>> (upbeat music) >> Okay, we just covered some of the critical aspects from Infinidat recent announcement and the importance of cyber resilience and fast recovery. Eric Hertzog is back and joining us is Stan Wysocki, who's president of Mark III Systems. Stan, welcome to the Cube, good to see you. >> Thank you, pleasure to be here. >> Tell us about Mark III Systems. You specialize in IT infrastructure and artificial intelligence. It says in your website. I'd love to hear more about your business. >> Yeah, yeah, definitely. You know, I think we're a little bit unique in our industry, right? There've been business partners resellers around for, we've been around for 26 years. And in 26 years, we've supported some of largest enterprise customers in the Southeast, with server storage networking virtualization. We have VCP number 94, so we've been doing that from the very beginning. But about six years ago, we realized that IT was changing, that business was changing, that the demands of the customers was changing and we needed to create the full stack message and a full-stack practice. So we hired data scientists and developers in DevOps, MLOps and gave them the environments and the tools that they could use to build experience around AI, ML deep learning. So now when we engage with our customers, not only can we handle the entire enterprise stack that they have, but we can help accelerate them on their adoption of open-source technologies, cloud native development and AI and integrating that into their business processes. >> I love it. You got to keep moving. You've been around for a long time, but you're not just sitting still. I wonder if you could comment in an Eric, I want you to comment as well. From your customer's perspective Stan, what are the big trends that you see that are impacting their business and the challenges that they're facing? >> Yeah, that's great. So kind of ties into what I just said. Today we live in a data-driven society. Everything that we do is really driven by how the customer wants to engage. And that's both an internal customer and your end user customers, on how they want to engage, how they want to consume and how they want to interact with everything out there in the world, right? So the real trends is really around engaging with the customer, but that means that you need to be data-driven, you need to adopt AI platforms, you need to adopt a more holistic view of what you're doing with your customers. That drives up the importance of the data that you have in your shop, right? So then cybersecurity becomes extremely important, not just because of the technical skills of the hacker is getting better and better, but because we're becoming more reliant on the data that we have moving forward and we're proud to partner with Infinidat in leveraging InfiniGuard and Infinni safe to really protect our customer's data. >> Great. Eric, thinking about the trends and some of the issues that Stan just mentioned, when you think about the launch and the announcement that you just made, how do you see it fitting in to Stan's business? How's how it's going to help the end customers? >> Well, I think there's one key aspect. As noted in the fortune survey of CEOs in 2021. The number one concern of CEOs of the fortune 500, was cybersecurity and they saw that as biggest threat to their business. As Stan pointed out, that becomes of the importance of the digital data, that all companies generate, of all types, financial services, healthcare, government institutions, manufacturing, you name it. So one of the key things you've got to do, is make sure that your storage estate, fits into an overall cybersecurity strategy. And with InfiniGuard, or Ifini safe technologies, we can ensure that Stan's customers and customers of our other business partners all over the world, can make sure that the data is safe, protected and can help them form a malware or ransomware attack, against that valuable data set. >> Well then you know, one of you guys could come with, I mean, we talked to CSOs and they've told us that there be could in part due to the pandemic, largely actually, their whole strategy has changed. Their spending strategies changed, no longer than just sort of putting up hardware firewalls. They're shifting their focus to two different areas, obviously endpoint, you know, cloud security is a big deal, identity access management, but ransomware, is just top of mind for everybody. And as we talked about earlier, the exposure, now the weak links, whether you're working from home, or Stan you mentioned greater sophistication of hacker. So what are you hearing from customers in this regard, Stan? >> Well, you know I think you have that, right? But then you always have, we've been doing this for 26 years. I've never heard of an IT budget that that's gone up, in any year, right? So, with the sophistication of these hackers that are coming out and the different angles that they're using to get in, it is extremely important for our customers to be very efficient and choose their security strategy and products very wisely, right? I think I read an article a year or so ago that the average enterprise had like something like 27 different security products and imagine a CSO and his team, who is struggling with their budget to manage that. So for us to be able to leverage InfiniGuard and Infini safe and to be able to provide, you know the immutable snapshots. The logical air gas, the physical air backs and offense network for recovery. That's all extremely easy to manage. I mean I talked to my customers on why they have chosen Infinidat, you know through us, right? And one of the things that they always talk about is how easy and how amazing the support is. How easy it is to install, how easy it is to manage. And normally when you have a simple product, right, you think you can sell that to an unsophisticated customers. But my most technical customers really appreciate this, because of the way Infinidat manages itself and provides the tools saying, just for example, the host tools, right? It does it in the way that they do it, so they trust it, so that they can focus on the more important tasks, rather than the tier and feeding other storage environment. >> Yeah, thank you and then when you talk to CSOs, you ask them what's the number one problem, they'll tell you lack of talent and you just nailed it. You've got on average 27 different tools, new tools coming out every day, you're getting billion dollar, VC investments and more and more companies are getting into it. It just adds to that confusion. So Stan, I wonder if you could talk about, specifically InfiniGuard, how it fits into your stack like where and how you're applying it? Maybe you could talk about some specific use cases. >> Oh yeah definitely, you know we have customers in pretty much every vertical, that we're supporting their stores environments and Infinidat plays and all of those verticals with all of our customers. One in particular a healthcare account, one of our very first Infinidat customers and over the years, is become the de facto standard, stores platform that they have. And they also now have InfiniGuard as the backup target for commovault. And this is one of those examples of the very technical discerning customer, that really demands excellence, right? So they love, you know, the three controller setup versus a dual controller set up, they love the availability and the resiliency, but then when it comes to the cybersecurity, before they moved on to this platform, they did have some ransomware attacks and they did have to pay out and it was very public. And, you know, since they've gone onto this platform, they feel much more comfortable. >> Excellent. So Eric, I want to bring you in. So let's talk through some of the options that customers have. You and I were talking earlier about, you know, the local air gap, what is that? You know, the logical air gap if you will and then the physical labor, what patterns are you seeing with customers to really try to protect themselves against some of this ransomware? How are they approaching it? >> Well, first of all, obviously, we with the InfiniGuard, has a purpose built backup appliance can work with all the various backup vendors. But because backup, is one of the first things these sophisticated ransomware, or malware it entity is going to attack. right? Otherwise the CIO will just call up say, hey, do we have a good backup? Let's recover from that. So secondary storage, AK their backup estate, is exactly the first thing they're going to target. And they do it certain viciously of course. So what are the key things we do, is we allow them to take those backup datasets, commvault for example and in Stan's example, or Vain or veritas or IBM Spectrum Protector, many other packages, even directly with databases like with Oracle Armin and allow them to create a mutable snapshots. Can't delete them, can't change them, can alter them. And then we air gap them locally, from the management framework. So in an InfiniGuard, we have a technology known as our day-to-day dupe engines ODDES. Those are really the management scanner for the entire solution. So when we create an immutable snapshots, we create a logical air gap, with ODDES, cannot alter the immutability characteristics, they cannot shorten them, they can not lengthen them, in short we take that management scheme away and create this separation. But we also allow them to replicate those backup datasets to a remote InfiniGuard box. You would set up the exact same parameters, I want to make an immutable snap every day, every 12 hours, every six hours and then you've got the duplicate. Remember the average length, from breach to closure on a cyber attack is 287 days. So once the attack starts, you don't know until they ask you for the ransom, it could be going on for 50 days, a hundred days, 150 days. And it's all done, if you will on the download, hidden. So if by the way, you happen to have a data center fire, or you happen to have a tornado or an earthquake, or some other natural disaster, you still want that data replicated to a secondary site, but then you still want the capability of the cyber resilience, as Stan pointed out. So you can do that. We can create a then a isolated fence network and we can do that on one InfiniGarden. Most of our competitors require two data protection appliances and it's public it's right on their websites. So we save you on some CapEx there and then we can do this near instantaneous recovery. And that's not just of the dataset. Some of the cyber reasons, technology you'll see out there, including on primary storage, only recovers the dataset. We can recover the entire backup data set and all the surrounding environment. So to second that Vain or Veritas, IBM spectrum protect commvault, backup is available. The backup admins or the storage admins, could immediately restored, it's ready to go. And we can do that in 15 to 30 minutes. Now that is being fast to react to a problem. >> So thank you for that. So Stan, I wonder if you could talk about the best practice Eric was just sharing, the local air gap and then the secondary, is that really in the case of a disaster, or is it also to isolate the network? What are you seeing as the gold standard that customers are applying with your advice? >> Yeah, definitely the gold standard would be three sites. We do have a lot of our customers. The one healthcare customer in particular is splits it between two sides and they are actually working with us right now to architect the third site. Just for that fact, we are down in Texas, hurricanes can come in 60, 70, 80 miles on in land. And then there's, you know, hurricane Harvey, right with all the flooding and stuff like that. So they do want to set up a third side. I think that gives them the peace of mind. And you know the whole thing about it is right. You know, having an environment like this means the CSO and his team can focus on preventing attacks, while they're very confident that their infrastructure team, can handle anything that slips by them. >> Okay, great. Thank you. We're about out of time but Eric, I wonder if you could kind of bring us home, give us a summary of, how you see InfiniGuard impacting customers, you know where's that value that business case for them. I wonder if you could just tie that note for us. >> Sure. We want to make sure that we tie everything back, normally technical value, as Stan very eloquently did with several different customers, but what we can do from a business value perspective. So as an example, one of our infiniGuard customers, is a global financial services company and they were using a solution from a different purpose-built backup appliance provider. They switched to us, not only they're able to increase the number of daily backups, from 30,000 to 90,000. So they get better data protection, but on top of that, they cut 40% of their costs. So you want to make sure that while you're doing this, you're doing things like consolidation. One of our other customers, which is in EMEA, in the European area, they had 14 purpose-built backup appliances, seven in one data center and set seven and a second data center. Now they've got two, one in one data center, one of the other, they of course do the local backups right then and there. And then they replicate, from one data center to the other data center. As both data centers are both active data centers, but differ for the other data center. So from their perspective, dramatic reduction of OPEX and CapEx, 14 physical boxes down to two. And of course the associated management of both the manpower side, but why I love to call the watch slots, power and floor. All of those things that go into an OPEX budget, they were cut dramatically, 'cause there's only two systems now, to power cool, et cetera et cetera. Floor space, Rackspace from 14. So wow, did they save money. So I think, it's not only providing that data protection and cyber resilience technology, but doing it in a cost-effective way. And as Stan pointed out, in a highly automated way, that cuts back on the manpower they need to manage these systems, because they're overworked and they need to focus on as Stan pointed out, their AI infrastructure, where they're doing for AI applications, don't have time to deal with it. So the more we automate, the better it is for them and the easier it is for everyone from the end-user perspective, as well as up in through their entire IT chain of command. >> Okay, if you want more information, you can go to infinidatguard.com or it's markiisis.com and check it out, learn about their full stack solution. A little bit about AI. Gentlemen, thanks so much for the conversation today, great to have you. >> Mark and Steve: Thank you, Dave. Now in a moment, I'm going to have some closing thoughts on the market and what we heard today. Thank you for watching the cube. You're a leader in enterprise tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> Okay, we just covered some of the critical aspects from Infinidat recent announcement and the importance of cyber resilience and fast recovery. Eric Hertzog is back and joining us is Stan Wysocki, who's president of Mark Three Systems. Stan, welcome to the Cube, good to see you. >> Thank you, pleasure to be here. >> Tell us about Mark Three Systems. You specialize in IT infrastructure and artificial intelligence. It says in your website. I'd love to hear more about your business. >> Yeah, yeah, definitely. You know, I think we're a little bit unique in our industry, right? There've been business partners resellers around for, we've been around for 26 years. And in 26 years, we've supported some of largest enterprise customers in the Southeast, with server storage networking virtualization. We have VCP number 94, so we've been doing that from the very beginning. But about six years ago, we realized that IT was changing, that business was changing, that the demands of the customers was changing and we needed to create the full stack message and a full-stack practice. So we hired data scientists and developers in DevOps, MLOps and gave them the environments and the tools that they could use to build experience around AI, ML deep learning. So now when we engage with our customers, not only can we handle the entire enterprise stack that they have, but we can help accelerate them on their adoption of open-source technologies, cloud native development and AI and integrating that into their business processes. >> I love it. You got to keep moving. You've been around for a long time, but you're not just sitting still. I wonder if you could comment in an Eric, I want you to comment as well. From your customer's perspective Stan, what are the big trends that you see that are impacting their business and the challenges that they're facing? >> Yeah, that's great. So kind of ties into what I just said. Today we live in a data-driven society. Everything that we do is really driven by how the customer wants to engage. And that's both an internal customer and your end user customers, on how they want to engage, how they want to consume and how they want to interact with everything out there in the world, right? So the real trends is really around engaging with the customer, but that means that you need to be data-driven, you need to adopt AI platforms, you need to adopt a more holistic view of what you're doing with your customers. That drives up the importance of the data that you have in your shop, right? So then cybersecurity becomes extremely important, not just because of the technical skills of the hacker is getting better and better, but because we're becoming more reliant on the data that we have moving forward and we're proud to partner with Infinidat in leveraging InfiniGuard and Infinni safe to really protect our customer's data. >> Great. Eric, thinking about the trends and some of the issues that Stan just mentioned, when you think about the launch and the announcement that you just made, how do you see it fitting in to Stan's business? How's how it's going to help the end customers? >> Well, I think there's one key aspect. As noted in the fortune survey of CEOs in 2021. The number one concern of CEOs of the fortune 500, was cybersecurity and they saw that as biggest threat to their business. As Stan pointed out, that becomes of the importance of the digital data, that all companies generate, of all types, financial services, healthcare, government institutions, manufacturing, you name it. So one of the key things you've got to do, is make sure that your storage estate, fits into an overall cybersecurity strategy. And with InfiniGuard, or Ifini safe technologies, we can ensure that Stan's customers and customers of our other business partners all over the world, can make sure that the data is safe, protected and can help them form a malware or ransomware attack, against that valuable data set. >> Well then you know, one of you guys could come with, I mean, we talked to CSOs and they've told us that there be could in part due to the pandemic, largely actually, their whole strategy has changed. Their spending strategies changed, no longer than just sort of putting up hardware firewalls. They're shifting their focus to two different areas, obviously endpoint, you know, cloud security is a big deal, identity access management, but ransomware, is just top of mind for everybody. And as we talked about earlier, the exposure, now the weak links, whether you're working from home, or Stan you mentioned greater sophistication of hacker. So what are you hearing from customers in this regard, Stan? >> Well, you know I think you have that, right? But then you always have, we've been doing this for 26 years. I've never heard of an IT budget that that's gone up, in any year, right? So, with the sophistication of these hackers that are coming out and the different angles that they're using to get in, it is extremely important for our customers to be very efficient and choose their security strategy and products very wisely, right? I think I read an article a year or so ago that the average enterprise had like something like 27 different security products and imagine a CSO and his team, who is struggling with their budget to manage that. So for us to be able to leverage InfiniGuard and Infini safe and to be able to provide, you know the immutable snapshots. The logical air gas, the physical air backs and offense network for recovery. That's all extremely easy to manage. I mean I talked to my customers on why they have chosen Infinidat, you know through us, right? And one of the things that they always talk about is how easy and how amazing the support is. How easy it is to install, how easy it is to manage. And normally when you have a simple product, right, you think you can sell that to an unsophisticated customers. But my most technical customers really appreciate this, because of the way Infinidat manages itself and provides the tools saying, just for example, the host tools, right? It does it in the way that they do it, so they trust it, so that they can focus on the more important tasks, rather than the tier and feeding other storage environment. >> Yeah, thank you and then when you talk to CSOs, you ask them what's the number one problem, they'll tell you lack of talent and you just nailed it. You've got on average 27 different tools, new tools coming out every day, you're getting billion dollar, VC investments and more and more companies are getting into it. It just adds to that confusion. So Stan, I wonder if you could talk about, specifically InfiniGuard, how it fits into your stack like where and how you're applying it? Maybe you could talk about some specific use cases. >> Oh yeah definitely, you know we have customers in pretty much every vertical, that we're supporting their stores environments and Infinidat plays and all of those verticals with all of our customers. One in particular a healthcare account, one of our very first Infinidat customers and over the years, is become the de facto standard, stores platform that they have. And they also now have InfiniGuard as the backup target for commovault. And this is one of those examples of the very technical discerning customer, that really demands excellence, right? So they love, you know, the three controller setup versus a dual controller set up, they love the availability and the resiliency, but then when it comes to the cybersecurity, before they moved on to this platform, they did have some ransomware attacks and they did have to pay out and it was very public. And, you know, since they've gone onto this platform, they feel much more comfortable. >> Excellent. So Eric, I want to bring you in. So let's talk through some of the options that customers have. You and I were talking earlier about, you know, the local air gap, what is that? You know, the logical air gap if you will and then the physical labor, what patterns are you seeing with customers to really try to protect themselves against some of this ransomware? How are they approaching it? >> Well, first of all, obviously, we with the InfiniGuard, has a purpose built backup appliance can work with all the various backup vendors. But because backup, is one of the first things these sophisticated ransomware, or malware it entity is going to attack. right? Otherwise the CIO will just call up say, hey, do we have a good backup? Let's recover from that. So secondary storage, AK their backup estate, is exactly the first thing they're going to target. And they do it certain viciously of course. So what are the key things we do, is we allow them to take those backup datasets, commvault for example and in Stan's example, or Vain or veritas or IBM Spectrum Protector, many other packages, even directly with databases like with Oracle Armin and allow them to create a mutable snapshots. Can't delete them, can't change them, can alter them. And then we air gap them locally, from the management framework. So in an InfiniGuard, we have a technology known as our day-to-day dupe engines ODDES. Those are really the management scanner for the entire solution. So when we create an immutable snapshots, we create a logical air gap, with ODDES, cannot alter the immutability characteristics, they cannot shorten them, they can not lengthen them, in short we take that management scheme away and create this separation. But we also allow them to replicate those backup datasets to a remote InfiniGuard box. You would set up the exact same parameters, I want to make an immutable snap every day, every 12 hours, every six hours and then you've got the duplicate. Remember the average length, from breach to closure on a cyber attack is 287 days. So once the attack starts, you don't know until they ask you for the ransom, it could be going on for 50 days, a hundred days, 150 days. And it's all done, if you will on the download, hidden. So if by the way, you happen to have a data center fire, or you happen to have a tornado or an earthquake, or some other natural disaster, you still want that data replicated to a secondary site, but then you still want the capability of the cyber resilience, as Stan pointed out. So you can do that. We can create a then a isolated fence network and we can do that on one InfiniGarden. Most of our competitors require two data protection appliances and it's public it's right on their websites. So we save you on some CapEx there and then we can do this near instantaneous recovery. And that's not just of the dataset. Some of the cyber reasons, technology you'll see out there, including on primary storage, only recovers the dataset. We can recover the entire backup data set and all the surrounding environment. So to second that Vain or Veritas, IBM spectrum protect commvault, backup is available. The backup admins or the storage admins, could immediately restored, it's ready to go. And we can do that in 15 to 30 minutes. Now that is being fast to react to a problem. >> So thank you for that. So Stan, I wonder if you could talk about the best practice Eric was just sharing, the local air gap and then the secondary, is that really in the case of a disaster, or is it also to isolate the network? What are you seeing as the gold standard that customers are applying with your advice? >> Yeah, definitely the gold standard would be three sites. We do have a lot of our customers. The one healthcare customer in particular is splits it between two sides and they are actually working with us right now to architect the third site. Just for that fact, we are down in Texas, hurricanes can come in 60, 70, 80 miles on in land. And then there's, you know, hurricane Harvey, right with all the flooding and stuff like that. So they do want to set up a third side. I think that gives them the peace of mind. And you know the whole thing about it is right. You know, having an environment like this means the CSO and his team can focus on preventing attacks, while they're very confident that their infrastructure team, can handle anything that slips by them. >> Okay, great. Thank you. We're about out of time but Eric, I wonder if you could kind of bring us home, give us a summary of, how you see InfiniGuard impacting customers, you know where's that value that business case for them. I wonder if you could just tie that note for us. >> Sure. We want to make sure that we tie everything back, normally technical value, as Stan very eloquently did with several different customers, but what we can do from a business value perspective. So as an example, one of our infiniGuard customers, is a global financial services company and they were using a solution from a different purpose-built backup appliance provider. They switched to us, not only they're able to increase the number of daily backups, from 30,000 to 90,000. So they get better data protection, but on top of that, they cut 40% of their costs. So you want to make sure that while you're doing this, you're doing things like consolidation. One of our other customers, which is in EMEA, in the European area, they had 14 purpose-built backup appliances, seven in one data center and set seven and a second data center. Now they've got two, one in one data center, one of the other, they of course do the local backups right then and there. And then they replicate, from one data center to the other data center. As both data centers are both active data centers, but differ for the other data center. So from their perspective, dramatic reduction of OPEX and CapEx, 14 physical boxes down to two. And of course the associated management of both the manpower side, but why I love to call the watch slots, power and floor. All of those things that go into an OPEX budget, they were cut dramatically, 'cause there's only two systems now, to power cool, et cetera et cetera. Floor space, Rackspace from 14. So wow, did they save money. So I think, it's not only providing that data protection and cyber resilience technology, but doing it in a cost-effective way. And as Stan pointed out, in a highly automated way, that cuts back on the manpower they need to manage these systems, because they're overworked and they need to focus on as Stan pointed out, their AI infrastructure, where they're doing for AI applications, don't have time to deal with it. So the more we automate, the better it is for them and the easier it is for everyone from the end-user perspective, as well as up in through their entire IT chain of command. >> Okay, if you want more information, you can go to infinidatguard.com or it's markiisis.com and check it out, learn about their full stack solution. A little bit about AI. Gentlemen, thanks so much for the conversation today, great to have you. >> Thank you, Dave. Now in a moment, I'm going to have some closing thoughts on the market and what we heard today. Thank you for watching the cube. You're a leader in enterprise tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> Despite its 70 to $80 billion total available market, computer storage is like a small town, everybody knows everybody else. We say in the storage world, there are a hundred people, and 99 seats. Infinidat is a company that was founded in 2011 by storage legend, Moshe Yanai. The company is known for building products with rock solid availability, simplicity, and a passion for white glove service, and client satisfaction. Company went through a leadership change recently, in early this year, appointed industry vet, Phil Bullinger, as CEO. It's making more moves, bringing on longtime storage sales exec, Richard Bradbury, to run EMEA, and APJ Go-To-Market. And just recently appointed marketing maven, Eric Hertzog to be CMO. Hertzog has worked at numerous companies, ranging from startups that were acquired, two stints at IBM, and is SVP of product marketing and management at Storage Powerhouse, EMC, among others. Hertzog has been named CMO of the year as an OnCon Icon, and top 100 influencer in big data, AI, and also hybrid cloud, along with yours truly, if I may say so. Joining me today, is the newly minted CMO of Infinidat, Mr.Eric Hertzog. Good to see you, Eric, thanks for coming on. >> Dave, thank you very much. You know, we love being on theCUBE, and I am of course sporting my Infinidat logo wear already, even though I've only been on the job for two weeks. >> Dude, no Hawaiian shirt, okay. That's a pretty buttoned up company. >> Well, next time, I'll have a Hawaiian shirt, don't worry. >> Okay, so give us the backstory, how did this all come about? you know Phil, my 99 seat joke, but, how did it come about? Tell us that story. >> So, I have known Phil since the late 90s, when he was a VP at LSA of Engineering, and he had... I was working at a company called Milax, which was acquired by IBM. And we were doing a product for HP, and he was providing the subsystem, and we were providing the fiber to fiber, and fiber to SCSI array controllers back in the day. So I met him then, we kept in touch for years. And then when I was a senior VP at EMC, he started originally as VP of engineering for the EMC Isilon team. And then he became the general manager. So, while I didn't work for him, I worked with him, A, at LSA, and then again at EMC. So I just happened to congratulate him about some award he won, and he said "Hey Herzog, "we should talk, I have a CMO opening". So literally happened over LinkedIn discussion, where I reached out to him, and congratulate him, he said "Hey, I need a CMO, let's talk". So, the whole thing took about three weeks in all honesty. And that included interviewing with other members of his exec staff. >> That's awesome, that's right, he was running the Isilon division for awhile at the EMC. >> Right. >> You guys were there, and of course, you talk about Milax, LSA, there was a period of time where, you guys were making subsystems for everybody. So, you sort of saw the whole landscape. So, you got some serious storage history and chops. So, I want to ask you what attracted you to Infinidat. I mean, obviously they're a leader in the magic quadrant. We know about InfiniBox, and the petabyte scale, and the low latency, what are the... When you look at the market, you obviously you see it, you talk to everybody. What were the trends that were driving your decision to join Infinidat? >> Well, a couple of things. First of all, as you know, and you guys have talked about it on theCUBE, most CIOs don't know anything about storage, other than they know a guy got to spend money on it. So the Infinidat message of optimizing applications, workloads, and use cases with 100% guaranteed availability, unmatched reliability, the set and forget ease of use, which obviously AIOps is driving that, and overall IT operations management was very attractive. And then on top of that, the reality is, when you do that consolidation, which Infinidat can do, because of the performance that it has, you can dramatically free up rack, stack, power, floor, and operational manpower by literally getting rid of, tons and tons of arrays. There's one customer that they have, you actually... I found out when I got here, they took out a hundred arrays from EMC Hitachi. And that company now has 20 InfiniBoxes, and InfiniBox SSAs running the exact same workloads that used to be, well over a hundred subsystems from the other players. So, that's got a performance angle, a CapEx and OPEX angle, and then even a clean energy angle because reducing Watson slots. So, lots of different advantages there. And then I think from just a pure marketing perspective, as someone has said, they're the best kept secret to the storage industry. And so you need to, if you will, amp up the message, get it out. They've expanded the portfolio with the InfiniBox SSA, the InfiniGuard product, which is really optimized, not only as the PBA for backup perspective, and it works with all the backup vendors, but also, has an incredible play on data and cyber resilience with their capability of local logical air gapping, remote logical air gapping, and creating a clean room, if you will, a vault, so that you can then recover their review for malware ransomware before you do a full recovery. So it's got the right solutions, just that most people didn't know who they were. So, between the relationship with Phil, and the real opportunity that this company could skyrocket. In fact, we have 35 job openings right now, right now. >> Wow, okay, so yeah, I think it was Duplessy called them the best kept secret, he's not the only one. And so that brings us to you, and your mission because it's true, it is the best kept secret. You're a leader in the Gartner magic quadrant, but I mean, if you're not a leader in a Gartner magic quadrant, you're kind of nobody in storage. And so, but you got chops and block storage. You talked about the consolidation story, and I've talked to many folks in Infinidat about that. Ken Steinhardt rest his soul, Dr. Rico, good business friend, about, you know... So, that play and how you handle the whole blast radius. And that's always a great discussion, and Infinidat has proven that it can operate at very very high performance, low latency, petabyte scale. So how do you get the word out? What's your mission? >> Well, so we're going to do a couple of things. We're going to be very, very tied to the channel as you know, EMC, Dell EMC, and these are articles that have been in CRN, and other channel publications is pulling back from the channel, letting go of channel managers, and there's been a lot of conflict. So, we're going to embrace the channel. We already do well over 90% of our business within general globally. So, we're doing that. In fact, I am meeting, personally, next week with five different CEOs of channel partners. Of which, only one of them is doing business with Infinidat now. So, we want to expand our channel, and leverage the channel, take advantage of these changes in the channel. We are going to be increasing our presence in the public relations area. The work we do with all the industry analysts, not just in North America, but in Europe as well, and Asia. We're going to amp up, of course, our social media effort, both of us, of course, having been named some of the best social media guys in the world the last couple of years. So, we're going to open that up. And then, obviously, increase our demand generation activities as well. So, we're going to make sure that we leverage what we do, and deliver that message to the world. Deliver it to the partner base, so the partners can take advantage, and make good margin and revenue, but delivering products that really meet the needs of the customers while saving them dramatically on CapEx and OPEX. So, the partner wins, and the end user wins. And that's the best scenario you can do when you're leveraging the channel to help you grow your business. >> So you're not only just the marketing guy, I mean, you know product, you ran product management at very senior levels. So, you could... You're like a walking spec sheet, John Farrier says you could just rattle it off. Already impressed that how much you know about Infinidat, but when you joined EMC, it was almost like, there was too many products, right? When you joined IBM, even though it had a big portfolio, it's like it didn't have enough relevant products. And you had to sort of deal with that. How do you feel about the product portfolio at Infinidat? >> Well, for us, it's right in the perfect niche. Enterprise class, AI based software defined storage technologies that happens run on a hybrid array, an all flash array, has a variant that's really tuned towards modern data protection, including data and cyber resilience. So, with those three elements of the portfolio, which by the way, all have a common architecture. So while there are three different solutions, all common architecture. So if you know how to use the InfiniBox, you can easily use an InfiniGuard. You got an InfiniGuard, you can easily use an InfiniBox SSA. So the capability of doing that, helps reduce operational manpower and hence, of course, OPEX. So the story is strong technically, the story has a strong business tie in. So part of the thing you have to do in marketing these days. Yeah, we both been around. So you could just talk about IOPS, and latency, and bandwidth. And if the people didn't... If the CIO didn't know what that meant, so what? But the world has changed on the expenditure of infrastructure. If you don't have seamless integration with hybrid cloud, virtual environments and containers, which Infinidat can do all that, then you're not relevant from a CIO perspective. And obviously with many workloads moving to the cloud, you've got to have this infrastructure that supports core edge and cloud, the virtualization layer, and of course, the container layer across a hybrid environment. And we can do that with all three of these solutions. Yet, with a common underlying software defined storage architecture. So it makes the technical story very powerful. Then you turn that into business benefit, CapEX, OPEX, the operational manpower, unmatched availability, which is obviously a big deal these days, unmatched performance, everybody wants their SAP workload or their Oracle or Mongo Cassandra to be, instantaneous from the app perspective. Excuse me. And we can do that. And that's the kind of thing that... My job is to translate that from that technical value into the business value, that can be appreciated by the CIO, by the CSO, by the VP of software development, who then says to VP of industry, that Infinidat stuff, we actually need that for our SAP workload, or wow, for our overall corporate cybersecurity strategy, the CSO says, the key element of the storage part of that overall corporate cybersecurity strategy are those Infinidat guys with their great cyber and data resilience. And that's the kind of thing that my job, and my team's job to work on to get the market to understand and appreciate that business value that the underlying technology delivers. >> So the other thing, the interesting thing about Infinidat. This was always a source of spirited discussions over the years with business friends from Infinidat was the company figured out a way, it was formed in 2011, and at the time the strategy perfectly reasonable to say, okay, let's build a better box. And the way they approached that from a cost standpoint was you were able to get the most out of spinning disk. Everybody else was moving to flash, of course, floyers work a big flash, all flash data center, etc, etc. But Infinidat with its memory cache and its architecture, and its algorithms was able to figure out how to magically get equivalent or better performance in an all flash array out of a system that had a lot of spinning disks, which is I think unique. I mean, I know it's unique, very rare anyway. And so that was kind of interesting, but at the time it made sense, to go after a big market with a better mouse trap. Now, if I were starting a company today, I might take a different approach, I might try to build, a storage cloud or something like that. Or if I had a huge install base that I was trying to protect, and maybe go into that. But so what's the strategy? You still got huge share gain potentials for on-prem is that the vector? You mentioned hybrid cloud, what's the cloud strategy? Maybe you could summarize your thoughts on that? >> Sure, so the cloud strategy, is first of all, seamless integration to hybrid cloud environments. For example, we support Outpost as an example. Second thing, you'd be surprised at the number of cloud providers that actually use us as their backend, either for their primary storage, or for their secondary storage. So, we've got some of the largest hyperscalers in the world. For example, one of the Telcos has 150 Infiniboxes, InfiniBox SSAS and InfiniGuards. 150 running one of the largest Telcos on the planet. And a huge percentage of that is their corporate cloud effort where they're going in and saying, don't use Amazon or Azure, why don't you use us the giant Telco? So we've got that angle. We've got a ton of mid-sized cloud providers all over the world that their backup is our servers, or their primary storage that they offer is built on top of Infiniboxes or InfiniBox SSA. So, the cloud strategy is one to arm the hyperscalers, both big, medium, and small with what they need to provide the right end user services with the right outside SLAs. And the second thing is to have that hybrid cloud integration capability. For example, when I talked about InfiniGuard, we can do air gapping locally to give almost instantaneous recovery, but at the same time, if there's an earthquake in California or a tornado in Kansas City, or a tsunami in Singapore, you've got to have that remote air gapping capability, which InfiniGuard can do. Which of course, is essentially that logical air gap remote is basically a cloud strategy. So, we can do all of that. That's why it has a cloud strategy play. And again we have a number of public references in the cloud, US signal and others, where they talk about why they use the InfiniBox, and our technologies to offer their storage cloud services based on our platform. >> Okay, so I got to ask you, so you've mentioned earthquakes, a lot of earthquakes in California, dangerous place to live, US headquarters is in Waltham, we're going to pry you out of the Golden State? >> Let's see, I was born at Stanford hospital where my parents met when they were going there. I've never lived anywhere, but here. And of course, remember when I was working for EMC, I flew out every week, and I sort of lived at that Milford Courtyard Marriott. So I'll be out a lot, but I will not be moving, I'm a Silicon Valley guy, just like that old book, the Silicon Valley Guy from the old days, that's me. >> Yeah, the hotels in Waltham are a little better, but... So, what's your priority? Last question. What's the priority first 100 days? Where's your focus? >> Number one priority is team assessment and integration of the team across the other teams. One of the things I noticed about Infinidat, which is a little unusual, is there sometimes are silos and having done seven other small companies and startups, in a startup or a small company, you usually don't see that silo-ness, So we have to break down those walls. And by the way, we've been incredibly successful, even with the silos, imagine if everybody realized that business is a team sport. And so, we're going to do that, and do heavy levels of integration. We've already started to do an incredible outreach program to the press and to partners. We won a couple awards recently, we're up for two more awards in Europe, the SDC Awards, and one of the channel publications is going to give us an award next week. So yeah, we're amping up that sort of thing that we can leverage and extend. Both in the short term, but also, of course, across a longer term strategy. So, those are the things we're going to do first, and yeah, we're going to be rolling into, of course, 2022. So we've got a lot of work we're doing, as I mentioned, I'm meeting, five partners, CEOs, and only one of them is doing business with us now. So we want to get those partners to kick off January with us presenting at their sales kickoff, going "We are going with Infinidat "as one of our strong storage providers". So, we're doing all that upfront work in the first 100 days, so we can kick off Q1 with a real bang. >> Love the channel story, and you're a good guy to do that. And you mentioned the silos, correct me if I'm wrong, but Infinidat does a lot of business in overseas. A lot of business in Europe, obviously the affinity to the engineering, a lot of the engineering work that's going on in Israel, but that's by its very nature, stovepipe. Most startups start in the US, big market NFL cities, and then sort of go overseas. It's almost like Infinidat sort of simultaneously grew it's overseas business, and it's US business. >> Well, and we've got customers everywhere. We've got them in South Africa, all over Europe, Middle East. We have six very large customers in India, and a number of large customers in Japan. So we have a sales team all over the world. As you mentioned, our white glove service includes not only our field systems engineers, but we have a professional services group. We've actually written custom software for several customers. In fact, I was on the forecast meeting earlier today, and one of the comments that was made for someone who's going to give us a PO. So, the sales guy was saying, part of the reason we're getting the PO is we did some professional services work last quarter, and the CIO called and said, I can't believe it. And what CIO calls up a storage company these days, but the CIO called him and said "I can't believe the work you did. We're going to buy some more stuff this quarter". So that white glove service, our technical account managers to go along with the field sales SEs and this professional service is pretty unusual in a small company to have that level of, as you mentioned yourself, white glove service, when the company is so small. And that's been a real hidden gem for this company, and will continue to be so. >> Well, Eric, congratulations on the appointment, the new role, excited to see what you do, and how you craft the story, the strategy. And we've been following Infinidat since, sort of day zero and I really wish you the best. >> Great, well, thank you very much. Always appreciate theCUBE. And trust me, Dave, next time I will have my famous Hawaiian shirt. >> Ah, I can't wait. All right, thanks to Eric, and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, and we'll see you next time. (bright upbeat music)

(soft music) >> There are many constants in the storage business, relentlessly declining cost per bit, innovations that perpetually battled the laws of physics, a seemingly endless flow of venture capital, despite the intense competition. And there's one other constant in the storage business, Eric Hertzog, and he joins us today in this CUBE video exclusive to talk about IBM's recent storage announcements. Eric, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Great, Dave, thanks very much, we love being on theCUBE and you guys do a great job of informing the industry about what's going on in storage and IT in general. >> Well, thank you for that. >> Great job. >> We're going to cover a lot of ground today. IBM Storage, made a number of announcements the past month around data resilience, a new as-a-service model, which a lot of folks are doing in the industry, you've made performance enhancements. Can you give us the top line summary of the hard news, Eric? >> Sure, the top line summary is of course cyber security is on top of mind for everybody in the recent Fortune 500 list that came out, you probably saw, there was a survey of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, they named cybersecurity as their number one concern, not war, not pandemic, but cybersecurity. So we've got an announcement around data resilience and cyber resiliency built on our FlashSystem family with our new offering, Safeguarded Copy. And the second thing is the move to a new method of storage consumption. Storage-as-a-Service, a pay-as-you-go model, cloud-like the way people buy cloud storage, that's what you can do now from IBM Storage with our Storage-as-a-Service. Those are the key, two takeaways, Dave. >> Yeah and I want to stay on the trends that we're seeing in cyber for a moment, the work from home pivot in the hybrid work approach has really created a new exposures, people aren't as secure outside of the walled garden of the offices and we've seen a dramatic escalation in the adversaries capabilities and techniques, another least of which is island hopping, in other words, putting code fragments in the digital supply chain, they reform once they're inside the company and it's almost like this organic creepy thing that occurs. They're also living as you know, stealthily for many, many months, sometimes years, exfiltrating data, and then just waiting and then when companies respond, the incidents response trigger a ransomware incident. So they escalate the cyber crime and it's just a really, really bad situation for victims. What are you seeing in that regard and the trends? >> Well, one of the key things we see as everyone is very concerned about cybersecurity. The Biden administration has issued (indistinct) not only to the government sector, but to the private sector, cyber security is a big issue. Other governments across the world have done the same thing. So at IBM Storage, what we see is taking a comprehensive view. Many people think that cybersecurity is moat with the alligators, the castle wall and then of course the sheriff of Nottingham to catch the bad guys. And we know the sheriff of Nottingham doesn't do a good job of catching Robin Hood. So it takes a while as you just pointed out, sitting there for months or even longer. So one of the key things you need to do in an overall cybersecurity strategy is don't forget storage. Now our announcement around Safeguarded Copy is very much about rapid recovery after an attack for malware or ransomware. We have a much broader set of cyber security technology inside of IBM Storage. For example, with our FlashSystem family, we can encrypt data at rest with no performance penalty. So if someone steals that data, guess what? It's encrypted. We can do anomalous pattern detection with our backup product, Spectrum Protect Plus, why would you care? Well, if theCUBE's backup was taking two hours on particular datasets and all of a sudden it was taking four hours, Hmm maybe someone is encrypting those backup data sets. And so we notify. So what we believe at IBM is that an overarching cybersecurity strategy has to keep the bad guys out, threat detection, anomalous pattern behavior on the network, on the servers, on the storage and all of that, chasing the bad guy down once they breach the wall, 'cause that does happen, but if you don't have cyber and data resilience built into your storage technology, you are leaving a gap that the bad guys can explain, whether that be the malware ransomware guys oh by the way, Dave, there still is internal IT theft that there was a case about 10 years ago now where 10 IT guys stole $175 million. I kid you not, $175 million from a bunch of large banks across the country, and that was an internal IT theft. So between the internal IT issues that could approach you malware and ransomware, a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy, must include storage. >> So I want to ask you about come back to Safeguarded Copy and you mentioned some features and capabilities, encrypting data at rest, your anomalous pattern recognition inferring, you're taking a holistic approach, but of course you've got a storage centricity, what's different about your cyber solution? What's your unique value probability to your (indistinct) . >> Well, when you look at Safeguarded Copy, what it does is it creates immutable copies that are logically air-gapped, but logically air-gapped locally. So what that means is if you have a malware or ransomware attack and you need to do a recovery, whether it be a surgical recovery or a full-on recovery, because they attacked everything, then we can do recovery in a couple hours versus a couple of days or a couple of weeks. Now, in addition to the logical local air-gapping with Safeguarded Copy, you also could do remote logical air-gapping by snapping out to the cloud, which we also have on our FlashSystem products and you also of course, could take our FlashSystem products and back up to tape, giving you a physical air gap. In short, we give our customers three different ways to help with malware and ransomware. >> Let me ask you- >> Are air-gapped locally. >> Yeah, please continue, I'm sorry. >> So our air-gapping locally for rapid recovery, air-gapping remotely, which again, then puts it on the cloud provider network, so hopefully they can't breach that. And then clearly a physical air gap going out to tape all three and on the mainframe, we have Safeguarded Copy already, Dave and several of our mainframe customers actually do two of those things, they'll do Safeguarded Copy or rapid recovery locally, but they'll also take that Safeguarded Copy and either put it out to tape or put it out to a cloud provider with a remote logical air-gap using a snapshot. >> I want to ask you a question about management 'cause when you ask CSOs, what's your number one challenge, they'll say lack of talent, We've got all these tools and all this lack of skills to really do all this stuff. Can't hire people fast enough and they don't have the skills. So when you think about it, and so what you do is you bring a lot of automation into the orchestration and management. My question is this, when you set up air gaps, do you recommend, or what do you see in terms of not, of logically and physically not only physically separating the data, but also the management and orchestration and automation does that have to be logically air-gapped as well or can you use the same management system? What's best practice there? >> Ah, so what we do is we work with our copy management software, which will manage regular copies as well, but Safeguarded Copies are immutable. You can't write to them, you can't get rid of them and they're logically air-gapped from the local hosts. So the hosts, for the Safeguarded Copies that immutable copy, you just made, the hosts don't even know that it's there. So you manage that with our copy management software, which by the way, we'll manage regular snapshots and replicas as well, but what that allows you to do is allows you to automate, for example, you can automate recovery across multiple FlashSystem arrays, the copy services manager will allow you to set different parameters for different Safeguarded Copies. So a certain Safeguarded Copy, you could say, make me a copy every four hours. And then on another volume on a different data set, you could say, make me a copy every 12 hours. Once you set all that stuff update, it's completely automated, completely automated. >> So, I want to come back to something you mentioned about anomalous pattern recognition and how you help with threat detection. So a couple of a couple of quick multi-part question here. First of all, the backup corpus is an obvious target. So that's an area that you have to protect. And so can, and you're saying, you've used the example if your backups taking too long, but so how do you do that? What's the technology behind that? And then can you go beyond, should you go beyond just the backup corpus, with primary data or copies on-prem, et cetera? Two part questions. >> So when we look at it, the anomalous pattern detection is part of our backup software, say Spectrum Protect and what it does it uses AI-based technology, it recognizes a pattern. So it knows that the backup dataset for the queue takes two hours and it recognizes that, and it sees that as the normal state of events. So if all of a sudden that backup that theCUBE was doing used to take two hours and starts taking four, what it does is that's an anomalous pattern, it's not a normal pattern. It'll send a note to the backup admin, the storage admin, whoever you designate it to and say the backup data set for theCUBE that used to take two hours, it's taken four hours, you probably ought to check that. So when we view cyber resiliency from a storage perspective, it's broad. We just talked about anomalous pattern detection in Spectrum Protect. We were talking most of the conversation about our Safeguarded Copy, which is available on the mainframe for several years and is now available on FlashSystems, making immutable local air-gap copies, that can be rapidly recovered and are immutable and can help you recover for a malware or ransomware attack. Our data at rest encryption happens to be with no performance penalty. So when you look at it, you need to create an overarching strategy for cybersecurity and then when you look at your storage estate, you need to look at your secondary storage, backup, replicas, snaps, archive, and have a strategy there to protect that and then you need a strategy to protect your primary storage, which would be things like Safeguarded Copy and encryption. So then you put it all together and in fact, Dave, one of the things we offer is a free cyber resilience assessment. It's not only for IBM Storage, but it happens to be a cyber resilience assessment that conforms to the NIST Framework and it's heterogeneous. So if you're a big company, you've got IBM EMC and HP Storage, guess what? It's all about the data sets not about the storage. So we say, you said these 10 data sets are critical, why are you not encrypting them? These data sets are XYZ, why are you not air-gapping them? So we come up based on the NIST Framework, a set of recommendations that are not IBM specific, but they are storage specific. Here's how you make your storage more resilient, both your secondary storage and your primary storage. That's how we see the big thing and Safeguarded Copy of course fits in on the primary storage side, A on the mainframe, which we've had for several years now and B in the Linux world, the Unix world and the Windows Server world on our FlashSystem portfolio with the announcement we did on July 20th. >> Great, thank you for painting that picture. Eric, are you seeing any use case patterns emerge in this space? >> Well, we see a couple of things. First of all, is A most resellers and most end-users, don't see storage an overarching part of the cybersecurity strategy, and that's starting to change. Second thing we're seeing is more and more storage companies are trying to get into this bailiwick of offering cyber and data resilience. The value IBM brings of course is much longer experience to that and we even integrate with other products. So for example, IBM offers a product called QRadar from the security divisions not a storage product, a security product, and it helps you with early data breach recognition. So it looks at servers, network access, it looks at the storage and it actually integrates now with our Safeguarded Copy. So, part of the value that we bring is this overarching strategy of a comprehensive data and cyber resilience across our whole portfolio, including Safeguarded Copy our July 20th announcement. But also integration beyond storage now with our QRadar product from IBM security division. And there will be future announcements coming in both Q4 and Q1 of additional integration with other security technologies, so you can see how storage can be a vital COD in the corporate cybersecurity strategy. >> Got it, thank you. Let's pivot to the, as-a-service it's, cloud obviously is brought in that as-a-service. Now, it seems like everybody has one now. You guys have announced obviously HPE, Dell, Lenovo, Cisco, Pure, everybody's gotten out there as-a-service model, what do we need to know about your as-a-service solution and why is it different from the others? >> Sure. Well, one of the big differences is we actually go on actual storage, not effective. So when you look at effective storage, which most of them do that includes creating the (indistinct) data sets and other things, so you're basically paying for that. Second thing we do is we have a bigger margin. So for example, if theCUBE says we want SLA-3 and we sell it by the SLA, Dave, SLA-1, two and three. So let's say theCUBE needs SLA-3 and the minimum capacity is a 100 terabytes, but let's say you think you need 300 terabytes. No problem. You also have a variable. One of the key differences is unlike many of our competitors, the rate for the base and the rate for the variable are identical. Several of our competitors, when you're in the base, you pay a certain amount, when you go into the variable, they charge you a premium. The other key differentiator is around data reduction. Some of our competitors and all storage companies have data reduction technology. Block-level D do thin provisioning, compression, we all offer those features. The difference is with IBM's pay-as-you-grow, Storage-as-a-Service model, if you have certain data sets that are not very deducible, not very compressible, we absorbed that with our competitors, most of them, if the dataset is not easily deducible, compressible, and they don't see the value, they actually charge you a premium for that. So that is a huge difference. And then the last big difference is our a 100% availability guarantee. We have that on our FlashSystem product line, we're the only one offering 100% availability guarantee. We also against many of the competitors offer a better base nines, as you know, availability characteristics. We offer six nines of availability, which is five minutes and 26 seconds of downtime and a 100% availability of offering. Some of our competitors only offer four nines of availability and if you want five or six, they charge you extra. We give you six nines base in which has only five minutes and change of downtime in a year. So those are the key difference between us and the other as-a-service models out there. >> So, the basic concept I think, is if you commit to more and buy more, you pay less per. I mean, that's the basic philosophy of these things, right? So, if- >> Yes. >> I commit to you X, let's say, I want to just sort of start small and I commit to you to X and great. I'm in now in, maybe I sign up for a multi-year term, I commit this much, whatever, a 100 terabytes or whatever the minimum is. And then I can say, Hey, you know what? This is working for me. The CFO likes it and the IT guys can provision more seamlessly, we got our chargeback or showback model goes, I want to now make a bigger commitment and I can, and I want to sort of, can I break my three-year term and come back and then renegotiate, kind of like reserved instances, maybe bigger and pay less? How do you approach that? >> Well, what you do is we do a couple of things. First of all, you could always add additional capacity, and you just call up. We assign a technical account manager to every account. So in addition to what you get from the regular sales team and what you get from our value business partners, by the way, we did factor in the business partners, Dave, into this, so business partners will have a great pay-as-you-go Storage-as-a-Service solution, that includes partners and their ability to leverage. In fact, several of our partners that do have both MSP and MHP businesses are working right now to leverage our Storage-as-a-Service, and then add on their own value with their own MSP and MHP capability. >> And they can white label that? Is that right or? >> Well, you'd still have Storage-as-a-Service from IBM. They would resell that to theCUBE and then they'd add in their own MHP or MSP. >> Got it. >> That said partners interested in doing a white label, we would certainly entertain that capability. >> Got it. I interrupted you, carry on please. >> Yeah, you can go ahead and add more capacity, not a problem. You also can change the SLA. So theCUBE, one of the leading an industry analyst firms, you bought every analyst firm in the world, and you're using IBM Storage-as-a-Service, pay-as-you-go cloud-like model. So what you do is you call up the technical account manager and say, Eric, we bought all these other companies they're using on-prem storage, we'd like to move to Storage-as-a-Service for all the companies we acquire. We can do that, so that would up your capacity. And then you could say, now we've been at SLA-2, but because we're adding all these new applications of workloads from our acquired companies, we want some of it to be at SLA-1. So we can have some of your workloads on SLA-2, others on SLA-1, you could switch everything to SLA-1, and you just call your technical account manager and they'll make that happen for you or your business partner, obviously, if you bought through the channel. >> I get it, the hard question is what if all those other companies theCUBE acquired are also IBM Storage-as-a-Service customers? Can I, what's that discussion like? Hey, can I consolidate those and get a better deal? >> Yeah, there are all Storage-as-a-Service customers and Dave I love that thought, we would just figure out a way to consolidate the agreement. The agreements are one through five years. What I think also that's very unique is let's say for whatever reason, and we all love finance people. Let's say the IT guys have called the finance and say, we did a one-year contract, we now like to do a three-year contract. The one year is coming up and guess what? Finance's delayed for whatever reason, the PO doesn't go through. So the ITI calls up the technical account manager, we love your service, it's delayed in finance. We will let them stay on their Storage-as-a-Service, even though they don't have a contract. Now, of course they've told us they want to do one, but if they exceed the contract by a quarter or two, because they can't get the finance guys are messing with the IT guys, that's fine. What the key differentiators? Exactly the same price. Several of our competitors will also extend without a contract, but until you do a contract, they charge you a premium, we do not, whatever, if you're an SLA-3, you're SLA-3, we'll extend you and no big deal. And then you do your contract, when the finance guys get their act together and you're ready to go. So that is something we can do and we'll do on a continual basis. >> Last question. Let's go way out. So, we're not doing any time, near-term forecasts, I'm trying to understand how popular you think as-a-service is going to be. I mean, if you think about the end of the decade, let's think industry total, IBM specific, how popular do you think as-a-service models will be? Do you think it will be the majority of the transacted business or it's kind of more of a, just one of many? >> So I think there will be many, some people will still have bare metal on-premises. Some people will still do virtualization on-premises or in a hybrid cloud configuration. What I do think though is Storage-as-a-Service will be over 50% by the end. Remember, we're sitting at 2021. So we're talking now 2029. >> Right. >> So I think Storage-as-a-Service will be over 50%. I think most of that Storage-as-a-Service will be in a hybrid cloud model. I think the days of a 100% cloud, which is the way it started. I think a lot of people realize that a 100% cloud actually is more expensive than a hybrid cloud or fully on-prem. I was at a major university in New York, they are in the healthcare space and I know their CIO from one of my past lives. I was talking to him, they did a full on analysis of all the cloud providers going a 100% cloud. And their analysis showed that a 100% cloud, particularly for highly transactional workloads was 50% more expensive than buying it, paying the maintenance and paying their employees. So we did an all in view. So what I think it's going to be is Storage-as-a-Service will be over 50%. I think most of that Storage-as-a-Service will be in a hybrid cloud configuration with storage on-prem or in a colo, like what our IBM pay-as-you-go service will do and then it will be accessed and available through a hybrid cloud configuration with IBM Cloud, Google, Amazon as or whoever the cloud provider is. So I do think that you're looking at over 50% of the storage being as-a-service, but I do think the bulk of that as-a-service will be as-a-service through someone like IBM or our competitors and then part of it will be from the cloud providers. But I do think you're going to see a mix because right now the expense of going a 100% cloud cloud storage is dramatically understated and when someone does an analysis like that major university in New York did, they had a guy from finance, help them do the analysis and it was 50% more expensive than doing on-premise either on-prem or on-prem as-a-service, both were way cheaper. >> But you own the asset, right? >> Yes. >> As-a-service model. >> We, right, we own the asset. >> And I would bet, >> I would bet that over the lifetime value of the spend and it as-a-service model, just like the cloud, if you do this with IBM or any of your competitors, I would bet that overall you're going to spend more just like you've seen in the cloud, but you get the benefit is the flexibility that you get. >> Yeah, yeah. If you compare it to the, so obviously the number one model would be to buy. That's probably going to be the least expensive. >> Right. >> But it's also the least flexible. Then you also have leasing, more flexibility, but leasing usually is more expensive. Just like when you lease your car, if you add up all the lease payments and then you, at the end, pay that balloon payment to buy, it's cheaper to buy the car up front than it is to lease a car. Same thing with any IT asset, now storage network servers, all are available on leasing, the net is at the bottom line, that's more than buying it upfront. And then Storage-as-a-Service will also be more expensive than buying it, my friend, but ultimate capability, altering SLAs, adding new capacity, being able to handle an app very quickly. We can provision the storage, as you mentioned, the IT guys can easily provision. We provision, the storage in 10 minutes, if you bought from IBM Storage or any competitor you bought and you need more storage, A you got to put a PO through your system and if you're not theCUBE, but you're a giant global Fortune 500, sometimes it takes weeks to get the PO done. Then the PO has to go to the business partner, the business partner has got to give a PO to the distributor and a PO to IBM. So it can take you weeks to actually get the additional storage that you need. With Storage-as-a-Service from IBM with our pay-as-you-go, cloud-like model, all you have to do is provision and you're done. And by the way, we provide a 50% overage for free. So if they end up needing more storage, that 50% is actually sitting on-prem already and if they get to 75% utilization of the total amount of storage, we then call them up, the technical account manager would call them up and their business partner and say, Dave, do you know that you guys are at 75% full? We'd like to come add some additional storage to get you back down to a 50% margin. And by the way, most of our competitors only do a 25% margin. So again, another differentiator for IBM Storage-as-a-Service. >> What about, I said, last question, but I have another question. What about day one? Like how long does it take, if I want to start fresh with as-a-service? >> Get it. >> How long does it take to get up and running? >> Basically you put the PO through, whatever it takes on your side or through your business partner, we then we'll sign the technical account manager, will call you up because you need to tell us, do you want to, in a colo facility that you're working with or do you want to put it on on-prem? And then once we do that, we just schedule a time for your IT guys do the install. So, probably two weeks. >> Yeah. >> It all depends because you've got to call back and say, Eric, we'd like it at our colo partner, our colo partners, ABC, we got to call ABC and then get back to you or on-prem , we're going to have guys in the office, a good day when it's not going to be too busy. Could you come two weeks from Thursday? Which now would be three weeks for sake of argument. But that would be, we interface with the customer, with the technical account manager to do it on your schedule on your time, whether you do it in your own facility or use a colo provider. >> Yeah, but once you tell, once I tell you, once we get through all that stuff, it's two weeks from when that's all agreed. >> Yeah. >> It's like the Xerox copier salesman, (Dave chuckles) Where are you going to put it? Once you decide where you're going to put it, then it's a couple of weeks. It's not a month or two months or yeah. >> Yeah, it's not. And we need additional capacity, remember there's a 50% margin sitting there. So if you need to go into the variable and use it, and when we hit a 75%, we actually track it with our storage insights pro. So we'll call you up and say, Dave, you're at 76%. We'd like to add more storage to give you better margin of extra storage and you would say, great, when can we do it? So, yeah, we're proactive about that to make sure that you stay at that 50% margin. Again, our competitors, all do only have 25% margin. So we're giving you that better margin, a larger margin in case you really have a high capacity demand for that quarter and we proactively will call you up, if we think you need more based on monitoring your storage usage. >> Great. Eric got to go, thank you so much for taking us through that great detail, I really appreciate it. Always good to see you. >> Great, thanks Dave, really appreciate it. >> Alright, thank you for watching this CUBE conversation, this is Dave Vellante and we'll see you next time. (soft music)

[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you [Music] [Applause] [Music] live from Barcelona Spain it's the cube covering Cisco live 2020 rot to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners come back this is the cubes coverage of Cisco live 2020 here in Barcelona doing about three and a half days of wall-to-wall coverage here I'm Stu minim and my co-host for this segment is Dave Volante John furs also here scouring the floor and really happy to welcome to the program to first-time guests I believe so Ron Daris is the product manager of product marketing for cloud computing with Cisco and sitting to his left is Matt Ferguson who's director of product development also with the Cisco cloud group Dave and I are from Boston Matt is also from the Boston area yes and Costas is coming over from London so thanks so much for joining us thanks IBPS all right so obviously cloud computing something we've been talking about many years we've really found fascinating the relationship Cisco's had with its customers as well as through the partner ecosystem had many good discussions about some of the announcements this week maybe start a little bit you know Cisco's software journey and you know positioning in this cloud space right now yes oh so it's a it's a really interesting dynamic when we start transitioning to multi cloud and we actually deal with cloud and compute coming together and we've had whether you're looking at the infrastructure ops organization or whether you're looking at the apps operations or whether you're looking at you know your dev environment your security operations each organization has to deal with their angle at which they view you know multi cloud or they view how they actually operate within those the cloud computing context and so whether you're on the infrastructure side you're looking at compute you're looking at storage you're looking at resources if you're an app operator you're looking at performance you're looking at visibility assurance if you are in the security operations you're looking at maybe governance you're looking at policy and then when you're a developer you really sort of thinking about CI CD you're talking about agility and there's very few organizations like Cisco that actually is looking at from a product perspective all those various angles of multi-cloud yeah definitely a lot of piece of cost us maybe up level it for us a little bit there's there's so many pieces you know we talked for so long you know you don't talk to any company that doesn't have a cloud strategy doesn't mean that it's not going to change over time and it means every company's got at home positioning but talk about the relationship cisco has with its customer and really the advisory position that you want to have with them it's actually a very relevant question to what to what Matt is talking about because we talk a lot about multi cloud as a trend and hybrid clouds and this kind of relationship between the traditional view of looking at computing data centers and then expanding to different clouds you know public cloud providers have now amazing platform capabilities and if you think about it the the it goes back to what Matt said about IT ops and the development kind of efforts why is this happening really you know there's there's the study that we did with with an analyst and there was an amazing a shocking stat around how within the next three years organizations will have to support 50% more applications than they do now and we have been trying to test this stat our events that made customer meetings etc that is a lot of a lot of change for organizations so if you think about why are they use why do they need to basically what go and expand to those clouds is because they want to service IT Ops teams want ER servers with capabilities their developers faster right and this is where you have within the IT ops kind of theme organization you have the security kind of frame the compute frame the networking where you know Cisco has a traditional footprint how do you blend all this how do you bring all this together in a linear way to support individual unique application modernization efforts I think that's what are we hearing from customers in terms of the feedback and this is what influences our strategy to converts the different business units and engineering engineering efforts right couple years ago I have to admit I was kind of a multi cloud skeptic I always said I thought it was more of a symptom than actually a strategy a symptom of you know shadow IT and different workloads and so forth but now I'm kind of buying in because I think IT in particular has been brought in to clean up the crime scene I often say so I think it is becoming a strategy so if you could help us understand what you're hearing from customers in terms of their strategy toward the multi cloud and how Cisco that was mapping into that yeah so so when we talk to customers it comes back to the angle at which they're approaching the problem in like you said the shadow IT has been probably around for longer than anybody won't cares to admit because the people want to move faster organizations want to get their product out to market sooner and and so what what really is we're having conversations now about you know how do I get the visibility how do I get you know the policies and the governance so that I can actually understand either how much I'm spending in the cloud or whether I'm getting the actual performance that I'm looking for that I need the connectivity so I get the bandwidth and so these are the kinds of conversations that we have with customers is is is going I realize that this is going on now I actually have to now put some you know governance and controls around that is their products is their solutions is their you know they're looking to Cisco to help them through this journey because it is a journey because as much as we talk about cloud and you know companies that were born in the cloud cloud native there is a tremendous number of IT organizations that are just starting that journey that are just entering into this phase where they have to solve these problems yeah I agree and it's just starting the journey with a deliberate strategy as opposed to okay we got this this thing but if you think about the competitive landscape its kind of interesting and I want to try to understand where Cisco fits because again you you initially had companies that didn't know in a public cloud sort of pushing multi cloud and you'd say oh well okay so they have to do that but now you see anthos come out with Google you see Microsoft leaning in we think eventually AWS is going to lean in and then you say I'm kind of interested in working with someone whose cloud agnostic not trying to force now now Cisco a few years ago you didn't really think about Cisco as a player now so this goes right in the middle I have said often that Cisco's in a great position John Fourier as well to connect businesses and from a source of networking strength making a strong argument that we have the most cost-effective most secure highest performance network to connect clouds that seems to be a pretty fundamental strength of yours and does that essentially summarize your strategy and and how does that map into the actions that you're taking in terms of products and services that you're bringing to market I would say that I can I can I can take that ya know it's a chewy question for hours yeah so I I was thinking about a satellite in you mentioned this before and you're like okay that's you know the world is turning around completely because we we seem to talk about satellite e is something bad happening and now suddenly we completely forgot about it like let let free free up the developers gonna let them do whatever they want and basically that is what I think is happening out there in the market so all the solutions you mentioned in the go to market approaches and the architectures that the public cloud providers at least are offering out there certainly the big three have differences have their strengths and I think those strengths are closer to the developer environment basically you know if you're looking into something like a IML there's one provider that you go with if you're looking for a mobile development framework you're gonna go somewhere else if you're looking for a dr you're gonna go somewhere else maybe not a big cloud but your service provider that you've been dealing with all these all these times and you know that they have their accreditation that you're looking for so where does Cisco come in you know we're not a public cloud provider we offer products as a service from our data centers and our partners data centers but at the - at the way that the industry sees a cloud provider a public cloud like AWS a sure Google Oracle IBM etc we're not that we don't do that our mission is to enable organizations with software hardware products SAS products to be able to facilitate their connectivity security visibility observability and in doing business and in leveraging the best benefits from those clouds so we we kind of we kind of moved to a point where we flip around the question and the first question is who is your cloud provider what how many tell us the clouds you work with and we can give you the modular pieces you can put we can put together for you so there's so that you can make the best out of your plan it's been being able to do that across clouds we're in an environment that is consistent with policies that are consistent that represent the edicts of your organization no matter where your data lives that's sort of the the vision in the way this is translated into products into Cisco's product you naturally think about Cisco as the connectivity provider networking that's that's really sort of our you know go to in what we're also when we have a significant computing portfolio as well so connectivity is not only the connectivity of the actual wire between geographies point A to point B in the natural routing and switching world there's connectivity between applications between cute and so this week you know the announcements were significant in that space when you talk about the compute and the cloud coming together on a single platform that gives you not only the ability to look at your applications from a experience journey map so you can actually know where the problems might occur in the application domain you can actually then go that next level down into the infrastructure level and you can say okay maybe I'm running out of some sort of resource whether it's compute resource whether it's memory whether it's on your private cloud that you have enabled on Prem or whether it's in the public cloud that you have that application residing and then why candidly you have the actual hardware itself so inter-site it has an ability to control that entire stack so you can have that visibility all the way down to the hardware layer I'm glad you brought up some of the applications wonderful we can you know stay there for a moment and talk about some of the changing patterns for customers a lot of talk in the industry about cloud native often it gets conflated with you know microservices containerization and lots of the individual pieces there but you know one of our favorite things that been talked about this week is the software that really sits at the application layer and how that connects down through some of the infrastructure pieces so help us understand what you're hearing from customers and and where how you're helping them through this transition to constants as you were saying absolutely there's going to be lots of new applications more applications and they still have the the old stuff that they need to continue to manage because we know an IT nothing ever goes away that's that's definitely true I was I was thinking you know there's there's a vacuum at the moment and and there's things that Cisco is doing from from technology leadership perspective to fill that gap between the application what do you see when it comes to monitoring making sure your services are observable and how does that fit within the infrastructure stack you know everything upwards network the network layer base again that is changing dramatically some of the things that Matt touched upon with regards to you know being able to connect the the networking the security in the infrastructure the computer infrastructure that the developers basically are deploying on top so there's a lot of there's a lot of things on containerization there's a lot of in fact it's you know one part of the of the self-injure side of the stack that you mentioned and one of the big announcements you know that there's a lot of discussion in the industry around ok how does that abstract further the conversation on networking for example because that now what we're seeing is that you have huge monoliths enterprise applications that are being carved down into micro services ok they you know there's a big misunderstanding around what is cloud native is it related to containers different kind of things right but containers are naturally the infrastructure de facto currency for developers to deploy because of many many benefits but then what happens you know between the kubernetes layer which seems to be the standard and the application who's gonna be managing services talking to each other that are multiplying you know things like service mesh network service mess how is the network evolving to be able to create this immutable infrastructure for developers to deploy applications so there's so many things happening at the same time where cisco has actually a lot of taking a lot of the front seat this is where it gets really interesting you know it's sort of hard to squint through because you mentioned kubernetes is the de facto standard but it's a de-facto standard that's open everybody's playing with but historically this industry has been defined by you know a leader who comes out with a de facto standard kubernetes not a company right it's an open standard and so but there's so many other components than containers and so history would suggest that there's going to be another de facto standard or multiple standards that emerge and your point earlier is you you got to have the full stack you can't just do networking you can't just do certain few so you guys are attacking that whole pie so how do you think this thing will evolve I mean you guys are obviously intend to put out as Casta as wide a net as possible capture not only your existing install base but attractive attract others and you're going aggressively at it as are as are others how do you see it shaking out deep do you see you know four or five pockets do you see you know one leader emerging I mean customers would love all you guys to get together come up with standards that's not going to happen so we're it's jump ball right now well yeah and you think about you know to your point regarding kubernetes is not a company right it is it is a community driven I mean it was open source by a large company but it's but it's community driven now and that's the pace at which open source is sort of evolving there is so much coming at IT organizations from a new paradigm a new software something that's you know the new the shiny object that sort of everybody sort of has to jump on to and sort of say that is the way we're going to function so IT organizations have to struggle with this influx of just every coming at them and every angle and I think what's starting to happen is the management and the you know that stack who controls that or who is helping IT organizations to manage it for them so really what we're trying to say is there's elements that you have to put together that have to function and kubernetes is just one example docker the operating system that associated with it that runs all that stuff then you have the application that goes rides IDEs on top of it so now what we have to have is things like what we just announced this week HX ap the application platform for HX so you have the compute cluster but then you have the on top of that that's managed by an organization that's looking at the security that's looking at the the actual making opinions about what should go in the stock and managing that for you so you don't have to deal with that because you can just focus on the application development yeah I mean Cisco's in a strong position to do there's no question about it and to me it comes down to execution if you guys execute and deliver on the the products and services that you say you know your nouns for instance this week and previously and you continue on a roadmap you're gonna get a fair share of this marketplace I think there's no question so last topic before we let you go is love your viewpoint on customers what's separating kind of leaders from you know the followers in this space you know there's so much data out there you know I'm a big fan of the state of DevOps report yeah focus you know separate you know some but not the not here's the technology or the piece but the organizational and you know dynamics that you should do so it sounds like Matt you you like that that report also love them what are you hearing from customers how do you help guide them towards becoming leaders in the cloud space yeah the state of DevOps report was fascinating and I mean they've been doing that for what a number of years yeah exactly and really what it's sort of highlighting is two main factors that I think that are in this revolution or this this this paradigm shift or journey we're going through there's the technology side for sure and so that's getting more complex you have micro services you have application explosion you have a lot of things that are occurring just in technology that you're trying to keep up but then it's really about the human aspect that human elements the people about it and that's really I think what separates you know the the elites that are really sort of you know just charging forward in the head because they've been able to sort of break down the silos because really what you're talking about in cloud native DevOps is how you take the journey of that experience of the service from end to end from the development all the way to production and how do you actually sort of not have organizations that look at their domain their data set their operations and then have to translate that or have to sort of you know have another conversation with another organization that it doesn't look at that that has no experience of that so that is what we're talking about that end-to-end view is that in addition to all the things we've been talking about I think Security's a linchpin here now you guys are executing on security you got a big portfolio and you've seen a lot of M&A and a lot of companies now trying to get in and it's gonna be interesting to see how that plays out but that's going to be a key because organizations are going to start there from a strategy standpoint and then build out yeah absolutely if you follow the DevOps methodology its security gets baked in along the way so that you're not having to sit on after do anything Custis give you the final word I was just as follow-up with regard what what Mark was saying there's so many there's what's happening out there is this just democracy around standards which is driven by communities and we will love that in fact cisco is involved in many open-source community projects but you asked about customers and and just right before you were asking about you know who's gonna be the winner there's so many use cases there's so much depth in terms of you know what customers want to do with on top of kubernetes you know take AI ml for example something that we have we have some some offering the services around there's the customer that wants to do AML there their containers that their infrastructure will be so much different to someone else's doing something just hosting yeah and there's always gonna be a SAS provider that is niche servicing some oil and gas company you know which means that the company of that industry will go and follow that instead of just going to a public law provider that is more organized if there's a does that make sense yeah yeah this there's relationships that exist the archer is gonna get blown away that add value today and they're not gonna just throw them out so exactly right well thank you so much for helping us understand the updates where your customers are driving super exciting space look forward to keeping an eye on it thank you thank you so much all right there's still lots more coming here from Cisco live 20/20 in Barcelona people are standing watching all the developer events lots of going on the floor and we still have more so thank you for watching the cute [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you [Music] live from Barcelona Spain it's the cube covering Cisco live 2020 rot to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners welcome back over 17,000 in attendance here for Cisco live 2020 in Barcelona ops to Minh and my co-host is Dave Volante and to help us to dig into of course one of the most important topic of the day of course that security we're thrilled to have back a distinguished engineer Francisco one of our cube alumni TK Kia Nene TK thanks so much for joining us ideal man good good all right so TK it's 2020 it's a new decade we know the bad actors are still out there they're there the the question always is you know it used to be you know how do you keep ahead of them then I've here Dave say many times well you know it's not you know when it's it's not if it's when you know you probably already have been okay you know compromised before so it gives latest so you know what you're seeing out there what you're talking to customers about in this important space yeah it's uh it's kind of an innovation spiral you know we we innovate we make it harder for them and then they innovate they make it harder for us right and round and round we go that's been going on for for many years I think I think the most significant changes that have happened recently have to deal with not essentially their objectives but how they go about their objectives and Defenders topologies have changed greatly instead of just your standard enterprise you now have you know hybrid multi cloud and all these new technologies so while while all that innovation happens you know they get a little clever and they find weaknesses and round and round we go so we talked a lot about the sort of changing profile of the the threat actors going from hacktivists took criminals now is a huge business and nation-states even what's that profile look like today and how has that changed over the last decade or so you know that's pretty much stayed the same bad guys are bad guys at some point in time you know just how how they go about their business their techniques they're having to like I said innovate around you know we make it harder for them they you know on Monday we're safe on Tuesday we're not you know and then on Wednesday it switches again so so it talked about kind of this multi-cloud environment when we talk to customers it's like well I want the developer to be able to build their application and not really have to think too much underneath it that that has to have some unique challenges we know security we knew long ago well I just go to the cloud it doesn't mean they take care of it some things are there some things they're gonna remind you now you need to make sure you set certain things otherwise you could be there but how do we make sure that Security's baked in everywhere and is up as a practice that everybody's doing well I mean again some of the practices hold true no matter what the environment I think the big thing was cognitive is in back in the day when when you looked at an old legacy data center you were part sort of administrator in your part detective and most people don't even know what's running on there that's not true in cloud native environments some some llamó file some some declaration it's it's just exactly what productions should look like right and then the machines instantiate production so you're doing things that machine scale forces the human scale people to be explicit and and for me I mean that's that's a breath of fresh air because once you're explicit then you take the mystery out of what you're protecting how about in terms of how you detect threats right phishing for credentials has become a huge deal but not just you know kicking down the door or smashing a window using your your own credentials to get inside of your network so how is that affected the way in which you detect yeah it's it's a big deal you know a lot of a lot of great technology has a dual use and what I mean by that is network cryptology you know that that whole crypto on the network has made us safer for us to compute over insecure networks and unfortunately it works just as well for the bad guys so you know all of their malicious activity is now private to so it you know for us we just have to invent new ways of detecting direct inspection for instance I think it's a thing of the past I mean we just can't depend on it anymore we have to have tools of inference and not only that but it's it's gave rise in a lot of innovation on behavioral science and as you say you know it's it's not that the attacker is breaking into your network anymore they're logging in ok what do you do then right Alice Alice's account it's not gonna set off the triggers so you have to say you know when did Alice start to behave differently you know she's working in accounting why is she playing around with the source code repository that's that's a different thing right yes automation is such a big trend you know how do we make sure that automation doesn't leave us more vulnerable that's rarity because we need to be able automate we've gone beyond human scale for most of these configurations that's exactly right and and how do how do we I always say just with security automation in particular just because you can automate something doesn't mean you should and you really have to go back and have practices you know you could argue that that this thing is just a you know machine scale automation you could do math on a legal pad or you can use a computer to do it right what so apply that to production if you mechanized something like order entry or whatever you're you're you're automating part of your business use threat modeling you use the standard threaten modeling like you would your code the network is code now right and the storage is code and everything is code so you know just automate your testing do your threat modeling do all that stuff please do not automate for your attacker matrix is here I want to go back to the Alice problem because you're talking about before you have to use inference so Alice's is in the network and you're observing her moves every day and then okay something anomalous occurs maybe she's doing something that normally she wouldn't do so you've got to have her profile in her actions sort of observed documented stored the data has got to be there and at the same time you want to make sure it's always that balance of putting handcuffs on people you know versus allowing them to do their job and be productive at the same time as well you don't want to let the bad guys know that you know that alice is doing something that she didn't be doing is actually not Alice so all that complexity how are you dealing with it and what's the data model look like doing it machines help let's say that machines can help us you know you and I we have only so many sense organs and the cognitive brain can only store so many so much state machines really help us extend that and so you know looking at not three dimensions of change but 7000 dimensions have changed right something in the machine is going to say there's an outlier here that's interesting and you can get another machine to say that's that's interesting maybe I should focus on that and you build these analytical pipelines so that at the end of it you know they may argue with each other all the way to the end but at the end you have a very high fidelity indicator that might be at the protocol level it might be at the behavioral level it might be seven days back or thirty days back all these temporal and spatial dimensions it's really cheap to do it with a machine yeah and if we could stay on that for a second so it try to understand I know that's a high-level example but is it best practice to have the Machine take action or is it is it an augmentation and I know it depends on the use case but but how is that sort of playing out again you have to do all of this safely okay a lot of things that machines do don't return back to human scale stuff that returns back to human scale that humans understand that is as useful so for instance if machines you know find out all these types of in assertions even in medical you know right now if if you've got so much telemetry going into the medical field see the machine tells you you have three weeks to live I mean you better explain what the heck you know how you came about that assertion it's the same with security you know if I'm gonna say look we're gonna quarantine your machine or we're gonna readjust machine it's not I'm not like picking movies for you or the next song you might listen to this is high stakes and so when you do things like that your analytics needs to have what is called entailment you have to explain what it is how you got to that assertion that's become incredibly important in how we measure our effectiveness in in doing analytics that's interesting because because you're using a lot of machine intelligence to do this and in a lot of AI is blackbox you're saying you cannot endure that blackbox problem in security yeah that black boxes is is very dangerous you know I you know personally I feel that you know things that should be open sourced this type of technology it's so advanced that the developer needs to understand that the tester needs to understand that certainly the customer needs to understand it you need to publish papers and be very very transparent with this domain because if it is in fact you know black box and it's given the authority to automate something like you know shut down the power or do things like that that's when things really start to get dangerous so good TK what wondered you know give us the latest on stealthWatch there you know Cisco's positioning when it when it comes to everything we've been talking about here you know stealthWatch again is it's been in market for quite some time it's actually been in market since 2001 and when I when I look back and see how much has changed you know how we've had to keep up with the market and again it's not just the algorithms rewrite for detection it's the environments have changed right but when did when did multi-cloud happen so so operating again cusp it's not that stealthWatch wants to go their customers are going there and they want the stealthWatch function across their digital business and so you know we've had to make advancements on the changing topology we've had to make advancements because of things like dark data you know the the network's opaque now right we have to have a lot of inference so we've just you know kept up and stayed ahead of it you know we've been spending a lot of time talking to developer communities and there's a lot of open-source tooling out there that that's helping enable developers specifically in security space you were talking about open-source earlier how does what you've been doing the self watch intersect with that yeah that's always interesting too because there's been sort of a shift in let's call them the cool kids right the cool kids they want everything is code right so it's not about what's on glass or you know a single pane of glass anymore it's it's what stealth watches code right what's your router as code look at dev net right yeah yeah I mean definite is basically Cisco as code and it's beautiful because that is infrastructure as code I mean that is the future and so all the products not just stealthWatch have beautiful api's and that's that's really exciting I've been saying for a while now it's do you I think you agree is that that is a big differentiator for Cisco I think you you're one of the few if not the only large established player and the enterprise that has figured out that sort of infrastructure is code play others have tried and are sort of getting there but you know start/stop you use a term that really cool is like living off the land you know bear bear grylls like the guy who lives down so bad so and and and threat actors are doing that now they're using your own installed software and tooling to hack you and and steal from you how were you dealing with that problem yeah it's a tough one and like I said you know much respect the the adversary is talented and they're patient they're well funded okay that's that's where it starts and so you know why why bring why bring an interpreter to a host when there's already one there right why right all this complicated software distribution when I can just use yours and so that's that's where the the play the game starts and and the most advanced threats aren't leaving footprints because the footprints are already there you know they'll get on a machine and behaviorally they'll check the cache to see what's hot and what's hot in the cache means that behaviorally it's a path they can go they're not cutting a new trail most of the time right so living off the land is not only the tools that they're using the automation your automation they're using against you but it's also behavioral and so that that makes it you know it makes it harder it's it impossible no can we make it harder for them yes so yeah no I'm having fun and I've been doing this for over twenty five years every week it's something new well it's a hard problem you're attacking and you know Robert Herjavec who came on the cube sort of opened my eyes and you think about what are we securing we're securing everything I mean a critical infrastructure were essentially exerted securing the entire global economy and he said something that really struck me it's an 86 trillion dollar economy we spend point zero one four percent on securing that economy and it's nothing now of course he's an entrepreneur and he's pimping for his is his business but it's true we are barely scratching the surface of this problem yeah I'm and it's changing I mean it's changing it could it be better yes it is changing his board awareness you know twenty years ago then right me to a dinner party they you know what does your husband do I'd say you know cyber security or something they'd roll their eyes and change the subject now they asked me the same question so oh you know my computer's running really slow right these are not this is everyone I'm worried about a life hack yeah how do I protect myself or what about these coming off the bank I mean that's those guys a dinner table cover every party so now now you know I just make something up I don't do cybersecurity I just you know a tort or a jipner's you've been to this business forever I can't remember have I ever asked you the superhero question what is that your favorite superhero that's a tough one there's all the security guys I know they like it's always dreamed about saving the world [Laughter] you're my superhero man I love what you do I think you've a great asset for Cisco and Cisco's customers really thanks TK give us a final word if people want to you know find out more about about what Cisco's doing read more of what you're working on but what's some of the best resource I have to go do you know just drop by the web pages I mean everything's published out that like I said even even for the super nerdy you know we published all our our laurs security analytics papers I think we're over 50 papers published in the last 12 years TK thank you so much always a pleasure to catch alright yeah and a travels thank you so much for de Villante I'm Stu Mittleman John furrier is also in the house we will be back with lots more coverage here from Cisco live 20/20 in Barcelona thanks for watching the keys [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] live from Barcelona Spain it's the cube covering Cisco live 2020s brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners hello and welcome back to the cubes live coverage it's our fourth day of four days of coverage here in Barcelona Spain for Cisco live 2020 I'm John Faria my co-host to many men to great guests here in the dev net studio where the cube is sitting all week long been packed with action mindy Whaley senior director developer experiences but dev net and partner a senior director welcome back to this cube good to see you guys glad to be here so we've had a lot of history with you guys what from day one yes watching def net from an idea of hey we should develop earthing you also have definite create yes separate more developer focused definite is Cisco's developer environment we've been here from the beginning what a progression congratulations on the success thank you thank you so much it's great to be here in Barcelona with everybody here you know learning in the workshops and we just love these times to connect with our community at Cisco live and it definitely ate what you mentioned which is coming up in March so it's right around the corner def net zone which we're in it's been really robust spins it's been the top of the show every year and it gets bigger and the sessions are packed because people are learning developers new developers as well as Cisco engineers who were certified coming in getting new skills as the modern cloud hybrid environments are new skills is a technology shift yeah exactly and what we have in the definite zone are different ways that the engineers and developers can engage with that technology shift so we have demos around IOT and security and showing how you know to prevent threats from attacking the Industrial routers and things like that we have coding workshops from you know beginning intro to Python intro to get all the way up through advanced like kubernetes topics and things like that so people can really dive in with what they're looking for and this year we're really excited because we have the new definite certifications with those exams coming out right around the corner in February so a lot of people are here saying I'm ready to skill up for those exams I'm starting to dive into this topic well Susie we was on she's the chief of deaf net among other things and she said there's gonna be a definite 500 the first 500 certifications of deaf net are gonna be kind of like the Hall of Fame or you know the inaugural or founder certifications so can you explain what this it means it's not a definite certification badge it's a series of write different sir can you deeper in then yeah just like we have our you know existing network certifications which are so respected and loved around the world people get CCIE tattoos and things just like there's an associate and professional and expert level on the networking truck there's now a definite associate a definite professional and coming soon definite expert and then there's also specialist badges which help you add specific skills like data center automation IOT WebEx so it's a whole new set of certifications that are more focused on the software so there are about 80 80 % software skills 20 percent knowledge of networking and then how you really connect up and down the stock so these are new certifications not replacing anything all the same stuff they're new they're part of the same program they have the same rigor the same kind of tests they actually have ways to enter weave with the existing networking certifications because we want people to do both skill paths right to build this new IT team of the future and so it's a completely new set of exams the exams are gonna be available to take February 24th and you can start signing up now so with the definite 500 you know that's gonna be a special recognition for the first 500 people who get dead note certifications it'll be a lifetime achievement they'll always be in the definite 500 right and I've had people coming up and telling me you know I'm signed up for the first day I'm taking my exams on the first day I'm trying to get into them you and I only always want to be on the lift so I think we might be on them and what's really great is with the certifications we've heard from people in the zone that they've been coming and taking classes and learning these skills but they didn't have a specific way to map that to their career path to get rewarded at work you know to have that sort of progression and so with the certifications they really will have that and it's also really important for our partners and par is doing a lot of work with certifications and partners yeah definitely that would love to hear a little bit we've interviewed on the cube over the years some of the definite partners from a technology standpoint of course the the channels ecosystem hugely important to Cisco's business gives the update as to you know definite partnering as well as what will these certifications mean to both the technology and go to market partners yeah the wonderful thing about this is it really demonstrates Cisco's embracement of software and making sure that we're providing that common language for software developers and networkers to bring the two together and what we've found is that our partners are at different levels of maturity along that progression of program ability and this new definite specialization which is anchored in the individuals that are now certified at that partner allow them to demonstrate from a go-to-market standpoint from a recognition standpoint that as a practice they have these skills and look at the end of the day it's all about delivering what our customers need and our customers are asking us for significant help in automation digital transformation they're trying to drive new business outcomes and this this will provide that recognition on on who to partner with in the market it's so important I remember when Cisco helped a lot of the partner ecosystem build data center practices went from the silos and now embracing you've got the hardware the software we're talking multi cloud it's the practice that is needed today going forward to help customers with where they're going it really is and and another benefit that we're finding and talking to our partners is we're packaging this up and rolling it out is not only will it help them from a recognition standpoint from a practice standpoint and from a competitive differentiation standpoint but it'll also help them attract challenge I mean it's no secret there is a talent shortage right now if you talk to any CEO that's top of mind and how these partners are able to attract these new skills and attract smart people smart people like working on smart things right and so this has really been a big traction point for them as well it's also giving ways to really specifically train for new job roles so some of the ways that you can combine the new definite certifications with the network engineering certifications we've looked at it and said you know there's there's a role of Network automation developer that's a new role everyone we ask in one of our sessions who needs that person on their team so many customers partners raise their hands like we want the network Automation developer on our team and you can combine you know your CCNP Enterprise with a definite certification and build up the skills to be that Network automation developer certainly has been great buzz I got to get your guys thoughts because certainly it's for careers and you guys are betting on the the people and the people are betting on Cisco mm-hmm yes this is what's going on submit surety of Devin it almost it's like a pinch me moment for you guys because you continue to grow I got to ask you what are some of the cool things that you're showing here as you mature you still have the start here session which is intro to Python and other things pretty elementary and then there's more advanced things what are some of the new things that's going on yeah that you could share so some of the new things we've got going on and one of my favorites is the IOT insecurity demonstration there's a an industrial robot arm that's picking and placing things and you can see how it's connected to the network and then something goes wrong with that robot alarm and then you can actually show how you can use the software and security tools to see was there code trying to access you know something that that robot was it was using it's getting in the way of it working so you could detect threats and move forward on that we also have a whole automation journey that starts from modeling your network to testing to how you would deploy automation to a deep dive on telemetry and then ends with multi domain automation so really helping engineers like look at that whole progression that's been that's been really popular Park talked about the specialization which ones are more popular or entry-level which ones are people coming into getting certified first network engineering automation first or what's the yeah so we're so the program is going to roll out with three different levels one is a specialized level the second is an advanced level and then we'll look to that third level again they're anchored in the in the individual certs and so as we look for that entry level it's really all about automation right I mean some things you take for granted but you still need these new skills to be able to automate and scale and have repeatable scalable benefits from that this the second tier will be more cross-domain and that's where we're really thinking that an additional skill set is needed to deliver dashboard experience compliance experiences and then that next level again we'll anchor towards the expert level that's coming out but one thing I want to point out is in addition to just having the certified people on staff they also have to demonstrate that they have a practice around it so it's not just enough to say I've passed an exam as we work with them to roll out the practice and they earn the badge they're demonstrating that they have the full methodology in place so that it really there's a lot behind it that means we can't be in the 500 list then even if a 500 list I don't know that the cube would end up being specialized its advertising no seriously all fun it's all fun it's Cisco live in Europe is there a difference between European and USD seeing any differences in geographic talent you know in the first couple years we did it I think there was a bigger difference it felt like there were different topics that were very popular in the US slightly different in Europe last year and this year I feel like they have converged it's it's the same focus on DevOps automation security as a huge focus in both places and it also feels like the the interest and level of the people attending has also converged it's really similar congratulations been fun to watch the rise and success of Devon it continues to be strong how see in the hub here and the definite zone behind us pact sessions yes what's the biggest surprise for you guys in terms of things that you didn't expect or some of the success what's what's jumped out yeah I think you know one of the points that I want to make sure we also cover and it has been an added benefit we're hoping it would happen we just didn't realize it would happen this soon we're attracting new companies new partners so the specialization won't just be available for our traditional bars this is also available for our non resale and we are finding different companies accessing definite resources and learning these skills so that's been a really great benefit of Deb net overall definitely my favorite surprises are when I show up at the community events and I hear from someone I met last year what the what they went back and did and the change that they drove and they come in their company and I think we're seeing those across the board of people who start a grassroots movement take back some new ideas really create change and then they come back and we get to hear about that from them those are my favorite surprises and I tell you we've known for years how important the developer is but I think the timing on this has been perfect because it is no longer just oh the developer has some tools that they like in the corner the developer connected to the business and driving things forward exactly so perfect timing congratulations on this certification their thing that's been great is that our at Cisco itself we now have API is across the whole portfolio and up and down the stock so that's been a wonderful thing to see come together because it opens up possibilities for all these developers so Cisco's API first company we are building it guys everywhere we can and and that the community is is taking them and finding creative things to build it's been fun to watch you guys change Cisco but also impact customers has been great to watch far many thanks for coming up yeah games live coverage here in Barcelona for Cisco live 20/20 I'm John Ford Dave Dave Alon face to many men we right back with more after this short break [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you live from Barcelona Spain it's the cube covering Cisco live 2020 brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners hello and welcome back to the cubes live coverage here at Cisco live 20/20 and partial into Spain I'm John first evening men cube coverage we've got a lot of stuff going on with Cisco multi-cloud and cloud technologies of clarification of Cisco's happening in real time is happening right now cloud is here here to stay we got two great guests to unpack what's going on in cloud native and networking and applications as the modern infrastructure and software evolves we got eugene kim global product marketing and compute storage at cisco global part of marketing manager and fabio corey senior director cloud solutions marketing guys great comeback great thanks for coming back appreciate it thanks very much great to see a lot of guys so probably we've had multiple conversations and usually even out from the sales force given kind of the that the discussion and the motivation cloud is big it's here it's here to stay it's changing Cisco API first we hear and all the products it's changing everything what's the story now what's going on I would say you know the reason why we're so excited about the launch here in Barcelona it's because this time it's all about the application experience I mean the last two years we've been announcing some really exciting stuff in the cloud space right think about all the announcements with the AWS the Google's the Azure so the world but this time it really boils down to making sure that is incredibly hyper distributed world well there is an application explosion ultimately we will help for the right operations tools and infrastructure management tools to ensure that the right application experience will be guaranteed for the end customer and that's incredibly important because at the end what really really matters is that you will ensure the best possible digital experience to your customer otherwise ultimately nothing is gonna work and of course you're going to lose your brand and your customers one of the main stories that we're covering is the transformation of the industry also Cisco and one of the highlights to me was the opening keynote you had app dynamics first not networking normally it's like what's under the hood the routers and the gear no it was about the applications this is the story we're seeing it's kind of a quiet unveiling it's not yet a launch but it's evolving very quickly can you share what's going on behind this all this absolutely it's exactly along the lines of what I was saying a second ago in the end that the reason why we're driving the announcement if you want from the application experience side of the house is because without dynamics we already have a very very powerful application performance measurement tool which it's evolving extremely rapidly first of all after Amex can correlate not just the application performance to some technology kpi's but to true actual business KPIs so AB dynamics can give you for instance the real-time visibility of say a marketing funnel conversion rates transactions that you're having in your in your business operation now we're introducing an incredibly powerful new capability that takes the bar to a whole new level and that's the dynamics experience journey Maps what are those it's actually the ability of focusing not so much on front-ends and backends and databases performances but really focusing on what the user is seeing in front of his or her screen and so what really matters is capturing the journey that a given user of your application is is being and understanding whether the experience is the one that you want to deliver oh you have like a sudden drop of somewhere and you know why that is important because in the end we've been talking about is it a problem of the application performance user performance well it could be a badly designed page how do you know and so this is a very precious information is that were giving to application developers not just to the IT ops guys that is incredibly precious to get this in so you just brought up that journey so that's part of the news so just break down real quick one minute yeah what the news is yeah so we have three components the first one as you as you correctly pointed out is really introduction the application journey Maps right the experience journey Maps that's very very important the second is we are actually integrating after am it's with the inter-site action inter-site optimization manager the workload team is a workload promisor and so because there is a change of data between the two now you are in a position to immediately understand whether you have an application problem we have a workload problem or infrastructure problem which is ultimate what you really need to do as quickly as you can and thirdly we have introduced a new version of our hyper flex platform which is hyper-converged flat G flat for Cisco with a fully containerized version we tax free if you want as well there is a great platform for containerized application of parameter so you teen when I've been talking to customers last few years when they go through their transformational journey there's the modernization they need to do the patterns I've seen most successful is first you modernize the platform often HCI is you know and often for that it really simplifies the environment you know reduces the silos and has more of that operational model that looks closer to what the cloud experience is and then if I've got a good platform then I can modernize the applications on top of it but often those two have been a little bit disconnected it feels like the announcements now that they are coming together what are you seeing what are you hearing how is your solution set solving this issue yeah exactly I mean as we've been talking to our customers love them are going through different application modernisations and kubernetes and containers is extremely important to them and to build a container cloud on Prem is extremely one of their needs and so there's three distinctive requirements that they've kind of talked to us about a lot of it has to be able to it's got to be very simple very turnkey and a fully integrated ready to turn on the other one is something that's very agile right very DevOps friendly and the third being a very economic container cloud on Prem as far we mentioned high flex application platform takes our hyper-converged system and builds on top of it a integrated kubernetes platform to deliver a container as a service type capability and it provides a full stack fully supported element platform for our customers and the one of the best great aspects of is that's all managed from inside from the physical infrastructure to the hyper-converged layer to all the way to the container management so it's very exciting to have that full stack management and insight as well yeah it's great to you know John and I have been following this kubernetes wave you know since the early early days Fabio mentioned integrations with the Amazons and Google's the world because you know a few years ago you talked to customers and they're like oh well I'm just gonna build my own urbanity right back nobody ever said that is easy now just delivering at his service seems to be the way most people wanted so if I'm doing it on Amazon or Google they've got their manage service that I could do that or that they're through partners they're working with so explain what you're doing to make it simpler in the data center environment because I'm tram absolutely is a piece of that hybrid equation the customers need yes so essentially from the customer experience perspective as I mentioned it's very fairly turnkey right from the hyper flicks application platform we're taking our hyper grew software we're integrating a application virtualization layer on top of it Linux KVM based and then on top of that we're integrating the kubernetes stack on top as well and so in essence right it's a fully curated kubernetes stack right it has all the different elements from the networking from the storage elements and and providing that in a very turnkey way and as I mentioned the inner site management is really providing that simplicity that customers need for that management ok Fabio this the previous announcement you've made with the public clouds yeah this just ties into those hybrid environments that's exactly you know a few years ago people like oh is there gonna be a distribution that wins in kubernetes we don't think that's the answer but still I can't just move between kubernetes you know seamlessly yet but this is moving towards that direction so a lot of customers want to have a very simple implementation at the same time they want of course a multi cloud approach and I really care about you know marking the difference between you know multi-cloud hybrid cloud there's been a lot of confusion but if you think about it multi cloud is really rooted into the business need of harnessing innovation from whatever it comes from you know the different clouds PV different things and you know what they do today tomorrow it could even change so people want option maladie so they want a very simple implementation that's integrated with public cloud providers that simplifies their life in terms of networking security and application of workload management and we've been executing towards that goal to fundamentally simplify the operations of these pretty complex kind of hybrid environments I want you to nail that operations on ibrid that's where multi cloud comes in absolutely just a connection point absolutely you're not a shitty mice no isn't a shit so in order to fulfill your business like your I know business needs you then you have a hybrid problem and you want to really kind of have a consistent production rate environment between fins on Prem that you own and control versus things that you use and you want to control better now of course there are different school of thoughts but most of the customers who are speaking with really want to expand their governance and technology model right to the cloud as opposed to absorb in different ways of doing things from each and every clock I want to unpack a little bit of what you said earlier about the knowing where the problem is because a lot of times it's a point the finger at the other first and where's it's the application problem isn't a problem so I want to get into that but first I want to understand the hyper flex application platform Eugene if you could just share the main problem that you guys saw what did some of the pain points that customers had what problems does the AP solve yeah as I mentioned it's really the platform for our customers to modernize their applications on right and it addresses those things that they're looking for as far as the economics right really the ability to provide a full stack container experience without having to you know but you know bringing any third party hypervisor licenses as well as support cost so that's fully integrated there you have your integrated hyper-converged storage capability you have the cloud-based management and that's really developing you providing that developer DevOps simplicity from the data Julie that they're looking for internally as well as for their product production environments and then the other aspect is its simplicity to be able to manage all this right in the entire lifecycle management as well so it's the operational side of the whole yeah uncovers Papio on the application side where the problem is because this is where I'm a little bit skeptical you know normally rightfully so but I can see in a problem where it's like whose fault is it gasification is problem or the network I mean it runs into more serious workloads the banking app that's having trouble how do you know where it what the problem is and how do you solve that problem what what's going on for that specific issue absolutely and you know the name of the game here is breaking down this operational side right and I love what our app dynamics VP GM Danny winoker said you know it has this terminology beast DevOps which you know may sound like an interesting acrobatics but it's absolutely true the business has to be part of this operational kind of innovation because as you said you know developer edges you know drops their containers and their code to the IET ops team but you don't really know whether the problem a certain point is gonna be in the code or in how the application is actually deployed or maybe a server that doesn't have enough CPU so in the end it boils down to one very important thing you have to have visibility inside and take action and every layer of the stack I mean instrumentation absolutely there are players that only do it in their software overlay domain the problem is very often these kind of players assume that underneath links are fine and very often they're not so in the end this visibility inside inaction is the loop that everybody is going after these days to really get to the next if you want generational operation where you gotta have a constant feedback loop and making it more faster and faster because in the end you can only win in the marketplace right regardless of your IT ops if you're faster than your competitor well still still was questioning the GM of AppDynamics running observability and he's like no it's not to feature it's everywhere so he his comment was yeah but serve abilities don't really talk about it because it's big din do you agree with that absolutely it has to be at every layer of the stack and only if you have visibility inside an action through the entire stack from the software all the way to the infrastructure level that you can solve the problem otherwise the finger-pointing quote-unquote will continue and you will not be able to gain the speed that you need okay so the question on my mind I want to get both of you guys can weigh in on this is that you look at Cisco as a company you got a lot going on I mean a guy's huge customer base core routers - no applications there's a lot going on a lot of a lot of complexity you got IOT security Ramirez talked about that you got the WebEx rooms got totally popular it's kind of got a lot of glam to it having the WebEx kind of you know I guess what virtual presence was yeah telepresence kind of model and then you get cloud is there a mind share within the company around how cloud is baked into everything because you can't do IOT edge without having some sort of cloud operational things so there's stuff you're talking about is not just a division it's kind of gonna it's kind of threads everywhere across Cisco what's the what's the mind share right now within the Cisco teams and also customers around clarification well I would say it's it's a couple of dimension the first one is the cloud is one of the critical domains of this multi domain architecture that of course is the cornerstone of Cisco's technology strategy right if you think about it it's all about connecting users to applications wherever they are and not just the user the applications themselves like if you look at the latest stats from IDC 58% of workloads is heading to the public cloud and to the edge it's like the data center is literally exploding in many different directions so you have this highly distributed kind of fabric guess what sits in between all these applications and microservices is a secure network and that's exactly what we're executing upon now that's the first kind of consideration the second is if you look at the other silver line most of the Cisco technology innovation is also going a direction of absorbing cloud as a simplified way of managing all the components or the infrastructure you look at the IP flex ap is actually managed by inter site which is a SAS kind of component this journey started a long time ago with Cisco Meraki and then of course we have SAS properties like WebEx everything else is kind of absolutely migrants reporter we've been reporting eugen that from years ago we saw the movement where api's are starting to come in when you go back five years ago not a lot of the gear and stuff at Cisco had api's now you got api's building into all the new products that's right you see the software shift with you know you know intent-based networking to AppDynamics it's interesting it's you're seeing kind of this agile mindset this is some of you and I talk about all the time but agile now is the new model is it ready for customers I mean the normal Enterprise is still got the infrastructure and application it's separated okay how do I bring it together what are you guys seeing the customer base what's going on with with not that not the early adopters heavy-duty hardcore pioneers out there but you know the the general mainstream enterprise are they there yet have they had that moment of awakening yeah I mean I think they they are there because fundamentally it's all about that ensuring that application experience and you can only ensure that application experience right by having your application teams and your structure teams work together and that's what's exciting you mentioned the API is and what we've done there with AppDynamics integrating with inter-site workload optimizer as Fabio mentioned it's all about visibility inside action and what app dynamics is provides providing that business and end-user application performance experience visibility inner sites giving you know visibility on the underlining workload and the resources whether it's on Prem in your you know drive data center environment or in different type of cloud providers so you get that full stack visibility right from the application all the way down to the bottom and then inner side local optimizer is then also optimizing the resources to proactively ensure that application experience so before you know if we talk about someone at a checkout and they're about to have abandonment because the functions not working we're able to proactively prevent that and take a look at all that so you know in the end I think it's all about ensuring that application experience and what we're providing with app dynamics is for the application team is kind of that horizontal visibility of how that application is performing and at the same time if there's an issue the infrastructure team could see exactly within the workload topology where the issue is and insert' aeneas lee whether it be manual intervention or even automatically there's or a ops capability go ahead and provide that action so the action could be you know scaling out the VMS it's on-prem or looking at a new different type of ec2 template in the cloud that's what's very exciting about this it's really the application experience is now driving and optimizing infrastructure in real time and let me flip your question like do you even have a choice John when you think about in the next two years 50% more applications if you're a large enterprise you have 5 to 7,000 apps you have another to 3,000 applications just coming into into the the frame and then 50% of the existing ones that are gonna be refactor lifted and shifted or replace or retired by SAS application it's just like it's tsunami that's that's coming on you and oh by the way because of again the micro service is kind of affect the number of dependencies between all these applications is growing incredibly rapidly like last year we were eight average interdependencies for applications now we are 20 so imaging imaging what happens as as you are literally flooded with the way the scanner really you have to ensure that your application infrastructure fundamentally will get tied up as quickly as you can still and I have been toilet for at least five years now if not longer the networking has been the key kind of last changeover - clarification and I would agree with you guys I think I've asked the question because I wanted to get your perspective but think about it it's 13 years since the iPhone so mobile has shown people that a mobile app can change business but now if you look at the pressure the network's bringing the pressure on the network or the pressure for the network to be better than programmable is the rise of video and data I mean so you got mobile check now you've got video I mean more people doing video now than ever before videos of consumer oil as streaming you got data these two things absolutely forced yeah the customers to deal with it but what really tipped the the balance John is is actually the SAS effect is the cloud effect because as you know it's in IT sort of inflection points nothing is linear right so once you reach a certain critical mass of cloud apps and we're absolutely there already all of a sudden you're traffic pattern on your network changes dramatically so why in the world are you continuing kind of you know concentrating all of your traffic in your data center and then going to the internet you have to absolutely open the floodgates at the branch level as close to the users as possible and that implies a radical change I would even add to that and I think you guys are right on where you guys are going it may be hard to kind of tease out with all the complexity with Cisco but in the keynote the business model shifts come from SAS so you got all this technical stuff going on now you have this Asif ocation or cloud that's changes the business models so new entrants can come in and existing players can get better so I think that whole business model conversation yeah never was discussed at Cisco live before yeah in depth as well hey run your business connect your hubs campus move packets around that was applications in business model yeah but also the fact that there is increasing number of software capabilities and so fundamental you want to simplify the life of your customers through subscription models that help the customer by now using what they really need right at any given point in time all the way to having enterprise agreements I also think that's about delivering these application experiences for your business small different type experience that's really what's differentiating you from your different competitors right and so I think that's a different type of shift as well well you guys are good got some good angle on this cloud I love it I got to ask you the question what can we expect next from Cisco more progression along clarification what's next well I would say we've been incredibly consistent I believe in the last few years in executing on our cloud strategy which again is centered around helping customers really gluon this mix set of data centers and clouds to make it work as one write as much as possible and so what we really deliver is networking security and application of performance management and we're integrating there's more and more on the two sides of the equation right the the designer side and the powerful outside and more more integrating in between all of these layers again to fundamentally give you this operational capability to get faster and faster we'll continue doing so and you set up before we came on camera that you were talking to the sales teams what are they what's their vibe with the sales team they get excited by this what's that oh yeah feedback oh yeah absolutely from the inner side were claw optimizer and they have dynamics that's very exciting for them especially the conversations they're having with their customers really from that application experience and proactively insuring it and on the hyper flex application platform side this is extremely exciting with providing a container cloud to our customers and you know what's coming down is more and more capabilities for our customers to modernize their applications on hyper flex you guys are riding some pretty big waves here at Cisco I get a cloud way to get the IOT Security wave it's pretty exciting pretty big stuff thanks for coming in thanks for sharing the insights Fabio I appreciate it thank you for having us your coverage here in Barcelona I'm John Force dude Minutemen be back with more coverage fourth day of four days of cube coverage we right back after this short break [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] why Trump Barcelona Spain it's the cube covering Cisco live 2020 rot to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners welcome back to Barcelona everybody we're here at Cisco live and you're watching the cube the leader in live tech coverage we got to the events and extract the signal from the noise this is day one really we started a zero yesterday Eric Hertzog is here he's the CMO and vice president of storage channels probably been on the cube more than [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] live from Barcelona Spain it's the cube covering Cisco live 2020 rot to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners welcome back everyone's two cubes live coverage day four of four days of wall-to-wall action here in Barcelona Spain Francisco live 2020 I'm John Ferrier with mykos Dave Volante with a very special guest here to wrap up Cisco live the president of Europe Middle East Africa and Russia Francisco Wendy Mars cube alumni great to see you thanks for coming on to kind of put a bookend to the show here thanks for joining us right there it's absolutely great to be here thank you so what a transformation as Cisco's business model of continues to evolve we've been saying brick by brick we still think is a big move coming I think there's more action I can sense the walls talking to us like let's just go live in the US and more technical announcements in the next 24 months you can see you can see where it's going it's cloud its apps yeah its policy based program ability it's really a whole nother business model shift for you and your customers the technology shift and the business model shift so I want to get your perspective of this year opening key no you let it off talking about the philosophy of the business model but also the first presenter was not a networking guy it was an application person yeah app dynamics yep this is a shift what's going on with Cisco what's happening what's the story well you know if you look for all of the work that we're doing is but is really driven by what we see from requirements from our customers the change that's happening in the market and it is all around you know if you think digital transformation is the driver organizations now are incredibly interested in how do they capture that opportunity how do they use technology to help them but you know if you look at it really there's the three items that are so important it's the business model evolution it's actually the business operations for for organisations plus their people there are people in the communities within that those three things working together and if you look at it with you know it's so exciting with application dynamics there because if you look for us within Cisco that linkage of the application layer through into the infrastructure into the network and bringing that linkage together is the most powerful thing because that's the insight and the value our customers are looking for you know we've been talking about the in the innovation sandwich you know you got you know date in the middle and you got technology and applications underneath that's kind of what's going on here but you I'm glad you brought up the year the part about business model business operations and people in communities because during your keno you had a slide that laid out three kind of pillars yes people in communities business model and business operations there was no 800 series in there there was no product discussions this is fundamentally the big shift that business models are changing I tweeted provocatively the killer app and digital the business model because you think about it the applications are the business and what's running under the covers is the technology but it's all shifting and changing so every single vertical every single business is impacted by this it's not like a certain secular thing in the industry this is a real change can you describe how those three things are operating with that constitute think if you look from you know so thinking through those three areas if you look at the actual business model itself our business models as organizations are fundamentally changing and they're changing towards as consumers we are all much more specific about what we want we have incredible choice in the market we are more informed than ever before but also we are interested in the values of the organizations that were getting the capability from as well as the products and the services that naturally we're looking to gain so if you look in that business model itself this is about you know organizations making sure they stay ahead from a competitive standpoint about the innovation of portfolio that they're able to bring but also that they have a strong strong focus around the experience that their customer gains from an application a touch standpoint that all comes through those different channels which is at the end of the day the application then if you look as to how do you deliver that capability through the systems the tools and the processes as we all evolve our businesses you have to change the dynamic within your organization to cope with that and then of course in driving any transformation the critical success factor is your people and your culture you need your teams with you the way teams operate now is incredibly different it's no longer command and control its agile capability coming together you need that to deliver on any transformation never never mind let it be smooth you know in the execution there so it's all three together what I like about that model and I have to say we this is you know ten years to do in the cube you you see that marketing in the vendor community often leads what actually happens not surprising as we entered the last decade it was a lot of talk about cloud well it kind of was a good predictor we heard a lot about digital transformations a lot of people roll their eyes and think it's a buzzword but we really are I feel like an exiting this cloud era into the digital era it feels real and there are companies that you know get it and are leaning in there are others that maybe you're complacent I'm wondering what you're seeing in in Europe just in terms of everybody talks digital yeah be CEO wants to get it right but there is complacency there when it's a services say well I'm doing pretty well not on my watch others say hey we want to be the disruptors and not get disrupted what are you seeing in the region in terms of that sentiment I would say across the region you know there will always be verticals and industries that are slightly more advanced than others but I would say that then the bulk of conversations that I'm engaged in independence of the industry or the country in which we're having that conversation in there is a acceptance of transfer digital transformation is here it is affecting my business i if I don't disrupt I myself will be disrupted and be challenged help me so I you know I'm not disputing the end state I need guidance and support to drive the transition and a risk mythic mitigated manner and they're looking for help in that and there's actually pressure in the boardroom now around a what are we doing within within organizations within that enterprise the service right of the public said to any type of style of company there's that pressure point in the boardroom of come on we need to move it speed now the other thing about your model is technology plays a role in contribute it's not the be-all end-all but plays a role in each of those the business model of business operations and developing and nurturing communities can you add more specifics what role do you see technology in terms of advancing those three spheres so I think you know if you look at it technology is fundamental to all of those spheres in regard to the innovation the differentiation technology can bring then the key challenges one of being able to reply us in a manner where you can really see differentiation of value within the business so in then the customers organization otherwise it's just technology for the sake of technology so we see very much a movement now to this conversation of talk about the use case the use cases the way by which that innovation can be used to deliver the value to the organization and also different ways by which a company will work look at the collaboration capability that we announced earlier this week of helping to bring to life that agility look at the app D discussion of helping to link the layer of the application into the infrastructure the network's to get to root cause identification quickly and to understand where you may have a problem before you thought it actually arises and causes downtime many many ways I think the agility message has always been a technical conversation a gel methodology technology software development no problem check that's ten years ago but business agility mmm it's moving from a buzzword to reality exactly that's what you're kind of getting in here and teams how teams operate how they work you know and being able to be quick efficient stand up stand down and operate in that way you know we were kind of thinking out loud on the cube and just riffing with Fabio gory on your team on Cisco's team about clarification with Eugene Kim around just just kind of real-time what was interesting is we're like okay it's been 13 years since the iPhone and so 13 years of mobile in your territory in Europe Middle East Africa mobilities been around before the iPhone so with in more advanced data privacy much more advanced in your region so you got you out you have a region that's pretty much I think the tell signs for what's going on in North America and around the world and so you think about that you say okay how is value created how the economics changing this is really the conversation about the business model is okay if the value activities are shifting and be more agile and the economics are changing with sass if someone's not on this bandwagon it's not an in-state discussion where it's done deal yeah it's but I think also there were some other conversation which which are very prevalent here is in in the region so around trust around privacy law understanding compliance you look at data where data resides portability of that data GDP are came from Europe you know and as ban is pushed out and those conversations will continue as we go over time and if I also look at you know the dialogue that you saw so you know within World Economic Forum around sustainability that is becoming a key discussion now within government here in Spain you know from a climate standpoint and many other areas as well Dave and I've been riffing around this whole where the innovation is coming from it's coming from Europe region not so much the u.s. I mean us discuss some crazy innovations but look at blockchain us is like don't touch it pretty progressive outside United States little bit dangerous to but that's where innovation is coming from and this is really the key that we're focused on I want to get your thoughts on how do you see it going next level the next level next-gen business model what's your what's your vision so I think there'll be lots of things if we look at things like with the introduction of artificial intelligence robotics capability 5g of course you know on the horizon we have Mobile World Congress here in Barcelona in a few weeks time and if you talked about with the iPhone the smartphone of course when 4G was introduced no one knew what the use case would that would be it was the smartphone which wasn't around at that time so with 5g in the capability there that will bring again yet more change to the business model for different organizations and the capability and what we can bring to market when we think about AI privacy data ownership becomes more important some of the things you were talking about before it's interesting what you're saying John and when the the GDP are set the standard and and you see in the u.s. there are stovepipes for that standard California is going to do one every state is going to have a different center that's going to slow things down that's going to slow down progress do you see sort of an extension of a GDP are like framework of being adopted across the region and that potentially you know accelerating some of these you know sticky issues and public policy issues that can actually move the market forward I think I think the will because I think there'll be more and more you know if you look at there's this terminology of data is the new oil what do you do with data how do you actually get value from that data and make intelligent business decisions around that so you know that's critical but yet if you look for all of ours we are extremely passionate about you know where is our data used again back to trust and privacy you need compliance you need regulation you know I think this is just the beginning of how we will see that evolve you know when do I get your thoughts does Dave and I have been riffing for 10 years around the death of storage long live storage and but data needs to be stored somewhere networking is the same kind of conversation just doesn't go away in fact there's more pressure now forget the smartphone that was 13 years ago before that mobility data and video now super important driver that's putting more pressure on you guys and so hey we're networking so it's kind of like Moore's law it's like more networking more networking so video and data are now big your thoughts on video and data video but if you look at the Internet of the future you know what so if you look for all of us now we are also demanding as individuals around capability and access to that and inter vetted the future the next phase we want even more so there'll be more and more - you know requirement for speed availability that reliability of service the way by which we engage and we communicate there's some fundamentals there so continuing to to grow which is which is so so exciting for us so you talk about digital transformation that's obviously in the mind of c-level executives I got to believe security is up there as a topic what other what's the conversation like in the corner office when you go visit your customers so I think that there's a huge excitement around the opportunity realizing the value of the of the opportunity you know if you look at top of mind conversations are around security around making sure that you can make tank maintain that fantastic customer experience because if you don't the custom will go elsewhere how do you do that how do you enrich at all times and also looking at markets adjacencies you know as you go in and you talk at senior levels within within organizations independent of the industry in which they're in there are a huge amount of commonalities that we see across those of consistent problems by which organizations are trying to solve and actually one of the big questions is what's the pace of change that I should operate at and when is it too fast and when is what am I too slow and trying to balance that is exciting but also a challenge for companies so you feel like sentiment is still strong even though we're 10 years into this this bull market you know you got Briggs it you get you know China tensions with the US u.s. elections but but generally you see Tennessee sentiment still pretty strong and demand so I would say that the the excitement around technology the opportunity that is there around technology in its broadest sense is greater than ever before and I think it's on all of us to be able to help organizations to understand how they can consume I see value from us but it's you know it's fantastic science it tastes trying to get some economic indicators but really the real thing I'm trying to get you is Minh set of the CEO the corner office right now is it is it we're gonna we're gonna grow short-term by cutting or do we do are we gonna be aggressive and go after this incremental opportunity and it's probably both you're seeing a lot of automation yeah and I think if you look fundamentally for organizations it's it's that the three things helped me to make money how me to save money keep me out of trouble you know so those are the pivots they all operate with and you know depending on where an organization is in its journey whether a start-up there you know in in the in the mid or the more mature and some of the different dynamics and the markets in which they operate in as well there's all different variables you know so it's it's it's mix Wendy thanks so much for spending the time to come on the cube really appreciate great keynote folks watching if you haven't seen the keynote opening sections that's a good section the business model I think it's really right on I think that's going to be a conversation it's going to continue thanks for sharing that before we look before we leave I want to just ask you a question around what you what's going on for you here at Barcelona as the show winds down you had all your activities take us in the day of the life of what you do customer meetings what were some of those conversations take us inside inside what what goes on for you here well I'd say it's been an amazing it's been an amazing few days so it's a combination of customer conversations around some of the themes we just talked about conversations with partners and there's investor companies that we invest in a Cisco that I've been spending some time with and also you know spending time with the teams as well the DEF net zone you know is amazing we have this afternoon the closing session where we've got a fantastic external guest who's coming in it's going to be really exciting as well and then of course the party tonight and we'll be announcing the next location which I'm not gonna reveal now later on today we kind of figured it out already because that's our job and there's the break news but we're not gonna break it for you you can have that hey thank you so much for coming on really appreciate Wendy Martin expecting the Europe Middle East Africa and Russia for Cisco she's got our hand on the pulse and the future is the business model that's what's going on fundamental radical change across the board in all areas this the cue bringing you all the action here in Barcelona thanks for watching [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music]