes. So for example, when an error happens, knowing who it happened to, which user ID, which, um, I don't know, region, they were in, um, what, what, what they were doing at the time and what was happening at the rest of your system. And our ingest engine is really fast. You can do it in as little as three seconds and we call data like this. I said, kind of rich data, contextual data. We refer it as having high ality and high dimensionality, which are big words. But at the end of the day, what that means is we can store and we can query the data. We can do it really fast. And to give you an example of how that looks for our customers, let's say you have a developer team who are using comb to understand and observe their system. >>And they get a report that a user is experiencing a slowdown or something's wrong. They can go into comb and figure out that this only happens to users who are using a particular language pack with their app. And they operated their app last week, that it only happens when they are trying to upload a file. And so it's this level of granularity and being able to zoom in and out, um, under your data that allows you to understand what's happening, especially when you have an incident going on, right. Or your really important high profile customer is telling you that something's wrong. And we can do that. Even if everything else in your other tools looks fine, right? All of your dashboards are okay. You're not actually getting paged on it, but your customers are telling you that something's wrong. Uh, and we believe that's where we shine in helping you there. >>Excellent. It sounds like that's where you really shine that real time visibility is so critical these days. Danielle, Danielle, wanna bring you into the conversation. Talk to us a little bit about the honeycomb partnership from the AWS lens. >>Yeah. So excuse me, observability is obviously a very important, uh, segment in the cloud space, very important to AWS, um, because a lot of all of our customers, uh, as they build their systems distributed, they need to be able to see where, where things are happening in the complex systems that they're building. And so honeycomb is a, is an advanced technology partner. Um, they've been working with us for quite some time and they have a, uh, their solution is listed on the marketplace. Um, definitely something that we see a lot of demand with our customers and they have many integrations, uh, which, you know, we've seen is key to success. Um, being able to work seamlessly with the rest of the services inside of the AWS platform. And I know that they've done some, some great things with people who are trying to develop games on top of AWS, uh, things in that area as well. And so, uh, very important partner in the observa observability market that we have >>Back to you, let's kind of unpack the partnership, the significance that honeycomb ha is getting from being partners with an organization as potent and pivotal as AWS. >>Yeah, absolutely. Um, I know this predates me to some extent, but I know for a long time, AWS and honeycomb has really pushed the envelope together. And, um, I think it's a beneficial relationship for both ends. There's kind of two ways of looking at it. On the one side, there is our own infrastructure. So honeycomb runs on AWS and actually one of our critical workloads that supports that fast query engine that I mentioned uses Lambda. And it does so in a pretty Orthodox way. So we've had a longstanding conversation with the AWS team as far as drawing outside those lines and kind of figuring out how to use this technology in a way that works for us and hopefully will work for other customers of theirs as well. Um, that also allows us to ask for early access for certain features when they become available. >>And then that way we can be sort of the Guinea pigs and try things out, um, in a way that migrates our system and optimizes our own performance, but also allows again, other customers of AWS to follow in that path. And then the other side of that partnership is really supporting our customers who are both honeycomb users and AWS users, because it's, as you imagine, quite a big overlap, and there are certain ways in which we can allow our customers to more easily get their data from AWS to honeycomb. So for example, last year we built a tool, um, based on the new Lambda extension capability that allowed our users who run their applications in Lambdas to get that telemetry data out of their applications and into honeycomb. And it man was win, win. >>Excellent. So I'm hearing a lot of synergies from a technology perspective, you're sticking with you, and then Danielle will bring you in, let's talk about how honeycomb supports D and I across its organization. And how is that synergistic with AWS's approach? Yeah, >>Yeah, absolutely. So I sort of alluded to that hesitancy to over index on the women led aspect of ourselves. Um, but again, a lot of things are shifting, we're growing a lot. And so we are recognizing that we need to be more intentional with our DEI initiatives, and we also notice that we can do better and we should do better. And to that, and we're doing a few things differently, um, that are pretty recent initiatives. We are partnering with organizations that help us target specific communities that are underrepresented in tech. Um, some examples would be after tech hu Latinas in tech among, um, a number of others. And another initiative is DEI head start. That's something that is an internal, um, practice that we started that includes reaching out to underrepresented applicants before any new job for honeycomb becomes live. So before we posted to LinkedIn, before it's even live on our job speech, and the idea there is to kind of balance our pipeline of applicants, which the hope is will lead to more diverse hires in the long term. >>That's a great focus there. Danielle, I know we've talked about this before, but for the audience, in terms of the context of the honeycomb partnership, the focus at AWS for D E and I is really significant, unpack that a little bit for us. >>Well, let me just bring it back to just how we think about it, um, with the companies that we work with, but also in, in terms of, you know, what we want to be able to do, excuse me, it's very important for us to, you know, build products that reflect, uh, the customers that we have. And I think, you know, working with, uh, a company like honeycomb that is looking to differentiate in a space, um, by, by bringing in, you know, the experiences of many different types of people I genuinely believe. And I'm sure Vera also believes that by having those diverse perspectives, that we're able to then build better products for our customers. Um, and you know, it's one of, one of our leadership principles, uh, is, is rooted in this. I write a lot, it asks for us to seek out diverse perspectives. Uh, and you can't really do that if everybody kind of looks the same and thinks the same and has the same background. So I think that is where our de and I, um, you know, I thought process is rooted and, you know, companies like honeycomb that give customers choice and differentiate and help them, um, to do what they need to do in their unique, um, environments is super important. So >>The, the importance of thought diversity cannot be underscored enough. It's something that is, can be pivotal to organizations. And it's very nice to hear that that's so fundamental to both companies, Barry, I wanna go back to you for a second. You, I think you mentioned this, the DEI head start program, that's an internal program at honeycomb. Can you shed a little bit of light on that? >>Yeah, that's right. And I actually am in the process of hiring a first engineer for my team. So I'm learning a lot of these things firsthand, um, and how it works is we try to make sure to pre-load our pipeline of applicants for any new job opening we have with diverse candidates to the best of our abilities, and that can involve partnering with the organizations that I mentioned or reaching out to our internal network, um, and make sure that we give those applicants a head start, so to speak. >>Excellent. I like that. Danielle, before we close, I wanna get a little bit of, of your background. We've got various background in tag, she's celebrating her 10th anniversary. Give me a, a short kind of description of the journey that you've navigated through being a female in technology. >>Yeah, thanks so much. I really appreciate, uh, being able to share this. So I started as a software engineer, uh, back actually in the late nineties, uh, during the, the first.com bubble and, uh, have, have spent quite a long time actually as an individual contributor, um, probably working in software engineering teams up through 2014 at a minimum until I joined AWS, uh, as a customer facing solutions architect. Um, I do think spending a lot of time, hands on definitely helped me with some of the imposter syndrome, um, issues that folks suffer from not to say I don't at all, but it, it certainly helped with that. And I've been leading teams at AWS since 2015. Um, so it's really been a great ride. Um, and like I said, I'm very happy to see all of our engineering teams change, uh, as far as their composition. And I'm, I'm grateful to be part of it. >>It's pretty great to be able to witness that composition change for the better last question for each of you. And we're almost out of time and Danielle, I'm gonna stick with you. What's your advice, your recommendations for women who either are thinking about getting into tech or those who may be in tech, maybe they're in individual positions and they're not sure if they should apply for that senior leadership position. What do you advise them to do? >>I mean, definitely for the individual contributors, tech tech is a great career, uh, direction, um, and you will always be able to find women like you, you have to maybe just work a little bit harder, uh, to join, have community, uh, in that. But then as a leader, um, representation is very important and we can bring more women into tech by having more leaders. So that's my, you just have to take the lead, >>Take the lead, love that there. Same question for you. What's your advice and recommendations for those maybe future female leaders in tech? >>Yeah, absolutely. Um, Danielle mentioned imposter syndrome and I think we all struggle with it from time to time, no matter how many years it's been. And I think for me, for me, the advice would be if you're starting out, don't be afraid to ask, uh, questions and don't be afraid to kind of show a little bit of ignorance because we've all been there. And I think it's on all of us to remember what it's like to not know how things work. And on the flip side of that, if you are a more senior IC or, uh, in a leadership role, also being able to model just saying, I don't know how this works and going and figuring out answers together because that was a really powerful shift for me early in my career is just to feel like I can say that I don't know something. >>I totally agree. I've been in that same situation where just ask the question because you I'm guaranteed, there's a million outta people in the room that probably has the, have the same question and because of imposter syndrome, don't wanna admit, I don't understand that. Can we back up, but I agree with you. I think that is, um, one of the best things. Raise your hand, ask a question, ladies. Thank you so much for joining me talking about honeycomb and AWS, what you're doing together from a technology perspective and the focus efforts that each company has on D E and I, we appreciate your insights. Thank you so much for having us great talking to you. My pleasure, likewise for my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the AWS partner showcase women in check. Welcome to the AWS partner showcase I'm Lisa Martin, your host. This is season one, episode three, and this is a great episode that focuses on women in tech. I'm pleased to be joined by Danielle Shaw, the ISV PSA director at AWS, and the sponsor of this fantastic program. Danielle, it's great to see you and talk about such an important topic. >>Yes. And I will tell you, all of these interviews have just been a blast for me to do. And I feel like there has been a lot of gold that we can glean from all of the, um, stories that we heard on these interviews and good advice that I myself would not have necessarily thought of. So >>I agree. And we're gonna get to set, cuz advice is one of the, the main things that our audience is gonna hear. We have Hillary Ashton, you'll see from TETA there, Reynolds joins us from honeycomb, Stephanie Curry from NetApp and Sue Paris from Jefferson Frank. And the topics that we dig into are first and foremost, diversity equity and inclusion. That is a topic that is incredibly important to every organization. And some of the things Danielle that our audiences shared were really interesting to me. One of the things that I saw from a thematic perspective over and over was that like D Reynolds was talking about the importance of companies and hiring managers and how they need to be intentional with de and I initiatives. And that intention was a, a, a common thing that we heard. I'm curious what your thoughts are about that, that we heard about being intentional working intentionally to deliver a more holistic pool of candidates where de I is concerned. What are your, what were some of the things that stuck out to you? >>Absolutely. I think each one of us is working inside of organizations where in the last, you know, five to 10 years, there's been a, you know, a strong push in this direction, mostly because we've really seen, um, first and foremost, by being intentional, that you can change the, uh, the way your organization looks. Um, but also just that, you know, without being intentional, um, there was just a lot of, you know, outcomes and situations that maybe weren't great for, um, you know, a healthy, um, and productive environment, uh, working environment. And so, you know, a lot of these companies have made a big investments and put forth big initiatives that I think all of us are involved in. And so we're really excited to get out here and talk about it and talk about, especially as these are all partnerships that we have, how, you know, these align with our values. So >>Yeah, that, that value alignment mm-hmm <affirmative> that you bring up is another thing that we heard consistently with each of the partners, there's a cultural alignment, there's a customer obsession alignment that they have with AWS. There's a D E and I alignment that they have. And I, I think everybody also kind of agreed Stephanie Curry talked about, you know, it's really important, um, for diversity on it, on, on impacting performance, highly performant teams are teams that are more diverse. I think we heard that kind of echoed throughout the women that we talked to in >>This. Absolutely. And I absolutely, and I definitely even feel that, uh, with their studies out there that tell you that you make better products, if you have all of the right input and you're getting all many different perspectives, but not just that, but I can, I can personally see it in the performing teams, not just my team, but also, you know, the teams that I work alongside. Um, arguably some of the other business folks have done a really great job of bringing more women into their organization, bringing more underrepresented minorities. Tech is a little bit behind, but we're trying really hard to bring that forward as well to in technical roles. Um, but you can just see the difference in the outcomes. Uh, at least I personally can just in the adjacent teams of mine. >>That's awesome. We talked also quite a bit during this episode about attracting women and underrepresented, um, groups and retaining them. That retention piece is really key. What were some of the things that stuck out to you that, um, you know, some of the guests talked about in terms of retention? >>Yeah. I think especially, uh, speaking with Hillary and hearing how, uh, Teradata is thinking about different ways to make hybrid work work for everybody. I think that is definitely when I talk to women interested in joining AWS, oftentimes that might be one of the first, uh, concerns that they have. Like, am I going to be able to, you know, go pick my kid up at four o'clock at the bus, or am I going to be able to, you know, be at my kids' conf you know, conference or even just, you know, have enough work life balance that I can, um, you know, do the things that I wanna do outside of work, uh, beyond children and family. So these are all very important, um, and questions that especially women come and ask, but also, um, you know, it kind of is a, is a bellwether for, is this gonna be a company that allows me to bring my whole self to work? And then I'm also gonna be able to have that balance that I need need. So I think that was something that is, uh, changing a lot. And many people are thinking about work a lot differently. >>Absolutely. The pandemic not only changed how we think about work, you know, initially it was, do I work from home or do I live at work? And that was legitimately a challenge that all of us faced for a long time period, but we're seeing the hybrid model. We're seeing more companies be open to embracing that and allowing people to have more of that balance, which at the end of the day, it's so much better for product development for the customers, as you talked about there's, it's a win-win. >>Absolutely. And, you know, definitely the first few months of it was very hard to find that separation to be able to put up boundaries. Um, but I think at least I personally have been able to find the way to do it. And I hope that, you know, everyone is getting that space to be able to put those boundaries up to effectively have a harmonious, you know, work life where you can still be at home most of the time, but also, um, you know, have that cutoff point of the day or at least have that separate space that you can feel that you're able to separate the two. >>Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of that from a work life balance perspective leads into one of the next topics that we covered in detail with, and that's mentors and sponsors the differences between them recommendations from, uh, the women on the panel about how to combat imposter syndrome, but also how to leverage mentors and sponsors throughout your career. One of the things that, that Hillary said that I thought was fantastic, advice were mentors and sponsors are concerned is, is be selective in picking your bosses. We often see people, especially younger folks, not necessarily younger folks. I shouldn't say that that are attracted to a company it's brand maybe, and think more about that than they do the boss or bosses that can help guide them along the way. But I thought that was really poignant advice that Hillary provided something that I'm gonna take into consideration myself. >>Yeah. And I honestly hadn't thought about that, but as I reflect through my own career, I can see how I've had particular managers who have had a major impact on helping me, um, with my career. But, you know, if you don't have the ability to do that, or maybe that's not a luxury that you have, I think even if you're able to, you know, find a mentor for a period of time or, um, you know, just, just enable for you to be able to get from say a point a to point B just for a temporary period. Um, just so you can grow into your next role, have a, have a particular outcome that you wanna drive, have a particular goal in mind find that person who's been there and done that and can really help you get through. If you don't have the luxury of picking your manager mentor, who can help you get to the next step. >>Exactly. That, that I thought that advice was brilliant and something that I hadn't really considered either. We also talked with several of the women about imposter syndrome. You know, that's something that everybody, I think, regardless of gender of your background, everybody feels that at some point. So I think one of the nice things that we do in this episode is sort of identify, yes, imposter syndrome is real. This is, this is how it happened to me. This is I navigated around or got over it. I think there's some great advice there for the audience to glean as well about how to dial down the imposter syndrome that they might be feeling. >>Absolutely. And I think the key there is just acknowledging it. Um, but also just hearing all the different techniques on, on how folks have dealt with it because everybody does, um, you know, even some of the smartest, most confident men I've, I've met in, uh, industry still talk to me about how they have it and I'm shocked by it oftentimes, but, um, it is very common and hopefully we, we talk about some good techniques to, to deal with that. >>I think we do, you know, one of the things that when we were asking the, our audience, our guests about advice, what would they tell their younger selves? What would they tell young women or underrepresented groups in terms of becoming interested in stem and in tech and everybody sort of agreed on me, don't be afraid to raise your hand and ask questions. Um, show vulnerabilities, not just as the employee, but even from a leadership perspective, show that as a leader, I, I don't have all the answers. There are questions that I have. I think that goes a long way to reducing the imposter syndrome that most of us have faced at some point in our lives. And that's just, don't be afraid to ask questions. You never know, oh, how can people have the same question sitting in the room? >>Well, and also, you know, for folks who've been in industry for 20, 25 years, I think we can just say that, you know, it's a, it's a marathon, it's not a sprint and you're always going to, um, have new things to learn and you can spend, you know, back to, we talked about the zing and zagging through careers, um, where, you know, we'll have different experiences. Um, all of that kind of comes through just, you know, being curious and wanting to continue to learn. So yes, asking questions and being vulnerable and being able to say, I don't know all the answers, but I wanna learn is a key thing, uh, especially culturally at AWS, but I'm sure with all of these companies as well, >>Definitely I think it sounded like it was really ingrained in their culture. And another thing too, that we also talked about is the word, no, doesn't always mean a dead end. It can often mean not right now or may, maybe this isn't the right opportunity at this time. I think that's another important thing that the audience is gonna learn is that, you know, failure is not necessarily a bad F word. If you turn it into opportunity, no isn't necessarily the end of the road. It can be an opener to a different door. And I, I thought that was a really positive message that our guests, um, had to share with the, the audience. >>Yeah, totally. I can, I can say I had a, a mentor of mine, um, a very, uh, strong woman who told me, you know, your career is going to have lots of ebbs and flows and that's natural. And you know that when you say that, not right now, um, that's a perfect example of maybe there's an ebb where it might not be the right time for you now, but something to consider in the future. But also don't be afraid to say yes, when you can. <laugh> >>Exactly. Danielle, it's been a pleasure filming this episode with you and the great female leaders that we have on. I'm excited for the audience to be able to learn from Hillary Vera, Stephanie Sue, and you so much valuable content in here. We hope you enjoy this partner showcase season one, episode three, Danielle, thanks so much for helping >>Us with it's been a blast. I really appreciate it >>All audience. We wanna enjoy this. Enjoy the episode.

>>Hello, everyone. Welcome to the cubes presentation of the 80, but startup showcases MarTech is the focus. And this is all about the emerging cloud scale customer experience. This is season two, episode three of the ongoing series covering the exciting, fast growing startups from the cloud AWS ecosystem to talk about the future and what's available now, where are the actions? I'm your host John fur. Today. We joined by Cub alumni, Jerry Chen partner at Greylock ventures. Jerry. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on, >>John. Thanks for having me back. I appreciate you welcome there for season two. Uh, as a, as a guest star, >><laugh>, you know, Hey, you know, season two, it's not a one and done it's continued coverage. We, we got the episodic, uh, cube flicks model going >>Here. Well, you know, congratulations, the, the coverage on this ecosystem around AWS has been impressive, right? I think you and I have talked a long time about AWS and the ecosystem building. It just continues to grow. And so the coverage you did last season, all the events of this season is, is pretty amazing from the data security to now marketing. So it's, it's great to >>Watch. And 12 years now, the cube been running. I remember 2013, when we first met you in the cube, we just left VMware just getting into the venture business. And we were just riffing the next 80. No one really kind of knew how big it would be. Um, but we were kinda riffing on. We kind of had a sense now it's happening. So now you start to see every vertical kind of explode with the right digital transformation and disruption where you see new incumbents. I mean, new Newton brands get replaced the incumbent old guard. And now in MarTech, it's ripe for, for disruption because web two has gone on to web 2.5, 3, 4, 5, um, cookies are going away. You've got more governance and privacy challenges. There's a slew of kind of ad tech baggage, but yet lots of new data opportunities. Jerry, this is a huge, uh, thing. What's your take on this whole MarTech cloud scale, uh, >>Market? I, I think, I think to your point, John, that first the trends are correct and the bad and the good or good old days, the battle days MarTech is really about your webpage. And then email right there. There's, there's the emails, the only channel and the webpage was only real estate and technology to care about fast forward, you know, 10 years you have webpages, mobile apps, VR experiences, car experiences, your, your, your Alexa home experiences. Let's not even get to web three web 18, whatever it is. Plus you got text messages, WhatsApp, messenger, email, still great, et cetera. So I think what we've seen is both, um, explosion and data, uh, explosion of channel. So sources of data have increases and the fruits of the data where you can reach your customers from text, email, phone calls, etcetera have exploded too. So the previous generation created big company responses, Equa, you know, that exact target that got acquired by Oracle or, or, um, Salesforce, and then companies like, um, you know, MailChimp that got acquired as well, but into it, you're seeing a new generation companies for this new stack. So I, I think it's exciting. >>Yeah. And you mentioned all those things about the different channels and stuff, but the key point is now the generation shifts going on, not just technical generation, uh, and platform and tools, it's the people they're younger. They don't do email. They have, you know, proton mail accounts, zillion Gmail accounts, just to get the freebie. Um, they're like, they're, they'll do subscriptions, but not a lot. So the generational piece on the human side is huge. Okay. And then you got the standards, bodies thrown away, things like cookies. Sure. So all this is makes it for a complicated, messy situation. Um, so out of this has to come a billion dollar startup in my mind, >>I, I think multiple billion dollars, but I think you're right in the sense that how we want engage with the company branch, either consumer brands or business brands, no one wants to pick a phone anymore. Right? Everybody wants to either chat or DM people on Twitter. So number one, the, the way we engage is different, both, um, where both, how like chat or phone, but where like mobile device, but also when it's the moment when we need to talk to a company or brand be it at the store, um, when I'm shopping in real life or in my car or at the airport, like we want to reach the brands, the brands wanna reach us at the point of decision, the point of support, the point of contact. And then you, you layer upon that the, the playing field, John of privacy security, right? All these data silos in the cloud, the, the, the, the game has changed and become even more complicated with the startup. So the startups are gonna win. Will do, you know, the collect, all the data, make us secure in private, but then reach your customers when and where they want and how they want it. >>So I gotta ask you, because you had a great podcast just this week, published and snowflake had their event going on the data cloud, there's a new kind of SAS platform vibe going on. You're starting to see it play out. Uh, and one of the things I, I noticed on your podcast with the president of Hashi Corp, who was on people should listen to that podcast. It's on gray matter, which is the Greylocks podcast, uh, plug for you guys. He mentioned he mentions the open source dynamic, right? Sure. And, and I like what he, things, he said, he said, software business has changed forever. It's my words. Now he said infrastructure, but I'm saying software in general, more broader infrastructure and software as a category is all open source. One game over no debate. Right. You agree? >>I, I think you said infrastructure specifically starts at open source, but I would say all open source is one more or less because open source is in every bit of software. Right? And so from your operating system to your car, to your mobile phone, open source, not necessarily as a business model or, or, or whatever, we can talk about that. But open source as a way to build software distribute, software consume software has one, right? It is everywhere. So regardless how you make money on it, how you build software, an open source community ha has >>One. Okay. So let's just agree. That's cool. I agree with that. Let's take it to the next level. I'm a company starting a company to sell to big companies who pay. I gotta have a proprietary advantage. There's gotta be a way. And there is, I know you've talked about it, but I have my opinion. There is needs to be a way to be proprietary in a way that allows for that growth, whether it's integration, it's not gonna be on software license or maybe support or new open source model. But how does startups in the MarTech this area in general, when they disrupt or change the category, they gotta get value creation going. What's your take on, on building. >>You can still build proprietary software on top of open source, right? So there's many companies out there, um, you know, in a company called rock set, they've heavily open source technology like Rock's DB under the hood, but they're running a cloud database. That's proprietary snowflake. You talk about them today. You know, it's not open source technology company, but they use open source software. I'm sure in the hoods, but then there's open source companies, data break. So let's not confus the two, you can still build proprietary software. There's just components of open source, wherever we go. So number one is you can still build proprietary IP. Number two, you can get proprietary data sources, right? So I think increasingly you're seeing companies fight. I call this systems intelligence, right, by getting proprietary data, to train your algorithms, to train your recommendations, to train your applications, you can still collect data, um, that other competitors don't have. >>And then it can use the data differently, right? The system of intelligence. And then when you apply the system intelligence to the end user, you can create value, right? And ultimately, especially marketing tech, the highest level, what we call the system of engagement, right? If, if the chat bot the mobile UI, the phone, the voice app, etcetera, if you own the system of engagement, be a slack, or be it, the operating system for a phone, you can also win. So still multiple levels to play John in multiple ways to build proprietary advantage. Um, just gotta own system record. Yeah. System intelligence, system engagement. Easy, right? Yeah. >>Oh, so easy. Well, the good news is the cloud scale and the CapEx funded there. I mean, look at Amazon, they've got a ton of open storage. You mentioned snowflake, but they're getting a proprietary value. P so I need to ask you MarTech in particular, that means it's a data business, which you, you pointed out and we agree. MarTech will be about the data of the workflows. How do you get those workflows what's changing and how these companies are gonna be building? What's your take on it? Because it's gonna be one of those things where it might be the innovation on a source of data, or how you handle two parties, ex handling encrypted data sets. I don't know. Maybe it's a special encryption tool, so we don't know what it is. What's your what's, what's your outlook on this area? >>I, I, I think that last point just said is super interesting, super genius. It's integration or multiple data sources. So I think either one, if it's a data business, do you have proprietary data? Um, one number two with the data you do have proprietary, not how do you enrich the data and do you enrich the data with, uh, a public data set or a party data set? So this could be cookies. It could be done in Brad street or zoom info information. How do you enrich the data? Number three, do you have machine learning models or some other IP that once you collected the data, enriched the data, you know, what do you do with the data? And then number four is once you have, um, you know, that model of the data, the customer or the business, what do you deal with it? Do you email, do you do a tax? >>Do you do a campaign? Do you upsell? Do you change the price dynamically in our customers? Do you serve a new content on your website? So I think that workflow to your point is you can start from the same place, what to do with the data in between and all the, on the out the side of this, this pipeline is where a MarTech company can have then. So like I said before, it was a website to an email go to website. You know, we have a cookie fill out a form. Yeah. I send you an email later. I think now you, you can't just do a website to email, it's a website plus mobile apps, plus, you know, in real world interaction to text message, chat, phone, call Twitter, a whatever, you know, it's >>Like, it's like, they're playing checkers in web two and you're talking 3d chess. <laugh>, I mean, there's a level, there's a huge gap between what's coming. And this is kind of interesting because now you mentioned, you know, uh, machine learning and data, and AI is gonna factor into all this. You mentioned, uh, you know, rock set. One of your portfolios has under the hood, you know, open source and then use proprietary data and cloud. Okay. That's a configuration, that's an architecture, right? So architecture will be important in terms of how companies posture in this market, cuz MarTech is ripe for innovation because it's based on these old technologies, but there's tons of workflows, but you gotta have the data. Right. And so if I have the best journey map from a client that goes to a website, but then they go and they do something in the organic or somewhere else. If I don't have that, what good is it? It's like a blind spot. >>Correct. So I think you're seeing folks with the data BS, snowflake or data bricks, or an Amazon that S three say, Hey, come to my data cloud. Right. Which, you know, Snowflake's advertising, Amazon will say the data cloud is S3 because all your data exists there anyway. So you just, you know, live on S3 data. Bricks will say, S3 is great, but only use Amazon tools use data bricks. Right. And then, but on top of that, but then you had our SaaS companies like Oracle, Salesforce, whoever, and say, you know, use our qua Marketo, exact target, you know, application as a system record. And so I think you're gonna have a battle between, do I just work my data in S3 or where my data exists or gonna work my data, some other application, like a Marketo Ella cloud Z target, um, or, you know, it could be a Twilio segment, right. Was combination. So you'll have this battle between these, these, these giants in the cloud, easy, the castles, right. Versus, uh, the, the, the, the contenders or the, or the challengers as we call >>'em. Well, great. Always chat with the other. We always talk about castles in the cloud, which is your work that you guys put out, just an update on. So check out greylock.com. They have castles on the cloud, which is a great thesis on and a map by the way ecosystem. So you guys do a really good job props to Jerry and the team over at Greylock. Um, okay. Now I gotta ask kind of like the VC private equity sure. Market question, you know, evaluations. Uh, first of all, I think it's a great time to do a startup. So it's a good time to be in the VC business. I think the next two years, you're gonna find some nice gems, but also you gotta have that cleansing period. You got a lot of overvaluation. So what happened with the markets? So there's gonna be a lot of M and a. So the question is what are some of the things that you see as challenges for product teams in particular that might have that killer answer in MarTech, or might not have the runway if there's no cash, um, how do people partner in this modern era, cuz scale's a big deal, right? Mm-hmm <affirmative> you can measure everything. So you get the combination of a, a new kind of M and a market coming, a potential growth market for the right solution. Again, value's gotta be be there. What's your take on this market? >>I, I, I think you're right. Either you need runway, so cash to make it through, through this next, you know, two, three years, whatever you think the market Turmo is or two, you need scale, right? So if you're at a company of scale and you have enough data, you can probably succeed on your own. If not, if you're kind of in between or early to your point, either one focus, a narrower wedge, John, just like we say, just reduce the surface area. And next two years focus on solving one problem. Very, very well, or number two in this MarTech space, especially there's a lot of partnership and integration opportunities to create a complete solution together, to compete against kind of the incumbents. Right? So I think they're folks with the data, they're folks doing data, privacy, security, they're post focusing their workflow or marketing workflows. You're gonna see either one, um, some M and a, but I definitely can see a lot of Coopers in partnership. And so in the past, maybe you would say, I'm just raise another a hundred million dollars and do what you're doing today. You might say, look, instead of raising more money let's partner together or, or merge or find a solution. So I think people are gonna get creative. Yeah. Like said scarcity often is good. Yeah. I think forces a lot more focus and a lot more creativity. >>Yeah. That's a great point. I'm glad you brought that up up. Cause I didn't think you were gonna go there. I was gonna ask that biz dev activity is going to be really fundamental because runway combined with the fact that, Hey, you know, if you know, get real or you're gonna go under is a real issue. So now people become friends. They're like, okay, if we partner, um, it's clearly a good way to go if you can get there. So what advice would you give companies? Um, even most experienced, uh, founders and operators. This is a different market, right? It's a different kind of velocity, obviously architectural data. You mentioned some of those key things. What's the posture to partner. What's your advice? What's the combat man manual to kind of compete in this new biz dev world where some it's a make or break time, either get the funding, get the customers, which is how you get funding or you get a biz dev deal where you combine forces, uh, go to market together or not. What's your advice? >>I, I think that the combat manual is either you're partnering for one or two things, either one technology or two customers or sometimes both. So it would say which partnerships, youre doing for technology EG solution completers. Like you have, you know, this puzzle piece, I have this puzzle piece data and data privacy and let's work together. Um, or number two is like, who can help you with customers? And that's either a, I, they can be channel for you or, or vice versa or can share customers and you can actually go to market together and find customers jointly. So ideally you're partner for one, if not the other, sometimes both. And just figure out where in your life cycle do you need? Um, friends. >>Yeah. Great. My final question, Jerry, first of all, thanks for coming on and sharing your in insight as usual. Always. Awesome final question for the folks watching that are gonna be partnering and buying product and services from these startups. Um, there's a select few great ones here and obviously every other episode as well, and you've got a bunch you're investing in this, it's actually a good market for the ones that are lean companies that are lean and mean have value. And the cloud scale does provide that. So a lot of companies are getting it right, they're gonna break through. So they're clearly gonna be getting customers the buyer side, how should they be looking through the lens right now and looking at companies, what should they look for? Um, and they like to take chances with seeing that. So it's not so much, they gotta be vetted, but you know, how do they know the winners from the pretenders? >>You know, I, I think the customers are always smart. I think in the, in the, in the past in market market tech, especially they often had a budget to experiment with. I think you're looking now the customers, the buyer technologies are looking for a hard ROI, like a return on investment. And before think they might experiment more, but now they're saying, Hey, are you gonna help me save money or increase revenue or some hardcore metric that they care about? So I think, um, the startups that actually have a strong ROI, like save money or increased revenue and can like point empirically how they do that will, will, you know, rise to the top of, of the MarTech landscape. And customers will see that they're they're, the customers are smart, right? They're savvy buyers. They, they, they, they, they can smell good from bad and they're gonna see the strong >>ROI. Yeah. And the other thing too, I like to point out, I'd love to get your reaction real quick is a lot of the companies have DNA, any open source or they have some community track record where communities now, part of the vetting. I mean, are they real good people? >>Yeah. I, I think open stores, like you said, in the community in general, like especially all these communities that move on slack or discord or something else. Right. I think for sure, just going through all those forums, slack communities or discord communities, you can see what's a good product versus next versus bad. Don't go to like the other sites. These communities would tell you who's working. >>Well, we got a discord channel on the cube now had 14,000 members. Now it's down to six, losing people left and right. We need a moderator, um, to get on. If you know anyone on discord, anyone watching wants to volunteer to be the cube discord, moderator. Uh, we could use some help there. Love discord. Uh, Jerry. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. What's new at Greylock. What's some of the things happening. Give a quick plug for the firm. When you guys working on, I know there's been some cool things happening, new investments, people moving. >>Yeah. Look we're we're Greylock partners, seed series a firm. I focus at enterprise software. I have a team with me that also does consumer investing as well as crypto investing like all firms. So, but we're we're seed series a occasionally later stage growth. So if you're interested, uh, FA me@jkontwitterorjgreylock.com. Thank you, John. >>Great stuff, Jerry. Thanks for coming on. This is the Cube's presentation of the, a startup showcase. MarTech is the series this time, emerging cloud scale customer experience where the integration and the data matters. This is season two, episode three of the ongoing series covering the hottest cloud startups from the ADWS ecosystem. Um, John farrier, thanks for watching.

>>The cube presents HPE discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >>Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Cube's day one coverage of HPE discover 22 live from the Venetian in Las Vegas. I got a power panel here, Lisa Martin, with Dave Valante, John furrier, Holger Mueller also joins us. We are gonna wrap this, like you've never seen a rap before guys. Lot of momentum today, lot, lot of excitement, about 8,000 or so customers, partners, HPE leaders here. Holger. Let's go ahead and start with you. What are some of the things that you heard felt saw observed today on day one? >>Yeah, it's great to be back in person. Right? 8,000 people events are rare. Uh, I'm not sure. Have you been to more than 8,000? <laugh> yeah, yeah. Okay. This year, this year. I mean, historically, yes, but, um, >>Snowflake was 10. Yeah. >>So, oh, wow. Okay. So 8,000 was my, >>Cisco was, they said 15, >>But is my, my 8,000, my record, I let us down with 7,000 kind of like, but it's in the Florida swarm. It's not nicely. Like, and there's >>Usually what SFI, there's usually >>20, 20, 30, 40, 50. I remember 50 in the nineties. Right. That was a different time. But yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Interesting what people do and it depends how much time there is to come. Right. And know that it happens. Right. But yeah, no, I think it's interesting. We, we had a good two analyst track today. Um, interesting. Like HPE is kind of like back not being your grandfather's HPE to a certain point. One of the key stats. I know Dave always for the stats, right. Is what I found really interesting that over two third of GreenLake revenue is software and services. Now a love to know how much of that services, how much of that software. But I mean, I, I, I, provocate some, one to ones, the HP executives saying, Hey, you're a hardware company. Right. And they didn't even come back. Right. But Antonio said, no, two thirds is, uh, software and services. Right. That's interesting. They passed the one exabyte, uh, being managed, uh, as a, as a hallmark. Right. I was surprised only 120,000 users if I had to remember the number. Right, right. So that doesn't seem a terrible high amount of number of users. Right. So, but that's, that's, that's promising. >>So what software is in there, cuz it's gotta be mostly services. >>Right? Well it's the 70 plus cloud services, right. That everybody's talking about where the added eight of them shockingly back up and recovery, I thought that was done at launch. Right. >>Still who >>Keep recycling storage and you back. But now it's real. Yeah. >>But the company who knows the enterprise, right. HPE, what I've been doing before with no backup and recovery GreenLake. So that was kind of like, okay, we really want to do this now and nearly, and then say like, oh, by the way, we've been doing this all the time. Yeah. >>Oh, what's your take on the installed base of HP. We had that conversation, the, uh, kickoff or on who's their target, what's the target audience environment look like. It certainly is changing. Right? If it's software and services, GreenLake is resonating. Yeah. Um, ecosystems responding. What's their customers cuz managed services are up too Kubernetes, all the managed services what's what's it like what's their it transformation base look like >>Much of it is of course install base, right? The trusted 20, 30 plus year old HP customer. Who's keeping doing stuff of HP. Right. And call it GreenLake. They've been for so many name changes. It doesn't really matter. And it's kind of like nice that you get the consume pain only what you consume. Right. I get the cloud broad to me then the general markets, of course, people who still need to run stuff on premises. Right. And there's three reasons of doing this performance, right. Because we know the speed of light is relative. If you're in the Southern hemisphere and even your email servers in Northern hemisphere, it takes a moment for your email to arrive. It's a very different user experience. Um, local legislation for data, residency privacy. And then, I mean Charles Phillips who we all know, right. Former president of uh, info nicely always said, Hey, if the CIOs over 50, I don't have to sell qu. Right. So there is not invented. I'm not gonna do cloud here. And now I've kind of like clouded with something like HP GreenLake. That's the customers. And then of course procurement is a big friend, right? Yeah. Because when you do hardware refresh, right. You have to have two or three competitors who are the two or three competitors left. Right. There's Dell. Yeah. And then maybe Lenovo. Right? So, so like a >>Little bit channels, the strength, the procurement physicians of strength, of course install base question. Do you think they have a Microsoft opportunity where, what 365 was Microsoft had office before 365, but they brought in the cloud and then everything changed. Does HP have that same opportunity with kind of the GreenLake, you know, model with their existing stuff. >>It has a GreenLake opportunity, but there's not much software left. It's a very different situation like Microsoft. Right? So, uh, which green, which HP could bring along to say, now run it with us better in the cloud because they've been selling much of it. Most of it, of their software portfolio, which they bought as an HP in the past. Right. So I don't see that happening so much, but GreenLake as a platform itself course interesting because enterprise need a modern container based platform. >>I want, I want to double click on this a little bit because the way I see it is HP is going to its installed base. I think you guys are right on say, this is how we're doing business now. Yeah. You know, come on along. But my sense is, some customers don't want to do the consumption model. There are actually some customers that say, Hey, of course I got, I don't have a cash port problem. I wanna pay for it up front and leave me alone. >>I've been doing this since 50 years. Nice. As I changed it, now <laugh> two know >>Money's wants to do it. And I don't wanna rent because rental's more expensive and blah, blah, blah. So do you see that in the customer base that, that some are pushing back? >>Of course, look, I have a German accent, right? So I go there regularly and uh, the Germans are like worried about doing anything in the cloud. And if you go to a board in Germany and say, Hey, we can pay our usual hardware, refresh, CapEx as usual, or should we bug consumption? And they might know what we are running. <laugh> so not whole, no offense against the Germans out. The German parts are there, but many of them will say, Hey, so this is change with COVID. Right. Which is super interesting. Right? So the, the traditional boards non-technical have been hearing about this cloud variable cost OPEX to CapEx and all of a sudden there's so much CapEx, right. Office buildings, which are not being used truck fleets. So there's a whole new sensitivity by traditional non-technical boards towards CapEx, which now the light bulb went on and say, oh, that's the cloud thing about also. So we have to find a way to get our cost structure, to ramp up and ramp down as our business might be ramping up through COVID through now inflation fears, recession, fears, and so on. >>So, okay. HP's, HP's made the statement that anything you can do in the cloud you can do in GreenLake. Yes. And I've said you can't run on snowflake. You can't run Mongo Atlas, you can't run data bricks, but that's okay. That's fine. Let's be, I think they're talking about, there's >>A short list of things. I think they're talking about the, their >>Stuff, their, >>The operating experience. So we've got single sign on through a URL, right. Uh, you've got, you know, some level of consistency in terms of policy. It's unclear exactly what that is. You've got storage backup. Dr. What, some other services, seven other services. If you had to sort of take your best guess as to where HP is now and peg it toward where Amazon was in which year? >>20 14, 20 14. >>Yeah. Where they had their first conference or the second we invent here with 3000 people and they were thinking, Hey, we're big. Yeah. >>Yeah. And I think GreenLake is the building blocks. So they quite that's the >>Building. Right? I mean similar. >>Okay. Well, I mean they had E C, Q and S3 and SQS, right. That was the core. And then the rest of those services were, I mean, base stock was one of that first came in behind and >>In fairness, the industry has advanced since then, Kubernetes is further along. And so HPE can take advantage of that. But in terms of just the basic platform, I, I would agree. I think it's >>Well, I mean, I think, I mean the software, question's a big one. I wanna bring up because the question is, is that software is getting the world. Hardware is really software scales, everything, data, the edge story. I love their story. I think HP story is wonderful Aruba, you know, hybrid cloud, good story, edge edge. But if you look under the covers, it's weak, right? It's like, it's not software. They don't have enough software juice, but the ecosystem opportunity to me is where you plug and play. So HP knows that game. But if you look historically over the past 25 years, HP now HPE, they understand plug and play interoperability. So the question is, can they thread the needle >>Right. >>Between filling the gaps on the software? Yeah. With partners, >>Can they get the partners? Right. And which have been long, long time. Right. For a long time, HP has been the number one platform under ICP, right? Same thing. You get certified for running this. Right. I know from my own history, uh, I joined Oracle last century and the big thing was, let's get your eBusiness suite certified on HP. Right? Like as if somebody would buy H Oracle work for them, right. This 20 years ago, server >>The original exit data was HP. Oracle. >>Exactly. Exactly. So there's this thinking that's there. But I think the key thing is we know that all modern forget about the hardware form in the platforms, right? All modern software has to move to containers and snowflake runs in containers. You mentioned that, right? Yeah. If customers force snowflake and HPE to the table, right, there will be a way to make it work. Right. And which will help HPE to be the partner open part will bring the software. >>I, I think it's, I think that's an opportunity because that changes the game and agility and speed. If HP plays their differentiation, right. Which we asked on their opening segment, what's their differentiation. They got size scale channel, >>What to the enterprise. And then the big benefit is this workload portability thing. Right? You understand what is run in the public cloud? I need to run it local. For whatever reason, performance, local residency of data. I can move that. There that's the big benefit to the ISVs, the sales vendors as well. >>But they have to have a stronger data platform story in my that's right. Opinion. I mean, you can run Oracle and HPE, but there's no reason they shouldn't be able to do a deal with, with snowflake. I mean, we saw it with Dell. Yep. We saw it with, with, with pure and I, if our HPE I'd be saying, Hey, because the way the snowflake deal worked, you probably know this is your reading data into the cloud. The compute actually occurs in the cloud viral HB going snowflake saying we can separate compute and storage. Right. And we have GreenLake. We have on demand. Why don't we run the compute on-prem and make it a full class, first class citizen, right. For all of our customers data. And that would be really innovative. And I think Mongo would be another, they've got OnPrem. >>And the question is, how many, how many snowflake customers are telling snowflake? Can I run you on premise? And how much defo open years will they hear from that? Right? This is >>Why would they deal Dell? That >>Deal though, with that, they did a deal. >>I think they did that deal because the customer came to them and said, you don't exactly that deal. We're gonna spend the >>Snowflake >>Customers think crazy things happen, right? Even, even put an Oracle database in a Microsoft Azure data center, right. Would off who, what as >>Possible snowflake, >>Oracle. So on, Aw, the >>Snow, the snowflakes in the world have to make a decision. Dave on, is it all snowflake all the time? Because what the reality is, and I think, again, this comes back down to the, the track that HP could go up or down is gonna be about software. Open source is now the software industry. There's no such thing as proprietary software, in my opinion, relatively speaking, cloud scale and integrated, integrated integration software is proprietary. The workflows are proprietary. So if they can get that right with the partners, I would focus on that. I think they can tap open source, look at Amazon with open source. They sucked it up and they integrated it in. No, no. So integration is the deal, not >>Software first, but Snowflake's made the call. You were there, Lisa. They basically saying it's we have, you have to be in snowflake in order to get the governance and the scalability, all that other wonderful stuff. Oh, but we we'll do Apache iceberg. We'll we'll open it up. We'll do Python. Yeah. >>But you can't do it data clean room unless you are in snowflake. Exactly. Snowflake on snowflake. >>Exactly. >>But got it. Isn't that? What you heard from AWS all the time till they came out outposts, right? I mean, snowflake is a market leader for what they're doing. Right. So that they want to change their platform. I mean, kudos to them. They don't need to change the platform. They will be the last to change their platform to a ne to anything on premises. Right. But I think the trend already shows that it's going that way. >>Well, if you look at outpost is an signal, Dave, the success of outpost launched what four years ago, they announced it. >>What >>EKS is beating, what outpost is doing. Outpost is there. There's not a lot of buzz and talk to the insiders and the open source community, uh, EKS and containers. To your point mm-hmm <affirmative> is moving faster on, I won't say commodity hardware, but like could be white box or HP, Dell, whatever it's gonna be that scale differentiation and the edge story is, is a good one. And I think with what we're seeing in the market now it's the industrial edge. The back office was gen one cloud back office data center. Now it's hybrid. The focus will be industrial edge machine learning and AI, and they have it here. And there's some, some early conversations with, uh, I heard it from, uh, this morning, you guys interviewed, uh, uh, John Schultz, right? With the world economic 4k birth Butterfield. She was amazing. And then you had Justin bring up a Hoar, bring up quantum. Yes. That is a differentiator. >>HP. >>Yes. Yeah. You, they have the computing shops. They had the R and D can they bring it to the table >>As, as HPC, right. To what they Schultz for of uh, the frontier system. Right. So very impressed. >>So the ecosystem is the key for them is because that's how they're gonna fill the gaps. They can't, they can't only, >>They could, they could high HPC edge piece. I wouldn't count 'em out of that game yet. If you co-locate a box, I'll use the word box, particularly at a telco tower. That's a data center. Yep. Right. If done properly. Yep. So, you know, what outpost was supposed to do actually is a hybrid opportunity. Aruba >>Gives them a unique, >>But the key thing is right. It's a yin and yang, right? It's the ecosystem it's partners to bring those software workload. Absolutely. Right. But HPE has to keep the platform attractive enough. Right. And the key thing there is that you have this workload capability thing that you can bring things, which you've built yourself. I mean, look at the telcos right. Network function, visualization, thousands of man, years into these projects. Right. So if I can't bring it to your edge box, no, I'm not trying to get to your Xbox. Right. >>Hold I gotta ask you since in the Dave too, since you guys both here and Lisa, you know, I said on the opening, they have serious customers and those customers have serious problems, cyber security, ransomware. So yeah. I teach transformation now. Industrial transformation machine learning, check, check, check. Oh, sounds good. But at the end of the day, their customers have some serious problems. Right? Cyber, this is, this is high stakes poker. Yeah. What do you think HP's position for in the security? You mentioned containers, you got all this stuff, you got open source, supply chain, you have to left supply chain issues. What is their position with security? Cuz that's the big one. >>I, I think they have to have a mature attitude that customers expect from HPE. Right? I don't have to educate HP on security. So they have to have the partner offerings again. We're back at the ecosystem to have what probably you have. So bring your own security apart from what they have to have out of the box to do business with them. This is why the shocker this morning was back up in recovery coming. <laugh> it's kind like important for that. Right? Well >>That's, that's, that's more ransomware and the >>More skeleton skeletons in the closet there, which customers should check of course. But I think the expectations HP understands that and brings it along either from partner or natively. >>I, I think it's, I think it's services. I think point next is the point of integration for their security. That's why two thirds is software and services. A lot of that is services, right? You know, you need security, we'll help you get there. We people trust HP >>Here, but we have nothing against point next or any professional service. They're all hardworking. But if I will have to rely on humans for my cyber security strategy on a daily level, I'm getting gray hair and I little gray hair >>Red. Okay. I that's, >>But >>I think, but I do think that's the camera strategy. I mean, I'm sure there's a lot of that stuff that's beginning to be designed in, but I, my guess is a lot of it is services. >>Well, you got the Aruba. Part of the booth was packed. Aruba's there. You mentioned that earlier. Is that good enough? Because the word zero trust is kicked around a lot. On one hand, on the other hand, other conversations, it's all about trust. So supply chain and software is trusting trust, trust and verified. So you got this whole mentality of perimeter gone mentality. It's zero trust. And if you've got software trust, interesting thoughts there, how do you reconcile zero trust? And then I need trust. What's what's you? What are you seeing older on that? Because I ask people all the time, they're like, uh, I'm zero trust or is it trust? >>Yeah. The middle ground. Right? Trusted. The meantime people are man manipulating what's happening in your runtime containers. Right? So, uh, drift control is a new password there that you check what's in your runtime containers, which supposedly impenetrable, but people finding ways to hack them. So we'll see this cat and mouse game going on all the time. Yeah. Yeah. There's always gonna be the need for being in a secure, good environment from that perspective. Absolutely. But the key is edge has to be more than Aruba, right? If yeah. HV goes away and says, oh yeah, we can manage your edge with our Aruba devices. That's not enough. It's the virtual probability. And you said the important thing before it's about the data, right? Because the dirty secret of containers is yeah, I move the code, but what enterprise code works without data, right? You can't say as enterprise, okay, we're done for the day check tomorrow. We didn't persist your data, auditor customer. We don't have your data anymore. So filling a way to transport the data. And there just one last thought, right? They have a super interesting asset. They want break lands for the venerable map R right. Which wrote their own storage drivers and gives you the chance to potentially do something in that area, which I'm personally excited about. But we'll see what happens. >>I mean, I think the holy grail is can I, can I put my data into a cloud who's ever, you know, call it a super cloud and can I, is it secure? Is it governed? Can I share it and be confident that it's discoverable and that the, the person I give it to has the right to use it. Yeah. And, and it's the correct data. There's not like a zillion copies running. That's the holy grail. And I, I think the answer today is no, you can, you can do that maybe inside of AWS or maybe inside of Azure, look maybe certainly inside of snowflake, can you do that inside a GreenLake? Well, you probably can inside a GreenLake, but then when you put it into the cloud, is it cross cloud? Is it really out to the edge? And that's where it starts to break down, but that's where the work is to be done. That's >>The one Exide is in there already. Right. So men being men. Yeah. >>But okay. But it it's in there. Yeah. Okay. What do you do with it? Can you share that data? What can you actually automate governance? Right? Uh, is that data discoverable? Are there multiple copies of that data? What's the, you know, master copy. Here's >>A question. You guys, here's a question for you guys analyst, what do you think the psychology is of the CIO or CSO when HP comes into town with GreenLake, uh, and they say, what's your relationship with the hyperscalers? Cause I'm a CIO. I got my environment. I might be CapEx centric or Hey, I'm open model. Open-minded to an operating model. Every one of these enterprises has a cloud relationship. Yeah. Yeah. What's the dynamic. What do you think the psychology is of the CIO when they're rationalizing their, their trajectory, their architecture, cloud, native scale integration with HPE GreenLake or >>HP service. I think she or he hears defensiveness from HPE. I think she hears HPE or he hears HPE coming in and saying, you don't need to go to the cloud. You know, you could keep it right here. I, I don't think that's the right posture. I think it should be. We are your cloud. And we can manage whether it's OnPrem hybrid in AWS, Azure, Google, across those clouds. And we have an edge story that should be the vision that they put forth. That's the super cloud vision, but I don't hear it >>From these guys. What do you think psycho, do you agree with that? >>I'm totally to make, sorry to be boring, but I totally agree with, uh, Dave on that. Right? So the, the, the multi-cloud capability from a trusted large company has worked for anybody up and down the stack. Right? You can look historically for, uh, past layers with cloud Foundry, right? It's history vulnerable. You can look for DevOps of Hashi coop. You can look for database with MongoDB right now. So if HPE provides that data access, right, with all the problems of data gravity and egres cost and the workability, they will be doing really, really well, but we need to hear it more, right. We didn't hear much software today in the keynote. Right. >>Do they have a competitive offering vis-a-vis or Azure? >>The question is, will it be an HPE offering or will, or the software platform, one of the offerings and you as customer can plug and play, right. Will software be a differentiator for HP, right. And will be close, proprietary to the point to again, be open enough for it, or will they get that R and D format that, or will they just say, okay, ES MES here on the side, your choice, and you can use OpenShift or whatever, we don't matter. That's >>The, that's the key question. That's the key question. Is it because it is a competitive strategy? Is it highly differentiated? Oracle is a highly differentiated strategy, right? Is Dell highly differentiated? Eh, Dell differentiates based on its breadth. What? >>Right. Well, let's try for the control plane too. Dell wants to be an, >>Their, their vision is differentiated. Okay. But their execution today is not >>High. All right. Let me throw, let me throw this out at you then. I'm I'm, I'm sorry. I'm I'm HPE. I wanna be the glue layer. Is that, does that fly? >>What >>Do you mean? The group glue layer? I'll I wanna be, you can do Amazon, but I wanna be the glue layer between the clouds and our GreenLake will. >>What's the, what's the incremental value that, that glue provides, >>Provides comfort and reliability and control for the single pane of glass for AWS >>And comes back to the data. In my opinion. Yeah. >>There, there there's glue levels on the data level. Yeah. And there's glue levels on API level. Right. And there's different vendors in the different spaces. Right. Um, I think HPE will want to play on the data side. We heard lots of data stuff. We >>Hear that, >>But we have to see it. Exactly. >>Yeah. But it's, it's lacking today. And so, Hey, you know, you guys know better than I APIs can be fragile and they can be, there's a lot of diversity in terms of the quality of APIs and the documentation, how they work, how mature they are, what, how, what kind of performance they can provide and recoverability. And so just saying, oh wow. We are living the API economy. You know, the it's gonna take time to brew, chime in here. Hi. >><laugh> oh, so guys, you've all been covering HPE for a long time. You know, when Antonio stood up on stage three years ago and said by 2022, and here we are, we're gonna be delivering everything as a service. He's saying we've, we've done it, but, and we're a new company. Do you guys agree with that? >>Definitely. >>I, yes. Yes. With the caveat, I think, yes. The COVID pandemic slowed them down a lot because, um, that gave a tailwind to the hyperscalers, um, because of the, the force of massive O under forecasting working at home. I mean, everyone I talked to was like, no one forecasted a hundred percent work at home, the, um, the CapEx investments. So I think that was an opportunity that they'd be much farther along if there's no COVID people >>Thought it wasn't impossible. Yeah. But so we had the old work from home thing right. Where people trying to get people fired at IBM and Yahoo. Right. So I would've this question covering the HR side and my other hat on. Right. And I would ask CHS let's assume, because I didn't know about COVID shame on me. Right. I said, big California, earthquake breaks. Right. Nobody gets hurt, but all the buildings have to be retrofitted and checked for seism logic down. So everybody's working from home, ask CHS, what kind of productivity gap hit would you get by forcing everybody working from home with the office unsafe? So one, one gentleman, I won't know him, his name, he said 20% and the other one's going ha you're smoking. It's 40 50%. We need to be in the office. We need to meet it first night. And now we went for this exercise. Luckily not with the California. Right. Well, through the price of COVID and we've seen what it can do to, to productivity well, >>The productivity, but also the impact. So like with all the, um, stories we've done over two years, the people that want came out ahead were the ones that had good cloud action. They were already in the cloud. So I, I think they're definitely in different company in the sense of they, I give 'em a pass. I think they're definitely a new company and I'm not gonna judge 'em on. I think they're doing great. But I think pandemic definitely slowed 'em down that about >>It. So I have a different take on this. I think. So we've go back a little history. I mean, you' said this, I steal your line. Meg Whitman took one for the Silicon valley team. Right. She came in. I don't think she ever was excited that I, that you said, you said that, and I think you wrote >>Up, get tape on that one. She >>Had to figure out how do I deal with this mess? I have EDS. I got PC. >>She never should have spun off the PC, but >>Okay. But >>Me, >>Yeah, you can, you certainly could listen. Maybe, maybe Gerstner never should have gone all in on services and IBM would dominate something other than mainframes. They had think pads even for a while, but, but, but so she had that mess to deal with. She dealt with it and however, they dealt with it, Antonio came in, he, he, and he said, all right, we're gonna focus the company. And we're gonna focus the mission on not the machine. Remember those yeah. Presentations, but you just make your eyes glaze over. We're going all in on Azure service >>And edge. He was all on. >>We're gonna build our own cloud. We acquired Aruba. He made some acquisitions in HPC to help differentiate. Yep. And they are definitely a much more focused company now. And unfortunately I wish Antonio would CEO in 2015, cuz that's really when this should have started. >>Yeah. And then, and if you remember back then, Dave, we were interviewing Docker with DevOps teams. They had composability, they were on hybrid really early. I think they might have even coined the term hybrid before VMware tri-state credit for it. But they were first on hybrid. They had DevOps, they had infrastructure risk code. >>HPE had an HP had an awesome cloud team. Yeah. But, and then, and then they tried to go public cloud. Yeah. You know, and then, you know, just made them, I mean, it was just a mess. The focus >>Is there. I give them huge props. And I think, I think the GreenLake to me is exciting here because it's much better than it was two years ago. When, when we talked to, when we started, it's >>Starting to get real. >>It's, it's a real thing. And I think the, the tell will be partners. If they make that right, can pull their different >>Ecosystem, >>Their scale and their customers and fill the software gas with partners mm-hmm <affirmative> and then create that integration opportunity. It's gonna be a home run if they don't do that, they're gonna miss the operating, >>But they have to have their own to your point. They have to have their own software innovation. >>They have to good infrastructure ways to build applications. I don't wanna build with somebody else. I don't wanna take a Microsoft stack on open source stack. I'm not sure if it's gonna work with HP. So they have to have an app dev answer. I absolutely agree with that. And the, the big thing for the partners is, which is a good thing, right? Yep. HPE will not move into applications. Right? You don't have to have the fear of where Microsoft is with their vocal large. Right. If AWS kind of like comes up with APIs and manufacturing, right. Google the same thing with their vertical push. Right. So HPE will not have the CapEx, but >>Application, >>As I SV making them, the partner, the bonus of being able to on premise is an attractive >>Part. That's a great point. >>Hold. So that's an inflection point for next 12 months to watch what we see absolutely running on GreenLake. >>Yeah. And I think one of the things that came out of the, the last couple events this past year, and I'll bring this up, we'll table it and we'll watch it. And it's early in this, I think this is like even, not even the first inning, the machine learning AI impact to the industrial piece. I think we're gonna see a, a brand new era of accelerated digital transformation on the industrial physical world, back office, cloud data center, accounting, all the stuff. That's applications, the app, the real world from space to like robotics. I think that HP edge opportunity is gonna be visible and different. >>So guys, Antonio Neri is on tomorrow. This is only day one. If you can imagine this power panel on day one, can you imagine tomorrow? What is your last question for each of you? What is your, what, what question would you want to ask him tomorrow? Hold start with you. >>How is HPE winning in the long run? Because we know their on premise market will shrink, right? And they can out execute Dell. They can out execute Lenovo. They can out Cisco and get a bigger share of the shrinking market. But that's the long term strategy, right? So why should I buy HPE stock now and have a good return put in the, in the safe and forget about it and have a great return 20 years from now? What's the really long term strategy might be unfair because they, they ran in survival mode to a certain point out of the mass post equipment situation. But what is really the long term strategy? Is it more on the hardware side? Is it gonna go on the HPE, the frontier side? It's gonna be a DNA question, which I would ask Antonio. >>John, >>I would ask him what relative to the macro conditions relative to their customer base, I'd say, cuz the customers are the scoreboard. Can they create a value proposition with their, I use the Microsoft 365 example how they kind of went to the cloud. So my question would be Antonio, what is your core value proposition to CIOs out there who want to transform and take a step function, increase for value with HPE? Tell me that story. I wanna hear. And I don't want to hear, oh, we got a portfolio and no, what value are you enabling your customers to do? >>What and what should that value be? >>I think it's gonna be what we were kind of riffing on, which is you have to provide either what their product market fit needs are, which is, are you solving a problem? Is it a pain point is a growth driver. Uh, and what's the, what's that tailwind. And it's obviously we know at cloud we know edge. The story is great, but what's the value proposition. But by going with HPE, you get X, Y, and Z. If they can explain that clearly with real, so qualitative and quantitative data it's home >>Run. He had a great line of the analyst summit today where somebody asking questions, I'm just listening to the customer. So be ready for this Steve jobs photo, listening to the customer. You can't build something great listening to the customer. You'll be good for the next quarter. The next exponential >>Say, what are the customers saying? <laugh> >>So I would make an observation. And my question would, so my observation would be cloud is growing collectively at 35%. It's, you know, it's approaching 200 billion with a big, big four. If you include Alibaba, IBM has actually said, Hey, we're gonna gr they've promised 6% growth. Uh, Cisco I think is at eight or 9% growth. Dow's growing in double digits. Antonio and HPE have promised three to 4% growth. So what do you have to do to actually accelerate growth? Because three to 4%, my view, not enough to answer Holger's question is why should I buy HPE stock? Well, >>If they have product, if they have customer and there's demand and traction to me, that's going to drive the growth numbers. And I think the weak side of the forecast means that they don't have that fit yet. >>Yeah. So what has to happen for them to get above five, 6% growth? >>That's what we're gonna analyze. I mean, I, I mean, I don't have an answer for that. I wish I had a better answer. I'd tell them <laugh> but I feel, it feels, it feels like, you know, HP has an opportunity to say here's the new HPE. Yeah. Okay. And this is what we stand for. And here's the one thing that we're going to do that consistently drives value for you, the customer. And that's gonna have to come into some, either architectural cloud shift or a data thing, or we are your store for blank. >>All of the above. >>I guess the other question is, would, would you know, he won't answer a rude question, would suspending things like dividends and stock buybacks and putting it into R and D. I would definitely, if you have confidence in the market and you know what to do, why wouldn't you just accelerate R and D and put the money there? IBM, since 2007, IBM spent is the last stat. And I'm looking go in 2007, IBM way, outspent, Google, and Amazon and R and D and, and CapEx two, by the way. Yep. Subsequent to that, they've spent, I believe it's the numbers close to 200 billion on stock buyback and dividends. They could have owned cloud. And so look at this business, the technology business by and large is driven by innovation. Yeah. And so how do you innovate if >>You have I'm buying, I'm buying HP because they're reliable high quality and they have the outcomes that I want. Oh, >>Buy their products and services. I'm not sure I'd buy the stock. Yeah. >>Yeah. But she has to answer ultimately, because a public company. Right. So >>Right. It's this job. Yeah. >>Never a dull moment with the three of you around <laugh> guys. Thank you so much for sharing your insights, your, an analysis from day one. I can't imagine what day two is gonna bring tomorrow. Debut and I are gonna be anchoring here. We've got a jam packed day, lots going on, hearing from the ecosystem from leadership. As we mentioned, Antonio is gonna be Tony >>Alma Russo. I'm dying. Dr. >>EDMA as well as on the CTO gonna be another action pack day. I'm excited for it, guys. Thanks so much for sharing your insights and for letting me join this power panel. >>Great. Great to be here. >>Power panel plus me. All right. For Holger, John and Dave, I'm Lisa, you're watching the cube our day one coverage of HPE discover wraps right now. Don't go anywhere, cuz we'll see you tomorrow for day two, live from Vegas, have a good night.

>> From The Cube studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from the cube and ETR. This is breaking analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Last year, we noted in a breaking analysis that the cloud ecosystem is innovating beyond the idea or notion of multi-cloud. We've said for years that multi-cloud is really not a strategy but rather a symptom of multi-vendor. And we coined this term supercloud to describe an abstraction layer that lives above the hyperscale infrastructure that hides the underlying complexities, the APIs, and the primitives of each of the respective clouds. It interconnects whether it's On-Prem, AWS, Azure, Google, stretching out to the edge and creates a value layer on top of that. So our vision is that supercloud is more than running an individual service in cloud native mode within an individual individual cloud rather it's this new layer that builds on top of the hyperscalers. And does things irrespective of location adds value and we'll get into that in more detail. Now it turns out that we weren't the only ones thinking about this, not surprisingly, the majority of the technology ecosystem has been working towards this vision in various forms, including some examples that actually don't try to hide the underlying primitives. And we'll talk about that, but give a consistent experience across the DevSecOps tool chain. Hello, and welcome to this week's Wikibon, Cube insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we're going to share some recent examples and direct quotes about supercloud from the many Cube guests that we've had on over the last several weeks and months. And we've been trying to test this concept of supercloud. Is it technically feasible? Is it business rational? Is there business case for it? And we'll also share some recent ETR data to put this into context with some of the players that we think are going after this opportunity and where they are in their supercloud build out. And as you can see I'm not in the studio, everybody's got COVID so the studios shut down temporarily but breaking analysis continues. So here we go. Now, first thing is we uncovered an article from earlier this year by Lori MacVittie, is entitled, Supercloud: The 22 Answer to Multi-Cloud Challenges. What a great title. Of course we love it. Now, what really interested us here is not just the title, but the notion that it really doesn't matter what it's called, who cares? Supercloud, distributed cloud, someone even called it Metacloud recently, and we'll get into that. But Lori is a technologist. She's a developer by background. She works at F-Five and she's partial to the supercloud definition that was put forth by Cornell. You can see it here. That's a cloud architecture that enables application migration as a service across different availability zones or cloud providers, et cetera. And that the supercloud provides interfaces to allocate, migrate and terminate resources... And can span all major public cloud providers as well as private clouds. Now, of course, we would take that as well to the edge. So sure. That sounds about right and provides further confirmation that something new is really happening out there. And that was our initial premise when we put this fourth last year. Now we want to dig deeper and hear from the many Cube guests that we've interviewed recently probing about this topic. We're going to start with Chuck Whitten. He's Dell's new Co-COO and most likely part of the Dell succession plan, many years down the road hopefully. He coined the phrase multi-cloud by default versus multi-cloud by design. And he provides a really good business perspective. He's not a deep technologist. We're going to hear from Chuck a couple of times today including one where John Furrier asks him about leveraging hyperscale CapEx. That's an important concept that's fundamental to supercloud. Now, Ashesh Badani heads products at Red Hat and he talks about what he calls Metacloud. Again, it doesn't matter to us what you call it but it's the ecosystem gathering and innovating and we're going to get his perspective. Now we have a couple of clips from Danny Allan. He is the CTO of Veeam. He's a deep technologist and super into the weeds, which we love. And he talks about how Veeam abstracts the cloud layer. Again, a concept that's fundamental to supercloud and he describes what a supercloud is to him. And we also bring with Danny the edge discussion to the conversation. Now the bottom line from Danny is we want to know is supercloud technically feasible? And is it a thing? And then we have Jeff Clarke. Jeff Clark is the Co-COO and Vice Chairman of Dell super experienced individual. He lays out his vision of supercloud and what John Furrier calls a business operating system. You're going to hear from John a couple times. And he, Jeff Clark has a dropped the mic moment, where he says, if we can do this X, we'll describe what X is, it's game over. Okay. So of course we wanted to then go to HPE, one of Dell's biggest competitors and Patrick Osborne is the vice president of the storage business unit at Hewlett Packet Enterprise. And so given Jeff Clarke's game over strategy, we want to understand how HPE sees supercloud. And the bottom line, according to Patrick Osborne is that it's real. So you'll hear from him. And now Raghu Raghuram is the CEO of VMware. He threw a curve ball at this supercloud concept. And he flat out says, no, we don't want to hide the underlying primitives. We want to give developers access to those. We want to create a consistent developer experience in that DevsSecOps tool chain and Kubernetes runtime environments, and connect all the elements in the application development stack. So that's a really interesting perspective that Raghu brings. And then we end on Itzik Reich. Itzik is a technologist and a technical team leader who's worked as a go between customers and product developers for a number of years. And we asked Itzik, is supercloud technically feasible and will it be a reality? So let's hear from these experts and you can decide for yourselves how real supercloud is today and where it is, run the sizzle >> Operative phrase is multi-cloud by default that's kind of the buzz from your keynote. What do you mean by that? >> Well, look, customers have woken up with multiple clouds, multiple public clouds, On-Premise clouds increasingly as the edge becomes much more a reality for customers clouds at the edge. And so that's what we mean by multi-cloud by default. It's not yet been designed strategically. I think our argument yesterday was, it can be and it should be. It is a very logical place for architecture to land because ultimately customers want the innovation across all of the hyperscale public clouds. They will see workloads and use cases where they want to maintain an On-Premise cloud, On-Premise clouds are not going away, I mentioned edge clouds, so it should be strategic. It's just not today. It doesn't work particularly well today. So when we say multi-cloud by default we mean that's the state of the world today. Our goal is to bring multi-cloud by design as you heard. >> Really great question, actually, since you and I talked, Dave, I've been spending some time noodling just over that. And you're right. There's probably some terminology, something that will get developed either by us or in collaboration with the industry. Where we sort of almost have the next almost like a Metacloud that we're working our way towards. >> So we manage both the snapshots and we convert it into the Veeam portable data format. And here's where the supercloud comes into play. Because if I can convert it into the Veeam portable data format, I can move that OS anywhere. I can move it from physical to virtual, to cloud, to another cloud, back to virtual, I can put it back on physical if I want to. It actually abstracts the cloud layer. There are things that we do when we go between cloud some use BIOS, some use UEFI, but we have the data in backup format, not snapshot format, that's theirs, but we have it in backup format that we can move around and abstract workloads across all of the infrastructure. >> And your catalog is control in control of that. Is that right? Am I thinking about that the right way? >> Yeah it is, 100%. And you know what's interesting about our catalog, Dave, the catalog is inside the backup. Yes. So here's, what's interesting about the edge, two things, on the edge you don't want to have any state, if you can help it. And so containers help with that You can have stateless environments, some persistent data storage But we not not only provide the portability in operating systems, we also do this for containers. And that's true. If you go to the cloud and you're using say EKS with relational database services RDS for the persistent data later, we can pick that up and move it to GKE or move it to OpenShift On-Premises. And so that's why I call this the supercloud, we have all of this data. Actually, I think you termed the term supercloud. >> Yeah. But thank you for... I mean, I'm looking for a confirmation from a technologist that it's technically feasible. >> It is technically feasible and you can do it today. >> You said also technology and business models are tied together and enabler. If you believe that then you have to believe that it's a business operating system that they want. They want to leverage whatever they can. And at the end of the day, they have to differentiate what they do. >> Well, that's exactly right. If I take that in what Dave was saying and I summarize it the following way, if we can take these cloud assets and capabilities, combine them in an orchestrated way to deliver a distributed platform, game over. >> We have a number of platforms that are providing whether it's compute or networking or storage, running those workloads that they plum up into the cloud they have an operational experience in the cloud and they now they have data services that are running in the cloud for us in GreenLake. So it's a reality, we have a number of platforms that support that. We're going to have a a set of big announcements coming up at HPE Discover. So we led with Electra and we have a block service. We have VM backup as a service and DR on top of that. So that's something that we're providing today. GreenLake has over, I think it's actually over 60 services right now that we're providing in the GreenLake platform itself. Everything from security, single sign on, customer IDs, everything. So it's real. We have the proofpoint for it. >> Yeah. So I want to clarify something that you said because this tends to be very commonly confused by customers. I use the word abstraction. And usually when people think of abstraction, they think it hides capabilities of the cloud providers. That's not what we are trying to do. In fact, that's the last thing we are trying to do. What we are trying to do is to provide a consistent developer experience regardless of where you want to build your application. So that you can use the cloud provider services if that's what you want to use. But the DevSecOp tool chain, the runtime environment which turns out to be Kubernetes and how you control the Kubernetes environment, how do you manage and secure and connect all of these things. Those are the places where we are adding the value. And so really the VMware value proposition is you can build on the cloud of your choice but providing these consistent elements, number one, you can make better use of us, your scarce developer or operator resources and expertise. And number two, you can move faster. And number three, you can just spend less as a result of this. So that's really what we are trying to do. We are not... So I just wanted to clarify the word abstraction. In terms of where are we? We are still, I would say, in the early stages. So if you look at what customers are trying to do, they're trying to build these greenfield applications. And there is an entire ecosystem emerging around Kubernetes. There is still, Kubernetes is not a developer platform. The developer experience on top of Kubernetes is highly inconsistent. And so those are some of the areas where we are introducing new innovations with our Tanzu Application Platform. And then if you take enterprise applications, what does it take to have enterprise applications running all the time be entirely secure, et cetera. >> Well, look, the multi-cloud by default today are isolated clouds. They don't work together. Your data is siloed. It's locked up and it is expensive to move and make sense of it. So I think the word you and I were batting around before, this is an interconnected tissue. That's what the world needs. They need the clouds to work together as a single platform. That's the problem that we're trying to solve. And you saw it in some of our announcements here that we're starting to make steps on that journey to make multi-cloud work together much simpler. >> It's interesting, you mentioned the hyperscalers and all that CapEx investments. Why wouldn't you want to take advantage of a cloud and build on the CapEx and then ultimately have the solutions machine learning as one area. You see some specialization with the clouds. But you start to see the rise of superclouds, Dave calls them, and that's where you can innovate on a cloud then go to the multiple clouds. Snowflakes is one, we see a lot of examples of supercloud... >> Project Alpine was another one. I mean, it's early, but it's its clearly where you're going. The technology is just starting to come around. I mean it's real. >> Yeah. I mean, why wouldn't you want to take advantage of all of the cloud innovation out there? >> Is that something that's, that supercloud idea is a reality from a technologist perspective. >> I think it is. So for example Katie Gordon, which I believe you've interviewed earlier this week, was demonstrating the Kubernetes data mobility aspect which is another project. That's exactly part of the it's rationale, the rationale of customers being able to move some of their Kubernetes workloads to the cloud and back and between different clouds. Why are we doing? Because customers wants to have the ability to move between different cloud providers, using a common API that will be able to orchestrate all of those things with a self-service that may be offered via the APEX console itself. So it's all around enabling developers and meeting them where they are today and also meeting them into tomorrow's world where they actually may have changed their mind to do those things. So yes we are walking on all of those different aspects. >> Okay. Let's take a quick look at some of the ETR data. This is an X-Y graph. You've seen it a number of times on breaking analysis, it plots the net score or spending momentum on the Y-axis and overlap or pervasiveness in the ETR dataset on the X-axis, used to be called market share. I think that term was off putting to some people, but anyway it's an indicator of presence in the dataset. Now that red dotted line that's rarefied air where anything above that line is considered highly elevated. Now you can see we've plotted Azure and AWS in the upper right. GCP is in there and Kubernetes. We've done that as reference points. They're not necessarily building supercloud platforms. We'll see if they ever want to do so. And Kubernetes of course not a company, but we put 'em in there for context. And we've cherry picked a few players that we believe are building out or are important for supercloud build out. Let's start with Snowflake. We've talked a lot about this company. You can see they're highly elevated on the vertical axis. We see the data cloud as a supercloud in the making. You've got pure storage in there. They made the public, the early part of its supercloud journey at Accelerate 2019 when it unveiled a hybrid block storage service inside of AWS, it connects its On-Prem to AWS and creates that singular experience for pure customers. We see Hashi, HashiCorp as an enabling infrastructure, as code. So they're enabling infrastructure as code across different clouds and different locations. You see Nutanix. They're embarking on their multi-cloud strategy but it's doing so in a way that we think is supercloud, like now. Now Veeam, we were just at VeeamON. And this company has tied Dell for the number one revenue player in data protection. That's according to IDC. And we don't think it won't be long before it holds that position alone at the top as it's growing faster than in Dell in the space. We'll see, Dell is kind of waking up a little bit and putting more resource on that. But Veeam, they're a pure play vendor in data protection. And you heard their CTO, Danny Allan's view on Supercloud, they're doing it today. And we heard extensive comments as well from Dell that's clearly where they're headed, project Alpine was an early example from Dell technologies world of Supercloud in our view. And HPE with GreenLake. Finally beginning to talk about that cross cloud experience. I think it in initially HPE has been more focused on the private cloud, we'll continue to probe. We'll be at HPE discover later on the spring, actually end of June. And we'll continue to probe to see what HPE is doing specifically with GreenLake. Now, finally, Cisco, we put them on the chart. We don't have direct quotes from recent shows and events but this data really shows you the size of Cisco's footprint within the ETR data set that's on the X-axis. Now the cut of this ETR data includes all sectors across the ETR taxonomy which is not something that we commonly show but you can see the magnitude of Cisco's presence. It's impressive. Now, they had better, Cisco that is, had better be building out a supercloud in our view or they're going to be left behind. And I'm quite certain that they're actually going to do so. So we have a lot of evidence that we're putting forth here and seeing in the marketplace what we said last year, the ecosystem is take taking shape, supercloud is forming and becoming a thing. And really in our view, is the future of cloud. But there are always risks to these predictive scenarios and we want to acknowledge those. So first, look, we could end up with a bunch of bespoke superclouds. Now one supercloud is better than three separate cloud native services that do fundamentally the same thing from the same vendor. One for AWS, one for GCP and one for Azure. So maybe that's not all that bad. But to point number two, we hope there evolves a set of open standards for self-service infrastructure, federated governance, and data sharing that will evolve as a horizontal layer versus a set of proprietary vendor specific tools. Now, maybe a company like Veeam will provide that as a data management layer or some of Veeam's competitors or maybe it'll emerge again as open source. As well, and this next point, we see the potential for edge disruptions, changing the economics of the data center. Edge in fact could evolve on its own, independent of the cloud. In fact, David Floria sees the edge somewhat differently from Danny Allan. Floria says he sees a requirement for distributed stateful environments that are ephemeral where recovery is built in. And I said, David, stateful? Ephemeral? Stateful ephemeral? Isn't that an oxymoron? And he responded that, look, if it's not ephemeral the costs are going to be prohibitive. He said the biggest mistake the companies could make is thinking that the edge is simply an extension of their current cloud strategies. We're seeing that a lot. Dell largely talks about the edge as retail. Now, and Telco is a little bit different, but back to Floria's comments, he feels companies have to completely reimagine an integrated file and recovery system which is much more data efficient. And he believes that the technology will evolve with massive volumes and eventually seep into enterprise cloud and distributed data centers with better economics. In other words, as David Michelle recently wrote, we're about 15 years into the most recent cloud cycle and history shows that every 15 years or so, something new comes along that is a blind spot and highly disruptive to existing leaders. So number four here is really important. Remember, in 2007 before AWS introduced the modern cloud, IBM outpost, sorry, IBM outspent Amazon and Google and RND and CapEx and was really comparable to Microsoft. But instead of inventing cloud, IBM spent hundreds of billions of dollars on stock buybacks and dividends. And so our view is that innovation rewards leaders. And while it's not without risks, it's what powers the technology industry it always has and likely always will. So we'll be watching that very closely, how companies choose to spend their free cash flow. Okay. That's it for now. Thanks for watching this episode of The Cube Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks to Stephanie Chan who does some of the background research? Alex Morrison is on production and is going to compile all this stuff. Thank you, Alex. We're all remote this week. Kristen Nicole and Cheryl Knight do Cube distribution and social distribution and get the word out, so thank you. Robert Hof is our editor in chief. Don't forget the checkout etr.ai for all the survey action. Remember I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com and you can check out all the breaking analysis podcasts. All you can do is search breaking analysis podcast so you can pop in the headphones and listen while you're on a walk. You can email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. If you want to get in touch or DM me at DVellante, you can always hit me up into a comment on our LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante. Thank you for watching this episode of break analysis, stay safe, be well and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>Hey everyone. Welcome to the AWS partner showcase season one, episode three women in tech. I'm your host. Lisa Martin. We've got two female rock stars here with me next. Stephanie Curry joins us the worldwide head of sales and go to market strategy for AWS at NetApp and Danielle GShock is back one of our QM ISV PSA director at AWS. Looking forward to a great conversation, ladies, about a great topic, Stephanie, let's go ahead and start with you. Give us an overview of your story, how you got into tech and what inspired you. >>Thanks so much, Lisa and Danielle. It's great to be on this show with you. Thank you for that. My name's Stephanie curs. Lisa mentioned I'm the worldwide head of sales for AWS at NetApp and run a global team of sales people that sell all things AWS going back 25 years now, when I first started my career in tech, it was kind of by accident. I'd come from a different background. I have a business background and a technical background from school, but had been in a different career. And I had an opportunity to try something new. I had an ally really that reached out to me and said, Hey, you'd be great for this role. And I thought, I'd take a chance. I was curious. And it, it turned out to be a 25 year career that I'm really, really excited about and, and really thankful for that person for introducing me to the, to the industry >>25 years in counting. I'm sure Danielle, we've talked about your background before. So what I wanna focus on with you is the importance of diversity for high performance. I know what a machine AWS is, and Stephanie, I'll come back to you with the same question, but talk about that, Danielle, from your perspective, that importance for diversity to drive the performance. >>Yeah. I truly believe that, you know, in order to have high performing teams, that you have to have people from all different types of backgrounds and experiences. And we do find that oftentimes being, you know, field facing, if we're not reflecting our customers and connecting with them deeply on, on the levels that they're at, we, we end up missing them. And so for us, it's very important to bring people of lots of different technical backgrounds experiences. And of course, both men, women, and underrepresented minorities, and put that forth to our customers in order to make that connection and to end up with better outcomes. So >>Definitely it's all about outcomes, Stephanie, your perspective and NetApp's perspective on diversity for creating highly performing teams and organizations. >>I really aligned with Danielle on the comment she made. And in addition to that, you know, just from building teams in my career note, we've had three times as many women on my team since we started a year ago and our results are really showing in that as well. We find the teams are stronger, they're more collaborative and to Danielle's point really not only our partners, but our customers themselves. So this really creates connections, which are really, really important to scale our businesses and, and really meet the customer where they're at as well. So huge proponent of that ourselves, and really finding that we have to be intentional in our hiring and intentional in how we attract diversity to our teams. >>So Stephanie let's stay with you. So a three X increase in women on the team in a year, especially the kind of last year that we've had is really incredible. I, I like your, I, your thoughts on there needs to be a, there needs to be focus and, and thought in how teams are hired. Let's talk about attracting and retaining those women now, especially in sales roles, we all know the number, the percentages of women in technical roles, but what are some of the things that, that you do Stephanie, that NetApp does to attract and retain women in those sales roles? >>The, the attracting part's really interesting. And we find that, you know, you, you read the stats and I'd say in my experience, they're also true in the fact that a lot of women would look at a job description and say, I can't do a hundred percent of that. So I'm not even going to apply with the women that we've attracted to our team. We've actually intentionally reached out and targeted those people in a good way to say, Hey, we think you've got what it takes. Some of the feedback I've got from those women are, gosh, I didn't think I could ever get this role. I didn't think I had the skills to do that. And they've been hired and they are doing a phenomenal job. In addition to that, I think a lot of the feedback I've got from these hires are, Hey, it's an aggressive sales is aggressive. Sales is competitive. It's not an environment that I think I can be successful in. And what we show them is bring those softer skills around collaboration, around connection, around building teams. And they do, they do bring a lot of that to the team. Then they see others like them there and they know they can be successful cuz they see others like them on the team. >>The whole concept of we can't be what we can't see, but we can be what we can see is so important. You said a couple things, Stephanie, that really stuck with me. And one of 'em was an, an interview on the cube I was doing, I think a couple weeks ago about women in tech. And the stat that we talked about was that women will apply will not apply for a job unless they meet 100% of the skills and the requirements that it's listed, but men will, if they only meet 60. And I, that just shocked me that I thought, you know, I, I can understand that imposter syndrome is real. It's a huge challenge, but the softer skills, as you mentioned, especially in the last two years, plus the ability to communicate, the ability to collaborate are incredibly important to, to drive that performance of, of any team of any business. >>Absolutely. >>Danielle, talk to me about your perspective in AWS as well for attracting and retaining talent and, and, and particularly in some of those challenging roles like sales that as Stephanie said, can be known as aggressive. >>Yeah, for sure. I mean, my team is focused on the technical aspect of the field and we definitely have an uphill battle for sure. Two things we are focused on first and foremost is looking at early career women and that how we, how can we bring them into this role, whether in they're in support functions, cl like answering the phone for support calls, et cetera, and how, how can we bring them into this organization, which is a bit more strategic, more proactive. And then the other thing that as far as retention goes, you know, sometimes there will be women who they're on a team and there are no other women on that team. And, and for me, it's about building community inside of AWS and being part of, you know, we have women at solution architecture organizations. We have, you know, I just personally connect people as well and feel like, oh, you should meet this person. Oh, you should talk to that person. Because again, sometimes they can't see someone on their team like them and they just need to feel anchored, especially as we've all been, you know, kind of stuck at home during the pandemic, just being able to make those connections with women like them has been super important and just being a long tenure Amazonian, that's definitely one thing I'm able to, to bring to the table as well. >>That's so important and impactful and spreads across organizations in a good way. Daniel let's stick with you. Let's talk about some of the allies that you've had sponsors, mentors that have really made a difference. And I said that in past tense, but I also mean in present tense, who are some of those folks now that really inspire you? >>Yeah. I mean, I definitely would say that one of my mentors and someone who ha has been a sponsor of my career has Matt ion, who is one of our control tower GMs. He has really sponsored my career and definitely been a supporter of mine and pushed me in positive ways, which has been super helpful. And then other of my business partners, you know, Sabina Joseph who's cube alum as well. She definitely has been, was a fabulous partner to work with. And, you know, between the two of us for a period of time, we definitely felt like we could, you know, conquer the world. It's very great to go in with a, with another strong woman, you know, and, and get things done inside of an organization like AWS. >>Absolutely. And know S I've had, I've been agreed here several times. So Stephanie, same question for you. You talked a little bit about your kind of, one of your original early allies in the tech industry, but talk to me about allies sponsors, mentors who have, and continue to make a difference in your life. >>Yeah. And, you know, I think it's a great differentiation as well, right? Because I think that mentors teach us sponsors show us the way and allies make room for us at the table. And that is really key difference. I thinks also as women leaders, we need to make room for others at the table too, and not forget those softer skills that we bring to the table. Some of the things that Danielle mentioned as well about making those connections for others, right. And making room for them at the table. Some of my allies, a lot of them are men. Brian ABI was my first mentor. He actually is in the distribution, was in distribution with advent tech data no longer there, Cory Hutchinson, who's now at Hashi Corp. He's also another ally of mine and remains an ally of mine, even though we're not at the same company any longer. So a lot of these people transcend careers and transcend different positions that I've held as well and make room for us. And I think that's just really critical when we're looking for allies. And when allies are looking for us, >>I love how you described allies, mentors and sponsors Stephanie. And the difference, I didn't understand the difference between a mentor and a sponsor until a couple of years ago. Do you talk with some of those younger females on your team so that when they come into the organization and maybe they're fresh outta college, or maybe they've transitioned into tech so that they can also learn from you and understand the importance and the difference between the allies and the sponsors and the mentors? >>Absolutely. And I think that's really interesting because I do take an extra approach and extra time to really reach out to the women that have joined the team. One, I wanna make sure they stay right. I don't want them feeling, Hey, I'm alone here and I need to, I need to go do something else. And they are located around the world, on my team. They're also different age groups. So early in career, as well as more senior people and really reaching out, making sure they know that I'm there. But also as Danielle had mentioned, connecting them to other people in the community that they can reach out to for those same opportunities and making room for them >>Make room at the table. It's so important. And it can, you never know what a massive difference and impact you can make on someone's life. And I, and I bet there's probably a lot of mentors and sponsors and allies of mine that would be surprised to know the massive influence they've had Danielle back. Let's talk about some of the techniques that you employ that AWS employs to make the work environment, a great place for women to really thrive and, and be retained as Stephanie was saying. Of course that's so important. >>Yeah. I mean, definitely I think that the community building, as well as we have a bit more programmatic mentorship, we're trying to get to the point of having a more programmatic sponsorship as well. But I think just making sure that, you know, both E everything from recruit to onboard to ever boarding that they they're the women who come into the organization, whether it's they're coming in on the software engineering side or the field side or the sales side that they feel as though they have someone working with them to help them drive their career. Those are the key things that were, I think from an organizational perspective are happening across the board. For me personally, when I run my organization, I'm really trying to make sure that people feel that they can to me at any time open door policy, make sure that they're surfacing any times in which they are feeling excluded or anything like that, any challenges, whether it be with a customer, a partner, or with a colleague. And then also of course, just making sure that I'm being a good sponsor to, to people on my team. That is key. You can talk about it, but you have to start with yourself as well. >>That's a great point. You you've got to, to start with yourself and really reflect on that and, and look, am I, am I embodying what it is that I need? And not that I know they need that focused, thoughtful intention on that is so importants, let's talk about some of the techniques that you use that NetApp uses to make the work environment, a great place for those women are marginalized communities to really thrive. >>Yeah. And I appreciate it. And it much like Danielle and much like AWS, we have some of those more structured programs, right around sponsorship and around mentorship, probably some growth there, opportunities for allies, because I think that's more of a newer concept in really an informal structure around the allies, but something that we're growing into at NetApp on my team personally, I think leading by example is really key. And unfortunately, a lot of the life stuff still lands on the women, whether we like it or not, I have a very active husband in our household, but I still carry when it push comes to shove it's on me. And I wanna make sure that my team knows it's okay to take some time and do the things you need to do with your family. I'm I show up as myself authentically and I encourage them to do the same. >>So it's okay to say, Hey, I need to take a personal day. I need to focus on some stuff that's happening in my personal life this week. Now obviously make sure your job' covered, but just allowing some of that softer vulnerability to come into the team as well, so that others, men and women can feel they can do the same thing. And that it's okay to say, I need to balance my life and I need to do some other things alongside. So it's the formal programs, making sure people have awareness on them. I think it's also softly calling people out on biases and saying, Hey, I'm not sure if you know, this landed that way, but I just wanted to make you aware. And usually the feedback is, oh my gosh, I didn't know. And could you coach me on something that I could do better next time? So all of this is driven through our NetApp formal programs, but then it's also how you manifest it on the teams that we're leading. >>Absolutely. And sometimes having that mirror to reflect into can be really eye-opening and, and allow you to, to see things in a completely different light, which is great. You both talked about kind of being what you can see. And, and I know both companies are obsess customer obsessed in a good way. Talk to me a little bit, Danielle, go back over to you about the AWS NetApp partnership. Some of the maybe alignment on, on performance on obviously you guys are very well aligned in terms of that, but also it sounds like you're quite aligned on diversity and inclusion. >>Well, we definitely do. We have the best partnerships with companies in which we have these value alignments. So I think that is a positive thing, of course, but just from a, from a partnership perspective, you know, from my five now plus years of being a part of the APN, this is, you know, one of the most significant years with our launch of FSX for NetApp, with that key key service, which we're making available natively on AWS. I, I can't think of a better Testament to the, to the partnership than that. And that's doing incredibly well and it really resonates with our customers. And of course it started with customers and their need for NetApp. So, you know, that is a reflection, I think, of the success that we're having together. >>And Stephanie talk to about the partnership from your perspective, NetApp, AWS, what you guys are doing together, cultural alignment, but also your alignment on really bringing diversity into drive performance. >>Yeah, I think it's a, a great question. And I have to say it's just been a phenomenal year. Our relationship has started before our first party service with FSX N but definitely just the trajectory between the two companies since the announcement about nine months ago has just taken off to a, a new level. We feel like an extended part of the family. We worked together seamlessly. A lot of the people on my team often say we feel like Amazonians, and we're really part of this transformation at NetApp from being that storage hardware company, into being an ISV and a cloud company. And we could not do this without the partnership with AWS and without the first party service of Fs XM that we've recently released. I think that those joint values that Danielle referred to are critical to our success, starting with customer obsession and always making sure that we are doing the right thing for the customer. >>We coach our team teams all the time on if you are doing the right thing for the customers, you cannot do anything wrong. Just always put the customer at the dis in the center of your decisions. And I think that there is a lot of best practice sharing and collaboration as we go through this change. And I think a lot of it is led by the diverse backgrounds that are on the team, female, male race, and so forth, and just to really have different perspectives and different experiences about how we approach this change. So we definitely feel like we're part of the family. We are absolutely loving working with the AWS team and our team knows that we are the right place, the right time with the right people. >>I love that last question for each of you. And I wanna stick with you Stephanie advice to your younger self, think back 25 years. What advice would you seen what you've accomplished and maybe the, the turns and, and serendipitous route that you've taken along the way, what would you advise your younger Stephanie self? >>I would say keep being curious, right? Keep being curious, keep asking questions. And sometimes when you get a no, it's not a bad thing, it just means not right now and find out why and, and try to get feedback as to why maybe that wasn't the right opportunity for you, but, you know, just go for what you want. Continue to be curious, continue to ask questions and find a support network of people around you that wanna help you because they are there and they are, they wanna see you be successful too. So never be shy about that stuff. >>Absolutely. And I always say failure does not have to be a bad F word. A no can be the beginning of something. Amazing. Danielle, same question for you. Thinking back to when you first started in your career, what advice would you give your younger self? >>Yeah, I think the advice I'd give my younger self would be, don't be afraid to put yourself out there. It's certainly, you know, coming from an engineering background, maybe you wanna stay behind the scenes, not, not do a presentation, not do a public speaking event, those types of things, but back to what the community really needs. This thing, you know, I genuinely now took me a while to realize it, but I realized I needed to put myself out there in order to, you know, allow younger women to see what they could be. So that would be the advice I would give. Don't be afraid to put yourself out there. >>Absolutely. That advice that you both gave are, is so fantastic, so important and so applicable to everybody. Don't be afraid to put yourself out there, ask questions. Don't be afraid of a, no, that it's all gonna happen at some point or many points along the way. That can also be good. So thank you ladies. You inspired me. I appreciate you sharing what AWS and NetApp are doing together to strengthen diversity, to strengthen performance and the advice that you both shared for your younger was brilliant. Thank you. >>Thank you. >>Thank you >>For my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the AWS partner showcase. See you next time.

(bright music) >> Okay, we're back in theCUBE. We said we were signing off for the night, but during the hallway track, we ran into old friend Stu Miniman who was the Director of Market Insights at Red Hat. Stu, friend of theCUBE done the thousands of CUBE interviews. >> Dave, it's great to be here. Thanks for pulling me on, you and I hosted Red Hat Summit before. It's great to see Paul here. I was actually, I was talking to some of the Red Hatters walking around Boston. It's great to have an event here. Boston's got strong presence and I understand, I think was either first or second year, they had it over... What's the building they're tearing down right down the road here. Was that the World Trade Center? I think that's where they actually held it, the first time they were here. We hosted theCUBE >> So they moved up. >> at the Hines Convention Center. We did theCUBE for summit at the BCEC next door. And of course, with the pandemic being what it was, we're a little smaller, nice intimate event here. It's great to be able to room the hall, see a whole bunch of people and lots watching online. >> It's great, it's around the same size as those, remember those Vertica Big Data events that we used to have here. And I like that you were commenting out at the theater and the around this morning for the keynotes, that was good. And the keynotes being compressed, I think, is real value for the attendees, you know? 'Cause people come to these events, they want to see each other, you know? They want to... It's like the band getting back together. And so when you're stuck in the keynote room, it's like, "Oh, it's okay, it's time to go." >> I don't know that any of us used to sitting at home where I could just click to another tab or pause it or run for, do something for the family, or a quick bio break. It's the three-hour keynote I hope has been retired. >> But it's an interesting point though, that the virtual event really is driving the physical and this, the way Red Hat marketed this event was very much around the virtual attendee. Physical was almost an afterthought, so. >> Right, this is an invite only for in-person. So you're absolutely right. It's optimizing the things that are being streamed, the online audience is the big audience. And we just happy to be in here to clap and do some things see around what you're doing. >> Wonderful see that becoming the norm. >> I think like virtual Stu, you know this well when virtual first came in, nobody had a clue with what they were doing. It was really hard. They tried different things, they tried to take the physical and just jam it into the virtual. That didn't work, they tried doing fun things. They would bring in a famous person or a comedian. And that kind of worked, I guess, but everybody showed up for that and then left. And I think they're trying to figure it out what this hybrid thing is. I've seen it both ways. I've seen situations like this, where they're really sensitive to the virtual. I've seen others where that's the FOMO of the physical, people want physical. So, yeah, I think it depends. I mean, reinvent last year was heavy physical. >> Yeah, with 15,000 people there. >> Pretty long keynotes, you know? So maybe Amazon can get away with it, but I think most companies aren't going to be able to. So what is the market telling you? What are these insights? >> So Dave just talking about Amazon, obviously, the world I live in cloud and that discussion of cloud, the journey that customers are going on is where we're spending a lot of the discussions. So, it was great to hear in the keynote, talked about our deep partnerships with the cloud providers and what we're doing to help people with, you like to call it super cloud, some call it hybrid, or multi-cloud... >> New name. (crosstalk) Meta-Cloud, come on. >> All right, you know if Che's my executive, so it's wonderful. >> Love it. >> But we'll see, if I could put on my VR Goggles and that will help me move things. But I love like the partnership announcement with General Motors today because not every company has the needs of software driven electric vehicles all over the place. But the technology that we build for them actually has ramifications everywhere. We've working to take Kubernetes and make it smaller over time. So things that we do at the edge benefit the cloud, benefit what we do in the data center, it's that advancement of science and technology just lifts all boats. >> So what's your take on all this? The EV and software on wheels. I mean, Tesla obviously has a huge lead. It's kind of like the Amazon of vehicles, right? It's sort of inspired a whole new wave of innovation. Now you've got every automobile manufacturer kind of go and after. That is the future of vehicles is something you followed or something you have an opinion on Stu? >> Absolutely. It's driving innovation in some ways, the way the DOS drove innovation on the desktop, if you remember the 64K DOS limit, for years, that was... The software developers came up with some amazing ways to work within that 64K limit. Then when it was gone, we got bloatware, but it actually does enforce a level of discipline on you to try to figure out how to make software run better, run more efficiently. And that has upstream impacts on the enterprise products. >> Well, right. So following your analogy, you talk about the enablement to the desktop, Linux was a huge influence on allowing the individual person to write code and write software, and what's happening in the EV, it's software platform. All of these innovations that we're seeing across industries, it's how is software transforming things. We go back to the mark end reasons, software's eating the world, open source is the way that software is developed. Who's at the intersection of all those? We think we have a nice part to play in that. I loved tha- Dave, I don't know if you caught at the end of the keynote, Matt Hicks basically said, "Our mission isn't just to write enterprise software. "Our mission is based off of open source because open source unlocks innovation for the world." And that's one of the things that drew me to Red Hat, it's not just tech in good places, but allowing underrepresented, different countries to participate in what's happening with software. And we can all move that ball forward. >> Well, can we declare victory for open source because it's not just open source products, but everything that's developed today, whether proprietary or open has open source in it. >> Paul, I agree. Open source is the development model period, today. Are there some places that there's proprietary? Absolutely. But I had a discussion with Deepak Singh who's been on theCUBE many times. He said like, our default is, we start with open source code. I mean, even Amazon when you start talking about that. >> I said this, the $70 billion business on open source. >> Exactly. >> Necessarily give it back, but that say, Hey, this is... All's fair in tech and more. >> It is interesting how the managed service model has sort of rescued open source, open source companies, that were trying to do the Red Hat model. No one's ever really successfully duplicated the Red Hat model. A lot of companies were floundering and failing. And then the managed service option came along. And so now they're all cloud service providers. >> So the only thing I'd say is that there are some other peers we have in the industry that are built off open source they're doing okay. The recent example, GitLab and Hashicorp, both went public. Hashi is doing some managed services, but it's not the majority of their product. Look at a company like Mongo, they've heavily pivoted toward the managed service. It is where we see the largest growth in our area. The products that we have again with Amazon, with Microsoft, huge growth, lots of interest. It's one of the things I spend most of my time talking on. >> I think Databricks is another interesting example 'cause Cloudera was the now company and they had the sort of open core, and then they had the proprietary piece, and they've obviously didn't work. Databricks when they developed Spark out of Berkeley, everybody thought they were going to do kind of a similar model. Instead, they went for all in managed services. And it's really worked well, I think they were ahead of that curve and you're seeing it now is it's what customers want. >> Well, I mean, Dave, you cover the database market pretty heavily. How many different open source database options are there today? And that's one of the things we're solving. When you look at what is Red Hat doing in the cloud? Okay, I've got lots of databases. Well, we have something called, it's Red Hat Open Database Access, which is from a developer, I don't want to have to think about, I've got six different databases, which one, where's the repository? How does all that happen? We give that consistency, it's tied into OpenShift, so it can help abstract some of those pieces. we've got same Kafka streaming and we've got APIs. So it's frameworks and enablers to help bridge that gap between the complexity that's out there, in the cloud and for the developer tool chain. >> That's really important role you guys play though because you had this proliferation, you mentioned Mongo. So many others, Presto and Starbursts, et cetera, so many other open source options out there now. And companies, developers want to work with multiple databases within the same application. And you have a role in making that easy. >> Yeah, so and that is, if you talk about the question I get all the time is, what's next for Kubernetes? Dave, you and I did a preview for KubeCon and it's automation and simplicity that we need to be. It's not enough to just say, "Hey, we've got APIs." It's like Dave, we used to say, "We've got standards? Great." Everybody's implementation was a little bit different. So we have API Sprawl today. So it's building that ecosystem. You've been talking to a number of our partners. We are very active in the community and trying to do things that can lift up the community, help the developers, help that cloud native ecosystem, help our customers move faster. >> Yeah API's better than scripts, but they got to be managed, right? So, and that's really what you guys are doing that's different. You're not trying to own everything, right? It's sort of antithetical to how billions and trillions are made in the IT industry. >> I remember a few years ago we talked here, and you look at the size that Red Hat is. And the question is, could Red Hat have monetized more if the model was a little different? It's like, well maybe, but that's not the why. I love that they actually had Simon Sinek come in and work with Red Hat and that open, unlocks the world. Like that's the core, it's the why. When I join, they're like, here's a book of Red Hat, you can get it online and that why of what we do, so we never have to think of how do we get there. We did an acquisition in the security space a year ago, StackRox, took us a year, it's open source. Stackrox.io, it's community driven, open source project there because we could have said, "Oh, well, yeah, it's kind of open source and there's pieces that are open source, but we want it to be fully open source." You just talked to Gunnar about how he's RHEL nine, based off CentOS stream, and now developing out in the open with that model, so. >> Well, you were always a big fan of Whitehurst culture book, right? It makes a difference. >> The open organization and right, Red Hat? That culture is special. It's definitely interesting. So first of all, most companies are built with the hierarchy in mind. Had a friend of mine that when he joined Red Hat, he's like, I don't understand, it's almost like you have like lots of individual contractors, all doing their things 'cause Red Hat works on thousands of projects. But I remember talking to Rackspace years ago when OpenStack was a thing and they're like, "How do you figure out what to work on?" "Oh, well we hired great people and they work on what's important to them." And I'm like, "That doesn't sound like a business." And he is like, "Well, we struggle sometimes to that balance." Red Hat has found that balance because we work on a lot of different projects and there are people inside Red Hat that are, you know, they care more about the project than they do the business, but there's the overall view as to where we participate and where we productize because we're not creating IP because it's all an open source. So it's the monetizations, the relationships we have our customers, the ecosystems that we build. And so that is special. And I'll tell you that my line has been Red Hat on the inside is even more Red Hat. The debates and the discussions are brutal. I mean, technical people tearing things apart, questioning things and you can't be thin skinned. And the other thing is, what's great is new people. I've talked to so many people that started at Red Hat as interns and will stay for seven, eight years. And they come there and they have as much of a seat at the table, and when I talk to new people, your job, is if you don't understand something or you think we might be able to do it differently, you better speak up because we want your opinion and we'll take that, everybody takes that into consideration. It's not like, does the decision go all the way up to this executive? And it's like, no, it's done more at the team. >> The cultural contrast between that and your parent, IBM, couldn't be more dramatic. And we talked earlier with Paul Cormier about has IBM really walked the walk when it comes to leaving Red Hat alone. Naturally he said, "Yes." Well what's your perspective. >> Yeah, are there some big blue people across the street or something I heard that did this event, but look, do we interact with IBM? Of course. One of the reasons that IBM and IBM Services, both products and services should be able to help get us breadth in the marketplace. There are times that we go arm and arm into customer meetings and there are times that customers tell us, "I like Red Hat, I don't like IBM." And there's other ones that have been like, "Well, I'm a long time IBM, I'm not sure about Red Hat." And we have to be able to meet all of those customers where they are. But from my standpoint, I've got a Red Hat badge, I've got a Red Hat email, I've got Red Hat benefits. So we are fiercely independent. And you know, Paul, we've done blogs and there's lots of articles been written is, Red Hat will stay Red Hat. I didn't happen to catch Arvin I know was on CNBC today and talking at their event, but I'm sure Red Hat got mentioned, but... >> Well, he talks about Red Hat all time. >> But in his call he's talking backwards. >> It's interesting that he's not here, greeting this audience, right? It's again, almost by design, right? >> But maybe that's supposed to be... >> Hundreds of yards away. >> And one of the questions being in the cloud group is I'm not out pitching IBM Cloud, you know? If a customer comes to me and asks about, we have a deep partnership and IBM will be happy to tell you about our integrations, as opposed to, I'm happy to go into a deep discussion of what we're doing with Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. So that's how we do it. It's very different Dave, from you and I watch really closely the VMware-EMC, VMware-Dell, and how that relationship. This one is different. We are owned by IBM, but we mostly, it does IBM fund initiatives and have certain strategic things that are done, absolutely. But we maintain Red Hat. >> But there are similarities. I mean, VMware crowd didn't want to talk about EMC, but they had to, they were kind of forced to. Whereas, you're not being forced to. >> And then once Dell came in there, it was joint product development. >> I always thought a spin in. Would've been the more effective, of course, Michael Dell and Egon wouldn't have gotten their $40 billion out. But I think a spin in was more natural based on where they were going. And it would've been, I think, a more dominant position in the marketplace. They would've had more software, but again, financially it wouldn't have made as much sense, but that whole dynamic is different. I mean, but people said they were going to look at VMware as a model and it's been largely different because remember, VMware of course was a separate company, now is a fully separate company. Red Hat was integrated, we thought, okay, are they going to get blue washed? We're watching and watching, and watching, you had said, well, if the Red Hat culture isn't permeating IBM, then it's a failure. And I don't know if that's happening, but it's definitely... >> I think a long time for that. >> It's definitely been preserved. >> I mean, Dave, I know I read one article at the beginning of the year is, can Arvin make IBM, Microsoft Junior? Follow the same turnaround that Satya Nadella drove over there. IBM I think making some progress, I mean, I read and watch what you and the team are all writing about it. And I'll withhold judgment on IBM. Obviously, there's certain financial things that we'd love to see IBM succeed. We worry about our business. We do our thing and IBM shares our results and they've been solid, so. >> Microsoft had such massive cash flow that even bomber couldn't screw it up. Well, I mean, this is true, right? I mean, you think about how were relevant Microsoft was in the conversation during his tenure and yet they never got really... They maintained a position so that when the Nadella came in, they were able to reascend and now are becoming that dominant player. I mean, IBM just doesn't have that cash flow and that luxury, but I mean, if he pulls it off, he'll be the CEO of the decade. >> You mentioned partners earlier, big concern when the acquisition was first announced, was that the Dells and the HP's and the such wouldn't want to work with Red Hat anymore, you've sort of been here through that transition. Is that an issue? >> Not that I've seen, no. I mean, the hardware suppliers, the ISVs, the GSIs are all very important. It was great to see, I think you had Accenture on theCUBE today, obviously very important partner as we go to the cloud. IBM's another important partner, not only for IBM Cloud, but IBM Services, deep partnership with Azure and AWS. So those partners and from a technology standpoint, the cloud native ecosystem, we talked about, it's not just a Red Hat product. I constantly have to talk about, look, we have a lot of pieces, but your developers are going to have other tools that they're going to use and the security space. There is no such thing as a silver bullet. So I've been having some great conversations here already this week with some of our partners that are helping us to round out that whole solution, help our customers because it has to be, it's an ecosystem. And we're one of the drivers to help that move forward. >> Well, I mean, we were at Dell Tech World last week, and there's a lot of talk about DevSecOps and DevOps and Dell being more developer friendly. Obviously they got a long way to go, but you can't have that take that posture and not have a relationship with Red Hat. If all you got is Pivotal and VMware, and Tansu >> I was thrilled to hear the OpenShift mention in the keynote when they talked about what they were doing. >> How could you not, how could you have any credibility if you're just like, Oh, Pivotal, Pivotal, Pivotal, Tansu, Tansu. Tansu is doing its thing. And they smart strategy. >> VMware is also a partner of ours, but that we would hope that with VMware being independent, that does open the door for us to do more with them. >> Yeah, because you guys have had a weird relationship with them, under ownership of EMC and then Dell, right? And then the whole IBM thing. But it's just a different world now. Ecosystems are forming and reforming, and Dell's building out its own cloud and it's got to have... Look at Amazon, I wrote about this. I said, "Can you envision the day where Dell actually offers competitive products in its suite, in its service offering?" I mean, it's hard to see, they're not there yet. They're not even close. And they have this high say/do ratio, or really it's a low say/do, they say high say/do, but look at what they did with Nutanix. You look over- (chuckles) would tell if it's the Cisco relationship. So it's got to get better at that. And it will, I really do believe. That's new thinking and same thing with HPE. And, I don't know about Lenovo that not as much of an ecosystem play, but certainly Dell and HPE. >> Absolutely. Michael Dell would always love to poke at HPE and HP really went very far down the path of their own products. They went away from their services organization that used to be more like IBM, that would offer lots of different offerings and very much, it was HP Invent. Well, if we didn't invent it, you're not getting it from us. So Dell, we'll see, as you said, the ecosystems are definitely forming, converging and going in lots of different directions. >> But your position is, Hey, we're here, we're here to help. >> Yeah, we're here. We have customers, one of the best proof points I have is the solution that we have with Amazon. Amazon doesn't do the engineering work to make us a native offering if they didn't have the customer demand because Amazon's driven off of data. So they came to us, they worked with us. It's a lot of work to be able to make that happen, but you want to make it frictionless for customers so that they can adopt that. That's a long path. >> All right, so evening event, there's a customer event this evening upstairs in the lobby. Microsoft is having a little shin dig, and then serves a lot of customer dinners going on. So Stu, we'll see you out there tonight. >> All right, thanks you. >> Were watching a brewing somewhere. >> Keynotes tomorrow, a lot of good sessions and enablement, and yeah, it's great to be in person to be able to bump some people, meet some people and, Hey, I'm still a year and a half in still meeting a lot of my peers in person for the first time. >> Yeah, and that's kind of weird, isn't it? Imagine. And then we kick off tomorrow at 10:00 AM. Actually, Stephanie Chiras is coming on. There she is in the background. She's always a great guest and maybe do a little kickoff and have some fun tomorrow. So this is Dave Vellante for Stu Miniman, Paul Gillin, who's my co-host. You're watching theCUBEs coverage of Red Hat Summit 2022. We'll see you tomorrow. (bright music)

>> The introduction of the modern public cloud in the mid 2000s, permanently changed the way we think about IT. At the heart of it, the cloud operating model attacked one of the biggest problems in enterprise infrastructure, human labor costs. More than half of IT budgets were spent on people, and much of that effort added little or no differentiable value to the business. The automation of provisioning, management, recovery, optimization, and decommissioning infrastructure resources has gone mainstream as organizations demand a cloud-like model across all their application infrastructure, irrespective of its physical location. This has not only cut cost, but it's also improved quality and reduced human error. Hello everyone, my name is Dave Vellante and welcome to Simplifying Hybrid Cloud, made possible by Cisco. Today, we're going to explore Hybrid Cloud as an operating model for organizations. Now the definite of cloud is expanding. Cloud is no longer an abstract set of remote services, you know, somewhere out in the clouds. No, it's an operating model that spans public cloud, on-premises infrastructure, and it's also moving to edge locations. This trend is happening at massive scale. While at the same time, preserving granular control of resources. It's an entirely new game where IT managers must think differently to deal with this complexity. And the environment is constantly changing. The growth and diversity of applications continues. And now, we're living in a world where the workforce is remote. Hybrid work is now a permanent state and will be the dominant model. In fact, a recent survey of CIOs by Enterprise Technology Research, ETR, indicates that organizations expect 36% of their workers will be operating in a hybrid mode. Splitting time between remote work and in office environments. This puts added pressure on the application infrastructure required to support these workers. The underlying technology must be more dynamic and adaptable to accommodate constant change. So the challenge for IT managers is ensuring that modern applications can be run with a cloud-like experience that spans on-prem, public cloud, and edge locations. This is the future of IT. Now today, we have three segments where we're going to dig into these issues and trends surrounding Hybrid Cloud. First up, is DD Dasgupta, who will set the stage and share with us how Cisco is approaching this challenge. Next, we're going to hear from Manish Agarwal and Darren Williams, who will help us unpack HyperFlex which is Cisco's hyperconverged infrastructure offering. And finally, our third segment will drill into Unified Compute. More than a decade ago, Cisco pioneered the concept of bringing together compute with networking in a single offering. Cisco frankly, changed the legacy server market with UCS, Unified Compute System. The X-Series is Cisco's next generation architecture for the coming decade and we'll explore how it fits into the world of Hybrid Cloud, and its role in simplifying the complexity that we just discussed. So, thanks for being here. Let's go. (upbeat music playing) Okay, let's start things off. DD Dasgupta is back on theCUBE to talk about how we're going to simplify Hybrid Cloud complexity. DD welcome, good to see you again. >> Hey Dave, thanks for having me. Good to see you again. >> Yeah, our pleasure. Look, let's start with big picture. Talk about the trends you're seeing from your customers. >> Well, I think first off, every customer these days is a public cloud customer. They do have their on-premise data centers, but, every customer is looking to move workloads, new services, cloud native services from the public cloud. I think that's one of the big things that we're seeing. While that is happening, we're also seeing a pretty dramatic evolution of the application landscape itself. You've got, you know, bare metal applications, you always have virtualized applications, and then most modern applications are containerized, and, you know, managed by Kubernetes. So I think we're seeing a big change in, in the application landscape as well. And, probably, you know, triggered by the first two things that I mentioned, the execution venue of the applications, and then the applications themselves, it's triggering a change in the IT organizations in the development organizations and sort of not only how they work within their organizations, but how they work across all of these different organizations. So I think those are some of the big things that, that I hear about when I talk to customers. >> Well, so it's interesting. I often say Cisco kind of changed the game in server and compute when it developed the original UCS. And you remember there were organizational considerations back then bringing together the server team and the networking team and of course the storage team as well. And now you mentioned Kubernetes, that is a total game changer with regard to whole the application development process. So you have to think about a new strategy in that regard. So how have you evolved your strategy? What is your strategy to help customers simplify, accelerate their hybrid cloud journey in that context? >> No, I think you're right Dave, back to the origins of UCS and we, you know, why did a networking company build a server? Well, we just enabled with the best networking technologies so, would do compute better. And now, doing something similar on the software, actually the managing software for our hyperconvergence, for our, you know, Rack server, for our blade servers. And, you know, we've been on this journey for about four years. The software is called Intersight, and, you know, we started out with Intersight being just the element manager, the management software for Cisco's compute and hyperconverged devices. But then we've evolved it over the last few years because we believe that a customer shouldn't have to manage a separate piece of software, would do manage the hardware, the underlying hardware. And then a separate tool to connect it to a public cloud. And then a third tool to do optimization, workload optimization or performance optimization, or cost optimization. A fourth tool to now manage, you know, Kubernetes and like, not just in one cluster, one cloud, but multi-cluster, multi-cloud. They should not have to have a fifth tool that does, goes into observability anyway. I can go on and on, but you get the idea. We wanted to bring everything onto that same platform that manage their infrastructure. But it's also the platform that enables the simplicity of hybrid cloud operations, automation. It's the same platform on which you can use to manage the, the Kubernetes infrastructure, Kubernetes clusters, I mean, whether it's on-prem or in a cloud. So, overall that's the strategy. Bring it to a single platform, and a platform is a loaded word we'll get into that a little bit, you know, in this conversation, but, that's the overall strategy, simplify. >> Well, you know, you brought platform. I like to say platform beats products, but you know, there was a day, and you could still point to some examples today in the IT industry where, hey, another tool we can monetize that. And another one to solve a different problem, we can monetize that. And so, tell me more about how Intersight came about. You obviously sat back, you saw what your customers were going through, you said, "We can do better." So tell us the story there. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, look, it started with, you know, three or four guys in getting in a room and saying, "Look, we've had this, you know, management software, UCS manager, UCS director." And these are just the Cisco's management, you know, for our, softwares for our own platforms. And every company has their own flavor. We said, we took on this bold goal of like, we're not, when we rewrite this or we improve on this, we're not going to just write another piece of software. We're going to create a cloud service. Or we're going to create a SaaS offering. Because the same, the infrastructure built by us whether it's on networking or compute, or the cyber cloud software, how do our customers use it? Well, they use it to write and run their applications, their SaaS services, every customer, every customer, every company today is a software company. They live and die by how their applications work or don't. And so, we were like, "We want to eat our own dog food here," right? We want to deliver this as a SaaS offering. And so that's how it started, we've being on this journey for about four years, tens of thousands of customers. But it was a pretty big, bold ambition 'cause you know, the big change with SaaS as you're familiar Dave is, the job of now managing this piece of software, is not on the customer, it's on the vendor, right? This can never go down. We have a release every Thursday, new capabilities, and we've learned so much along the way, whether it's to announce scalability, reliability, working with, our own company's security organizations on what can or cannot be in a SaaS service. So again, it's been a wonderful journey, but, I wanted to point out, we are in some ways eating our own dog food 'cause we built a SaaS application that helps other companies deliver their SaaS applications. >> So Cisco, I look at Cisco's business model and I compare, of course compare it to other companies in the infrastructure business and, you're obviously a very profitable company, you're a large company, you're growing faster than most of the traditional competitors. And, so that means that you have more to invest. You, can afford things, like to you know, stock buybacks, and you can invest in R&D you don't have to make those hard trade offs that a lot of your competitors have to make, so-- >> You got to have a talk with my boss on the whole investment. >> Yeah, right. You'd never enough, right? Never enough. But in speaking of R&D and innovations that you're intro introducing, I'm specifically interested in, how are you dealing with innovations to help simplify hybrid cloud, the operations there, improve flexibility, and things around Cloud Native initiatives as well? >> Absolutely, absolutely. Well, look, I think, one of the fundamentals where we're kind of philosophically different from a lot of options that I see in the industry is, we don't need to build everything ourselves, we don't. I just need to create a damn good platform with really good platform services, whether it's, you know, around, searchability, whether it's around logging, whether it's around, you know, access control, multi-tenants. I need to create a really good platform, and make it open. I do not need to go on a shopping spree to buy 17 and 1/2 companies and then figure out how to stich it all together. 'Cause it's almost impossible. And if it's impossible for us as a vendor, it's three times more difficult for the customer who then has to consume it. So that was the philosophical difference and how we went about building Intersight. We've created a hardened platform that's always on, okay? And then you, then the magic starts happening. Then you get partners, whether it is, you know, infrastructure partners, like, you know, some of our storage partners like NetApp or PR, or you know, others, who want their conversion infrastructures also to be managed, or their other SaaS offerings and software vendors who have now become partners. Like we did not write Terraform, you know, but we partnered with Hashi and now, you know, Terraform service's available on the Intersight platform. We did not write all the algorithms for workload optimization between a public cloud and on-prem. We partner with a company called Turbonomic and so that's now an offering on the Intersight platform. So that's where we're philosophically different, in sort of, you know, how we have gone about this. And, it actually dovetails well into, some of the new things that I want to talk about today that we're announcing on the Intersight platform where we're actually announcing the ability to attach and be able to manage Kubernetes clusters which are not on-prem. They're actually on AWS, on Azure, soon coming on GC, on GKE as well. So it really doesn't matter. We're not telling a customer if you're comfortable building your applications and running Kubernetes clusters on, you know, in AWS or Azure, stay there. But in terms of monitoring, managing it, you can use Intersight, and since you're using it on-prem you can use that same piece of software to manage Kubernetes clusters in a public cloud. Or even manage DMS in a EC2 instance. So. >> Yeah so, the fact that you could, you mentioned Storage Pure, NetApp, so Intersight can manage that infrastructure. I remember the Hashi deal and I, it caught my attention. I mean, of course a lot of companies want to partner with Cisco 'cause you've got such a strong ecosystem, but I thought that was an interesting move, Turbonomic you mentioned. And now you're saying Kubernetes in the public cloud. So a lot different than it was 10 years ago. So my last question is, how do you see this hybrid cloud evolving? I mean, you had private cloud and you had public cloud, and it was kind of a tug of war there. We see these two worlds coming together. How will that evolve on for the next few years? >> Well, I think it's the evolution of the model and I, really look at Cloud, you know, 2.0 or 3.0, or depending on, you know, how you're keeping terms. But, I think one thing has become very clear again, we, we've be eating our own dog food, I mean, Intersight is a hybrid cloud SaaS application. So we've learned some of these lessons ourselves. One thing is for sure that the customers are looking for a consistent model, whether it's on the edge, on the COLO, public cloud, on-prem, no data center, it doesn't matter. They're looking for a consistent model for operations, for governance, for upgrades, for reliability. They're looking for a consistent operating model. What (indistinct) tells me I think there's going to be a rise of more custom clouds. It's still going to be hybrid, so applications will want to reside wherever it most makes most sense for them which is obviously data, 'cause you know, data is the most expensive thing. So it's going to be complicated with the data goes on the edge, will be on the edge, COLO, public cloud, doesn't matter. But, you're basically going to see more custom clouds, more industry specific clouds, you know, whether it's for finance, or transportation, or retail, industry specific, I think sovereignty is going to play a huge role, you know, today, if you look at the cloud provider there's a handful of, you know, American and Chinese companies, that leave the rest of the world out when it comes to making, you know, good digital citizens of their people and you know, whether it's data latency, data gravity, data sovereignty, I think that's going to play a huge role. Sovereignty's going to play a huge role. And the distributor cloud also called Edge, is going to be the next frontier. And so, that's where we are trying line up our strategy. And if I had to sum it up in one sentence, it's really, your cloud, your way. Every customer is on a different journey, they will have their choice of like workloads, data, you know, upgrade reliability concern. That's really what we are trying to enable for our customers. >> You know, I think I agree with you on that custom clouds. And I think what you're seeing is, you said every company is a software company. Every company is also becoming a cloud company. They're building their own abstraction layers, they're connecting their on-prem to their public cloud. They're doing that across clouds, and they're looking for companies like Cisco to do the hard work, and give me an infrastructure layer that I can build value on top of. 'Cause I'm going to take my financial services business to my cloud model, or my healthcare business. I don't want to mess around with, I'm not going to develop, you know, custom infrastructure like an Amazon does. I'm going to look to Cisco and your R&D to do that. Do you buy that? >> Absolutely. I think again, it goes back to what I was talking about with platform. You got to give the world a solid open, flexible platform. And flexible in terms of the technology, flexible in how they want to consume it. Some of our customers are fine with the SaaS, you know, software. But if I talk to, you know, my friends in the federal team, no, that does not work. And so, how they want to consume it, they want to, you know, (indistinct) you know, sovereignty we talked about. So, I think, you know, job for an infrastructure vendor like ourselves is to give the world a open platform, give them the knobs, give them the right API tool kit. But the last thing I will mention is, you know, there's still a place for innovation in hardware. And I think some of my colleagues are going to get into some of those, you know, details, whether it's on our X-Series, you know, platform or HyperFlex, but it's really, it's going to be software defined, it's a SaaS service and then, you know, give the world an open rock solid platform. >> Got to run on something All right, Thanks DD, always a pleasure to have you on the, theCUBE, great to see you. >> Thanks for having me. >> You're welcome. In a moment, I'll be back to dig into hyperconverged, and where HyperFlex fits, and how it may even help with addressing some of the supply chain challenges that we're seeing in the market today. >> It used to be all your infrastructure was managed here. But things got more complex in distributing, and now IT operations need to be managed everywhere. But what if you could manage everywhere from somewhere? One scalable place that brings together your teams, technology, and operations. Both on-prem and in the cloud. One automated place that provides full stack visibility to help you optimize performance and stay ahead of problems. One secure place where everyone can work better, faster, and seamlessly together. That's the Cisco Intersight cloud operations platform. The time saving, cost reducing, risk managing solution for your whole IT environment, now and into the future of this ever-changing world of IT. (upbeat music) >> With me now are Manish Agarwal, senior director of product management for HyperFlex at Cisco, @flash4all, number four, I love that, on Twitter. And Darren Williams, the director of business development and sales for Cisco. MrHyperFlex, @MrHyperFlex on Twitter. Thanks guys. Hey, we're going to talk about some news and HyperFlex, and what role it plays in accelerating the hybrid cloud journey. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thanks a lot Dave. >> Thanks Dave. >> All right Darren, let's start with you. So, for a hybrid cloud, you got to have on-prem connection, right? So, you got to have basically a private cloud. What are your thoughts on that? >> Yeah, we agree. You can't have a hybrid cloud without that prime element. And you've got to have a strong foundation in terms of how you set up the whole benefit of the cloud model you're building in terms of what you want to try and get back from the cloud. You need a strong foundation. Hyperconversions provides that. We see more and more customers requiring a private cloud, and they're building it with Hyperconversions, in particular HyperFlex. Now to make all that work, they need a good strong cloud operations model to be able to connect both the private and the public. And that's where we look at Intersight. We've got solution around that to be able to connect that around a SaaS offering. That looks around simplified operations, gives them optimization, and also automation to bring both private and public together in that hybrid world. >> Darren let's stay with you for a minute. When you talk to your customers, what are they thinking these days when it comes to implementing hyperconverged infrastructure in both the enterprise and at the edge, what are they trying to achieve? >> So there's many things they're trying to achieve, probably the most brutal honesty is they're trying to save money, that's probably the quickest answer. But, I think they're trying to look in terms of simplicity, how can they remove layers of components they've had before in their infrastructure? We see obviously collapsing of storage into hyperconversions and storage networking. And we've got customers that have saved 80% worth of savings by doing that collapse into a hyperconversion infrastructure away from their Three Tier infrastructure. Also about scalability, they don't know the end game. So they're looking about how they can size for what they know now, and how they can grow that with hyperconvergence very easy. It's one of the major factors and benefits of hyperconversions. They also obviously need performance and consistent performance. They don't want to compromise performance around their virtual machines when they want to run multiple workloads. They need that consistency all all way through. And then probably one of the biggest ones is that around the simplicity model is the management layer, ease of management. To make it easier for their operations, yeah, we've got customers that have told us, they've saved 50% of costs in their operations model on deploying HyperFlex, also around the time savings they make massive time savings which they can reinvest in their infrastructure and their operations teams in being able to innovate and go forward. And then I think probably one of the biggest pieces we've seen as people move away from three tier architecture is the deployment elements. And the ease of deployment gets easy with hyperconverged, especially with Edge. Edge is a major key use case for us. And, what I want, what our customers want to do is get the benefit of a data center at the edge, without A, the big investment. They don't want to compromise in performance, and they want that simplicity in both management and deployment. And, we've seen our analysts recommendations around what their readers are telling them in terms of how management deployment's key for our IT operations teams. And how much they're actually saving by deploying Edge and taking the burden away when they deploy hyperconversions. And as I said, the savings elements is the key bit, and again, not always, but obviously those are case studies around about public cloud being quite expensive at times, over time for the wrong workloads. So by bringing them back, people can make savings. And we again have customers that have made 50% savings over three years compared to their public cloud usage. So, I'd say that's the key things that customers are looking for. Yeah. >> Great, thank you for that Darren. Manish, we have some hard news, you've been working a lot on evolving the HyperFlex line. What's the big news that you've just announced? >> Yeah, thanks Dave. So there are several things that we are announcing today. The first one is a new offer called HyperFlex Express. This is, you know, Cisco Intersight led and Cisco Intersight managed eight HyperFlex configurations. That we feel are the fastest path to hybrid cloud. The second is we are expanding our server portfolio by adding support for HX on AMD Rack, UCS AMD Rack. And the third is a new capability that we are introducing, that we are calling, local containerized witness. And let me take a minute to explain what this is. This is a pretty nifty capability to optimize for Edge environments. So, you know, this leverages the, Cisco's ubiquitous presence of the networking, you know, products that we have in the environments worldwide. So the smallest HyperFlex configuration that we have is a 2-node configuration, which is primarily used in Edge environments. Think of a, you know, a backroom in a departmental store or a oil rig, or it might even be a smaller data center somewhere around the globe. For these 2-node configurations, there is always a need for a third entity that, you know, industry term for that is either a witness or an arbitrator. We had that for HyperFlex as well. And the problem that customers face is, where you host this witness. It cannot be on the cluster because the job of the witness is to, when the infrastructure is going down, it basically breaks, sort of arbitrates which node gets to survive. So it needs to be outside of the cluster. But finding infrastructure to actually host this is a problem, especially in the Edge environments where these are resource constraint environments. So what we've done is we've taken that witness, we've converted it into a container reform factor. And then qualified a very large slew of Cisco networking products that we have, right from ISR, ASR, Nexus, Catalyst, industrial routers, even a Raspberry Pi that can host this witness. Eliminating the need for you to find yet another piece of infrastructure, or doing any, you know, care and feeding of that infrastructure. You can host it on something that already exists in the environment. So those are the three things that we are announcing today. >> So I want to ask you about HyperFlex Express. You know, obviously the whole demand and supply chain is out of whack. Everybody's, you know, global supply chain issues are in the news, everybody's dealing with it. Can you expand on that a little bit more? Can HyperFlex Express help customers respond to some of these issues? >> Yeah indeed Dave. You know the primary motivation for HyperFlex Express was indeed an idea that, you know, one of the folks are on my team had, which was to build a set of HyperFlex configurations that are, you know, would have a shorter lead time. But as we were brainstorming, we were actually able to tag on multiple other things and make sure that, you know, there is in it for, something in it for our customers, for sales, as well as our partners. So for example, you know, for our customers, we've been able to dramatically simplify the configuration and the install for HyperFlex Express. These are still HyperFlex configurations and you would at the end of it, get a HyperFlex cluster. But the part to that cluster is much, much simplified. Second is that we've added in flexibility where you can now deploy these, these are data center configurations, but you can deploy these with or without fabric interconnects, meaning you can deploy with your existing top of rack. We've also, you know, added attractive price point for these, and of course, you know, these will have better lead times because we've made sure that, you know, we are using components that are, that we have clear line of sight from our supply perspective. For partner and sales, this is, represents a high velocity sales motion, a faster turnaround time, and a frictionless sales motion for our distributors. This is actually a set of disty-friendly configurations, which they would find very easy to stalk, and with a quick turnaround time, this would be very attractive for the distys as well. >> It's interesting Manish, I'm looking at some fresh survey data, more than 70% of the customers that were surveyed, this is the ETR survey again, we mentioned 'em at the top. More than 70% said they had difficulty procuring server hardware and networking was also a huge problem. So that's encouraging. What about, Manish, AMD? That's new for HyperFlex. What's that going to give customers that they couldn't get before? >> Yeah Dave, so, you know, in the short time that we've had UCS AMD Rack support, we've had several record making benchmark results that we've published. So it's a powerful platform with a lot of performance in it. And HyperFlex, you know, the differentiator that we've had from day one is that it has the industry leading storage performance. So with this, we are going to get the fastest compute, together with the fastest storage. And this, we are hoping that we'll, it'll basically unlock, you know, a, unprecedented level of performance and efficiency, but also unlock several new workloads that were previously locked out from the hyperconverged experience. >> Yeah, cool. So Darren, can you give us an idea as to how HyperFlex is doing in the field? >> Sure, absolutely. So, both me and Manish been involved right from the start even before it was called HyperFlex, and we've had a great journey. And it's very exciting to see where we are taking, where we've been with the technology. So we have over 5,000 customers worldwide, and we're currently growing faster year over year than the market. The majority of our customers are repeat buyers, which is always a good sign in terms of coming back when they've proved the technology and are comfortable with the technology. They, repeat buyer for expanded capacity, putting more workloads on. They're using different use cases on there. And from an Edge perspective, more numbers of science. So really good endorsement of the technology. We get used across all verticals, all segments, to house mission critical applications, as well as the traditional virtual server infrastructures. And we are the lifeblood of our customers around those, mission critical customers. I think one big example, and I apologize for the worldwide audience, but this resonates with the American audience is, the Super Bowl. So, the SoFi stadium that housed the Super Bowl, actually has Cisco HyperFlex running all the management services, through from the entire stadium for digital signage, 4k video distribution, and it's completely cashless. So, if that were to break during Super Bowl, that would've been a big news article. But it was run perfectly. We, in the design of the solution, we're able to collapse down nearly 200 servers into a few nodes, across a few racks, and have 120 virtual machines running the whole stadium, without missing a heartbeat. And that is mission critical for you to run Super Bowl, and not be on the front of the press afterwards for the wrong reasons, that's a win for us. So we really are, really happy with HyperFlex, where it's going, what it's doing, and some of the use cases we're getting involved in, very, very exciting. >> Hey, come on Darren, it's Super Bowl, NFL, that's international now. And-- >> Thing is, I follow NFL. >> The NFL's, it's invading London, of course, I see the, the picture, the real football over your shoulder. But, last question for Manish. Give us a little roadmap, what's the future hold for HyperFlex? >> Yeah. So, you know, as Darren said, both Darren and I have been involved with HyperFlex since the beginning. But, I think the best is yet to come. There are three main pillars for HyperFlex. One is, Intersight is central to our strategy. It provides a, you know, lot of customer benefit from a single pane of class management. But we are going to take this beyond the lifecycle management, which is for HyperFlex, which is integrated into Intersight today, and element management. We are going to take it beyond that and start delivering customer value on the dimensions of AI Ops, because Intersight really provides us a ideal platform to gather stats from all the clusters across the globe, do AI/ML and do some predictive analysis with that, and return back as, you know, customer valued, actionable insights. So that is one. The second is UCS expand the HyperFlex portfolio, go beyond UCS to third party server platforms, and newer UCS server platforms as well. But the highlight there is one that I'm really, really excited about and think that there is a lot of potential in terms of the number of customers we can help. Is HX on X-Series. X-Series is another thing that we are going to, you know, add, we're announcing a bunch of capabilities on in this particular launch. But HX on X-Series will have that by the end of this calendar year. And that should unlock with the flexibility of X-Series of hosting a multitude of workloads and the simplicity of HyperFlex. We're hoping that would bring a lot of benefits to new workloads that were locked out previously. And then the last thing is HyperFlex data platform. This is the heart of the offering today. And, you'll see the HyperFlex data platform itself it's a distributed architecture, a unique distributed architecture. Primarily where we get our, you know, record baring performance from. You'll see it can foster more scalable, more resilient, and we'll optimize it for you know, containerized workloads, meaning it'll get granular containerized, container granular management capabilities, and optimize for public cloud. So those are some things that we are, the team is busy working on, and we should see that come to fruition. I'm hoping that we'll be back at this forum in maybe before the end of the year, and talking about some of these newer capabilities. >> That's great. Thank you very much for that, okay guys, we got to leave it there. And you know, Manish was talking about the HX on X-Series that's huge, customers are going to love that and it's a great transition 'cause in a moment, I'll be back with Vikas Ratna and Jim Leach, and we're going to dig into X-Series. Some real serious engineering went into this platform, and we're going to explore what it all means. You're watching Simplifying Hybrid Cloud on theCUBE, your leader in enterprise tech coverage. >> The power is here, and here, but also here. And definitely here. Anywhere you need the full force and power of your infrastructure hyperconverged. It's like having thousands of data centers wherever you need them, powering applications anywhere they live, but manage from the cloud. So you can automate everything from here. (upbeat music) Cisco HyperFlex goes anywhere. Cisco, the bridge to possible. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's special presentation, Simplifying Hybrid Cloud brought to you by Cisco. We're here with Vikas Ratna who's the director of product management for UCS at Cisco and James Leach, who is director of business development at Cisco. Gents, welcome back to theCUBE, good to see you again. >> Hey, thanks for having us. >> Okay, Jim, let's start. We know that when it comes to navigating a transition to hybrid cloud, it's a complicated situation for a lot of customers, and as organizations as they hit the pavement for their hybrid cloud journeys, what are the most common challenges that they face? What are they telling you? How is Cisco, specifically UCS helping them deal with these problems? >> Well, you know, first I think that's a, you know, that's a great question. And you know, customer centric view is the way that we've taken, is kind of the approach we've taken from day one. Right? So I think that if you look at the challenges that we're solving for that our customers are facing, you could break them into just a few kind of broader buckets. The first would definitely be applications, right? That's the, that's where the rubber meets your proverbial road with the customer. And I would say that, you know, what we're seeing is, the challenges customers are facing within applications come from the the way that applications have evolved. So what we're seeing now is more data centric applications for example. Those require that we, you know, are able to move and process large data sets really in real time. And the other aspect of applications I think to give our customers kind of some, you know, pause some challenges, would be around the fact that they're changing so quickly. So the application that exists today or the day that they, you know, make a purchase of infrastructure to be able to support that application, that application is most likely changing so much more rapidly than the infrastructure can keep up with today. So, that creates some challenges around, you know, how do I build the infrastructure? How do I right size it without over provisioning, for example? But also, there's a need for some flexibility around life cycle and planning those purchase cycles based on the life cycle of the different hardware elements. And within the infrastructure, which I think is the second bucket of challenges, we see customers who are being forced to move away from the, like a modular or blade approach, which offers a lot of operational and consolidation benefits, and they have to move to something like a Rack server model for some applications because of these needs that these data centric applications have, and that creates a lot of you know, opportunity for siloing the infrastructure. And those silos in turn create multiple operating models within the, you know, a data center environment that, you know, again, drive a lot of complexity. So that, complexity is definitely the enemy here. And then finally, I think life cycles. We're seeing this democratization of processing if you will, right? So it's no longer just CPU focused, we have GPU, we have FPGA, we have, you know, things that are being done in storage and the fabrics that stitch them together that are all changing rapidly and have very different life cycles. So, when those life cycles don't align for a lot of our customers, they see a challenge in how they can manage this, you know, these different life cycles and still make a purchase without having to make too big of a compromise in one area or another because of the misalignment of life cycles. So, that is a, you know, kind of the other bucket. And then finally, I think management is huge, right? So management, you know, at its core is really right size for our customers and give them the most value when it meets the mark around scale and scope. You know, back in 2009, we weren't meeting that mark in the industry and UCS came about and took management outside the chassis, right? We put it at the top of the rack and that worked great for the scale and scope we needed at that time. However, as things have changed, we're seeing a very new scale and scope needed, right? So we're talking about a hybrid cloud world that has to manage across data centers, across clouds, and, you know, having to stitch things together for some of our customers poses a huge challenge. So there are tools for all of those operational pieces that touch the application, that touch the infrastructure, but they're not the same tool. They tend to be disparate tools that have to be put together. >> Right. >> So our customers, you know, don't really enjoy being in the business of, you know, building their own tools, so that creates a huge challenge. And one where I think that they really crave that full hybrid cloud stack that has that application visibility but also can reach down into the infrastructure. >> Right. You know Jim, I said in my open that you guys, Cisco sort of changed the server game with the original UCS, but the X-Series is the next generation, the generation for the next decade which is really important 'cause you touched on a lot of things, these data intensive workload, alternative processors to sort of meet those needs. The whole cloud operating model and hybrid cloud has really changed. So, how's it going with with the X-Series? You made a big splash last year, what's the reception been in the field? >> Actually, it's been great. You know, we're finding that customers can absolutely relate to our, you know, UCS X-Series story. I think that, you know, the main reason they relate to it is they helped create it, right? It was their feedback and their partnership that gave us really the, those problem areas, those areas that we could solve for the customer that actually add, you know, significant value. So, you know, since we brought UCS to market back in 2009, you know, we had this unique architectural paradigm that we created, and I think that created a product which was the fastest in Cisco history in terms of growth. What we're seeing now is X-Series is actually on a faster trajectory. So we're seeing a tremendous amount of uptake. We're seeing all, you know, both in terms of, you know, the number of customers, but also more importantly, the number of workloads that our customers are using, and the types of workloads are growing, right? So we're growing this modular segment that exist, not just, you know, bringing customers onto a new product, but we're actually bring them into the product in the way that we had envisioned, which is one infrastructure that can run any application and do it seamlessly. So we're really excited to be growing this modular segment. I think the other piece, you know, that, you know, we judge ourselves is, you know, sort of not just within Cisco, but also within the industry. And I think right now is a, you know, a great example, you know, our competitors have taken kind of swings and misses over the past five years at this, at a, you know, kind of the new next architecture. And, we're seeing a tremendous amount of growth even faster than any of our competitors have seen when they announced something that was new to this space. So, I think that the ground up work that we did is really paying off. And I think that what we're also seeing is it's not really a leap frog game, as it may have been in the past. X-Series is out in front today, and, you know, we're extending that lead with some of the new features and capabilities we have. So we're delivering on the story that's already been resonating with customers and, you know, we're pretty excited that we're seeing the results as well. So, as our competitors hit walls, I think we're, you know, we're executing on the plan that we laid out back in June when we launched X-Series to the world. And, you know, as we continue to do that, we're seeing, you know, again, tremendous uptake from our customers. >> So thank you for that Jim. So Vikas, I was just on Twitter just today actually talking about the gravitational pull, you've got the public clouds pulling CXOs one way and you know, on-prem folks pulling the other way and hybrid cloud. So, organizations are struggling with a lot of different systems and architectures and ways to do things. And I said that what they're trying to do is abstract all that complexity away and they need infrastructure to support that. And I think your stated aim is really to try to help with that confusion with the X series, right? I mean, so how so can you explain that? >> Sure. And, that's the right, the context that you built up right there Dave. If you walk into enterprise data center you'll see plethora of compute systems spread all across. Because, every application has its unique needs, and, hence you find drive node, drive-dense system, memory dense system, GPU dense system, core dense system, and variety of form factors, 1U, 2U, 4U, and, every one of them typically come with, you know, variety of adapters and cables and so forth. This creates the siloness of resources. Fabric is (indistinct), the adapter is (indistinct). The power and cooling implication. The Rack, you know, face challenges. And, above all, the multiple management plane that they come up with, which makes it very difficult for IT to have one common center policy, and enforce it all across, across the firmware and software and so forth. And then think about upgrade challenges of the siloness makes it even more complex as these go through the upgrade processes of their own. As a result, we observe quite a few of our customers, you know, really seeing an inter, slowness in that agility, and high burden in the cost of overall ownership. This is where with the X-Series powered by Intersight, we have one simple goal. We want to make sure our customers get out of that complexities. They become more agile, and drive lower TCOs. And we are delivering it by doing three things, three aspects of simplification. First, simplify their whole infrastructure by enabling them to run their entire workload on single infrastructure. An infrastructure which removes the siloness of form factor. An infrastructure which reduces the Rack footprint that is required. An infrastructure where power and cooling budgets are in the lower. Second, we want to simplify by delivering a cloud operating model, where they can and create the policy once across compute network storage and deploy it all across. And third, we want to take away the pain they have by simplifying the process of upgrade and any platform evolution that they're going to go through in the next two, three years. So that's where the focus is on just driving down the simplicity, lowering down their TCOs. >> Oh, that's key, less friction is always a good thing. Now, of course, Vikas we heard from the HyperFlex guys earlier, they had news not to be outdone. You have hard news as well. What innovations are you announcing around X-Series today? >> Absolutely. So we are following up on the exciting X-Series announcement that we made in June last year, Dave. And we are now introducing three innovation on X-Series with the goal of three things. First, expand the supported workload on X-Series. Second, take the performance to new levels. Third, dramatically reduce the complexities in the data center by driving down the number of adapters and cables that are needed. To that end, three new innovations are coming in. First, we are introducing the support for the GPU node using a cableless and very unique X-Fabric architecture. This is the most elegant design to add the GPUs to the compute node in the modular form factor. Thereby, our customers can now power in AI/ML workload, or any workload that need many more number of GPUs. Second, we are bringing in GPUs right onto the compute node, and thereby our customers can now fire up the accelerated VDI workload for example. And third, which is what you know, we are extremely proud about, is we are innovating again by introducing the fifth generation of our very popular unified fabric technology. With the increased bandwidth that it brings in, coupled with the local drive capacity and densities that we have on the compute node, our customers can now fire up the big data workload, the FCI workload, the SDS workload. All these workloads that have historically not lived in the modular form factor, can be run over there and benefit from the architectural benefits that we have. Second, with the announcement of fifth generation fabric, we've become the only vendor to now finally enable 100 gig end to end single port bandwidth, and there are multiple of those that are coming in there. And we are working very closely with our CI partners to deliver the benefit of these performance through our Cisco Validated Design to our CI franchise. And third, the innovations in the fifth gen fabric will again allow our customers to have fewer physical adapters made with ethernet adapter, made with power channel adapters, or made with, the other storage adapters. They've reduced it down and coupled with the reduction in the cable. So very, very excited about these three big announcements that we are making in this month's release. >> Great, a lot there, you guys have been busy, so thank you for that Vikas. So, Jim, you talked a little bit about the momentum that you have, customers are adopting, what problems are they telling you that X-Series addresses, and how do they align with where they want to go in the future? >> That's a great question. I think if you go back to, and think about some of the things that we mentioned before, in terms of the problems that we originally set out to solve, we're seeing a lot of traction. So what Vikas mentioned I think is really important, right? Those pieces that we just announced really enhance that story and really move again, to the, kind of, to the next level of taking advantage of some of these, you know, problem solving for our customers. You know, if you look at, you know, I think Vikas mentioned accelerated VDI. That's a great example. These are where customers, you know, they need to have this dense compute, they need video acceleration, they need tight policy management, right? And they need to be able to deploy these systems anywhere in the world. Well, that's exactly what we're hitting on here with X-Series right now. We're hitting the market in every single way, right? We have the highest compute config density that we can offer across the, you know, the very top end configurations of CPUs, and a lot of room to grow. We have the, you know, the premier cloud based management, you know, hybrid cloud suite in the industry, right? So check there. We have the flexible GPU accelerators that Vikas just talked about that we're announcing both on the system and also adding additional ones to the, through the use of the X-Fabric, which is really, really critical to this launch as well. And, you know, I think finally, the fifth generation of fabric interconnect and virtual interface card, and, intelligent fabric module go hand in hand in creating this 100 gig end to end bandwidth story, that we can move a lot of data. Again, you know, having all this performance is only as good as what we can get in and out of it, right? So giving customers the ability to manage it anywhere, to be able to get the bandwidth that they need, to be able to get the accelerators that are flexible that it fit exactly their needs, this is huge, right? This solves a lot of the problems we can tick off right away. With the infrastructure as I mentioned, X-Fabric is really critical here because it opens a lot of doors here, you know, we're talking about GPUs today, but in the future, there are other elements that we can disaggregate, like the GPUs that solve these life cycle mismanagement issues. They solve issues around the form factor limitations. It solves all these issues for like, it does for GPU we can do that with storage or memory in the future. So that's going to be huge, right? This is disaggregation that actually delivers, right? It's not just a gimmicky bar trick here that we're doing, this is something that customers can really get value out of day one. And then finally, I think the, you know, the future readiness here, you know, we avoid saying future proof because we're kind of embracing the future here. We know that not only are the GPUs going to evolve, the CPUs are going to evolve, the drives, you know, the storage modules are going to evolve. All of these things are changing very rapidly. The fabric that stitches them together is critical, and we know that we're just on the edge of some of the development that are coming with CXL, with some of the PCI Express changes that are coming in the very near future, so we're ready to go. And the X-Fabric is exactly the vehicle that's going to be able to deliver those technologies to our customers, right? Our customers are out there saying that, you know, they want to buy into to something like X-Series that has all the operational benefits, but at the same time, they have to have the comfort in knowing that they're protected against being locked out of some technology that's coming in the future, right? We want our customers to take these disruptive technologies and not be disrupted, but use them to disrupt their competition as well. So, you know, we're really excited about the pieces today, and, I think it goes a long way towards continuing to tell the customer benefit story that X-Series brings, and, you know, again, you know, stay tuned because it's going to keep getting better as we go. >> Yeah, a lot of headroom for scale and the management piece is key there. Just have time for one more question Vikas. Give us some nuggets on the roadmap. What's next for X-Series that we can look forward to? >> Absolutely Dave. As we talked about, and as Jim also hinted, this is a future ready architecture. A lot of focus and innovation that we are going through is about enabling our customers to seamlessly and painlessly adopt very disruptive hardware technologies that are coming up, no refund replace. And, there we are looking into, enabling the customer's journey as they transition from PCI generation four, to five to six without driven replace, as they embrace CXL without driven replace. As they embrace the newer paradigm of computing through the disaggregated memory, disaggregated PCIe or NVMe based dense drives, and so forth. We are also looking forward to X-Fabric next generation, which will allow dynamic assignment of GPUs anywhere within the chassis and much more. So this is again, all about focusing on the innovation that will make the enterprise data center operations a lot more simpler, and drive down the TCO by keeping them not only covered for today, but also for future. So that's where some of the focus is on Dave. >> Okay. Thank you guys we'll leave it there, in a moment, I'll have some closing thoughts. (upbeat music) We're seeing a major evolution, perhaps even a bit of a revolution in the underlying infrastructure necessary to support hybrid work. Look, virtualizing compute and running general purpose workloads is something IT figured out a long time ago. But just when you have it nailed down in the technology business, things change, don't they? You can count on that. The cloud operating model has bled into on-premises locations. And is creating a new vision for the future, which we heard a lot about today. It's a vision that's turning into reality. And it supports much more diverse and data intensive workloads and alternative compute modes. It's one where flexibility is a watch word, enabling change, attacking complexity, and bringing a management capability that allows for a granular management of resources at massive scale. I hope you've enjoyed this special presentation. Remember, all these videos are available on demand at thecube.net. And if you want to learn more, please click on the information link. Thanks for watching Simplifying Hybrid Cloud brought to you by Cisco and theCUBE, your leader in enterprise tech coverage. This is Dave Vellante, be well and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Greetings from Los Angeles, Lisa Martin here with Dave Nicholson. We are on day three of the caves wall-to-wall coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon North America 21. We're pleased to welcome Mark Hinkle to the program, the co-founder and CEO of TriggerMesh. Mark welcome. >> Thank you, It's nice to be here. >> Lisa: Love the name. Very interesting TriggerMesh. Talk to us about what TriggerMesh does and what, when you were founded and what some of the gaps were that you saw in the market. >> Yeah, so TriggerMesh actually the Genesis of the name is in, cloud event, driven architecture. You trigger workloads. So that's the trigger and trigger mesh, and then mesh, we mesh services together, so cloud, so that's why we're called TriggerMesh. So we're a cloud native open source integration platform. And the idea is that, the number of cloud services are proliferating. You still have stuff in your data center that you can't decommission and just wholesale lift and shift to the cloud. So we wanted to provide a platform to create workflows from the data center, to the cloud, from cloud to cloud and not, and use all the cloud native design principles, but not leave your past behind. So that's, what we do. We're, very, we were cloud, we are cloud operators and developers, and we wanted the experience to be very similar to the way that DevOps folks are doing infrastructure code and deploying that we want to make it easy to do integration as code. So we follow the same design patterns, use the same domain languages, some of those tools like Hashi corpse, Terraform, and that that's what we do and how we go about doing it. >> Lisa: And when were you guys founded? >> September, 2018. >> Oh so your young, your three years young. >> Three years it's feels like 21 >> I bet. >> And startup years it's a lot has happened, but yeah, we my co-founder and I were former early cloud folks. We were at cloud.com worked through the OpenStack years and the CloudStack, and we just saw the pattern of, abstraction coming about. So first you abstract the hardware, then you abstract the operating system. And now at with the Kubernetes container, you know, evolution, you're abstracting it up to the application layer and we want it to be able to provide tooling that lets you take full advantage of that. >> Dave: So being founded in 2018, what's your perception of that? The shift that happened during the pandemic in terms of the drive towards cloud adoption and the demands for services like you provide? >> Mark: Yeah, I think it's a mixed blessing. So we, people became more remote. They needed to enable digital transformation. Biggest thing, I think that that for us is, you know, you don't go to the bank anymore. And the banking industry is doing, you know, exponentially more remote, online transactions than in person. And it's very important. So we decided that financial services is where we were going to start with first because they have a lot of legacy architecture. They have a lot of need to move to the cloud to have better digital experiences. And we wanted to enable them to, you know, keep their mainframes online while they were still doing cutting edge, you know, mobile applications, that kind of thing. >> Lisa: And of course the legacy institutions like the BFA's the Wells Fargo, they're competing with the fintechs who are much more nimble, much more agile and able to sort of disrupt the financial services industry. Was that part of also your decision to start in financial services? >> It was a little bit of luck because we started with our network and it turned out the, you know, we saw, we started talking to our friends early on, cause we're a startup and said, this is what we're going to do. And where it really resonated was PNC bank was our, one of our first customers. You know, another financial regulatory company was another one, a couple of banks in Europe. And we, you know, as we started talking about what we were doing, that we just gravitated there because they had the, the biggest need, even though everybody has the need, their businesses are, you know, critically tied to digital transformation. >> So starting with financial services. >> It's, it's counter intuitive, isn't it? >> It was counterintuitive, but it lends credibility to any other industry vertical that you're going to approach. >> Yeah, yeah it does. It's a, it's a great, they're going to be our hardest customers and they have more at stake than a lot of like transactions are millions and millions of dollars per hour for these folks. So they don't want to play around, they, they have no tolerance for failure. So it's a good start, but it's sort of like taking up jogging and running a marathon in your first week. It's very very grilling in that sense, but it really has made us a lot better and gave us a lot of insight into the kinds of things we need to do from not just functionality, but security and that kind of thing. >> Where are you finding these customers with respect to adoption of Kubernetes? Are they leading? Are they knowing we've got to get there eventually from an infrastructure perspective? >> So the interesting thing is Kubernetes is a platform for us to deliver on, so we, we don't require you to be a Kubernetes expert we offer it as a SaaS, but what happens is that the Kubernetes folks are the ones that we end up really engaging with earlier on. And I think that we find that they're in this phase of they're containerizing their apps, that's the first step. And then they're putting them on Kubernetes and then their next step is a security and integration path. So once she, I think they call it and this is my buzzword of the show day two operations, right? So they, they get to day two and then they have a security and an integration concern before they go live. So they want to be able to make sure that they don't increase their attack face. And then they also want to make sure that this newly deployed containerized infrastructure is as well integrated as the previous, you know, virtualized or even, you know, on the server infrastructure that they had before. >> So TriggerMesh, doesn't solely work in the containerized world, you're, you're sort of you're bridging the divide. >> Mark: Yes. >> What percentage of the workloads that you're seeing are the result of modernization migration, as opposed to standing up net new application environments in Kubernetes? Do you have a sense for that? >> I think we live in a lot in the brown field. So, you know, folks that have an existing project that they're trying to bridge to it versus the Greenfield kind of, you know, the, the huge wins that you saw in the early cloud days of the Netflix and the Twitter's Dwayne scale. Now we're talking to the enterprises who have, you know, they have existing concerns. So I would say that it's, it's mostly people that are, you know, very few net new projects, unless it's a modernization and they're getting ready to decommission an old one, which is. >> Dave: So Brownfield financial services. You just said, you know, let's just, let's just go after that. >> You know, yeah. I mean, we had this dart forward and we put up buzzwords, but no, it was, it was actually just, and you know, we're still finding our way as far as early on where we're open source folks. And we did not open source from day one, which is very weird when everybody's new, your identity is, you know, I worked, I was the VP of marketing for Linux foundation and no JS and all these open source projects. And my co-founder and I are Apache committers. And our project wasn't open yet because we had to get to the point where it could be open and people could be productive in the use and contribution. And we had to staff up engineers. And now I think this week we open-sourced our entire platform. And I think that's going to open up, you know, that's where we started because it was not necessarily the lowest hanging fruit, but the profitable, less profitable, lowest hanging fruit was financial services. Now we are letting our code out into the wild. And I think it'll be interesting to see what comes back. >> So you just announced that this week TriggerMesh integration platform as an open source project here at KubeCon, what's been some of the feedback? >> It's all been positive. I haven't heard anything negative. We did it, so we're very, very, there's a very, the culture around open source is very tough. It's very critical if you don't do it right. So I think we did a good job, we used enough, we used a OSI approved. They've been sourced, licensed the Apache software, a V2 license. We hired someone who was well-respected in the DevREL world from a chef who understands the DevOps sort of culture methodologies. We staffed up our engineers who are going to be helping the free and open source users. So they're successful and we're betting that that will yield business results down the road. >> Lisa: And what are the two I see on your website, two primary use cases that you guys support. Can you dig into details on that? >> So the first one is sort of a workflow automation and a really simple example of that is you have a, something that happens in one cloud. So for example, you take a picture on your phone and you upload it and it goes to Amazon and there is a service that wants to identify what's in that picture. And once you put it on the line and the internship parlance, you could kick off a workflow from TensorFlow, which is artificial intelligence to identify the picture. And there isn't a good way for clouds to communicate from one to the other, without writing custom blue, which is really what, what we're helping to get rid of is there's a lot of blue written to put together cloud native applications. So that's a workflow, you know, triggering a server less function is the workflow. The other thing is actually breaking up data gravity. So I have a warehouse of data, in my data center, and I want to start replicating some portion of that. As it changes to a database as a service, we can based on an event flow, which is passive. We're not, we're not making, having a conversation like you would with an API where there's an event stream. That's like drinking from the fire hose and TriggerMesh is the nozzle. And we can direct that data to a DBaaS. We can direct that data to snowflake. We can direct that data to a cloud-based data lake on Microsoft Azure, or we can split it up, so some events could go to Splunk and all of the events can go to your data lake or some of those, those things can be used to trigger workloads on other systems. And that event driven architecture is really the design pattern of the individual clouds. We're just making it multi-cloud and on-prem. >> Lisa: Do you have a favorite customer example that you think really articulates that the value of that use case? >> Mark: Yeah I think a PNC is probably our, well for the, for the data flow one, I would say we have a regular to Oracle and one of their customers it was their biggest SMB customer of last year. The Oracle cloud is very, very important, but it's not as tool. It doesn't have the same level of tooling as a lot of the other ones. And to, to close that deal, their regulatory customer wanted to use Datadog. So they have hundreds and hundreds of metrics. And what TriggerMesh did was ingest the hundreds and hundreds of metrics and filter them and connect them to Datadog so that, they could, use Datadog to measure, to monitor workloads on Oracle cloud. So that, would be an example of the data flow on the workflow. PNC bank is, is probably our best example and PNC bank. They want to do. I talked about infrastructure code integration is code. They want to do policy as code. So they're very highly regulatory regulated. And what they used to do is they had policies that they applied against all their systems once a month, to determine how much they were in compliance. Well, theoretically if you do that once a month, it could be 30 days before you knew where you were out of compliance. What we did was, we provided them a way to take all of the changes within their systems and for them to a server less cluster. And they codified all of these policies into server less functions and TriggerMesh is triggering their policies as code. So upon change, they're getting almost real-time updates on whether or not they're in compliance or not. And that's a huge thing. And they're going to, they have, within their first division, we worked with, you know, tens of policies throughout PNC. They have thousands of policies. And so that's really going to revolutionize what they're able to do as far as compliance. And that's a huge use case across the whole banking system. >> That's also a huge business outcome. >> Yes. >> So Mark, where can folks go to learn more about TriggerMesh, maybe even read about more specifically about the announcement that you made this week. >> TriggerMesh.com is the best way to get an overview. The open source project is get hub.com/triggermesh/trigger mesh. >> Awesome Mark, thank you for joining Dave and me talking to us about TriggerMesh, what you guys are doing. The use cases that you're enabling customers. We appreciate your time and we wish you best of luck as you continue to forge into financial services and other industries. >> Thanks, it was great to be here. >> All right. For Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin coming to you live from Los Angeles at KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 21, stick around Dave and I, will be right back with our next guest.

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is braking analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Techniques to protect sensitive data have evolved over thousands of years, literally. The pace of modern data protection is rapidly accelerating and presents both opportunities and threats for organizations. In particular, the amount of data stored in the cloud combined with hybrid work models, the clear and present threat of cyber crime, regulatory edicts, and the ever expanding edge and associated use cases should put CXOs on notice that the time is now to rethink your data protection strategies. Hello, and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we're going to explore the evolving world of data protection and share some information on how we see the market changing in the competitive landscape for some of the top players. Steve Kenniston, AKA the Storage Alchemist, shared a story with me, and it was pretty clever. Way back in 4000 BC, the Sumerians invented the first system of writing. Now, they used clay tokens to represent transactions at that time. Now, to prevent messing with these tokens, they sealed them in clay jars to ensure that the tokens, i.e the data, would remain secure with an accurate record that was, let's call it quasi, immutable, and lived in a clay vault. And since that time, we've seen quite an evolution of data protection. Tape, of course, was the main means of protecting data and backing data up during most of the mainframe era. And that carried into client server computing, which really accentuated and underscored the issues around backup windows and challenges with RTO, recovery time objective and RPO recovery point objective. And just overall recovery nightmares. Then in the 2000's data reduction made disk-based backup more popular and pushed tape into an archive last resort media. Data Domain, then EMC, now Dell still sell many purpose-built backup appliances as do others as a primary backup target disc-based. The rise of virtualization brought more changes in backup and recovery strategies, as a reduction in physical resources squeezed the one application that wasn't under utilizing compute, i.e, backup. And we saw the rise of Veem, the cleverly-named company that became synonymous with data protection for virtual machines. Now, the cloud has created new challenges related to data sovereignty, governance, latency, copy creep, expense, et cetera. But more recently, cyber threats have elevated data protection to become a critical adjacency to information security. Cyber resilience to specifically protect against attacks is the new trend being pushed by the vendor community as organizations are urgently looking for help with this insidious threat. Okay, so there are two major disruptors that we're going to talk about today, the cloud and cyber crime, especially around ransoming your data. Every customer is using the cloud in some way, shape, or form. Around 76% are using multiple clouds, that's according to a recent study by Hashi Corp. We've talked extensively about skill shortages on theCUBE, and data protection and security concerns are really key challenges to address, given that skill shortage is a real talent gap in terms of being able to throw people at solving this problem. So what customers are doing, they're either building out or they're buying really mostly building abstraction layers to hide the underlying cloud complexity. So what this does... The good news is it's simplifies provisioning and management, but it creates problems around opacity. In other words, you can't see sometimes what's going on with the data. These challenges fundamentally become data problems, in our view. Things like fast, accurate, and complete backup recovery, compliance, data sovereignty, data sharing. I mentioned copy creep, cyber resiliency, privacy protections. These are all challenges brought to fore by the cloud, the advantages, the pros, and the cons. Now, remote workers are especially vulnerable. And as clouds span rapidly, data protection technologies are struggling to keep pace. So let's talk briefly about the rapidly-expanding public cloud. This chart shows worldwide revenue for the big four hyperscalers. As you can see, we projected that they're going to surpass $115 billion in revenue in 2021. That's up from 86 billion last year. So it's a huge market, it's growing in the 35% range. The interesting thing is last year, 80-plus billion dollars in revenue, but 100 billion dollars was spent last year by these firms in cap ex. So they're building out infrastructure for the industry. This is a gift to the balance of the industry. Now to date, legacy vendors and the surrounding community have been pretty defensive around the cloud. Oh, not everything's going to move to the cloud. It's not a zero sum game we hear. And while that's all true, the narrative was really kind of a defensive posture, and that's starting to change as large tech companies like Dell, IBM, Cisco, HPE, and others see opportunities to build on top of this infrastructure. You certainly see that with Arvind Krishna comments at IBM, Cisco obviously leaning in from a networking and security perspective, HPE using language that is very much cloud-like with its GreenLake strategy. And of course, Dell is all over this. Let's listen to how Michael Dell is thinking about this opportunity when he was questioned on the queue by John Furrier about the cloud. Play the clip. So in my view, Michael nailed it. The cloud is everywhere. You have to make it easy. And you have to admire the scope of his comments. We know this guy, he thinks big. He said, "Enables everything." He's basically saying is that technology is at the point where it has the potential to touch virtually every industry, every person, every problem, everything. So let's talk about how this informs the changing world of data protection. Now, we all know, we've seen with the pandemic, there's an acceleration in toward digital, and that has caused an escalation, if you will, in the data protection mandate. So essentially what we're talking about here is the application of Michael Dell's cloud everywhere comments. You've got on-prem, private clouds, hybrid clouds. You've got public clouds across AWS, Azure, Google, Alibaba. Really those are the big four hyperscalers. You got many clouds that are popping up all their place. But multi-cloud, to that Hashi Corp data point, 75, 70 6%. And then you now see the cloud expanding out to the edge, programmable infrastructure heading out to the edge. So the opportunity here to build the data protection cloud is to have the same experiences across all these estates with automation and orchestration in that cloud, that data protection cloud, if you will. So think of it as an abstraction layer that hides that underlying complexity, you log into that data protection cloud, it's the same experience. So you've got backup, you've got recovery, you can handle bare metal. You can do virtualized backups and recoveries, any cloud, any OS, out to the edge, Kubernetes and container use cases, which is an emerging data protection requirement. And you've got analytics, perhaps you've got PII, personally identifiable information protection in there. So the attributes of this data protection cloud, again, abstracts the underlying cloud primitives, takes care of that. It also explodes cloud native technologies. In other words, it takes advantage of whether it's machine learning, which all the big cloud players have expertise in, new processor models, things like graviton, and other services that are in the cloud natively. It doesn't just wrap it's on-prem stack in a container and shove it into the cloud, no. It actually re architects or architects around those cloud native services. And it's got distributed metadata to track files and volumes and any organizational data irrespective of location. And it enables sets of services to intelligently govern in a federated governance manner while ensuring data integrity. And all this is automated and an orchestrated to help with the skills gap. Now, as it relates to cyber recovery, air-gap solutions must be part of the portfolio, but managed outside of that data protection cloud that we just briefly described. The orchestration and the management must also be gaped, if you will. Otherwise, (laughs) you don't have an air gap. So all of this is really a cohort to cyber security or your cybersecurity strategy and posture, but you have to be careful here because your data protection strategy could get lost in this mess. So you want to think about the data protection cloud as again, an adjacency or maybe an overlay to your cybersecurity approach. Not a bolt on, it's got to be fundamentally architectured from the bottom up. And yes, this is going to maybe create some overheads and some integration challenges, but this is the way in which we think you should think about it. So you'll likely need a partner to do this. Again, we come back to the skill skills gap if we're seeing the rise of MSPs, managed service providers and specialist service providers. Not public cloud providers. People are concerned about lock-in, and that's really not their role. They're not high-touch services company. Probably not your technology arms dealer, (clear throat) excuse me, they're selling technology to these MSPs. So the MSPs, they have intimate relationships with their customers. They understand their business and specialize in architecting solutions to handle these difficult challenges. So let's take a look at some of the risk factors here, dig a little bit into the cyber threat that organizations face. This is a slide that, again, the Storage Alchemists, Steve Kenniston, shared with me. It's based on a study that IBM funds with the Panmore Institute, which is a firm that studies these things like cost of breaches and has for many, many, many years. The slide shows the total cost of a typical breach within each dot and on the Y axis and the frequency in percentage terms on the horizontal axis. Now, it's interesting. The top two compromise credentials and phishing, which once again proves that bad user behavior trumps good security every time. But the point here is that the adversary's attack vectors are many. And specific companies often specialize in solving these problems often with point products, which is why the slide that we showed from Optiv earlier, that messy slide, looks so cluttered. So there's a huge challenge for companies. And that's why we've seen the emergence of cyber recovery solutions from virtually all the major players. Ransomware and the solar winds hack have made trust the number one issue for CIOs and CISOs and boards of directors. Shifting CISO spending patterns are clear. They're shifting largely because they're catalyzed by the work from home. But outside of the moat to endpoint security, identity and access management, cloud security, the horizontal network security. So security priorities and spending are changing. And that's why you see the emergence of disruptors like we've covered extensively, Okta, CrowdStrike, Zscaler. And cyber resilience is top of mind, and robust solutions are required. And that's why companies are building cyber recovery solutions that are most often focused on the backup corpus because that's a target for the bad guys. So there is an opportunity, however, to expand from just the backup corpus to all data and protect this kind of 3, 2, 1, or maybe it's 3, 2, 1, 1, three copies, two backups, a backup in the cloud and one that's air gaped. So this can be extended to primary storage, copies, snaps, containers, data in motion, et cetera, to have a comprehensive data protection strategy. And customers, as I said earlier, are increasingly looking to manage service providers and specialists because of that skills gap. And that's a big reason why automation is so important in orchestration. And automation and orchestration, I'll emphasize, on the air gap solutions should be separated physically and logically. All right, now let's take a look at some of the ETR data and some of the players. This is a chart that we like to show often. It's a X-Y axis. And the Y axis is net score, which is a measure of spending momentum. And the horizontal axis is market share. Now, market share is an indicator of pervasiveness in the survey. It's not spending market share, it's not market share of the overall market, it's a term that ETR uses. It's essentially market share of the responses within the survey set. Think of it as mind share. Okay, you've got the pure plays here on this slide, in the storage category. There is no data protection or backup category. So what we've done is we've isolated the pure plays or close to pure plays in backup and data protection. Now notice that red line, that red is kind of our subjective view of anything that's over that 40% line is elevated. And you can see only Rubrik, and the July survey is over that 40% line. I'll show you the ends in a moment. Smaller ends, but still, Rubrik is the only one. Now, look at Cohesity and Rubrik in the January 2020. So last year, pre-pandemic, Cohesity and Rubrik, they've come well off their peak for net score. Look at Veeam. Veeam, having studied this data for the last say 24 hours months, Veeam has been steady Eddy. It is really always in the mid to high 30s, always shows a large shared end, so it's coming up in the survey. Customers are mentioning Veeam. And it's got a very solid net score. It's not above that 40% line, but it's hovering just below consistently. That's very impressive. Commvault has steadily been moving up. Sanjay Mirchandani has made some acquisitions. He did the Hedvig acquisition. They launched Metallic, that's driving cloud affinity within Commvault's large customer base. So it's good example of a legacy player pivoting and evolving and transforming itself. Veritas, it continues to under perform in the ETR surveys relative to the other players. Now, for context, let's add IBM and Dell to the chart. Now just note, this is IBM and Dell's full storage portfolio. The category in the taxonomy at ETR is all storage. Just previous slide, I isolated on the pure plays. But this now adds in IBM and Dell. It probably representative of where they would be. Probably Dell larger on the horizontal axis than IBM, of course. And you could see the spending momentum accordingly. So you can see that in the data chart that we've inserted. So some smaller ends for Rubrik and Cohesity. But still enough to pay attention, it's not like one or two. When you're 20-plus, 15-plus 25-plus, you can start to pay attention to trends. Veeam, again, is very impressive. It's net score is solid, it's got a consistent presence in the dataset, it's clear leader here. SimpliVity is small, but it's improving relative to last several surveys. And we talked about Convolt. Now, I want to emphasize something that we've been hitting on for quite some time now. And that's the Renaissance that's coming in compute. Now, we all know about Moore's Law, the doubling of transistor density every two years, 18 to 24 months. And that leads to a doubling of performance in that timeframe. X86, that x86 curve is in the blue. And if you do the math, this is expressed in trillions of operations per second. The orange line is representative of Apples A series, culminating in the A15, most recently. The A series is what Apple is now... Well, it's the technology basis for what's inside M1, the new Apple laptops, which is replacing Intel. That's that that orange line there, we'll come back to that. So go back to the blue line for a minute. If you do the math on doubling performance every 24 months, it comes out to roughly 40% annual improvement in processing power per year. That's now moderated. So Moore's Law is waning in one sense, so we wrote a piece Moore's Law is not dead. So I'm sort of contradicting myself there. But the traditional Moore's Law curve on x86 is waning. It's probably now down to around 30%, low 30s. But look at the orange line. Again, using the A series as an indicator, if you combine then the CPU, the NPU, which neuro processing unit, XPU, pick whatever PU you want, the accelerators, the DSPs, that line is growing at 100% plus per year. It's probably more accurately around 110% a year. So there's a new industry curve occurring, and it's being led by the Arm ecosystem. The other key factor there, and you're seeing this in a lot of use cases, a lot of consumer use cases, Apple is an example, but you're also seeing it in things like Tesla, Amazon with AWS graviton, the Annapurna acquisition, building out graviton and nitro, that's based on Arm. You can get from design to tape out in less than two years. Whereas the Intel cycles, we know, they've been running it four to five years now. Maybe Pat Gelsinger is compressing those. But Intel is behind. So organizations that are on that orange curve are going to see faster acceleration, lower cost, lower power, et cetera. All right, so what's the tie to data protection. I'm going to leave you with this chart. Arm has introduced it's confidential, compute architecture and is ushering in a new era of security and data protection. Zero trust is the new mandate. And what Arm has it's done with what they call realms is create physical separation of the vulnerable components by creating essentially physical buckets to put code in and to put data in, separate from the OS. Remember, the OS is the most valuable entry point for hackers or one of them because it contains privileged access, and it's a weak link because of things like memory leakages and vulnerabilities. And malicious code can be placed by bad guys within data in the OS and appear benign, even though it's anything but. So in this, all the OS does is create API calls to the realm controller. That's the only interaction. So it makes it much harder for bad actors to get access to the code and the data. And importantly, very importantly, it's an end-to-end architecture. So there's protection throughout. If you're pulling data from the edge and bringing it back to the on-prem or the cloud, you've got that end to end architecture and protection throughout. So the link to data protection is that backup software vendors need to be the most trusted of applications. Backup software needs to be the most trusted of applications because it's one of the most targeted areas in a cyber attack. Realms provide an end-to-end separation of data and code from the OS and it's a better architectural construct to support zero trust and confidential computing and critical use cases like data protection/backup and other digital business apps. So our call to action is backup software vendors, you can lead the charge. Arm is several years ahead at the moment, ahead of Intel, in our view. So you've got to pay attention to that, research that. We're not saying over rotate, but go investigate that. And use your relationships with Intel to accelerate its version of this architecture. Or ideally, the industry should agree on common standards and solve this problem together. Pat Gelsinger told us in theCUBE that if it's the last thing he's going to do in his industry life, he's going to solve this security problem. That's when he was at VMware. Well, Pat, you're even in a better place to do it now. You don't have to solve it yourself, you can't, and you know that. So while you're going about your business saving Intel, look to partner with Arm. I know it sounds crazy to use these published APIs and push to collaborate on an open source architecture that addresses the cyber problem. If anyone can do it, you can. Okay, that's it for today. Remember, these episodes are all available as podcasts. All you got to do is search Braking Analysis Podcast. I publish weekly on wikibond.com and siliconangle.com. Or you can reach me @dvellante on Twitter, email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. And don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey and data action. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, everybody. Be well, and we'll see you next time. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> In 2009, Cisco made a major announcement in the form of UCS. It was designed to attack the IT labor problem. Cisco recognized that, data center professionals were struggling to be agile and provide the types of infrastructure services that lines of business were demanding for the modern applications of that day. The value proposition was all about, simplifying infrastructure deployment and management and by combining networking compute and storage with virtualization and a management layer, Cisco changed the game for running applications on premises and the era of converged infrastructure was born. Now fast forward a dozen years, and a lot has changed. The cloud has gone mainstream, forcing new requirements on organizations to bridge their on-prem environments to public clouds and manage workloads across clouds. Now to address this challenge, Cisco earlier this month, announced a series of offerings, that meaningfully expands its original vision, to support the more demanding requirements of today's dev sec ops teams. In particular Cisco, with this announcement is enabling customers to deploy a full stack cloud-like operating model that leverages modern platforms such as Kubernetes, new integrations and advanced tooling to bring automation, visibility and better security for both hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Now the underpinning of this solution, is a new UCS architecture called the X series. Cisco claims this new system gives customers a trusted platform for the next decade to support their hybrid and multi-cloud workloads. Gents, great to see you, welcome. >> Hey, thank you. Good to be here. >> Thanks for having a us Dave. I appreciate. >> My pleasure. Looking forward to this. So look, we've seen the X series announcement and it looks to be quite a new approach. What are the critical aspects of the X series that you want people to understand? Maybe James, and you can take that. >> Sure I think that, you know, overall, there is a lot of change coming in the marketplace, right? We're seeing we're looking at and we're seeing from a technology standpoint, a significant amount of change. Look at CPU's and GPU's, the power draw alone is becoming, you know, it basically at the trajectory, it is, it may be untenable for some, you know, of the current configurations that people are consuming, right? So some of these current architectures just can't deal with that, right? Or at least they can't deal with what's coming in the future. We're also seeing the relevance of other types of architectures like maybe arm to start to become something that our customers want to take advantage of, right? Or maybe want to see how that scale fits into their environment on a totally different level. At the same time, the fabrics are really evolving at lightning speed here, right? So we're seeing PCI express, we've gone from gen three to gen four, gen five is coming in the very near future. We're layering on top of that, things like CXL to take that, that fabric to the next level for capabilities and be able to do things that we couldn't do before. To connect things together, we couldn't do before. Beyond that, we probably are just a few years away from even more exciting developments in the fabric space around some of the high performance low latency fabrics that are that are again on the drawing board today just around the corner. Take that and you, you look at the kind of the evolution of the the admin, right? So we're seeing the admin developer emerge. No longer is this just a guy who's sitting in front of a dashboard and managing systems, keeping them up and down, we're now seeing a whole class of developers that are also administrators, right? So all of this together is starting to push us well beyond what human scale really can manage, what human scale can consume. So, there's a lot of change coming and I think that we're taking a look at that and realizing that something like X series has to be able to deal with that change and the challenges that it brings, but also and do so in a simple manner that we can allow automation orchestration and some of these new capabilities to enhance what our customers can do, not to drown them in technology. >> You know, that taught, that's kind of interesting what James was saying about beyond human scale. I mean, I think my little narrative upfront, it was sort of, hey, we recognize as an IT labor problem. We're going to address that. And it really wasn't about massive scale back then, it is now. We really what we've learned from the cloud guys, right? >> Definitely. I mean, people are moving from pets to cattle to now with containers, they're saying that it's mosquitoes, right? Cause they're so ephemeral, they come and go and on a single host, you could have, you know, hundreds if not thousands of containers. And so the application environment has influenced the infrastructure design and really changed the role of the infrastructure operator to one that necessitates automation, necessitates operations at scale, even on prem everyone's trying to operate in that cloud like model and they're trying to bridge, the big challenge I see is, they're trying to bridge their existing environment big monolithic applications they've got on-prem with those data lakes that they built around them over the past decade, but they're also trying to follow their developers as they go out into the public cloud and innovate there. That's really where the nexus of all the application innovation is. So the IT teams who are already strapped for resources it's not like their budgets are going up every year, are now taking on a new front out in the cloud while they're still trying to maintain the systems that they've built with on-prem. That's the challenge. >> Yeah that's really the hard part and where some of the innovation here is, is anybody that lives in an old house knows that connecting old to new is very challenging much more challenging than building from scratch. But James I wonder if we'd come back to the to the architecture of the X series and what's really unique about it and what's in it for your customers? >> Yes, absolutely. So we're, when were looking at at kind of redesigning this thing from the ground up, we recognized that, you know from a timing standpoint, we're sitting at a place with the development of future fabrics and some of these other technologies that we finally have the opportunity to hit the timing perfectly to start to do composability right. So we've heard a lot of noise, you know in the market for the last several years about composability and how that's going to be the salvation or change the game here. But at the end of the day, the technology hasn't been there in those offerings, right? So we're sitting at the edge of some of the development of those technologies that are going to allow us to do that. And what we've done with X series, is we've taken a construct that we call the UCS X fabric, which is the ability to consume these technologies today as like a effectively a chassis fabric that can allow us to connect resources together within the chassis and future external to the chassis. But it also allows us to take advantage of the change in fabric that's coming. So as fabrics evolve, as we see new technologies like CXL and the PCI express gen five and beyond, come into play here and eventually physical technologies like Silicon Photonix, those are constructs that are going to allow our customers to do some amazing things and we have the construct to be able to consume those. Our goal here is like, to effectively look out at these disruptive technologies on the horizon and make sure that they're not disrupting our customers that we give our customers the ability to disrupt their competitors and to disrupt their markets, but by consuming those technologies in an easy way. >> You know, you didn't use the term future-proof. And I usually don't like that phrase because a lot of times people go that's future-proof and I'm like, well, what's future proof? Well, it's really fast. Well, okay. And in two years, it's going to be, you know really slow compared to everything else. But what you, what you just laid out is an architecture that's really taking advantage of some of these new capabilities that are driving latency down. So that's so, thank you for that. Now, Todd I get how the X series is going to enable customers you know, today I just mentioned the future but how does it play into Cisco's hybrid cloud vision? >> Well I mean, our customers aren't looking for, you know, point solutions or bolt on layers of software to manage across the hybrid cloud landscape. That's the fundamental challenge and so what we're doing with intersite, if you really think about all the systems that we have in our portfolio, like X series, really it's just extensions of our inner site platform. And there we're bridging the gaps between fundamental infrastructure prem, with all of those services that you need to optimize workloads and infrastructure, both in that on-prem environment but also out in the public cloud and even moving up the stack now into serverless. So we know that customers again are trying to bolt together a cohesive environment that allows them to manage those existing workloads on prem but also support the innovation going on out in the cloud and to do that, you have to have services to manage Kubernetes. You need hooks into modern tool chains like a Hashi corks Terraform, we did that a few months back and we recently brought in something we call our service mesh manager that came out of an acquisition of a Bonzai cloud. So what we're doing is, we're kind of spanning that entire spectrum from physical infrastructure, to the workload and that could be extracted in any number of ways either in containers or containers around VMs or bare metal running applications run on bare metal or just virtual machine applications encapsulation. So, you got all these different modalities that customers are going to run applications in and it's our intent to create a platform here that supports all of them, both on their on-prem environment and also all the resources they're managing out in the cloud. So that's a big deal for us. You know, one thing I want to go back to the X series for a second, something James mentioned, right? Is you know as we see subsystems in computing, start to decompose and break apart, you know, we have intersite as the mechanism to put Humpty Dumpty back together again and that's really, I think composability and district's options bar, but that's okay. But so I'll read it together. And like James said, you know be able to take on whatever fabrics, low latency fabrics, ultra low latency fabrics we need in coming years to sew these systems together, we're kind of breaking a barrier that didn't, that wasn't, you know people have trouble breaking through in the past, right? And that's this idea of true infrastructure as code or true software defined infrastructure. Cause now we're talking about being able to apply policy and automation, to the actual construct of a server. How do you build that thing to the needs of the workload? And so if you talk to an SRE or a developer today and you say infrastructure, they're thinking of Kubernetes cluster, but ultimately we want to push that boundary or that frontier between the world software to find it abstracted as far down in the infrastructure, as we can. And with intersite and X fabric and X series, we're taking it all the way down to the individual drive or CPU or ultimately breaking memory apart and sewing that back together. So it's kind of exciting time for us, cause really, pushing that frontier of what is software defined further and further down into the infrastructure and that just gives people a lot more flexibility in what they build. >> So I want to play something back to you and see if it resonates. Essentially, I look at what you just said is you're building a layer across my on-prem, whatever public cloud across clouds at the conventionally, you know, get to the edge, but let's hold off on that, let's park that for now. But that layer obstructs the underlying technical complexity and allows that infrastructure to be, you said programmable, infrastructure is code essentially. So that's one of my other questions, it's like, how programmable is this infrastructure, you know, today and in the future? But is that idea of an abstraction layer kind of how you're thinking about hybrid and multi-cloud? >> It is in terms of the infrastructure that customers are going to run on prem right in the public cloud the cloud providers are already abstracting that for them. And so what we want to do is bring that same type of public cloud experience to managing infrastructure on prem. So being able to have pools of resources that you allocate out to workloads, shifted as things change. So it's absolutely a cloud-like approach to on-prem infrastructure and you know, one of the things I like to say is, you know, friends don't let friends, build their own private cloud platforms from scratch, right? We're productizing this, we're bringing it as a cohesive system that customers don't need to engineer on their own. They can focus on their operations and James actually, he's a pilot, and one of the things he observed about Intersight a couple of years ago was, this idea of Intersight as a co-pilot and kind of, you know, adding a person to your team almost when you have intersite in your data center, because some very, what feels like rudimentary things are incredibly impactful day-to-day for our customers. So we have recommendation engines. If it, if like, you know, maybe it says some interplay between bios and firmware and operating system and we know that there's an issue there rather than letting customers stumble upon that on their own we're going to flag it, show them the correction, go implement it for them. So that it starts to feel a lot more like what they're accustomed to in a public cloud setting where the system has some intelligence baked in, the system is kind of covering them and watching their back and acting like a co-pilot day-to-day operations. >> Okay, so I get that, you know, the cloud guys will abstract the complexity you guys are focused on prem, but is it, so my question then is multi-cloud across clouds because we have some cloud providers, you know you're partners with Google they do some things with Antho, so I know Microsoft with Ark, but even near-term. Should we think about Cisco as playing that role of my, across cloud, you know, partner if you will? >> Absolutely. You know, cloud agnosticism is core to our approach because we know that, you know if you dial the clock way back to the early odds, right? When cloud first started emerging it was kind of an efficiency play. And you had folks like Nicholas Carr, right? The author that they put out the big switch, kind of envisioning a world where there'd be this ultimate consolidation to maybe one or two or three cloud platforms worldwide. But what we're seeing, you know we had data sovereignty kind of emerge over the past decade but even the past year or two, it's now becoming issues of actual cloud sovereignty. So you have governments in Australia and in India and in Europe actually asserting control over the cloud providers and services that can be used by their public sector organizations and so that's just leading to actually cloud fragmentation. It's not nearly as monolithic of future as we thought it would be. It's a lot of clouds and so as customers want to move around geographically or if they want to go harvest innovation that maybe Google is really good at something like machine vision, or they want to use AWS or Azure for different applications that they're going to go build. We're seeing customers really being put in a place where they're going to deal with multiple cloud providers and the data supports that. So it's definitely our approach especially on the networking technology side to make it very easy for our customers to go out and connect these different clouds and not have to repeat the integration process every time they want to go, you know, start using another public cloud provider. So that's absolutely our strategies to be very agnostic and build everything in mind for customers they're going to be using in multiple providers. >> Thank you for that touch. So James, I want to come back and talk a little bit about sort of your competitive posture here. I mean, you guys, when you made the announcement, I inferred that you were feeling like you were in a pretty good position relative to the competition that you were putting forth, not just you know, core infrastructure in hardware and software but also all these other components around it that we talked about, observability extending out to the, you know, beyond the four walls of my data center, et cetera. But talk a little bit about why you think this gives you such competitive advantage in the marketplace. >> Well I mean, I think first of all, back to where Todd was going as well, is that, you know if you think about trying to be, to work in this hybrid cloud world, that we're clearly living in, the idea of burrowing features and functions as far down the stack as possible, doesn't make a lot of sense, right? So intersite is a great example. We want to manage and we want to orchestrate across clouds, right? So how are we going to have our management and infrastructure services buried into the chassis, down at the very lowest level, that doesn't make sense. So we elevated our, you know, our operating model to the cloud, right? And that's how we manage across clouds from the cloud. So, building a system and really we've done this from the ground up with X series, building a system that is able to take advantage of all these two technologies. And you mentioned, you know, how being future proof was probably you know, a derogatory term almost and I agree with you completely. I think we're future ready. Like, we're ready to embrace it because we're not trying to say that nothing is going to change beyond what we've already thought of, we're saying, bring it on. We're saying, bring on that change because we're ready for it. We've we can accommodate change. We, we're not saying that the technology we have today is to going to ride us for 10 years, we're saying,, we're ready for the next 10 years of change. Bring it. We can do that in a simple way. That is, you know, I think, you know going to give us the versatility and the simplicity to allow the technology to go beyond human scale without having to you know drown our customers in administrative duties, right? So that co-pilot that Todd mentioned is going to be able to take on a lot more of the work, just like an airplane where you know, the pilot has functionality that he has to absolutely be part of and those are the our developers, right? We want those admin developers to develop, to build things and to do things and not get bogged down in the minutiae that exists. So I think competitively, you know, our architecture top to bottom, you know, all the way up the stack, all the way to the bottom is unique and it is focused on not just the rear view mirror but what's coming in the future. >> So my takeaway there is that, okay, I get it. The new technologies will come along but this architecture is the architecture for the decade. You're not going to have to redo the architecture in a few years. That's really the key point here. Todd, I'll give you last word might just taking some notes here and takeaways that I heard, I heard upfront. Chip diversity really take advantage of all the innovations that are coming out. You're ready for that. You're kind of blurring the lines between blade and rack, giving some optionality there. Scale is a big theme. I mean, the cloud has brought that in and, you know people want to scale, they don't want to be, you know provisioning lawns all day and they won't be able to scale if that's what their job is. Developer friendly, particularly as it relates to infrastructure as code. And you've got a roadmap. So Todd, that's my summary. I'll give you the last word. >> No, it's really good. I mean, you hit it, right. We're thinking about this holistic operating environment that our customers are building for hybrid cloud and we're pre-engineering that environment for them. So our Intersight platform, all of our systems that connect to that, are really built to tackle that hybrid environment from end to end, and with systems like X series, we're giving them a more simple, efficient landing spot for their workloads on prem but crucially it's fully integrated with this hybrid cloud platform so as they have workloads on prem and workloads in the cloud, it's kind of a transparent environment between those two, between those two, two worlds there. So bringing it together so that our customers don't have to build it themselves. >> Excellent. Well, gents thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and sharing the details of this announcement. Congratulations, I know how much work and thought goes into these things, really looking forward to its progress and adoption in the marketplace. Appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for time. >> And thank you for watching this cube conversation. This is Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. Presenting Future Cloud. One event, a world of opportunities. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Okay. We're here with Thomas Scheibe, who's the vice president of Product Management, aka VP of all things Data Center Networking, STN, cloud, you name it in that category. Welcome Thomas, good to see you again. >> Hey, same here. Thanks for having me on. >> Yeah, it's our pleasure. Okay. Let's get right into observability. When you think about observability, visibility, infrastructure monitoring, problem resolution across the network, how does cloud change things? In other words, what are the challenges that networking teams are currently facing as they're moving to the cloud and trying to implement hybrid cloud? >> Yeah. (scoffs) Yeah. Visibility as always is very, very important and it's quite frankly, it's not just, it's not just the networking team, it's actually the application team too, right? And as you pointed out, the the underlying impetus to what's going on here is the, the data center is wherever the data is, and I think we said this a couple years back. And really what happens the, the applications are going to be deployed in different locations, right? Whether it's in a public cloud, whether it's on-prem and they're built differently, right? They're built as micro servers, so they might actually be distributed as well at the same application. And so what that really means is you need, as an operator as well as actually a user, a better visibility, "where are my pieces?", and you need to be able to correlate between where the app is and what the underlying network is, that is in place in these different locations. So you have actually a good knowledge why the app is running so fantastic or sometimes not. So I think that's, that's really the problem statement. What, what we're trying to go after with observability. >> Okay. Let's, let's double click on that. So, so a lot of customers tell me that you got to stare at log files until your eyes bleed, then you've got to bring in guys with lab coats who have PhDs to figure all this stuff out. >> Thomas: Yeah. >> So you just described, it's getting more complex, but at the same time, you have to simplify things. So how, how are you doing that? >> Correct. So what we basically have done is we have this fantastic product that is called ThousandEyes. And so what this does is basically (chuckles) as the name which I think is a fantastic, fantastic name. You have these sensors everywhere and you can have a good correlation on links between if I run a from a site to a site, from a site to a cloud, from the cloud to cloud. And you basic can measure what is the performance of these links? And so what we're, what we're doing here is we're actually extending the footprint of the ThousandEyes agent, right? Instead of just having a, an inversion machine of clouds we are now embedding them with the Cisco network devices, right? We announced this was the Catalyst 9000. And we're extending this now to our 8000 Catalyst product line for the for the SD-WAN products, as well as to the data center products, in Nexus line. And so what you see is, is you know, a half a thing, you have ThousandEyes. You get a million insights and you get a billion dollar off improvements for how your applications run. And this is really the, the power of tying together the footprint of what a network is with the visibility, what is going on. So you actually know the application behavior that is attached to this network. >> I see. So, okay. So as the cloud evolves, it expands, it connects, you're actually enabling ThousandEyes to go further, not just confined within a single data center location but out to the network across clouds, et cetera. >> Thomas: Correct. >> Wherever the network is you're going to have a ThousandEyes sensor and you can bring this together and you can quite frankly pick, if you want to say, Hey I have my application in public cloud provider A domain one, and I have another one in domain two I can do monitor that link. I can also monitor, I have a user that has a campus location or a branch location. I kind of put an agent there and then I can monitor the connectivity from that branch location all the way to the, let's say, corporation's data center or headquarter or to the cloud. And I can have these probes and just the, have visibility in saying, Hey, if there's a performance I know where the issue is. And then I obviously can use all the other tools that we have to address those. >> All right, let's talk about the cloud operating model. Everybody tells us that, you know, it's really the change in the model that drives big numbers in terms of ROI. And I want you to maybe address how you're bringing automation and DevOps to this world of hybrid and specifically, how is Cisco enabling IT organizations to move to a cloud operating model as that cloud definition expands? >> Yeah, no, that's that's another interesting topic beyond the observability. So it really, really what we're seeing, and this is going on for, I want to say couple of years now it's really this transition from operating infrastructure as a networking team, more like a service like what you would expect from a cloud provider, right? This is really around the networking team offering services like a cloud provided us. And that's really what the meaning is of cloud operating model, right? Where this is infrastructure running your own data center where that's linking that infrastructure was whatever runs on the public cloud is operating it like a cloud service. And so we are on this journey for a while. So one of the examples um that we have, we're moving some of the control software assets that customers today can deploy on-prem to an instance that they can deploy in a, in a cloud provider and just basically instantiate things there and then just run it that way. Right? And so the latest example for this is what we have, our Identity Service Engine that is now unlimited availability, available on AWS and will become available mid this year, both on AWS and Azure, as a service. You can just go to Marketplace, you can load it there and now increase. You can start running your policy control in the cloud managing your access infrastructure in your data center, in your campus, wherever you want to do it. And so that's just one example of how we see our Customers Network Operations team taking advantage of a cloud operating model and basically deploying their, their tools where they need them and when they need them. >> Dave: So >> What's the scope of I, I hope I'm saying it right, ISE, right? I.S.E, I think it's um, you call it ISE. What's the scope of that? Like for instance, to an effect my, or even, you know address, simplify my security approach? >> Absolutely. That's now coming to what is the beauty of the product itself? Yes. What you can do is really is, a lot of people talking about is, how do I get to a Zero Trust approach to networking? How do I get to a much more dynamic, flexible segmentation in my infrastructure, again, whether this was only campus access as well as the data center and ISE helps you there. You can use it as a pawn to define your policies and then inter-connect from there, right. In this particular case, we would, instead of ISE in a cloud as a software, alone, you now can connect and say, Hey, I want to manage and program my network infrastructure and my data center or my campus going to the respective controller, whether it's DNA Center for campus or whether it's the, the ACI policy controller. And so yes, what you get as an effect out of this is a very elegant way to automatically manage ,in one place, "what is my policy", and then drive the right segmentation in your network infrastructure. >> Yeah. Zero Trust. It was..Pre pandemic it was kind of a buzzword, now it's become a mandate. I, I wonder if we could talk about- >> Thomas: - Yes >> Yeah, right. I mean, so- >> Thomas: -Pretty much. >> I wondered if we could talk about cloud native apps. You got all these developers that are working inside organizations, they're maintaining legacy apps they're connecting their data to systems in the cloud. They're sharing that data. These developers, they're rapidly advancing their skillsets. How is Cisco enabling its infrastructure to support this world of cloud native, making infrastructure more responsive and agile for application developers? >> Yeah. So you were going to the talk we saw was the visibility. We talked about the operating model how our network operates actually want to use tools going forward. Now the next step to this is, it's not just the operator. How do they actually, where do they want to put these tools? Or how they interact with this tools? As well as quite frankly, as how let's say, a DevOps team, or application team or a cloud team also wants to take advantage of the programmability of the underlying network. And this is where we're moving into this whole cloud native discussion, right. Which has really two angles. So it's the cloud native way, how applications are being built. And then there is the cloud native way, how you interact with infrastructure, right? And so what we have done is we're A, putting in place the on-ramps between clouds, and then on top of it, we're exposing for all these tools APIs that can be used and leveraged by standard cloud tools or cloud-native tools, right? And one example or two examples we always have. And again, we're on this journey for a while, is both Ansible script capabilities that access from RedHat as well as Hashi Terraform capabilities that you can orchestrate across infrastructure to drive infrastructure automation. And what, what really stands behind it is what either the networking operations team wants to do or even the app team. They want to be able to describe the application as a code and then drive automatically or programmatically instantiation of infrastructure needed for that application. And so what you see us doing is providing all these capability as an interface for all our network tools, right. Whether this is ISE, what I just mentioned, whether this is our DCN controllers in the data center whether these are the controllers in the, in the campus for all of those, we have cloud-native interfaces. So operator or a DevOps team can actually interact directly with that infrastructure the way they would do today with everything that lives on the cloud or with everything how they built the application. >> Yeah, this is key. You can't even have the conversation of of Op cloud operating model that includes and comprises on-prem without programmable infrastructure. So that's, that's very important. Last question, Thomas, are customers actually using this? You made the announcement today. Are there, are there any examples of customers out there doing this? >> We do have a lot of customers out there that are moving down the path and using the Cisco High-performance Infrastructure both on the compute side, as well as on the Nexus side. One of the costumers, and this is like an interesting case, is Rakuten. Rakuten is a large telco provider, a mobile 5G operator in Japan and expanding, and as in different countries. And so people, some think, "Oh cloud" "You must be talking about the public cloud provider" "the big three or four". But if you look at it, there's a lot of the telco service providers are actually cloud providers as well and expanding very rapidly. And so we're actually very proud to work together with Rakuten and help them build high performance data center infrastructure based on HANA Gig and actually for a gig to drive their deployment to its 5G mobile cloud infrastructure, which is which is where the whole the whole world, which frankly is going. And so it's really exciting to see this development and see the power of automation visibility together with the High-performance infrastructure becoming a reality on delivering actually, services. >> Yeah, some great points you're making there. Yes, you have the big four clouds, they're enormous but then you have a lot of actually quite large clouds telcos that are either proximate to those clouds or they're in places where those hyper-scalers may not have a presence and building out their own infrastructure. So, so that's a great case study. Thomas.Hey, great having you on. Thanks much for spending some time with us. >> Yeah, same here. I appreciate it. Thanks a lot. >> All right. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, the leader in tech event coverage. (upbeat music)