(gentle synth music) (music ends) >> Welcome back to Supercloud 2, an open industry collaboration between technologists, consultants, analysts, and of course practitioners to help shape the future of cloud. At this event, one of the key areas we're exploring is the intersection of cloud and data. And how building value on top of hyperscale clouds and across clouds is evolving, a concept of course we call "Supercloud". And we're pleased to welcome our friends from Enterprise Technology research, Erik Bradley and Darren Brabham. Guys, thanks for joining us, great to see you. we love to bring the data into these conversations. >> Thank you for having us, Dave, I appreciate it. >> Yeah, thanks. >> You bet. And so, let me do the setup on what is Supercloud. It's a concept that we've floated, Before re:Invent 2021, based on the idea that cloud infrastructure is becoming ubiquitous, incredibly powerful, but there's a lack of standards across the big three clouds. That creates friction. So we defined over the period of time, you know, better part of a year, a set of essential elements, deployment models for so-called supercloud, which create this common experience for specific cloud services that, of course, again, span multiple clouds and even on-premise data. So Erik, with that as background, I wonder if you could add your general thoughts on the term supercloud, maybe play proxy for the CIO community, 'cause you do these round tables, you talk to these guys all the time, you gather a lot of amazing information from senior IT DMs that compliment your survey. So what are your thoughts on the term and the concept? >> Yeah, sure. I'll even go back to last year when you and I did our predictions panel, right? And we threw it out there. And to your point, you know, there's some haters. Anytime you throw out a new term, "Is it marketing buzz? Is it worth it? Why are you even doing it?" But you know, from my own perspective, and then also speaking to the IT DMs that we interview on a regular basis, this is just a natural evolution. It's something that's inevitable in enterprise tech, right? The internet was not built for what it has become. It was never intended to be the underlying infrastructure of our daily lives and work. The cloud also was not built to be what it's become. But where we're at now is, we have to figure out what the cloud is and what it needs to be to be scalable, resilient, secure, and have the governance wrapped around it. And to me that's what supercloud is. It's a way to define operantly, what the next generation, the continued iteration and evolution of the cloud and what its needs to be. And that's what the supercloud means to me. And what depends, if you want to call it metacloud, supercloud, it doesn't matter. The point is that we're trying to define the next layer, the next future of work, which is inevitable in enterprise tech. Now, from the IT DM perspective, I have two interesting call outs. One is from basically a senior developer IT architecture and DevSecOps who says he uses the term all the time. And the reason he uses the term, is that because multi-cloud has a stigma attached to it, when he is talking to his business executives. (David chuckles) the stigma is because it's complex and it's expensive. So he switched to supercloud to better explain to his business executives and his CFO and his CIO what he's trying to do. And we can get into more later about what it means to him. But the inverse of that, of course, is a good CSO friend of mine for a very large enterprise says the concern with Supercloud is the reduction of complexity. And I'll explain, he believes anything that takes the requirement of specific expertise out of the equation, even a little bit, as a CSO worries him. So as you said, David, always two sides to the coin, but I do believe supercloud is a relevant term, and it is necessary because the cloud is continuing to be defined. >> You know, that's really interesting too, 'cause you know, Darren, we use Snowflake a lot as an example, sort of early supercloud, and you think from a security standpoint, we've always pushed Amazon and, "Are you ever going to kind of abstract the complexity away from all these primitives?" and their position has always been, "Look, if we produce these primitives, and offer these primitives, we we can move as the market moves. When you abstract, then it becomes harder to peel the layers." But Darren, from a data standpoint, like I say, we use Snowflake a lot. I think of like Tim Burners-Lee when Web 2.0 came out, he said, "Well this is what the internet was always supposed to be." So in a way, you know, supercloud is maybe what multi-cloud was supposed to be. But I mean, you think about data sharing, Darren, across clouds, it's always been a challenge. Snowflake always, you know, obviously trying to solve that problem, as are others. But what are your thoughts on the concept? >> Yeah, I think the concept fits, right? It is reflective of, it's a paradigm shift, right? Things, as a pendulum have swung back and forth between needing to piece together a bunch of different tools that have specific unique use cases and they're best in breed in what they do. And then focusing on the duct tape that holds 'em all together and all the engineering complexity and skill, it shifted from that end of the pendulum all the way back to, "Let's streamline this, let's simplify it. Maybe we have budget crunches and we need to consolidate tools or eliminate tools." And so then you kind of see this back and forth over time. And with data and analytics for instance, a lot of organizations were trying to bring the data closer to the business. That's where we saw self-service analytics coming in. And tools like Snowflake, what they did was they helped point to different databases, they helped unify data, and organize it in a single place that was, you know, in a sense neutral, away from a single cloud vendor or a single database, and allowed the business to kind of be more flexible in how it brought stuff together and provided it out to the business units. So Snowflake was an example of one of those times where we pulled back from the granular, multiple points of the spear, back to a simple way to do things. And I think Snowflake has continued to kind of keep that mantle to a degree, and we see other tools trying to do that, but that's all it is. It's a paradigm shift back to this kind of meta abstraction layer that kind of simplifies what is the reality, that you need a complex multi-use case, multi-region way of doing business. And it sort of reflects the reality of that. >> And you know, to me it's a spectrum. As part of Supercloud 2, we're talking to a number of of practitioners, Ionis Pharmaceuticals, US West, we got Walmart. And it's a spectrum, right? In some cases the practitioner's saying, "You know, the way I solve multi-cloud complexity is mono-cloud, I just do one cloud." (laughs) Others like Walmart are saying, "Hey, you know, we actually are building an abstraction layer ourselves, take advantage of it." So my general question to both of you is, is this a concept, is the lack of standards across clouds, you know, really a problem, you know, or is supercloud a solution looking for a problem? Or do you hear from practitioners that "No, this is really an issue, we have to bring together a set of standards to sort of unify our cloud estates." >> Allow me to answer that at a higher level, and then we're going to hand it over to Dr. Brabham because he is a little bit more detailed on the realtime streaming analytics use cases, which I think is where we're going to get to. But to answer that question, it really depends on the size and the complexity of your business. At the very large enterprise, Dave, Yes, a hundred percent. This needs to happen. There is complexity, there is not only complexity in the compute and actually deploying the applications, but the governance and the security around them. But for lower end or, you know, business use cases, and for smaller businesses, it's a little less necessary. You certainly don't need to have all of these. Some of the things that come into mind from the interviews that Darren and I have done are, you know, financial services, if you're doing real-time trading, anything that has real-time data metrics involved in your transactions, is going to be necessary. And another use case that we hear about is in online travel agencies. So I think it is very relevant, the complexity does need to be solved, and I'll allow Darren to explain a little bit more about how that's used from an analytics perspective. >> Yeah, go for it. >> Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think any modern, you know, multinational company that's going to have a footprint in the US and Europe, in China, or works in different areas like manufacturing, where you're probably going to have on-prem instances that will stay on-prem forever, for various performance reasons. You have these complicated governance and security and regulatory issues. So inherently, I think, large multinational companies and or companies that are in certain areas like finance or in, you know, online e-commerce, or things that need real-time data, they inherently are going to have a very complex environment that's going to need to be managed in some kind of cleaner way. You know, they're looking for one door to open, one pane of glass to look at, one thing to do to manage these multi points. And, streaming's a good example of that. I mean, not every organization has a real-time streaming use case, and may not ever, but a lot of organizations do, a lot of industries do. And so there's this need to use, you know, they want to use open-source tools, they want to use Apache Kafka for instance. They want to use different megacloud vendors offerings, like Google Pub/Sub or you know, Amazon Kinesis Firehose. They have all these different pieces they want to use for different use cases at different stages of maturity or proof of concept, you name it. They're going to have to have this complexity. And I think that's why we're seeing this need, to have sort of this supercloud concept, to juggle all this, to wrangle all of it. 'Cause the reality is, it's complex and you have to simplify it somehow. >> Great, thanks you guys. All right, let's bring up the graphic, and take a look. Anybody who follows the breaking analysis, which is co-branded with ETR Cube Insights powered by ETR, knows we like to bring data to the table. ETR does amazing survey work every quarter, 1200 plus 1500 practitioners that that answer a number of questions. The vertical axis here is net score, which is ETR's proprietary methodology, which is a measure of spending momentum, spending velocity. And the horizontal axis here is overlap, but it's the presence pervasiveness, and the dataset, the ends, that table insert on the bottom right shows you how the dots are plotted, the net score and then the ends in the survey. And what we've done is we've plotted a bunch of the so-called supercloud suspects, let's start in the upper right, the cloud platforms. Without these hyperscale clouds, you can't have a supercloud. And as always, Azure and AWS, up and to the right, it's amazing we're talking about, you know, 80 plus billion dollar company in AWS. Azure's business is, if you just look at the IaaS is in the 50 billion range, I mean it's just amazing to me the net scores here. Anything above 40% we consider highly elevated. And you got Azure and you got Snowflake, Databricks, HashiCorp, we'll get to them. And you got AWS, you know, right up there at that size, it's quite amazing. With really big ends as well, you know, 700 plus ends in the survey. So, you know, kind of half the survey actually has these platforms. So my question to you guys is, what are you seeing in terms of cloud adoption within the big three cloud players? I wonder if you could could comment, maybe Erik, you could start. >> Yeah, sure. Now we're talking data, now I'm happy. So yeah, we'll get into some of it. Right now, the January, 2023 TSIS is approaching 1500 survey respondents. One caveat, it's not closed yet, it will close on Friday, but with an end that big we are over statistically significant. We also recently did a cloud survey, and there's a couple of key points on that I want to get into before we get into individual vendors. What we're seeing here, is that annual spend on cloud infrastructure is expected to grow at almost a 70% CAGR over the next three years. The percentage of those workloads for cloud infrastructure are expected to grow over 70% as three years as well. And as you mentioned, Azure and AWS are still dominant. However, we're seeing some share shift spreading around a little bit. Now to get into the individual vendors you mentioned about, yes, Azure is still number one, AWS is number two. What we're seeing, which is incredibly interesting, CloudFlare is number three. It's actually beating GCP. That's the first time we've seen it. What I do want to state, is this is on net score only, which is our measure of spending intentions. When you talk about actual pervasion in the enterprise, it's not even close. But from a spending velocity intention point of view, CloudFlare is now number three above GCP, and even Salesforce is creeping up to be at GCPs level. So what we're seeing here, is a continued domination by Azure and AWS, but some of these other players that maybe might fit into your moniker. And I definitely want to talk about CloudFlare more in a bit, but I'm going to stop there. But what we're seeing is some of these other players that fit into your Supercloud moniker, are starting to creep up, Dave. >> Yeah, I just want to clarify. So as you also know, we track IaaS and PaaS revenue and we try to extract, so AWS reports in its quarterly earnings, you know, they're just IaaS and PaaS, they don't have a SaaS play, a little bit maybe, whereas Microsoft and Google include their applications and so we extract those out and if you do that, AWS is bigger, but in the surveys, you know, customers, they see cloud, SaaS to them as cloud. So that's one of the reasons why you see, you know, Microsoft as larger in pervasion. If you bring up that survey again, Alex, the survey results, you see them further to the right and they have higher spending momentum, which is consistent with what you see in the earnings calls. Now, interesting about CloudFlare because the CEO of CloudFlare actually, and CloudFlare itself uses the term supercloud basically saying, "Hey, we're building a new type of internet." So what are your thoughts? Do you have additional information on CloudFlare, Erik that you want to share? I mean, you've seen them pop up. I mean this is a really interesting company that is pretty forward thinking and vocal about how it's disrupting the industry. >> Sure, we've been tracking 'em for a long time, and even from the disruption of just a traditional CDN where they took down Akamai and what they're doing. But for me, the definition of a true supercloud provider can't just be one instance. You have to have multiple. So it's not just the cloud, it's networking aspect on top of it, it's also security. And to me, CloudFlare is the only one that has all of it. That they actually have the ability to offer all of those things. Whereas you look at some of the other names, they're still piggybacking on the infrastructure or platform as a service of the hyperscalers. CloudFlare does not need to, they actually have the cloud, the networking, and the security all themselves. So to me that lends credibility to their own internal usage of that moniker Supercloud. And also, again, just what we're seeing right here that their net score is now creeping above AGCP really does state it. And then just one real last thing, one of the other things we do in our surveys is we track adoption and replacement reasoning. And when you look at Cloudflare's adoption rate, which is extremely high, it's based on technical capabilities, the breadth of their feature set, it's also based on what we call the ability to avoid stack alignment. So those are again, really supporting reasons that makes CloudFlare a top candidate for your moniker of supercloud. >> And they've also announced an object store (chuckles) and a database. So, you know, that's going to be, it takes a while as you well know, to get database adoption going, but you know, they're ambitious and going for it. All right, let's bring the chart back up, and I want to focus Darren in on the ecosystem now, and really, we've identified Snowflake and Databricks, it's always fun to talk about those guys, and there are a number of other, you know, data platforms out there, but we use those too as really proxies for leaders. We got a bunch of the backup guys, the data protection folks, Rubric, Cohesity, and Veeam. They're sort of in a cluster, although Rubric, you know, ahead of those guys in terms of spending momentum. And then VMware, Tanzu and Red Hat as sort of the cross cloud platform. But I want to focus, Darren, on the data piece of it. We're seeing a lot of activity around data sharing, governed data sharing. Databricks is using Delta Sharing as their sort of place, Snowflakes is sort of this walled garden like the app store. What are your thoughts on, you know, in the context of Supercloud, cross cloud capabilities for the data platforms? >> Yeah, good question. You know, I think Databricks is an interesting player because they sort of have made some interesting moves, with their Data Lakehouse technology. So they're trying to kind of complicate, or not complicate, they're trying to take away the complications of, you know, the downsides of data warehousing and data lakes, and trying to find that middle ground, where you have the benefits of a managed, governed, you know, data warehouse environment, but you have sort of the lower cost, you know, capability of a data lake. And so, you know, Databricks has become really attractive, especially by data scientists, right? We've been tracking them in the AI machine learning sector for quite some time here at ETR, attractive for a data scientist because it looks and acts like a lake, but can have some managed capabilities like a warehouse. So it's kind of the best of both worlds. So in some ways I think you've seen sort of a data science driver for the adoption of Databricks that has now become a little bit more mainstream across the business. Snowflake, maybe the other direction, you know, it's a cloud data warehouse that you know, is starting to expand its capabilities and add on new things like Streamlit is a good example in the analytics space, with apps. So you see these tools starting to branch and creep out a bit, but they offer that sort of neutrality, right? We heard one IT decision maker we recently interviewed that referred to Snowflake and Databricks as the quote unquote Switzerland of what they do. And so there's this desirability from an organization to find these tools that can solve the complex multi-headed use-case of data and analytics, which every business unit needs in different ways. And figure out a way to do that, an elegant way that's governed and centrally managed, that federated kind of best of both worlds that you get by bringing the data close to the business while having a central governed instance. So these tools are incredibly powerful and I think there's only going to be room for growth, for those two especially. I think they're going to expand and do different things and maybe, you know, join forces with others and a lot of the power of what they do well is trying to define these connections and find these partnerships with other vendors, and try to be seen as the nice add-on to your existing environment that plays nicely with everyone. So I think that's where those two tools are going, but they certainly fit this sort of label of, you know, trying to be that supercloud neutral, you know, layer that unites everything. >> Yeah, and if you bring the graphic back up, please, there's obviously big data plays in each of the cloud platforms, you know, Microsoft, big database player, AWS is, you know, 11, 12, 15, data stores. And of course, you know, BigQuery and other, you know, data platforms within Google. But you know, I'm not sure the big cloud guys are going to go hard after so-called supercloud, cross-cloud services. Although, we see Oracle getting in bed with Microsoft and Azure, with a database service that is cross-cloud, certainly Google with Anthos and you know, you never say never with with AWS. I guess what I would say guys, and I'll I'll leave you with this is that, you know, just like all players today are cloud players, I feel like anybody in the business or most companies are going to be so-called supercloud players. In other words, they're going to have a cross-cloud strategy, they're going to try to build connections if they're coming from on-prem like a Dell or an HPE, you know, or Pure or you know, many of these other companies, Cohesity is another one. They're going to try to connect to their on-premise states, of course, and create a consistent experience. It's natural that they're going to have sort of some consistency across clouds. You know, the big question is, what's that spectrum look like? I think on the one hand you're going to have some, you know, maybe some rudimentary, you know, instances of supercloud or maybe they just run on the individual clouds versus where Snowflake and others and even beyond that are trying to go with a single global instance, basically building out what I would think of as their own cloud, and importantly their own ecosystem. I'll give you guys the last thought. Maybe you could each give us, you know, closing thoughts. Maybe Darren, you could start and Erik, you could bring us home on just this entire topic, the future of cloud and data. >> Yeah, I mean I think, you know, two points to make on that is, this question of these, I guess what we'll call legacy on-prem players. These, mega vendors that have been around a long time, have big on-prem footprints and a lot of people have them for that reason. I think it's foolish to assume that a company, especially a large, mature, multinational company that's been around a long time, it's foolish to think that they can just uproot and leave on-premises entirely full scale. There will almost always be an on-prem footprint from any company that was not, you know, natively born in the cloud after 2010, right? I just don't think that's reasonable anytime soon. I think there's some industries that need on-prem, things like, you know, industrial manufacturing and so on. So I don't think on-prem is going away, and I think vendors that are going to, you know, go very cloud forward, very big on the cloud, if they neglect having at least decent connectors to on-prem legacy vendors, they're going to miss out. So I think that's something that these players need to keep in mind is that they continue to reach back to some of these players that have big footprints on-prem, and make sure that those integrations are seamless and work well, or else their customers will always have a multi-cloud or hybrid experience. And then I think a second point here about the future is, you know, we talk about the three big, you know, cloud providers, the Google, Microsoft, AWS as sort of the opposite of, or different from this new supercloud paradigm that's emerging. But I want to kind of point out that, they will always try to make a play to become that and I think, you know, we'll certainly see someone like Microsoft trying to expand their licensing and expand how they play in order to become that super cloud provider for folks. So also don't want to downplay them. I think you're going to see those three big players continue to move, and take over what players like CloudFlare are doing and try to, you know, cut them off before they get too big. So, keep an eye on them as well. >> Great points, I mean, I think you're right, the first point, if you're Dell, HPE, Cisco, IBM, your strategy should be to make your on-premise state as cloud-like as possible and you know, make those differences as minimal as possible. And you know, if you're a customer, then the business case is going to be low for you to move off of that. And I think you're right. I think the cloud guys, if this is a real problem, the cloud guys are going to play in there, and they're going to make some money at it. Erik, bring us home please. >> Yeah, I'm going to revert back to our data and this on the macro side. So to kind of support this concept of a supercloud right now, you know Dave, you and I know, we check overall spending and what we're seeing right now is total year spent is expected to only be 4.6%. We ended 2022 at 5% even though it began at almost eight and a half. So this is clearly declining and in that environment, we're seeing the top two strategies to reduce spend are actually vendor consolidation with 36% of our respondents saying they're actively seeking a way to reduce their number of vendors, and consolidate into one. That's obviously supporting a supercloud type of play. Number two is reducing excess cloud resources. So when I look at both of those combined, with a drop in the overall spending reduction, I think you're on the right thread here, Dave. You know, the overall macro view that we're seeing in the data supports this happening. And if I can real quick, couple of names we did not touch on that I do think deserve to be in this conversation, one is HashiCorp. HashiCorp is the number one player in our infrastructure sector, with a 56% net score. It does multiple things within infrastructure and it is completely agnostic to your environment. And if we're also speaking about something that's just a singular feature, we would look at Rubric for data, backup, storage, recovery. They're not going to offer you your full cloud or your networking of course, but if you are looking for your backup, recovery, and storage Rubric, also number one in that sector with a 53% net score. Two other names that deserve to be in this conversation as we watch it move and evolve. >> Great, thank you for bringing that up. Yeah, we had both of those guys in the chart and I failed to focus in on HashiCorp. And clearly a Supercloud enabler. All right guys, we got to go. Thank you so much for joining us, appreciate it. Let's keep this conversation going. >> Always enjoy talking to you Dave, thanks. >> Yeah, thanks for having us. >> All right, keep it right there for more content from Supercloud 2. This is Dave Valente for John Ferg and the entire Cube team. We'll be right back. (gentle synth music) (music fades)

>>Mhm Yes. Welcome to this cube conversation. I'm john Kerry host of the cube here in Palo alto California. We've got two great guests all the way from Ohio and here in the bay area with sequence securities is our focus on cloud growth companies. Sri and met a co founder and CTO of sequence security and Jason Kent hacker in residence at sequence security. We're gonna find out what that actually means in the second but this is a really important company in the sense of A P. I. S. As they are starting to be the connective tissue between systems and and data. Um you're starting to see more vulnerabilities, more risk but also more upside. So risk, reward is high. And anyone who's doing things in the cloud obviously deals with the A. P. I. So Trey and Jason. Thanks for let's keep conversation. >>Happy to be here >>guys. Let's let's talk about A P. I. Security. And but first before we get there trans what does sequence security do? What do you guys specifically build? And what do you sell >>sequences in the business protecting your web and um A P. I. S from various kinds of attacks? Uh We protect from business logic attacks, A P. I. Uh do your api inventory, uh also the detect and defend against things like a town taker. Where's fake account creation, scraping pretty much anything and everything. An application on a PDA is exposed to from from the Attackers. >>Jason. What do you what do you do there as hacker and residents? I also want to get your perspective on api security from the point of view of, you know, uh attack standpoint from a vector. How are people doing it? So first explain what you do and uh love the title hacker and residents. But also what does that actually mean from a security standpoint? >>Yeah. So we can't be in the business that we're in without having an adversarial approach to where our customers are deployed and how we look at them. So a lot of times I spend my time trying to be on the client's backdoors and and try to hit their A. P. I. S. With as many kinds of attacks that I can. It helps us understand how an attacker is going to approach a specific client as well as helps us tune for our machine learning models to make sure that we can defend against those kinds of things. Um as a hacker and residents, my mostly my position is client facing. But I do spend an awful lot of time being research and looking for the next api threat that's out there. >>You gotta stay ahead of the bad guys. But let's bring up some kind of cutting edge relevant topics. One is all over the news cycle. You heard peloton, very highly visible company, It represents that new breed of digital companies that have a new approach and it's absolutely doing very, very well. The new consumers like this product and you're seeing a lot more peloton, like companies out there that are leveraging technology, so they're fully integrated, they had an A. P. I. Issue recently. Um what does it mean? Is that, is that something we're gonna see more of these kind of leaks in these kind of vulnerabilities? What do you guys think about this political thing, >>You know, from an attacker's perspective as a really boring attack? Um, but it led to a huge amount of data leaking out. Same with, you know, the news has been been right with this lately, right, john Deere got hit. Um We've seen yet another credit bureau got hit right. Um and these attacks are coming off as fairly simple attacks that are dumping huge amounts of data, just proving that the FBI attack surface is really a great place to get a rich amount of data, but you have to have a good understanding of how the application works so you can spend a little bit of time on it. But once you've taken a look at how the data flows, you end up with, you know, pretty rich data set as an attacker. I go after them just by simply utilizing their products, utilizing the programs and understanding how they work. And then I drag out all the pieces that I think are going to be interesting and start plucking away at it. If I see a like a profile, for instance, that I can edit, I wonder can I edit someone else's profile. And this is how the peloton attack work. I'm logged in, I'm allowed to see my things, what other things can I see? And it turns out they can see everything. >>So we also saw a hack with clubhouse, which is the hot app now I think just opened up to android users, but they were simply calling it back and Agora, which is, you know, I've seen china, but once you've understood that the tokens work, once you understood what they were doing, you could essentially go in and figure things out. There seems to be like pretty like trivial stuff, but it gets exposed. No one kind of thinks it through. How does someone protect themselves against these things? Because that's the real issue, like just make it less secure. Our Api is gonna be more secure in the future. What can customers do about what do you guys to think about this? >>Yeah, but the reality is, I mean that's just uh too many babies out there. I mean if you see the transition that is happening and that is the transformation where it used to be like a one app or two apps before and now there are like hundreds and thousands of applications driven by the devops world, a child development and and what matters is, I mean the starting point really is you cannot protect what, you cannot see what used to be. Uh an up hosted in your data center is now being hosted in the cloud environments, in the virtual environments, in several less environments and coordinators, you name it, they're out there. So the key is really to understand your attack surface, that's your starting point. So you're you're tooling your applications need to uh I need to be able to provide that visibility that that that is needed to protect these applications and you can't rely just on your developers to do this for you. So you need a right tool that can secure these applications, >>Jason what's the steps that an attacker takes to uncover vulnerabilities? What goes through the mind of the attacker? Um I mean the old days you used to just do port scans and try to penetrate you get through the perimeter. Now with this no perimeter mindset, the surface area Schramm was talking about is huge. What what's going on the mind of the attacker here and the A P I S and vulnerabilities. >>So the very first thing that we do is we sign up for an account, we use the thing, right? We look at all the different endpoints. Um I've got scripts running in my attack tools that do things like show me comments uh in case the developer left some comments in there to tell me where things are. Um I basically I'm just going to poke around using it like a regular user, but in that I'm going to look for places. That makes sense to try to do an attack. So the login screen is a really easy thing. Everybody understands that you put in a user name, you put in a password, you can't go. What I'm gonna do is put in a bad username and a bad password. I'm gonna put in a good user name and a bad password and I'm gonna see what changes, what are the different things that your application is telling me. And so when we look at an application for flaws and ways to get to the data on the back end, all we're doing is seeing what data do you present me on standard use. And then I'm going to look at, well, how can I change these parameters or what are the things that I can change in my requests to get a different response? So in the early phases of an attack, Attackers are very difficult to a seat. Right. They just look like a regular user just doing regular things. It's when we decide. All right. I've found something that starts to get actually interesting and we start to try to pull data out. >>What are some of the common vulnerabilities and risks that you guys see in the A. P. I is when you look when you poke at them that people are are doing is that they're not really doing their homework. Doing good. Security designers are just more of tech risk. What's the most common vulnerabilities and risks? >>Well, so for me, I I've noticed a lot of the OAS KPI top 10, the first couple of things you see them on almost all applications, so broken object level authorization is the first one. It's mouthful. Um but basically all it is is I log onto the platform, I'm authorized to be there, but I can see someone else's stuff and that's exactly what happened in peloton. Um that and what we call insecure direct object reference where I don't have to be logged in, I can just make the request without any authentication and get information back. So those are pretty common areas um that you know people need to focus on, but there's a few others that are outside the top 10 that really make a lot more sense as a defender strains probably has a little better answer to me. >>Yeah. So um I'm like like we said um creating that inventories is key, but where are they being hostess? Another another aspect of things. So so when when Jason spoke about um like hackers are actually probing, trying to figure out what are the different entry points? It could be your production environment, it could be your QA environment staging environment and you're not even aware of, but once you've actually figured out those entry points, the next step of attack was like at peloton and and other places is really eggs filtering. Exfiltrate ng that that information. Right. Is it, is it the O P II information, ph I information um and and you don't want to exfiltrate as a hacker, just one person's information. You you're automating that business logic that is behind it ability to protect and defend against those kinds of attacks, giving that visibility, even though you might not have instrumented that application for for that kind of visibility is key. Once you are bubbling up those behaviors, then you can go ahead and and and protect from these kinds of attacks. And it could be about just simply enumerating through I. D. S. Uh that paladin might have or uh experience might have and just enumerate through that and exfiltrate the information behind it. So the tools need to be able to protect from those kinds of attacks out there. >>Yeah, I think I was actually on clubhouse when um that went down that hole enumerating through the I. D. S. Room I. D. S. And then the people just querying once they got an I. D. They essentially just sucked all the content out because they were just calling the back end. It was just like the most dumbest thing I've ever seen, but they didn't think about, I mean, you know, they were just rushing really fast. So So the question I have for transit and on a defense basis, people are going first party um with a P. I. S. A. P. I. First strategies because it's just some benefits there as we were talking about what do I need to do to protect myself? So I don't have that clubhouse problem or the pelton problem. Is there a Is there a playbook or is their software tools that I could use? How do I build? My apologies from day one and my principles around it to be good hygiene or good design? What's the what's the >>yeah. So aPI security is sort of a looking uh less known given that it's constantly evolving and changing. And the adoption of A P. S. Have gone up significantly. So what you need to start with effectively is the runtime security aspect of things. When a an aPI is live, how do I actually protected? And it ranges from simple syntactic protection things around people. Can can go ahead and break these ap is by providing sort of uh going after endpoints that you don't think exist anymore or going after certain functions by giving large values that they're not sort of coded to accept and so on so forth. Once you've done that runtime protection from a syntactic aspect, you also need to protect from a business logic aspect. I mean, mps will will expose uh information, interact with the customers and partners, what what business logic are they actually exposing and how can it be abused? Understanding that is another big aspects and then you can go ahead and protect from a runtime uh from a long time security perspective, once you've done that and understood that, well then you can start shifting lap things, invest in your uh sort of uh Dass tools or static analysis tools which can catch these things early so that they don't bubble up all the way, but none of them are actually silver bullets, right? So that you have a good uh time security tools, so I don't need to invest in dust or assessed whatever I have invested in my shift left aspect of things and uh and nothing will flow through. So you you need to start shifting left uh but covered all your bases properly, >>you can't shift left, there's nothing to shift from. I mean if you don't have that baseline foundation, what does that even mean to shift left and get that built into the Ci cd pipeline? So that's a great point. How does how does someone and some companies and teams set that foundation with the run time? Do you think it's a critical problem right now or most people are do a good job or they just get get lazy or just lose track of it or you know what, what's what's the common um, use case? Do you see behavior behaviorally inside these enterprises? >>Yeah. So what, what we're seeing is adoption of new technologies and environments um, and they're not um, well suited for the traditional way of doing that time. Security. Like if if you have an app running in your kubernetes environment, if you have an app running in in in a serval less environment, how do you actually protected with the traditional appliance based approach? So I think being able to get that visibility into these environments, understanding the the user behavior, how these applications are interacted with being able to differentiate from that uh, normal human behavior or even sometimes legitimate automation uh from from the malicious intents or or the the probing and the business logic attacks is key to understanding and defending these applications. >>Before we wrap up, I want to just get your expert opinion since you guys are both here around, you know, the next level of of innovation. Also you got cloud public cloud showed us a P. I. S are great. Now you're starting to see cloud operations, they call day two operations or whatever you call it A IOP. There's all kinds of buzz words are for it, but hybrid cloud and multi cloud, Edge five G. These are all basically pointing to distributed computing systems, basically distributed cloud. So that means more A P. I. Is gonna be out there. Um So in a way the surface area of a piece is increasing. What's your what's your view on this as a market? I mean, early days developing fast and what's, what's the, what's the landscape look like? What do you guys see from a attack and defense standpoint? >>Well, just from the attacker's perspective, you know, I see a lot more traffic going, what we call east west traffic, where it's traveling inside the application, it's a P is feeding a ps more data. Um, but what is really happening is we're trying to figure out how to hook third parties into our api is more and more. The john Deere attack was just simply their development api platform that they open up for other organizations to integrate with them. Um, you know, it's, it's very beneficial for John Deere to be able to say I planted this seed at an inch and a half of depth and later, uh, I harvested 280 bushels of corn off that acres. So I know that's perfect. I can feed that back to my seed guy. Well that kind of data flow that's going around from AP to AP means that there's far more attack surface and we're going to see it more and more. I I don't think that we're going to have less Ap is communicating in the near future. I think this is the foundation that we're building for what it's gonna look like for almost every business in the near term. >>I mean this is the plumbing of integration. I mean as people work with each other data transfer, data knowledge format, you mentioned syntax and all these basic things in computer science are coming to A PS which was supposed to be just a dumb pipe or just, you know, rest api those glory days now it's not there. They're basically, it's basically connections. >>Yeah. You're absolutely right. John, I mean like what Jason mentioned earlier, uh, in terms of the way the A. P. I. S are going to grow and the bad guys are going to go after it. You need to think like a bad guy, what are they going to go after? Uh, these assets that are going to be in the cloud, in your hybrid environment, in in your own prem environment. And, and it's, it's a flip of a switch where an internal API can be externally exposed or, or just a new api getting rolled out. So all those things you need to be able to protect, um, and get that visibility first and then being then protect these environments. >>That's awesome. You guys represent the new kind of company that's going to take advantage of the cloud scale and as people shift to the new structural change and people are re factoring security, This is an area that's going to be explosive in development. Obviously the upside is huge. Um Quickly before to end, you guys take a minute to give a plug for the company. Um This is pretty cool. I love love what you guys do. I think it's very relevant and cool at the same time. So sequence security. What are you guys doing funding hiring? What's the plug? Tell folks about it. >>Yeah. So uh we we we started about six years ago but we like starting in the the body defense space by focusing on obscenity ice. And from then we we've grown and we've grown significantly in terms of our customer base, the verticals that we're going after in financial retail social media, you name it, we are there because pretty much all these these uh articles depends on A. P. I. S. To interact with their customers. Uh We've we've raised our cities we last year we've we've grown our customer base. Uh Just in the last year when there was a lockdown people were all these retailers were transforming from brick and mortar to online. Social media also also grew and we grew with them. So >>Jason your thoughts. >>I think that sequence is his ability to scale out to any size environment. We've got a customer that does a billion and a half transactions a month. Um That are ap is from 1000 other clients of theirs. Being able to protect environments that are confusing and cloudy like that. Um Is really it makes what we do shine. We use a lot of machine learning models and ai in order to surface real problems. And we have a lot of great humans behind all of that, making sure that the bad guy maybe they're right now, but they're going away and we're going to keep them away. >>It's super, super awesome. I think it's a combination of more connections, distributed computing at large scale with a data problem. That's, that's playing out. You guys are solving great stuff and hey, you know when the cube studio ap I gets built, we're gonna need to call you guys up to to help us secure the cube data. >>Absolutely right. Absolutely. >>Hey, thanks for coming on the q Great uh, great insight and thanks for sharing about sequence. Appreciate you coming on, >>appreciate the time. >>Okay. It's a cube conversation here in Palo alto with remote guests. I'm john for your host. Thanks for watching. Yeah.

>>and welcome to this cube conversation. I'm john for a host of the queue here in Palo alto California. We've got two great remote guests to talk about, some big news hitting with scalability and Hewlett Packard enterprise drill, MCAT ceo of sexuality and chris Tinker, distinguished technologist from H P E. Hewlett Packard enterprise U room chris, Great to see you both. Cube alumni's from an original gangster days. As we say Back then when we started almost 11 years ago. Great to see you both. >>It's great to be back. >>So let's see. So >>really compelling news around kind of this next generation storage, cloud native solution. Okay. It's a, it's really kind of an impact on the next gen. I call, next gen devops meets application, modern application world and some, we've been covering heavily, there's some big news here around sexuality and HP offering a pretty amazing product. You guys introduced essentially the next gen piece of it are pesca, we'll get into in a second. But this is a game changing announcement you guys announces an evolution continuing I think it's more of a revolution but I think you know storage is kind of abstraction layer of evolution to this app centric world. So talk about this environment we're in and we'll get to the announcement which is object store for modern workloads but this whole shift is happening jerome, this is a game changer to storage, customers are gonna be deploying workloads. >>Yeah skeleton. Really I mean I personally really started working on Skele T more than 10 years ago 15 now And if we think about it I mean cloud has really revolutionized IT. and within the cloud we really see layers and layers of technology. I mean we all started around 2006 with Amazon and Google and finding ways to do initially we was consumer it at very large scale, very low incredible reliability and then slowly it creeped into the enterprise and at the very beginning I would say that everyone was kind of wizards trying things and and really coupling technologies together uh and to some degree we were some of the first wizard doing this But we're now close to 15 years later and there's a lot of knowledge and a lot of experience, a lot of schools and this is really a new generation, I'll call it cloud native, you can call it next year and whatever, but there is now enough experience in the world, both at the development level and at the infrastructure level to deliver truly distributed automate systems that run on industry standard service. Obviously good quality server deliver a better service than the service. But there is now enough knowledge for this to truly go at scale and call this cloud or call this cloud native. Really the core concept here is to deliver scalable I. T at very low cost, very high level of reliability. All based on software. We've we've been participated in this solution but we feel that now the draft of what's coming is at the new level and it was time for us to think, develop and launch a new product that specifically adapted to that. And chris I will let you comment on this because customers or some of them you can add a custom of you to that. >>Well, you know, you're right. You know, I've been in there have been like you have been in this industry for uh, well a long time, a little longer to 20, years. This HPV and engineering and look at the actual landscape has changed with how we're doing scale out, suffered to find storage for particular workloads and were a catalyst has evolved. Here is an analytic normally what was only done in the three letter acronyms and massively scale out politics name, space, file systems, parallel file systems. The application space has encroached into the enterprise world where the enterprise world needed a way to actually take a look at how to help simplify the operations. How do I actually be able to bring about an application that can run in the public cloud or on premise or hybrid. Be able to actually look at a workload off my stat that aligns the actual cost to the actual analytics that I'm going to be doing the work load that I'm going to be doing and be able to bridge those gaps and be able to spin this up and simplify operations. And you know, and if you if you are familiar with these parallel fossils, which by the way we we actually have on our truck. I do engineer those. But they are they are they are they have their own unique challenges. But in the world of enterprise where customers are looking to simplify operations, then take advantage of new application, analytic workloads, whether it be sparred may so whatever it might be right. If I want to spend the Mongol BB or maybe maybe a last a search capability, how do I actually take those technologies embrace a modern scale out storage stack that without without breaking the bank but also provide a simple operations. And that's that's why we look for object storage capabilities because it brings us this massive parallelization. Thank you. >>Well, before we get into the product, I want to just touch on one thing from you mentioned and chris you, you brought up the devoPS piece, next gen, next level, whatever term you use it is cloud Native. Cloud Native has proven that deVOPS infrastructure as code is not only legit being operationalized in all enterprises, add security in there. You have def sec ops this is the reality and hybrid cloud in particular has been pretty much the consensus. Is that standard. So or de facto saying whatever you want to call it, that's happening. Multi cloud on the horizon. So these new workloads have these new architectural changes, cloud on premises and edge, this is the number one story and the number one challenge, all enterprises are now working on how do I build the architecture for the cloud on premises and edge. This is forcing the deVOPS team to flex and build new apps. Can you guys talk about that particular trend and is and is that relevant here? >>Yeah, I, I not talk about uh really storage anywhere and cloud anywhere. And and really the key concept is edged to go to cloud. I mean we all understand now that the Edge will host a lot of data and the edges many different things. I mean it's obviously a smartphone, whatever that is, but it's also factories, it's also production, it's also, you know, moving uh moving machinery, trains, playing satellites, um that that's all the Edge cars obviously uh and a lot of that, I will be both produced and processed there. But from the Edge you will want to be able to send that uh for analysis for backup for logging to a court. And that core could be regional maybe not, you know, one call for the whole planet, but maybe one corporate region uh state in the US. Uh and then from there, you will also want to push some of the data to probably cloud. Uh One of the things that we see more and more is that the the our data center, the disaster recovery is not another physical data center, it's actually the cloud and that's a very efficient infrastructure, very cost efficient. Especially so really it's changing the padding on how you think about storage because you really need to integrate these three layers in a consistent approach, especially around the topic of security because you want the data to be secure all along the way and the data is not just data data and who can access the data, can modify the data. What are the conditions that allow modification or automatically ratios that are in some cases it's super important that data be automatically raised 10 years and all this needs to be transported fromage Co two cloud. So that that's one of the aspects, another aspect that resonates for me with what you said is a word you didn't say but it's actually crucial this whole revolution. It's kubernetes mean Cuban it isn't now a mature technology and it's just, you know, the next level of automaticity operation for distributed system Which we didn't have five or 10 years ago and that is so powerful that it's going to allow application developers to develop much faster system that can be distributed again edge to go to crowd because it's going to be an underlying technology that spans the three layers >>chris your thoughts. Hybrid cloud, I've been, I've been having conscious with the HP folks for got years and years on hybrid clouds now here. >>Well, you know, and it's exciting in a layout, right? So if you look at like a whether it be enterprise virtualization that is a scale out gender purpose fertilization workload. Whether the analytic workloads, whether we know data protection is a paramount to all of this orchestration is paramount. Uh if you look at that depth laptops absolutely you mean securing the actual data. The digital last set is absolutely paramount. And if you look at how we do this, look at the investments we're making we're making. And if you look at the collaborative platform development which goes to our partnership with reality it is we're providing them an integral aspect of everything we do. Whether we're bringing as moral which is our suffer be used orchestration. Look at the veneer of its control plane controlling kubernetes being able to actually control the african area clusters in the actual backing store for all the analytics. And we just talked about whether it be a web scale out That is traditionally using politics. Name space has now been modernized to take advantage of newer technologies running an envy me burst buffers or 100 gig networks with slingshot network at 200 and 400 gigabit. Looking at how do we actually get the actual analytics the workload to the CPU and have it attached to the data at rest? Where is the data? How do we land the data and how do we actually align essentially locality, locality of the actual asset to the compute. This is where, you know, we can leverage whether it be a juror or google or name your favorite hyper scaler, leverage those technologies leveraging the actual persistent store and this is where scale it is with this object store capability has been an industry trend setter, uh setting the actual landscape of how to provide an object store on premise and hybrid cloud running into public cloud but be able to facilitate data mobility and tie it back to and tie it back to an application. And this is where a lot of things have changed in the world of the, of analytics because the applications, the newer technologies that are coming on the market have taken advantage of this particular protocol as three so they can do web scale massively parallel concurrent workloads, >>you know what, let's get into the announcement, I love cool and relevant products and I think this hits the Mark Scaletta you guys have are Tesco which is um, just announced and I think, you know, we obviously we reported on it. You guys have a lightweight, true enterprise grade object store software for kubernetes. This is the announcement, Jerome. Tell us about it. >>What's the big >>deal? Cool and >>relevant? Come on, >>this is cool. All right, tell us >>I'm super excited. I'm not sure that it did. That's where on screen, but I'm super, super excited. You know, we, we introduced the ring 11 years ago and this is our biggest announcements for the past 11 years. So yes, do pay attention. Uh, you know, after after looking at all these trends and understanding where we see the future going, uh, we decided that it was time to embark block. So there's not one line of code that's the same as the previous generation product. They will both could exist. They both have space in the market, uh, and artist that was specifically this design for this cloud native era. And what we see is that people want something that's lightweight, especially because it had to go to the edge. They still want the enterprise grade, the security is known for and it has to be modern. What we really mean by modern is uh, we see object storage now being the primary storage for many application more and more applications and so we have to be able to deliver the performance that primary storage expects. Um this idea of skeletons serving primary storage is actually not completely new When we launched guilty 10 years ago, the first application that we were supporting West consumer email for which we were and we are still today the primary story. So we have we know what it is to be the primary store, we know what's the level of reliability you need to hit. We know what, what latest thinking and latency is different from fruit, but you really need to optimize both. Um, and I think that's still today. We're the only object storage company that protects that after both replication and the red recording because we understand that replication is factor the recording is better and more larger file were fast in terms of latency doesn't matter so much. So we, we've been bringing all that experience but really rethinking a product for that new generation that really is here now. And so we're truly excited against a little bit more about the product. It's a software was guilty is a software company and that's why we love to partner with HP who's producing amazing service. Um, you know, for the record and history, the very first deployment of skeleton in 2000 and 10 was on the HP service. So this is a, a long love story here. Um, and so to come back to artistic, uh, is lightweight in the sense that it's easy to use. We can start small, we can start from just one server or 11 VM instance. I mean start really small. Can grow infinitely. The fact that we start small, we didn't, you know, limit the technology because of that. Uh, so you can start from one too many. Um, and uh, it's contaminated in the sense that it's completely Cuban, it is compatible. It's communities orchestrated. It will deploy on many Cuban distributions. We're talking obviously with Admiral, we're also talking with Ponzu and with the other in terms of uh, communities distribution will also be able to be run in the cloud. I'm not sure that there will be many uh, true production deployment of artists in the club because you already have really good object storage by the cloud providers. But when you are developing something and you want to test their, um, you know, just doing it in the cloud is very practical. So you'll be able to deploy our discount communities cloud distribution and it's modern object storage in the sense that its application century. A lot of our work is actually validating that our storage is fit for a single purpose application and making sure that we understand the requirement of this application that we can guide our customers on how to deploy. And it's really designed to be the primary storage for these new workloads. >>The big part of the news is your relationship with Hewlett Packard Enterprises? Some exclusivity here as part of this announced, you mentioned, the relationship goes back many, many years. We've covered your relationship in the past chris also, you know, we cover HP like a blanket. Um, this is big news for h P E as >>well. >>What is the relationship talk about this? Exclusivity could you share about the partnership and the exclusivity piece? >>Well, the partnership expands into the pan HPV portfolio. We look we made a massive investment in edge IOT devices. Uh, so we actually have, how do we align the cost to the demand for our customers come to us wanting to looking at? Uh think about what we're doing with green, like a consumption based modeling, they want to be able to be able to consume the asset without having to do a capital outlay out of the gate uh, number to look at, you know, how do you deploy? Technology really demand? It depends on the scale. Right? So in a lot of your web skill, you know, scale out technologies, uh, putting them on a diet is challenging, meaning how skinny can you get it getting it down into the 50 terabyte range and then the complexities of those technologies at as you take a day one implementation and scale it out over, you know, you know, multiple iterations of recorders. The growth becomes a challenge. So, working with scalability, we we believe we've actually cracked this nut. We figured out how to a number one, how to start small but not limited customers ability to scale it out incrementally or grotesquely grotesque. A you can depending on the quarters the month, whatever whatever the workload is, how do you actually align and be able to consume it? Uh So now, whether it be on our edge line products are D. L. Products go back there. Now what the journalist talking about earlier, you know, we ship a server every few seconds. That won't be a problem. But then of course into our density optimized compute with the Apollo product. Uh This where uh our two companies have worked in an exclusivity where the, the scaly software bonds on the HP ecosystem. Uh and then we can of course provide you our customers the ability to consume that through our Green link financial models or through a complex parts of >>awesome. So jerome and chris who's the customer here? Obviously there's an exclusive period talk about the target customer. And how do customers get the product? How do we get the software? And how does this exclusivity with HP fit into it? >>Yeah. So there's really three types of customers and we really, we've worked a lot with a company called use design to optimize the user interface for each of the three types of customers. So we really thought about each uh customer role and providing with each of them the best product. Uh So the first type of customer application owners who are deploying application that requires an object storage in the back end. They typically want a simple objects to of one application. They wanted to be temple and work. I mean yesterday they want no freedom to just want an object store that works and they want to be able to start as small as they start with their application. Often it's, you know, the first department, maybe a small deployment. Um, you know, applications like backup like female rubric or uh, analytics like Stone Carver, tikka or false system now available as a software. Uh, you know, like Ceta does a really great department or nass that works very well. That means an object store in the back end of high performance computing. Wake up file system is an amazing file system. Um, we also have vertical application like broad peak, for example, who provides origin and view the software, the broadcasters. So all these applications, they request an object store in the back end and you just need a simple, high performance, working well object store and I'll discuss perfect. The second type of people that we think will be interested by artists. Uh essentially developers who are currently developing some communities of collaborative application your next year. Um and as part of their development stack, um it's getting better and better when you're developing a cloud native application to really target an object storage rather than NFS as you're persistently just, you know, think about generations of technologies and um, NFS and file system were great 25 years ago. I mean, it's an amazing technology. But now when you want to develop a distributed scalable application, objects toys a better fit because it's the same generation and so same thing. I mean, you know, developing something, they need uh an object so that they can develop on so they wanted very lightweight, but they also want the product that they're enterprise or their customers will be able to rely on for years and years on and this guy is really great for today. Um, the third type of customer are more architecture with security architects that are designing, uh, System where they're going to have 50 factories, 1000 planes, a million cars are going to have some local storage, which will they want to replicate to the core and possibly also to the club. And uh, as the design is really new generation workloads that are incredibly distributed. But with local storage, uh, these guys are really grateful for that >>and talk about the HP exclusive chris what's the, how does that fit into? They buy through sexuality. Can they get it for the HP? Are you guys working together on how customers can procure >>place? Yeah. Both ways they can procure it through security. They can secure it through HP. Uh, and it is the software stack running on our density, optimized compute platforms which you would choose online does. And to provide an enterprise quality because if it comes back to it in all of these use cases it's how do we align up into a true enterprise step? Um bringing about multi Tennessee, bringing about the fact that, you know, if you look at like a local racial coding, uh one of the things that they're bringing to it so that we can get down into the deal 3 25. So with the exclusivity, uh you actually get choice and that choice comes into our entire portfolio, whether it be the edge line platform, the D. L 3:25 a.m. B. Processing stack or the intel deal three eighties or whether whether it be the Apollo's or Alexa, there's there's so many ample choices there that facilitates this and it just allows us to align those two strategies >>awesome. And I think the kubernetes pieces really relevant because, you know, I've been interviewing folks practitioners um and kubernetes is very much maturing fast. It's definitely the centerpiece of the cloud native, both below the line, if you will under the hood for the, for the infrastructure and then for apps, um they want to program on top of it. That's critical. I mean, jeremy, this is like this is the future. >>Yeah. And if you don't mind, like to come back for a minute on the exclusive with HP. So we did a six month exclusive and the very reason we could do this is because HP has suffered such wrath of server portfolio and so we can go from, you know, really simple, very cheap, you know, HDD on the L 3 80 means a machine that retails for a few $4. I mean it's really like Temple System 50 terabyte. Uh we can have the dl 3 25. That uh piece mentioned there is really a powerhouse. All envy any uh slash uh all the storage is envy any uh very fast processors or uh you know, dance large large system like the Apollo 4500. So it's a very large breath of portfolio. We support the whole portfolio and we work together on this. So I want to say that you know, one of the reasons I want to send kudos to HP for for the breath of the silver lining rio as mentioned, um Jessica can be ordered from either company, hand in hand together. So anyway you'll see both of us uh and our field is working incredibly well together. >>We'll just on that point, I think just for clarification, uh was this co design by scalability and H P E. Because chris you mentioned, you know, the configuration of your systems. Can you guys quickly talk about the design, co design >>from from from the code base? The software entirely designed and developed by security from a testing and performance. So this really was a joint work with HP providing both hardware and manpower so that we could accelerate the testing phase. >>You know, chris H P E has just been doing such a great job of really focused on this. And you know, I've been Governor for years before it was fashionable the idea of apps working no matter where it lives. Public Cloud data center Edge, you mentioned. Edge line has been around for a while. You know, apps centric, developer friendly cloud first has been an H P E. Kind of guiding first principle for many, many years. >>But it has and you know, you know as our our ceo internal areas cited by 2022 everything will be able to be consumed as a service in our portfolio. Uh And then this stack allows us the simplicity and the consume ability of the technology and degranulation of it allows us to simplify the installation, simplify the actual deployment bringing into a cloud ecosystem. But more importantly for the end customer, they simply get an enterprise quality product running on identity optimized stack that they can consume through a orchestrated simplistic interface. That's that's cos that's what they're warning for today is where they come to me and asked hey how do I need a, I've got this new app new project and you know it goes back to who's actually coming, it's no longer the I. T. People who are actually coming to us, it's the lines of business. It's it's that entire dimension of business owners coming to us going this is my challenge and how can you HP help us And we rely on our breath of technology but also a breath of partners to come together and are of course reality is hand in hand and are collaborative business unit are collaborative storage product engineering group that actually brought this market. So we're very excited about this solution >>chris thanks for that input. Great insight, Jerome, congratulations on a great partnership with H. P. E. Obviously um great joint customer base congratulations on the product release here. Big moving the ball down the field as they say new functionality, clouds cloud native object store, phenomenal um So wrap wrap wrap up the interview. Tell us your vision for scalability in the future of storage. >>Yeah. Yeah I start I mean skeleton is going to be an amazing leader is already um but yeah so you know I have three themes that I think will govern how storage is going and obviously um Mark Andrews had said it software is everywhere and software is eating the world so definitely that's going to be true in the data center in storage in particular. Uh But the free trends that are more specific. First of all I think that security performance and agility is now basic expectation. It's not you know, it's not like an additional feature. It's just the best table, stakes, security performance and a job. Um The second thing is and we've talked about it during this conversation is edged to go you need to think your platform with Edge Co and cloud. You know you don't want to have separate systems separate design interface point for edge and then think about corn and think about clouds and then think about the divers. All this needs to be integrated in the design. And the third thing that I see as a major trend for the next 10 years is that a sovereignty uh more and more. You need to think about where is the data residing? What are the legal challenges? What is the level of protection against who are you protected? What what is your independence uh strategy? How do you keep as a company being independent from the people? You need to be independent. And I mean I say companies, but this is also true for public services. So these these for me are the three big trends. I do believe that uh software find distributed architecture are necessary for these tracks. But you also need to think about being truly enterprise grade. And there has been one of our focus with the design of a fresca. How do we combine a lot with product With all of the security requirements and that our sovereignty requirements that we expect to have in the next 10 years? >>That's awesome. Congratulations on the news scale. D Artois ca the big release with HP exclusive um, for six months, chris tucker, distinguished engineer at H P E. Great to ceo, jeremy, katz, ceo sexuality. Great to see you as well. Congratulations on the big news. I'm john for the cube. Thanks for watching. >>Mhm. >>Yeah.

(uplifting music) >> Hello and welcome to this Cube Conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCube here in Palo Alto, California. We've got two great remote guests to talk about some big news hitting with Scality and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Jerome Lecat CEO of Scality and Chris Tinker, Distinguished Technologist from HPE, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Jerome, Chris, great to see you both Cube alumnis from an original gangster days as we'd say back then when we started almost 11 years ago. Great to see you both. >> It's great to be back. >> Good to see you John. >> So, really compelling news around kind of this next generation storage cloud native solution. Okay, it's really kind of an impact on the next gen, I call next gen, dev ops meets application, modern application world and something we've been covering heavily. There's some big news here around Scality and HPE offering a pretty amazing product. You guys introduced essentially the next gen piece of it, Artesca, we'll get into in a second, but this is a game-changing announcement you guys announced, this is an evolution continuing I think is more of a revolution, but I think, you know storage is kind of abstractionally of evolution to this app centric world. So talk about this environment we're in and we'll get to the announcement, which is object store for modern workloads, but this whole shift is happening Jerome. This is a game changer to storage and customers are going to be deploying workloads. >> Yeah, Scality really, I mean, I personally really started working on Scality more than 10 years ago, close to 15 now. And if we think about it I mean the cloud has really revolutionized IT. And within the cloud, we really see layers and layers of technology. I mean, it all start at around 2006 with Amazon and Google and Facebook finding ways to do initially what was consumer IT at very large scale, very low credible reliability and then slowly creeped into the enterprise. And at the very beginning, I would say that everyone was kind of wizards trying things and really coupling technologies together. And to some degree we were some of the first wizard doing this, but we, we're now close to 15 years later and there's a lot of knowledge and a lot of experience, a lot of tools. And this is really a new generation. I'll call it cloud native, or you can call it next gen whatever, but there is now enough experience in the world, both at the development level and at the infrastructure level to deliver truly distributed automated systems that run on industry standard servers. Obviously good quality server deliver a better service than others, but there is now enough knowledge for this to truly go at scale. And call this cloud or call this cloud native. Really the core concept here is to deliver scalable IT at very low cost, very high level of reliability, all based on software. And we've, we've been participated in this motion, but we feel that now the breadth of what's coming is at the new level, and it was time for us to think, develop and launch a new product that's specifically adapted to that. And Chris, I will let you comment on this because the customers or some of them, you can add a customer, you do that. >> Well, you know, you're right. You know, I've been in the, I've been like you I've been in this industry for a, well, along time. Give a long, 20 to 21 years in HPE in engineering. And look at the actual landscape has changed with how we're doing scale-out software-defined storage for particular workloads. And we're a catalyst has evolved here is an analytics normally what was only done in the three letter acronyms and massively scale-out parallel namespace file systems, parallel file systems. The application space has encroached into the enterprise world where the enterprise world needed a way to actually take a look at how to, how do I simplify the operations? How do I actually be able to bring about an application that can run in the public cloud or on premise or hybrid, be able to actually look at a workload optimized step that aligns the actual cost to the actual analytics that I'm going to be doing the workload that I'm going to be doing and be able to bridge those gaps and be able to spin this up and simplify operations. And you know, and if you, if you are familiar with these parallel processes which by the way we actually have on our truck, I, I do engineer those, but they are, they are, they are they have their own unique challenges, but in the world of enterprise where customers are looking to simplify operations, then take advantage of new application, analytic workloads whether it be smart, Mesa, whatever it might be, right. I mean, if I want to spin up a Mongo DB or maybe maybe a, you know, last a search capability how do I actually take those technologies, embrace a modern scale-out storage stack that without without breaking the bank, but also provide a simple operations. And that's, that's why we look for object storage capabilities because it brings us this massive parallelization. Back to you John. >> Well before we get into the product. I want to just touch on one thing Jerome you mentioned, and Chris, you, you brought up the DevOps piece next gen, next level, whatever term you use. It is cloud native, cloud native has proven that DevOps infrastructure is code is not only legit. It's being operationalized in all enterprises and add security in there, you have DevSecOps, this is the reality and hybrid cloud in particular has been pretty much the consensus is that standard. So our defacto center whatever you want to call it, that's happening. Multicloud are on the horizon. So these new workloads are have these new architectural changes, cloud on premises and edge. This is the number one story. And the number one challenge all enterprises are now working on. How do I build the architecture for the cloud on premises and edge? This is forcing the DevOps team to flex and build new apps. Can you guys talk about that particular trend? And is it, and is that relevant here? >> Yeah, I, I now talk about really storage anywhere and cloud anywhere and and really the key concept is edge to go to cloud. I mean, we all understand now that the edge will host a lot of that time and the edge is many different things. I mean, it's obviously a smartphone, whatever that is, but it's also factories, it's also production. It's also, you know, moving moving machinery, trains, planes, satellites that that's all the edge, cars obviously. And a lot of that I will be both produced and process there, but from the edge who will want to be able to send the data for analysis, for backup, for logging to a call, and that call could be regional, maybe not, you know, one call for the whole planet, but maybe one corporate region the state in the U.S. And then from there you will also want to push some of the data to public cloud. One of the thing that we see more and more is that the D.R that has centered the disaster recovery is not another physical data center. It's actually the cloud, and that's a very efficient infrastructure very cost efficient, especially. So really it, it, it's changing the paradigm on how you think about storage because you really need to integrate these three layers in a consistent approach especially around the topic of security because you want the data to be secure all along the way. And data is not just data, its data, and who can access the data, who can modify the data what are the conditions that allow modification all automatically erasure of the data? In some cases, it's super important that the data automatically erased after 10 years and all this needs to be transported from edge to core to cloud. So that that's one of the aspects. Another aspects that resonates for me with what you said is a word you didn't say, but it's actually crucial this whole revolution. It's Kubernetes I mean, Kubernetes is in now a mature technology, and it's, it's just, you know the next level of automatized operation for distributed system, which we didn't have 5 or 10 years ago. And that is so powerful that it's going to allow application developers to develop much faster system that can be distributed again edge to go to cloud, because it's going to be an underlying technology that spans the three layers. >> Chris, your thoughts hybrid cloud. I've been, I've been having questions with the HPE folks for God years and years on hybrid clouds, now here. >> Right (chuckles) >> Well, you know, and, and it's exciting in a layout right, so you look at like a, whether it be enterprise virtualization, that is a scale-out general purpose virtualization workloads whether it be analytic workloads, whether it be no data protection is a paramount to all of this, orchestration is paramount. If you look at that DevSecOps, absolutely. I mean, securing the actual data the digital last set is, is absolutely paramount. And if you look at how we do this look at the investments we're making, we're making enough and look at the collaborative platform development which goes to our partnership with Scality. It is, we're providing them an integral aspect of everything we do, whether we're bringing in Ezmeral which is our software we use for orchestration look at the veneer of its control plane, controlling Kubernetes. Being able to actually control the active clusters and the actual backing store for all the analytics that we just talked about. Whether it be a web-scale app that is traditionally using a politics namespace and now been modernized and take advantage of newer technologies running an NBME burst buffers or a hundred gig networks with Slingshot network of 200 and 400 gigabit looking at how do we actually get the actual analytics, the workload to the CPU and have it attached to the data at risk. Where's the data, how do we land the data? How do we actually align, essentially locality, locality of the actual asset to the computer. And this is where, you know, we can look leverage whether it be a Zair or Google or name your favorite hybrid, hyperscaler, leverage those technologies leveraging the actual persistent store. And this is where Scality is, with this object store capability has it been an industry trendsetter, setting the actual landscape of how provide an object store on premise and hybrid cloud run it in a public cloud, but being able to facilitate data mobility and tie it back to, and tie it back to an application. And this is where a lot of things have changed in the world of analytics, because the applications that you, the newer technologies that are coming on the market have taken advantage of this particular protocol as threes. So they can do web scale massively parallel concurrent workloads. >> You know what let's get into the announcement. I love cool and relevant products. And I think this hits the mark. Scality you guys have Artesca, which is just announced. And I think it, you know, we obviously we reported on it. You guys have a lightweight true enterprise grade object store software for Kubernetes. This is the announcement, Jerome, tell us about it. What's the big deal? Cool and relevant, come on, this is cool. Right, tell us. >> I'm super excited. I'm not sure, if you can see it as well on the screen, but I'm super, super excited. You know, we, we introduced the ring 11 years ago and they says our biggest announcements for the past 11 years. So yes, do pay attention. And, you know, after, after looking at, at all these trends and understanding where we see the future going. We decided that it was time to embark (indistinct) So there's not one line of code that's the same as our previous generation product. They will both exist, they both have a space in the market. And Artesca was specifically designed for this cloud native era. And what we see is that people want something that's lightweight especially because it had to go to the edge. They still want the enterprise grid that Scality is known for. And it has to be modern. What we really mean by modern is, we see object storage now being the primary storage for many application more and more applications. And so we have to be able to deliver the performance, that primary storage expects. This idea of a Scality of serving primary storage is actually not completely new. When we launched Scality 10 years ago, the first application that we were supporting was consumer email for which we were, and we are still today, the primary storage. So we have, we know what it is to be the primary store. We know what's the level of reliability you need to hit. We know what, what latency means and latency is different from throughput, you really need to optimize both. And I think that still today we're the only object storage company that protects data from both replication and original encoding Because we understand that replication is faster, but the original encoding is more better, and more, of file where fast internet latency doesn't matter so much. So we we've been being all that experience, but really rethinking of product for that new generation that really is here now. And so where we're truly excited, I guess people a bit more about the product. It's a software, Scality is a software company and that's why we love to partner with HPE who's producing amazing servers, you know for the record and the history. The very first deployment of Scality in 2010 was on the HP servers. So this is a long love story here. And so to come back to our desk is lightweight in the sense that it's easy to use. We can start small, we can start from just one server or one VM I mean, you would start really small, but he can grow infinitely. The fact that we start small, we didn't, you know limit the technology because of that. So you can start from one to many and it's cloud native in the sense that it's completely Kubernetes compatible it's Kubernetes office traded. It will deploy on many Kubernetes distributions. We're talking obviously with Ezmeral we're also talking with zoo and with the other all those of communities distribution it will also be able to be run in the cloud. Now, I'm not sure that there will be many true production deployment of Artesca going the cloud, because you already have really good object storage by the cloud providers but when you are developing something and you want to test that, you know just doing it in the cloud is very practical. So you'll be able to deploy our Kubernetes cloud distribution, and it's more than object storage in the sense that it's application centric. A lot of our work is actually validating that our storage is fit for this single purpose application. And making sure that we understand the requirement of these application, that we can guide our customers on how to deploy. And it's really designed to be the primary storage for these new workloads. >> The big part of the news is your relationship with Hewlett Packard Enterprise is some exclusivity here as part of this and as you mentioned the relationship goes back many, many years. We've covered the, your relationship in the past. Chris also, you know, we cover HP like a blanket. This is big news for HPE as well. >> This is very big news. >> What is the relationship, talk about this exclusivity Could you share about the partnership and the exclusivity piece? >> Well, there's the partnership expands into the pan HPE portfolio. we look, we made a massive investment in edge IOT device. So we actually have how did we align the cost to the demand. Our customers come to us, wanting to looking at think about what we're doing with Greenlake, like in consumption based modeling. They want to be able to be able to consume the asset without having to do a capital outlay out of the gate. Number two, look at, you know how do you deploy technology, really demand. It depends on the scale, right? So in a lot of your web skill, you know, scale out technologies, it putting them on a diet is challenging. Meaning how skinny can you get it. Getting it down into the 50 terabyte range and then the complexities of those technologies at as you take a day one implementation and scale it out over you know, you know, multiple iterations over quarters, the growth becomes a challenge so working with Scality we, we believe we've actually cracked this nut. We figured out how to a number one, how to start small, but not limit a customer's ability to scale it out incrementally or grotesquely. You can eat depending on the quarters, the month, whatever whatever the workload is, how do you actually align and be able to consume it? So now whether it be on our Edgeline products our DL products go right there, now what that Jerome was talking about earlier you know, we, we, we ship a server every few seconds. That won't be a problem. But then of course, into our density optimized compute with the Apollo products. And this where our two companies have worked in an exclusivity where they scale the software bonds on the HP ecosystem. And then we can, of course provide you, our customers the ability to consume that through our GreenLake financial models or through a CapEx partners. >> Awesome, so Jerome and, and Chris, who's the customer here obviously, there's an exclusive period. Talk about the target customer and how the customers get the product and how they get the software. And how does this exclusivity with HP fit into it? >> Yeah, so there there's really a three types of customers and we've really, we've worked a lot with a company called UseDesign to optimize the user interface for each the types of customers. So we really thought about each customer role and providing with each of them the best product. So the, the first type of customer are application owners who are deploying an application that requires an object storage in the backend, you typically want a simple object store for one application, they want it to be simple and work. Honestly they want no thrill, just want an object store that works. And they want to be able to start as small as they start with their application. Often it's, you know, the first deployment maybe a small deployment, you know applications like a backup like VML, Rubrik, or analytics like (indistinct), file system that now, now available as a software, you know like CGI does a really great departmental NAS that works very well that needs an object store in the backend. Or for high performance computing a wake-up house system is an amazing file system. We will also have vertical application like road peak, for example, who provides origin and the view of the software broadcasters. So all these are application, they request an object store in the backend and you just need a simple high-performance working well object store and I'll discuss perfect for that. Now, the second type of people that we think will be interested by Artesca are essentially developer who are currently developing some capabilities or cloud native application, your next gen. And as part of their development stack, it's getting better and better when you're developing a cloud native application to really target an object storage rather than NFS, as you're persistent. It just, you know, think about generations of technologies and NFS and filesystem were great 25 years ago. I mean, it's an amazing technology. Now, when you want to develop a distributed scalable application object storage is a better fit because it's the same generation. And so same thing, I mean, you know, they're developing something they need an object store that they can develop on. So they want it very lightweight, but they also want the product that their enterprise or their customers will be able to rely on for years and years on. And this guy's really great fit to do that. The third type of customer are more architects, I would say are the architects that are designing a system where they are going to have 50 factories, a thousand planes, a million cars, they are going to have some local storage which will they want to replicate to the core and possibly also to the cloud. And as the design is really new generation workloads that are incredibly distributed but with local storage Artesca are really great for that. >> And tell about the HPE exclusive Chris. What's the, how does that fit in? Do they buy through Scality? Can they get it for the HP? Are you guys working together on how customers can procure it? >> Both ways, yeah both ways they can procure it through Scality. They can secure it through HPE and it's, it's it's the software stack running on our density optimized compute platforms which you would choose and align those and to provide an enterprise quality. Cause if it comes back to it in all of these use cases is how do we align up into a true enterprise stack, bringing about multitenancy bringing about the, the, the fact that you know, if you look at like a local coding one of the things that they're bringing to it, so that we can get down into the DL325. So with the exclusivity, you actually get choice. And that choice comes into our entire portfolio whether it be the Edgeline platform the DL325 AMD processing stack or the Intel 380, or whether it be the Apollos or like I said, there's, there's, there's so many ample choices there that facilitate this, and it's this allows us to align those two strategies. >> Awesome, and I think the Kubernetes piece is really relevant because, you know, I've been interviewing folks practitioners and Kubernetes is very much maturing fast. It's definitely the centerpiece of the cloud native both below the, the line, if you will below under the hood for the, for the infrastructure and then for apps, they want a program on top of it that's critical. I mean, Jerome, this is like, this is the future. >> Yeah, and if you don't mind like to come back to the myth on the exclusivity with HP. So we did a six month exclusive and the very reason we could do this is because HP has such breadth of server portfolio. And so we can go from, you know, really simple, very cheap you know, DL380, machine that we tell us for a few dollars. I mean, it's really like simple system, 50 terabyte. We can have the DL325 that Chris mentioned that is really a powerhouse all NVME, clash over storage is NVME, very fast processors you know, dense, large, large system, like the APOE 4,500. So it's a very large graph of portfolio. We support the whole portfolio and we work together on this. So I want to say that you know, one of the reason I want to send kudos to HP for the breadth of their server line really. As mentioned, Artesca can be ordered from either company. In hand-in-hand together, so anyway, you'll see both of us and our field working incredibly well together. >> Well, just on that point, I think just for clarification was this co-design by Scality and HPE, because Chris you mentioned, you know, the, the configuration of your systems. Can you guys, Chris quickly talk about the design. >> From, from, from the code base the software is entirely designed and developed by Scality, from testing and performance, so this really was a joint work with HP providing both a hardware and manpower so that we could accelerate the testing phase. >> You know, Chris HPE has just been doing such a great job of really focused on this. I know I've been covering it for years before it was fashionable. The idea of apps working no matter where it lives, public cloud, data center, edge. And you mentioned edge line's been around for awhile, you know, app centric, developer friendly, cloud first, has been an HPE kind of guiding first principle for many, many years. >> Well, it has. And, you know, as our CEO here intended, by 2022 everything will be able to be consumed as a service in our portfolio. And then this stack allows us the simplicity and the consumability of the technology and the granulation of it allows us to simplify the installation. Simplify the actual deployment bringing into a cloud ecosystem, but more importantly for the end customer. They simply get an enterprise quality product running on an optimized stack that they can consume through a orchestrated simplistic interface. That customers that's what they're wanting for today's but they come to me and ask, hey how do I need a, I've got this new app, new project. And, you know, it goes back to who's actually coming. It's no longer the IT people who are actually coming to us. It's the lines of business. It's that entire dimension of business owners coming to us, going this is my challenge. And how can you, HPE help us? And we rely on our breadth of technology, but also our breadth of partners to come together in our, of course Scality is hand in hand and our collaborative business unit our collaborative storage product engineering group that actually brought, brought this to market. So we're very excited about this solution. >> Chris, thanks for that input and great insight. Jerome, congratulations on a great partnership with HPE obviously great joint customer base. Congratulations on the product release here. Big moving the ball down the field, as they say. New functionality, clouds, cloud native object store. Phenomenal, so wrap, wrap, wrap up the interview. Tell us your vision for Scality and the future of storage. >> Yeah, I think I started in, Scality is going to be an amazing leader, it is already. But yeah, so, you know I have three things that I think will govern how storage is going. And obviously Marc Andreessen said it software is everywhere and software is eating the world. So definitely that's going to be true in the data center in storage in particular, but the three trends that are more specific are first of all, I think that security performance and agility is now basic expectation. It's, it's not, you know it's not like an additional feature. It's just the basic tables, security performance and our job. The second thing is, and we've talked about it during this conversation is edge to go. You need to think your platform with edge, core and cloud. You know, you, you don't want to have separate systems separate design interface point for edge and then think about the core and then think about cloud, and then think about the diverse power. All this needs to be integrated in a design. And the third thing that I see as a major trend for the next 10 years is data sovereignty. More and more, you need to think about where is the data residing? What are the legal challenges? What is the level of protection, against who are you protected? What is your independence strategy? How do you keep as a company being independent from the people you need to be in the band? And I mean, I say companies, but this is also true for public services. So these, these for me are the three big trends. And I do believe that software defined distributed architecture are necessary for these trends but you also need to think about being truly enterprise grade. and that has been one of our focus with design of Artesca. How do we combine a lightweight product with all of the security requirements and data sovereignty requirements that we expect to have in the next thing? >> That's awesome. Congratulations on the news Scality, Artesca. The big release with HPE exclusive for six months, Chris Tinker, Distinguished Engineer at HPE. Great to see you Jerome Lecat CEO of Scality, great to see you as well. Congratulations on the big news. I'm John Furrier from theCube. Thanks for watching. (uplifting music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Tech spending is poised to rebound as the economy reopens in 2021. CIOs and IT buyers, they expect a 4% increase in 2021 spending based on ETR's latest surveys. And we believe that number will actually be higher, in the six to 7% range even. The big drivers are continued fine tuning of, and investment in digital strategies, for example, cloud security, AI data and automation. Application modernization initiatives continue to attract attention, and we also expect more support with work from home demand, for instance laptops, et cetera. And we're even seeing pent-up demand for data center infrastructure and other major risks to this scenario, they remain the pace of the reopening, of course, no surprise there, however, even if there are speed bumps to the vaccine rollout and achieving herd immunity, we believe tech spending will grow at least two points faster than GDP, which is currently forecast at 4.1%. Hello and welcome to this week's (indistinct) on Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we want to update you on our latest macro view of the market, and then highlight a few key sectors that we've been watching, namely cloud with a particular drill down on Microsoft and AWS, security, database, and then we'll look at Dell and VMware as a proxy for the data center. Now here's a look at what IT buyers and CIOs think. This chart shows the latest survey data from ETR and it compares the December results with the year earlier survey. Consistent with our earlier reporting, we see a kind of a swoosh-like recovery with a slower first half and accelerating in the second half. And we think that CIOs are being prudently conservative, 'cause if GDP grows at 4% plus, we fully expect tech spending to outperform. Now let's look at the factors that really drive some of our thinking on that. This is data that we've shown before it asks buyers if they're initiating any of the following strategies in the coming quarter, in the face of the pandemic and you can see there's no change in work from home, really no change in business travel, but hiring freezes, freezing new deployments, these continue to trend down. New deployments continue to be up, layoffs are trending down and hiring is also up. So these are all good signs. Now having said that, one part of our scenario assumes workers return and the current 75% of employees that work from home will moderate by the second half to around 35%. Now that's double the historical average, and that large percentage, that will necessitate continued work from home infrastructure spend, we think and drive HQ spending as well in the data center. Now the caveat of course is that lots of companies are downsizing corporate headquarters, so that could weigh on this dual investment premise that we have, but generally with the easy compare in these tailwinds, we expect solid growth in this coming year. Now, what sectors are showing growth? Well, the same big four that we've been talking about for 10 months, machine intelligence or AI/ML, RPA and broader automation agendas, these lead the pack along with containers and cloud. These four, you can see here above that red dotted line at 40%, that's a 40% net score which is a measure of spending momentum. Now cloud, it's the most impressive because what you see in this chart is spending momentum or net score in the vertical axis and market share or pervasiveness in the data center on the horizontal axis. Now cloud it stands out, as it's has a large market share and it's got spending velocity tied to it. So, I mean that is really impressive for that sector. Now, what we want to do here is do a quick update on the big three cloud revenue for 2020. And so we're looking back at 2020, and this really updates the chart that we showed last week at our CUBE on Cloud event, the only differences Azure, Microsoft reported and this chart shows IaaS estimates for the big three, we had had Microsoft Azure in Q4 at 6.8 billion, it came in at 6.9 billion based on our cloud model. Now the points we previously made on this chart, they stand out. AWS is the biggest, and it's growing more slowly but it throws off more absolute dollars, Azure grew 48% sent last quarter, we had it slightly lower and so we've adjusted that and that's incredible. And Azure continues to close that gap on AWS and we'll see how AWS and Google do when they report next week. We definitely think based on Microsoft result that AWS has upside to these numbers, especially given the Q4 push, year end, and the continued transition to cloud and even Google we think can benefit. Now what we want to do is take a closer look at Microsoft and AWS and drill down into those two cloud leaders. So take a look at this graphic, it shows ETR's survey data for net score across Microsoft's portfolio, and we've selected a couple of key areas. Virtually every sector is in the green and has forward momentum relative to the October survey. Power Automate, which is RPA, Teams is off the chart, Azure itself we've reported on that, is the linchpin of Microsoft's innovation strategy, serverless, AI analytics, containers, they all have over 60% net scores. Skype is the only dog and Microsoft is doing a fabulous job of transitioning its customers to Teams away from Skype. I think there are still people using Skype. Yes, I know it's crazy. Now let's take a look at the AWS portfolio drill down, there's a similar story here for Amazon and virtually all sectors are well into the 50% net scores or above. Yeah, it's lower than Microsoft, but still AWS, very, very large, so across the board strength for the company and it's impressive for a $45 billion cloud company. Only Chime is lagging behind AWS and maybe, maybe AWS needs a Teams-like version to migrate folks off of Chime. Although you do see it's an uptick there relative to the last survey, but still not burning the house down. Now let's take a look at security. It's a sector that we've highlighted for several quarters, and it's really undergoing massive change. This of course was accelerated by the work from home trend, and this chart ranks the CIO and CSO priorities for security, and here you see identity access management stands out. So this bodes well for the likes of Okta and SailPoint, of course endpoint security also ranks highly, and that's good news for a company like CrowdStrike or Forescout, Carbon Black, which was acquired by VMware. And you can see network security is right there as well, I mean, it's all kind of network security but Cisco, Palo Alto, Fortinet are some of the names that we follow closely there, and cloud security, Microsoft, Amazon and Zscaler also stands out. Now, what we want to do now is drill in a little bit and take a look at the vendor map for security. So this chart shows one of our favorite views, it's getting net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis and market share on the horizontal. Okta, note in the upper right of that little chart there that table, Okta remains the highest net score of all the players that we're showing here, SailPoint and CrowdStrike definitely looming large, Microsoft continues to be impressive because of its both presence, you can see that dot in the upper right there and it's momentum, and you know, for context, we've included some of the legacy names like RSA and McAfee and Symantec, you could see them in the red as is IBM, and then the rest of the pack, they're solidly in the green, we've said this before security remains a priority, it's a very strong market, CIOs and CSOs have to spend on it, they're accelerating that spending, and it's a fragmented space with lots of legitimate players, and it's undergoing a major change, and with the SolarWinds hack, it's on everyone's radar even more than we've seen with earlier high profile breaches, we have some other data that we'll share in the future, on that front, but in the interest of time, we'll press on here. Now, one of the other sectors that's undergoing significant changes, database. And so if you take a look at the latest survey data, so we're showing that same xy-view, the first thing that we call your attention to is Snowflake, and we've been reporting on this company for years now, and sharing ETR data for well over a year. The company continues to impress us with spending momentum, this last survey it increased from 75% last quarter to 83% in the latest survey. This is unbelievable because having now done this for quite some time, many, many quarters, these numbers are historically not sustainable and very rarely do you see that kind of increase from the mid-70s up into the '80s. So now AWS is the other big call out here. This is a company that has become a database powerhouse, and they've done that from a standing start and they've become a leader in the market. Google's momentum is also impressive, especially with it's technical chops, it gets very, very high marks for things like BigQuery, and so you can see it's got momentum, it does not have the presence in the market to the right, that for instance AWS and Microsoft have, and that brings me to Microsoft is also notable, because it's so large and look at the momentum, it's got very, very strong spending momentum as well, so look, this database market it's seeing dramatically different strategies. Take Amazon for example, it's all about the right tool for the right job, they get a lot of different data stores with specialized databases, for different use cases, Aurora for transaction processing, Redshift for analytics, I want a key value store, hey, some DynamoDB, graph database? You got little Neptune, document database? They've got that, they got time series database, so very, very granular portfolio. You got Oracle on the other end of the spectrum. It along with several others are converging capabilities and that's a big trend that we're seeing across the board, into, sometimes we call it a mono database instead of one database fits all. Now Microsoft's world kind of largely revolves around SQL and Azure SQL but it does offer other options. But the big difference between Microsoft and AWS is AWS' approach is really to maximize the granularity in the technical flexibility with fine-grained access to primitives and APIs, that's their philosophy, whereas Microsoft with synapse for example, they're willing to build that abstraction layer as a means of simplifying the experiences. AWS, they've been reluctant to do this, their approach favors optionality and their philosophy is as the market changes, that will give them the ability to move faster. Microsoft's philosophy favors really abstracting that complexity, now that adds overhead, but it does simplify, so these are two very interesting counter poised strategies that we're watching and we think there's room for both, they're just not necessarily one better than the other, it's just different philosophies and different approaches. Now Snowflake for its part is building a data cloud on top of AWS, Google and Azure, so it's another example of adding value by abstracting away the underlying infrastructure complexity and it obviously seems to be working well, albeit at a much smaller scale at this point. Now let's talk a little bit about some of the on-prem players, the legacy players, and we'll use Dell and VMware as proxies for these markets. So what we're showing here in this chart is Dell's net scores across select parts of its portfolio and it's a pretty nice picture for Dell, I mean everything, but Desktop is showing forward momentum relative to previous surveys, laptops continue to benefit from the remote worker trend, in fact, PCs actually grew this year if you saw our spot on Intel last week, PCs had peaked, PC volume at peaked in 2011 and it actually bumped up this year but it's not really, we don't think sustainable, but nonetheless it's been a godsend during the pandemic as data center infrastructure has been softer. Dell's cloud is up and that really comprises a bunch of infrastructure along with some services, so that's showing some strength that both, look at storage and server momentum, they seem to be picking up and this is really important because these two sectors have been lagging for Dell. But this data supports our pent-up demand premise for on-prem infrastructure, and we'll see if the ETR survey which is forward-looking translates into revenue growth for Dell and others like HPE. Now, what about Dell's favorite new toy over at VMware? Let's take a look at that picture for VMware, it's pretty solid. VMware cloud on AWS, we've been reporting on that for several quarters now, it's showing up in the ETR survey and it is well, it's somewhat moderating, it's coming down from very high spending momentum, so it's still, we think very positive. NSX momentum is coming back in the survey, I'm not sure what happened there, but it's been strong, VMware's on-prem cloud with VCF VMware Cloud Foundation, that's strong, Tanzu was a bit surprising because containers are very hot overall, so that's something we're watching, seems to be moderating, maybe the market says okay, you did great VMware, you're embracing containers, but Tanzu is maybe not the, we'll see, we'll see how that all plays out. I think it's the right strategy for VMware to embrace that container strategy, but we said remember, everybody said containers are going to kill VMware, well, VMware rightly, they've embraced cloud with VMware cloud on AWS, they're embracing containers. So we're seeing much more forward-thinking strategies and management philosophies. Carbon Black, that benefits from the security tailwind, and then the core infrastructure looks good, vSAN, vSphere and VDI. So the big thing that we're watching for VMware, is of course, who's going to be the next CEO. Is it going to be Zane Rowe, who's now the acting CEO? And of course he's been the CFO for years. Who's going to get that job? Will it be Sanjay Poonen? The choice I think is going to say much about the direction of VMware going forward in our view. Succeeding Pat Gelsinger is like, it's going to be like following Peyton Manning at QB, but this summer we expect Dell to spin out VMware or do some other kind of restructuring, and restructure both VMware and Dell's balance sheet, it wants to get both companies back to investment grade and it wants to set a new era in motion or it's going to set a new era in motion. Now that financial transaction, maybe it does call for a CFO in favor of such a move and can orchestrate such a move, but certainly Sanjay Poonen has been a loyal soldier and he's performed very well in his executive roles, not just at VMware, but previous roles, SAP and others. So my opinion there's no doubt he's ready and he's earned it, and with, of course with was no offense to Zane Rowe by the way, he's an outstanding executive too, but the big questions for Dell and VMware's what will the future of these two companies look like? They've dominated, VMware especially has dominated the data center for a decade plus, they're responding to cloud, and some of these new trends, they've made tons of acquisitions and Gelsinger has orchestrated TAM expansion. They still got to get through paying down the debt so they can really double down on an innovation agenda from an R&D perspective, that's been somewhat hamstrung and to their credit, they've done a great job of navigating through Dell's tendency to take VMware cash and restructure its business to go public, and now to restructure both companies to do the pivotal acquisition, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera and clean up it's corporate structure. So it's been a drag on VMware's ability to use its free cash flow for R&D, and again it's been very impressive what it's been able to accomplish there. On the Dell side of the house, it's R&D largely has gone to kind of new products, follow-on products and evolutionary kind of approach, and it would be nice to see Dell be able to really double down on the innovation agenda especially with the looming edge opportunity. Look R&D is the lifeblood of a tech company, and there's so many opportunities across the clouds and at The Edge we've talked this a lot, I haven't talked much about or any about IBM, we wrote a piece last year on IBM's innovation agenda, really hinges on its R&D. It seems to be continuing to favor dividends and stock buybacks, that makes it difficult for the company to really invest in its future and grow, its promised growth, Ginni Rometty promised growth, that never really happened, Arvind Krishna is now promising growth, hopefully it doesn't fall into the same pattern of missed promises, and my concern there is that R&D, you can't just flick a switch and pour money and get a fast return, it takes years to get that. (Dave chuckles) We talked about Intel last week, so similar things going on, but I digress. Look, these guys are going to require in my view, VMware, Dell, I'll put HPE in there, they're going to require organic investment to get back to growth, so we're watching these factors very, very closely. Okay, got to wrap up here, so we're seeing IT spending growth coming in as high as potentially 7% this year, and it's going to be powered by the same old culprits, cloud, AI, automation, we'll be doing an RPA update soon here, application modernization, and the new work paradigm that we think will force increased investments in digital initiatives. The doubling of the expectation of work from home is significant, and so we see this hybrid world, not just hybrid cloud but hybrid work from home and on-prem, this new digital world, and it's going to require investment in both cloud and on-prem, and we think that's going to lift both boats but cloud, clearly the big winner. And we're not by any means suggesting that their growth rates are going to somehow converge, they're not, cloud will continue to outpace on-prem by several hundred basis points, throughout the decade we think. And AWS and Microsoft are in the top division of that cloud bracket. Security markets are really shifting and we continue to like the momentum of companies in identity and endpoint and cloud security, especially the pure plays like CrowdStrike and Okta and SailPoint, and Zscaler and others that we've mentioned over the past several quarters, but CSOs tell us they want to work with the big guys too, because they trust them, especially Palo Alto networks, Cisco obviously in the mix, their security business continues to outperform the balance of Cisco's portfolio, and these companies, they have resources to withstand market shifts and we'll do a deeper drill down at the security soon and update you on other trends, on other companies in that space. Now the database world, it continues to heat up, I used to say on theCUBE all the time that decade and a half ago database was boring and now database is anything but, and thank you to cloud databases and especially Snowflake, it's data cloud vision, it's simplicity, we're seeing lots of different ways though, to skin the cat, and while there's disruption, we believe Oracle's position is solid because it owns Mission-Critical, that's its stronghold, and we really haven't seen those workloads migrate into the cloud, and frankly, I think it's going to be hard to rest those away from Oracle. Now, AWS and Microsoft, they continue to be the easy choice for a lot of their customers. Microsoft migrating its software state, AWS continues to innovate, we've got a lot of database choices, the right tool for the right job, so there's lots of innovation going on in databases beyond these names as well, and we'll continue to update you on these markets shortly. Now, lastly, it's quite notable how well some of the legacy names have navigated through COVID. Sure, they're not rocketing like many of the work-from-home stocks, but they've been able to thus far survive, and in the example of Dell and VMware, the portfolio diversity has been a blessing. The bottom line is the first half of 2021 seems to be shaping up as we expected, momentum for the strongest digital plays, low interest rates helping large established companies hang in there with strong balance sheets, and large customer bases. And what will be really interesting to see is what happens coming out of the pandemic. Will the rich get richer? Yeah, well we think so. But we see the legacy players adjusting their business models, embracing change in the market and steadily moving forward. And we see at least a dozen new players hitting the radar that could become leaders in the coming decade, and as always, we'll be highlighting many of those in our future episodes. Okay, that's it for now, listen, these episodes remember, they're all available as podcasts, all you got to do is search for Breaking Analysis Podcasts and you'll you'll get them so please listen, like them, if you like them, share them, really, I always appreciate that, I publish weekly on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com, and really would appreciate your comments and always do in my LinkedIn posts, or you can always DM me @dvellante or email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com, and tell me what you think is happening out there. Don't forget to check out ETR+ for all the survey action, this is David Vellante, thanks for watching theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Stay safe, we'll see you next time. (downbeat music)

>> Introducer: From the CUBE studios in Palo Alto and in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi everybody this is Dave Volante. Welcome to the special CUBE Conversation. I'm really excited to invite in my mentor and friend. We go way back. Fred Moore is here. He's the president of Horizon Information Strategies. We going to talk about managing data in the zettabyte era. Fred, I think when we first met, we were talking about like the megabyte era. >> Right, exactly. I think back then we had, you know, maybe 10 bytes in our telephone and one on the wristwatch, you know, but now you can put a whole data center in a single cartridge of tape and take off. Things that really changed. >> It's pretty amazing. And of course, for those who don't know Fred, he was the first a systems engineer at Storage Tech. And as I said, somebody who taught me a lot in my early days, of course he's very famous for the term that everybody uses today. Backup is one thing, recovery is everything. And Fred just wrote, you know, this fantastic paper. He's done this year after year after year. He's just dug in, he's a clear thinker, strategic planner with a technical bent in a business bent. You're like one of those five tool baseball players, Fred. But tell me about this paper. Why, did you write it? >> Well, the reason I wrote that is there's been so much focus in the last year or so on the archive component of the storage hierarchy. And the thing that's happening, we're generating data lots faster than we're analyzing it. So it's piling up being unanalyzed and sitting basically untapped for years at a time. So that has posed a big challenge for people. The other thing that got me deeper into this last year was the Hyperscale market. They are, those people are so big in terms of footprint and infrastructure that they can no longer keep everything on disk. It's just economically not possible. The energy consumption per disk, the infrastructure costs, the frequency of, you know, taking a disc out every three, four or five years for just for replacement, has made it very difficult to do that. So Hyperscale has gone to tape in a big way, and it's kind of where most of the tape business in the future is going to wind up in these Hyperscale businesses. >> Right. >> We know tape doesn't exist in the home. It doesn't exist in a small data center. It's only a large scale data center technology, but that whole cosmos led me into the archive space and in a need for a new archive technology beyond tape. >> So, I want to set up the premise here. Just going to pull this out of your paper. It says a 60% of all data is archival, and could reach 80% or more by 2024, making archival data by far the largest storage class. And given this trajectory, the traditional storage hierarchy paradigm is going to to need to disrupt itself. And quickly we're going to talk about that. That really is the premise of your paper here, isn't it? >> It is, you know, to do all this with traditional technologies is going to get very painful for a variety of reasons. So the stage is set for a new tier and a new technology to appear in the next five years. Fortunately, I'm actually working with somebody who is after this in a big way, and in a different way than what you and I know. So I think there is some hope here that we can redefine and really add a new tier down at the bottom. You see it kind of emerging on that picture of the deep archive tier it's. Beginning to show up now and it's, you know, infinite storage. I mean, if you look at major league sports, the world series and Superbowl, you know, that data will never be deleted. It'll be here forever. It'll be used periodically based on circumstances. >> Yeah, well, we've got that pyramid chart up here. I mean, you invented this chart, essentially. At least you were the first person that ever showed it to me. I honestly think that you first created this concept where you had a high performance tier, and a high cost per bit, and then an archive tier. Maybe it wasn't this granular, you know, back in the '70s and '80s? But it's constantly been changing with different media types and different use cases. >> You know, you're right. I mean, and you all know this because you know, when storage deck introduced the nearline architecture, nearline set in between online and offline storage, we called it nearline, and trademarked that term. So that was the tape library concept to move data from offline status to online status, with a robotic library. So that brought up that third tier online, nearline, and offline, but you're right. This pyramid has evolved and morphed into several things. And, you know, I keep it alive. Somebody said, I'll have a pyramid on my tombstone instead of my name when I go down. (both chuckles) But it's really the heart and soul of the infrastructure for data. And then out of this comes all the management and security, the deletion, the immutable storage concepts, the whole thing starts here. So it's like your house, you got to have a foundation, then you can build everything on top of it. >> Well, and as you pointed out in your paper, a minute ago, it always comes down to economics. So I want to bring up the sort of 10 year expected cost of ownership the TCO for the three levels you got all disk, you got all cloud and you got LTO and you got the different aspects of the cost. The purple is always the biggest piece of cost. It's the labor costs. But of course, you know, in cloud, you've got the big media cost because they've done so much automation. I wonder if you could take us through this slide, what are the key takeaways there? >> Well, you know the thing that hurts here with all these technologies is, as you can see up on top up there, what the key issues are with this and the staff and personnel. So the less people you have to manage data, the better off you are. And then, you know, it's pretty high for disk compared to a lot of things to do on desk, but lack of manage a lot of, you know, sadly what you and I had to deal with years ago and provision kind of, I mean, a lot of this stuff is just labor intensive. The further you get, the further down the pyramid and you also get less labor intensive storage. And that helps then you get a lower cost for energy and cost of ownership. The TCO thing is kind of taking on a new meaning. I hate to put up a TCO chart in some regards, because it's all based on what your input variables are. So you can decide something different, but we've tried to normalize all kinds of pricing and come up with everything. And the cloud is a big question for most people as to how does it stack up. And if you don't ever touch the data in the cloud, you know, the price comes way down. If you want to start moving data in and out of the cloud, you're going to have to ante up in a big way like that. But, you know we're going to see dollar a terabyte storage prices down at the bottom of this pyramid here in the next five years. But hey, you can get down to four or five terabyte with drives media in libraries tape, just entire flash and certainly higher than that. But you know, we're going to have the race to a dollar a terabyte, total TCO cost here in 2025. >> So when Amazon announced, they just announced a glacier. Everybody said, okay, what is that? Is that tape is that, you know, this spun down disk, cause it took a while to get it back. But you're kind of seeing that tape technology as you said, really move into the Hyperscale space and that's going to accommodate this massive, you know, lower part of the pyramid, isn't it? >> Exactly. Yeah. And we don't have a spin down disk solution today. I was actually on the board of a company that started that called Copay and years ago, right up here near Boulder. >> You watch him (both chuckles) You absolutely right. And a few other people that, you know also, but the spin down disk never made it. And you know, you can spin up and down on a desk on your desktop computer, but doing that in a data center, then on a fiber channel drive never made it. So we don't have a spin down disk to do that. The archive space is kind of dominated by very high capacity disc and then tape. And most of the archive data in the world today, unfortunately sits on display. It's not used and spinning seven by 24, three 65 and not touch much. So that's a bad economic move, but customers just found that easier to handle by doing that then going back to tape. So we've got a lot of data stored in the wrong place from a total economics point of view. >> But the Hyperscalers are solving this problem, or they're not through automation. And, you know, you referenced storage, tiering, really trying to take the labor cost out. How are they doing? Are they doing a good job? >> They've done really well taking the labor costs down, I mean, they have optimized every screw, nut and bolt in the 42 chassis that you could imagine to make it as clean as possible to do that. So they've done a whole lot to bring that cost down, but still the magnitude of these data centers, we're going to finish the year 2020 with about 570 Hyperscale data centers. So it's going right now around the world. You know, each one of these things is 350 400,000 square feet, and up of race wars space. And the economics just don't allow you to keep putting inactive data on spinning disk. We don't have to spin down disk, tape You know, I feel like the only guy in the industry that says this sometimes, but, you know, tapes had a, you know, a renaissance. That people don't appreciate in terms of reliability, throughput, you know, tapes three orders of reliability higher than disc right now. And most people don't know this. So tape's viable, the Hyperscalers see that. And read one Hyperscalers or you know, by over a million pieces of LTO tape last year alone. Just to handle this, you know, be the pressure valve to take all of this inactive stuff off of the gigantic disc farms that they have. >> Well, so let's talk about that a little bit. So you just try to keep it simple. You've got, you know, flash disk and tape. It feels like disc is getting squeezed. We know what flash has done in terms of eating into disc. And you see in that, in the storage market generally, it's soft right now. And I've posited that a lot of that is the headroom that data centers have with flash, is they don't have to buy spindles anymore for performance reasons. And the market is soft. Only pure is showing consistent growth, and ends up a little bit, cause because of mainframe, you've got Dell popping back and forth, but generally speaking, the primary storage market is not a great place to be right now, all the actions and sort of secondary storage and data protection. And so just going to get squeezed, and you mentioned tape, you said that if your only person talking about it, but you said in your paper, you know, it's sequential. So time to first bite is, is sometimes problematic, but you can front end a tape with cash. You can use algorithms and, you know, smart scans and to really address that problem. And dramatically lower the cost. Plus you could do things like you tell me Fred, you're the technologists here, but you're going to have multiple heads things that you can't necessarily do in a hermetically sealed disc drive. >> (chuckles) You can. And what you just described is called the active archive layer in the pyramid. So when you front end a tape library with a disk array for a cash buffer, you create an active archive and that data will sit in there three or four or five days before it gets demoted based on inactivity. So, you know for repetitive use and you're going to get dislike performance for tape data, and that's the same cash in concept that deserve systems had 30 years ago. So that does work and the active archive has got a lot of momentum right now. There's right here near me, where I live in Boulder. We have the Active Archive Alliances headquarters, and I get to do their annual report every year. And this whole active archives thing is a big way to make and overcome that time, the first bike problem that we've had in tape. And we'll have for quite a while. >> In your paper, you've talked about some of the use cases and workloads and you laid out, you know basically taking the pyramid and saying, okay based on the workload, some certain percentage should be up at the top of the pyramid for the high performance stuff. And of course lower for the, you know, the less, you know, important traditional workloads, et cetera. And it was striking to see the Delta between annual, the highest performance we had 70% , I think was up in the top of the pyramid versus, you know the last use case. So in you're talking about what it costs to store a zettabyte in services is that if I talk about 108 million at the high end versus a about 11 or 12 million, so huge Delta 10 X Delta between the top and the bottom based on those, you know allocations based on the workload. >> Yeah, I tried to get at the value of tiered storage based on your individual workload in your business. So I looked at five different workloads, the top one that you referenced. That was in there at 108 million, you know, is the HPC market. I mean, when I visited a few of the HPC people, you know, their DOD agencies in many cases, you know that and I threw the pyramid up. The first thing they would say our permanents inverted. You know (chuckles), all of our archive data is about 10%. You know, we were all flash as much as we can. And we have a little bit archived, we're in constant. Simulation and compute mode and producing results like crazy from the data. So we do an IO, bring in maybe a whole file at a time and compute for minutes before we come up with an answer. So just the reverse. And then I got to look into all the different workloads talking to people, and that's how we develop these profiles. >> So let's pull up this future of the storage hierarchy, was again kind of of talks to the premise of your paper. Walk us through this like, what changes should we be expecting, and you got air gap in here. We're going to, I'm going to ask you about remastering and lifespan, but take us through this. >> Yeah, you know, the traditional chart that you had up on the first big year had four tiers, you know, two disturbs and solid state at the top. And then the big archive tier, which is kind of everything falling down into tape at this point. But you know again, tape has some challenges. You know time to first bite and sequential access on. And then when we couple using tape or disc as an archive, most of that data that's archival is captured as unstructured data. So we don't have, we don't have tags, we don't have metadata, we don't have indices, and that has led to the movement for object storage, to be a primary, maybe in the next five years, the primary format in store archived data, because it's got all that information inside of it. So now we have a way to search things and we can get to objects, but in the interim, you know, it's hard to find and search out things that are unstructured and, you know, most estimates would say 80% of the world's data is at least that much is unstructured. So archives are hard to find once you store it, there's one storing is one thing, retrieving it is another thing. And that's led to the formation of another layer in the story tier. It's going to be data that doesn't have to be remastered or converted to a new technology. in the case of the disc, every three, four or five years or tape drive every eight, maybe 10 years take large lost. Kate Media can go 30 years, but with all new modern tape media, but unfortunately, you know, the underlying drive doesn't go back that far, you can't support that many different versions. So the media life is actually longer than it needs to be. So the stage is set for a new technology to appear down here to deal with this archives. So it'll have faster access will not need to be remastered every five or 10 years, but you'll have, you know, a 50 year life in here. And I believe me, I've been looking for a long time to be able find something like this. And, you know we have a shot at this now, and I'm actually working with the technology that could pull this off. >> Well, it's interesting also as well, you calling out the air gap and the chart we go back to our mainframe guesses, is not a lot we haven't seen before, you know, maybe data D duplication, but you know, the adversary has become a lot more sophisticated. And so air gaps and, you know, ransomware on everybody's mind today, but you've sort of highlighted three layers of the pyramid that are actually candidates for that air gapping. >> Yeah. The active archive up there, of course, you know, with the disk and tape combined, then just pure tape. And then this new technology, which can be removable. You know, when you have removability you create an air gap. little did we know when you and I met that removability would be important to take. We thought we were trying to get rid of the Chevy truck access method, and now without electricity with a terrorist attack and pandemic or whatever. The fastest way to move data is put it on a truck and get it out of town. So that has got renewed life right now. Removability much to my shock from where we started. >> You talked about remastering and you said it's a costly labor intensive process that typically migrates previously archived data to new media every five to 10 years. First of all, explain why you have to do that and how a data center operators can solve that problem. >> Yeah. And let's start with data where most of it sits today on described, you know it describes useful life is four to five years before it either fails or is replaced. That's pretty much common now. So then they have to start replacing these things. And that means you have to copy, you know, read the data off the disk and write it somewhere else, big data move. And as the years go by that amount of data to revamp or gets bigger and bigger. So, I mean, you can do the math as you well know, you want to move, you know, 50 petabytes of data. It's going to take several weeks to do that electronically. So this gets to be a real time consuming effort. So most data centers that I've seen will keep about one fifth of their disposal every year migrating to a new technology, just kind of rolling forward as they go like that rather than do the whole thing every five years. So that's the new build in the disc world. And then for tape the drive stay in there longer, you know the LTO family drives a good read. You know two generations back from the current one that's been there. They cut that off a year ago. They'll go back to something like this soon. But you know, you can go into 10 years on a tape drive. The media life because of very unfair right media, which was already oxidized the last 30 years or more. The old media metal particle was not oxidized. So, you know, the oxidized flake, the particles would fall off people will say shit. I've had this in here eight years, you know, and it's kind flake it I put it back in. So that didn't work well. But now that we had various Verite Media, it was all oxidized, the media lives skyrocket. So that was the whole trick with tape to get into something that was preoxidized before time could cause it to decay. So the remastering is a lot, is less on tape by two to one to three to one, but still when you've got petabytes, maybe an exabyte sitting on tape in the future, that's going to take a long time to do that. >> Right. >> So remastering you'd love a way to scale capacity without having to continue to move the data to something new ever so often. >> So my last question is you've , you know, you went from a technical role into a strategic planning role, which of course the more technical you are in that role, the better off you're going to be. You don't understand that the guardrails, but you've always had a sort of telescope in the industry and you close the paper and it's kind of where I want to end here on, you know, what's ahead. And you talk about some of the technologies that obviously have legs, like three D NAND and obviously magnetic storage. You got optical in here, but then you've got all these other ones that you even mentioned, you know, don't hold your breath waiting for these multilayer photonics and dedic DNA. What class media, holographic storage, quantum storage we do a lot about quantum. What should we be thinking about and expecting as observers as to, you know, new technologies that might drive some innovation in the storage business? >> Well, I've listed the ones that are in the lab that have any life at all, right on this paper. So, you know can kind of take your pick at what goes on there. I mean, optical disk has not made it in the data center. We talked about it for 35 years. We invested in it in storage deck and never saw the light of day. You know, optical disk has remained an entertainment technology throughout the last 35 years. And the bigger rate is very low compared to data center technology. So, you know optical would have to take a huge step going forward. We got a lot of legs left in the solid state business. That's really active SSB, the whole nonvolatile memory spaces. Probably not 45% of the total disc shipments in terms of units, from what it was at it's high and in 2010. Unbelievable though. You know, in disc shipment 650 million drives a year announced just under 400, 35,400. So flashes has taken this stuff away, like crazy. Tape shouldn't be taking just away, but the tape industry doesn't do a very effective job of marketing itself. Most people still don't know what's going on with tape. They're still looking out of the roof, still looking out of the rear view mirror at a tape, as opposed to the front windshield. We see all the new things that have happened. So, you know they have bad memories of taping the past load stretch, edge damage tape, wouldn't work a tear or anything like that. It was a problem. Oh, that's pretty well gone away now. In a moderate tape is a whole different ball game, but most people don't know that. So, you know tapes going to have to struggle with access time and sequential reality. They've done a few things to come over excess time and the order request now to take the optimizer based on physical movement on the tape that can take out 50% of your access time for multiple requests on a cartridge. The one on here that's got the most promise right now would be a version of a multilayer photonic storage, which is. I would say sort like optical, but, you know, with data center, class characteristics, multi-layer recording capability on that random access, which tape doesn't have. And, you know, I would say that's probably the one that you would want to take some look at going forward like this. The others are highly specular. You know, we've been talking about DNA since we were kids. So we don't have a DNA product out here yet. You know, it's access times eight hours. It's probably not going to work for us. That's your, that's not your deep archive anymore. That's your time capsule storage. >> Yeah, right. >> Lock the earth. So, I mean, I think you kind of see what's here. I mean, the chances are it's still going to be the magnetic technologies tape disc, and then the solid state number and stuff. >> Right. >> But these are the ones that I'm tracking and looking at, trying to have worked with a few of the companies that are in this. Future list and I'd love to see something breakthrough out there, but it's like, we've always said about a holographic storage. For example, you know, there's been more written about it than there's ever been written on it. (both chuckles) >> Well, the paper's called Reinventing Archival Storage. You can get it on your website I presume Fredhorizon.com >> Yep, absolutely. >> Awesome. >> Fred Moore, great to see you again. Thanks so much for coming on the CUBE. >> My pleasure, Dave. Thanks a lot. Great job. >> All right. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante for the CUBE. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of you. I path live the release show brought to you by you. >>I path Hi. Welcome back to this special R p A drill down with support from you. I path You're watching The Cube. My name is Dave Volante and Bobby CMO. You know I passed Bobby. Good to see you again. Hope you're doing well. Thanks for coming on. >>Hi, Dave. It's great to see you as well. It's always a pleasure to be on the Cube and even in the virtual format, this is really exciting. >>So, you know, last year at forward, we talked about the possibility of a downturn. Now nobody expected this kind of downturn. But we talked about that. Automation was likely something that was going to stay strong even in the downturn. We were thinking about potential recession or an economic downturn. Stock market dropped, but nothing like this. How are you guys holding up in this posted 19 pandemic? What are you seeing in the marketplace? >>Yeah, we certainly we're not thinking of a black swan or rhino or whatever we call this, but, you know, it's been a pretty crazy couple of months for everybody. You know, when When this first started, we were like everybody else. Not sure how it impact our business. The interesting thing has been that you're in code. It actually brought a reality check through. A lot of companies and organizations realize that it's very few tools to respond quickly, right? Bond with, you know, cost pressures that we're urgent or preserving revenue, perhaps, or responding to Ah, strange resource is, you know, in all centers, or or built to support. You know, the surge in in, um, in the healthcare community. And so r p a became one of those tools that quickly waas knowledge and adopted. And so we went out two months ago to go find those 1st 1st use cases. Talk about him, then. You know, 1st 30 days we had 50 in production, right? Companies, you know, great organizations like Cleveland Clinic, right? You know where they use their parking lot? Give the first tests the swab tests, right of, uh, well, who have proven right? You know, they had a line of 88 hours by, you know, putting a robot in place in two days. They got that line down by 80 or 90% right? It is a huge hit as we see that kind of a kind of benefit all across right now in the world. Right now we have. We were featured in The Wall Street Journal recently with nurses and a large hospital system in Ireland called Matter. The nurses said in the interview that, you know they have. They were able to free up time to be a patient's right, which is what they're there for, anyway, thanks to robots during this during this emergency. So I think you know, it's it's definitely raise The awareness that that this technology is provides an amazing time to value, and that's it's pretty unprecedented in the world of B two B software. >>I want to share some data with you in our community is the first time we've we've shown this. Guys would bring up the data slide, and so this is ah, chart that e. T are produced. There's enterprise technology research. They go out of reporter. They survey CIOs and I T practitioners and a survey in different segments and the use of methodology Net score. And this is sort of how method how Net scores derived. And so what this chart shows is the percent of customers that responded there were about 125 You I path customers that responded. Are you adopting new U I path? Are you increasing spending in 2020? Are you planning on flat spending or decreasing spending? Are you replacing the platform of beacons? And so basically, we take the green, uh, subtract the read from the green, and that gives us net score. But the point is that Bobby abouts about 80% of your customers are planning to spend Maurin 2020 than they spent in 2019 and only about 6% of planning on spending less, which is fairly astounding. I mean, we've been reporting on this for a while in the heat nous in the in the automation market generally and specifically. But are you seeing this in the marketplace? And maybe you could talk about why? >>Well, we just finished our first fiscal quarter into the end of April, and we're still privately held, so we can be, uh, find some insights of our company, but yeah, the the pace of our business picked up actually in in the mark. April timeframe. Um, customer adoption, large customer adoption. Um, the number of new new companies and new logos were at a record high. And, you know, we're entering into this quarter now, and we have some 20 plus $1,000,000 deals that are like that. It closed, right? I mean, that's probably a 30% increase Versus what? How many we have today alone. Right? So our business, you know, is is now well over 400 million and air are we ended last year, 3 60 and the growth rate continues fast. I think you know what's interesting is that the pace of the recode world was already fast, right? The the luxury of time has kind of disappeared. And so people are thinking about, you know, they don't have they can't wait now, months and years for digital transformation. They have to do things in days and days and days and weeks. And and that's where our technology really comes into play. Right? And and and it actually is also coming to play well in the world of the remote workforce. Reality two of the ability for remote workers to get trained while they're home on automation to build automation pipelines to to build automation. Now, with our latest release, you can download our podcast, capture and report what you're doing, and it basically generates the process definition document and the sample files, which allow for faster implementation by our center of excellence. So what's really happening here? We see it is a sense of urgency coming out of this. Prices are coming down the curve. Hopefully, now this is of urgency that our customers are facing in terms of how they respond, you know, and respond digitally to helping their business out. And it varies a lot by industry, our state and local business was really thinking was not going to be the biggest laggard of any industry picked up in a significant way in the last couple of months, New York State, with Governor Cuomo, became a big customer of ours. There's a quote from L. A County, see Iot that I've got here. They just employed us. It's public, this quote, he said. Deputy CIO said Price is always the mother of invention. We can always carry forward the good things they're coming out of this crisis situation. He's referring to our P A is being a lesson. They learned hearing this, that they're going to carry forward. And so we see this state of Oklahoma became a customer and others. So I think that's that's what we're seeing kind of a broad based. It's worldwide. >>You're really organizations can't put it off anymore. I think you're right. It sort of brought forward the future into the present. Now you mentioned 360 million last year. We had forecast 350 million was pretty good for you guys released, so it's happy about that. But so obviously still a strong trajectory. You know, it might have been higher without without covert. We'll never know, but sort of underscores the strength of the space. Um, and February you guys, there was an article that so you're essentially Theo Dan, Daniel Hernandez was quoted. Is that on hold now? Are you guys still sort of thinking about pressing forward or too early to say right? >>Yeah. I mean, I think I think the reality is we have a very, very strong business. We've raised, you know, significant money from great investors, some of which are the leading VCs in the world. and also that the public company investors and, you know, we have, ah, aggressive plan. We have an aggressive plan to build out our platform for hyper automation to continue. The growth path is now becoming the center of companies of I, T and Digital Strategies, not on the side. Right. And so to do that, you know, we're gonna want capital to help fuel our our our ambitions and fuel Our ability to serve our customers and public markets is probably a very, very logical one. As Daniel mentioned in a in a A recent, uh, he's on Bloomberg that he definitely sees. That is ah, maybe accelerating that, You know, we're late Last year, we started focusing on sustainable growth as a company and operational regular. These are important things in addition to having strong growth that, you know, a long term company has to have in place. And I can tell you, um, I'm really excited about the fact that we, you know, we operate very much like a public company. Now, internally, we you know, we do draft earnings releases that aren't public yet, and we do mock earnings, earnings calls, and we have hired Thomas Hansen is runs our chief revenue officer with storage backgrounds. And so you're gonna interview as well. These are these are these are the best of the best, right? That joint, they're joined this company, they're joining alongside the arm Kalonzo the world that are part of this company. And so I think, Yeah, I think it's an AR It's likely. And and it's gonna We're here to be a long term leader in this decade of automation. >>Well, and one of the other things that we forecast on our breaking analysis we took a look at the total available market kind of like into it. Early days of service Now is you know, people were really not fully understanding the market and chillin C it is is quite large, so video. So when we look at the competition, you know, you guys, if I showed you the same wheel with automation anywhere, it would also look strong. You know, some of the others, maybe not a strong but still stronger than many of the segments. I mean, for instance, you know, on Prem hardware. You know, compared with that and you know the automation space in general across the board is very, very strong. So I wonder if maybe you could talk a little bit about how you guys differentiate from the competition. How you see that? >>Yeah, I think you know, we've We've come a long way in the last three years, right? In terms of becoming the market leader, having the highest market share, we're very open and transparent about our numbers with We've long had the vision of a robot. Every person, uh, and and we've been delivering on that on on that vision and ah, building out a platform that helps companies, you know, transform digitally enterprise wide. Right. So, you know, I don't see any of our competitors with a platform for hyper automation like this. We have an incredible focus on the ability to help people actually find the ideas, build the pipeline, score the pipelines and integrate those with the automation center of excellence. Right? We have the ability now with our latest release to help test automation testers now not only in the world of art A but actually take robotic robots and and architecture into doing test automation. The traditional test automation market in a much better and faster way So you know, we're innovating at a pace that that it is, I think, much faster than I don't. I don't know automation anywhere. I won't share any their numbers. You know, who knows what the numbers are. We have guesses, but I'm fairly certain that we continue to gain share on them. But you know, what's most important is customer adoption, and we've also seen a number of customers switch from some of our competitors to us. Our competitors are undercapitalized and middle. Invest in R and D. This is an investment area, really build a platform out from our competitors have architectures that are hard to upgrade, right? This has been a big source of pain for companies that have been on our competitors. Where upgrades are difficult requires them to retest every time where our upgrades are very rolling, you know, are very smooth. We have an insider program which you know, I don't think any of our competitors have. If you go inside that you had pat that your customer every single bit every single review betting, private preview, public preview and general availability, you can provide feedback on and the customers can score up new ideas. They drive our our roadmap. Right. And this is I think we operate differently. I think our growth is a is a good indication of that. And, you know, and there are new competitors like Microsoft. But I think you know, you know, medium or long term, you know, they're gonna make effort around our, um and you know, they're behind the, um, automation is really hard. The buried entry here is not it's not. Not easy. And we're going to keep me on that platform, play out, and I think that's ah, that's what makes us so different. Um and ah, you know, we have the renewal numbers, retention numbers, expansion numbers and and the revenue numbers to improve that, uh, you know, we're number one. >>Well, so I mean, there's a lot of ways to skin the cat, and you're right. You guys are really focused, you know, you automation anywhere really focused on this space, and you shared with us how you differentiate there. But as you point out Microsoft, they sort of added on I had talked to Allan, preferably the day from paga. You know, those guys don't position themselves as our PC, but they have r p A. I talked to, you know, our mutual friend Robert Young John the other day, right? They're piling onto this this trend, right? So why not? Right, It's it's ah, it's hot. But so, you know, clearly you guys are innovating there. I want to talk about your vision before we get into the latest product release two things that I would call out the term hyper automation with, I think is the Gartner term. And then it will probably stick. And then this this idea of a robot for every person How would you describe your vision? >>Yeah, I mean, we think that robots can and improve, you know, the the lives of of or pers everywhere, right? We think in every every function, every role. And we see that already, the job satisfaction and the people don't want to do the mundane, repetitive work, right? The new hires coming out of college, you know, they're gonna be excel and sequel server. We're no longer the tools of productivity. For them, it's it's your path. We have business. Schools that have committed top tier business schools have committed to deploying your path or to putting you're passing every force in the school these students are graduating with the right path is their most important skill going into companies. And they're gonna expect to be able to use robots within their companies in their daily lives. A swell. So, you know, we have customers today that are rolling out a robot for every person you know. We had Ah, Conoco Phillips on just earlier in our launch, talking about citizen developers, enabling says, developer armies of developers and growing enterprise wide. See, Intel was on as well from Singapore, the large telco. They're doing the exact same thing. So I think you know, I think this is this is this is this is about broad based digital transformation. Everybody participating And what happens is the leading companies to do this, you know, they're going to get the benefit of benefits out of it. It can reinvest that productivity, benefits and data science and analytics and serving customers and in, you know, and and, ah, new product ideas. And so, you know, this is this. You know, automation is going to fuel now the ability for companies to really differentiate and serve their customers better. And it's only needed enterprise wide view on it that you really maximizing. Take Amazon, for example, a great customer during during this prices. You know, they're trying to hire hundreds of thousands of people, right? Help in the fact that in their in their distribution centers elsewhere, this all served demand to help people who like you and I home or ordering things that we need, right? Well, they're use your path robots all throughout their HR hr on boarding HR recruiting HR administration And so helping them has been a big during this prices surge of robots is helping them actually hire workers. You know another example of Schneider Electric and amazing customer of ours. They're bringing their plants, their manufacturing facilities, implants back online faster by using robots to help manage the PPE personal protective equipment in the plant allow people workers to get back to work faster. Right? So what's happening is is, you know in that in those cases is your different examples of robots and different functions, right? In all cases, it's about helping grow a company faster. It's about helping protect workers. It's about helping getting revenue machines back up and running after Kobe is going to be critical to get back to work faster. So I'm I'm really excited about the fact that as people think about automation across the organization, the number of ideas and Aaron opportunities for improvement are are we're just starting to tap that potential. >>Well, this is why I think the vision is so important because you're talking about things that are transformative. Now, as you well know, one of the criticisms of RPS. So you have people, the suppliers and just yeah, we, you know, looking at mundane tasks, just automating mundane tasks like sometimes paving the cow path and say, you're very much aware of that criticism. But if I look at the recent announcements, you're really starting to build out that vision that you just talked about. They're really four takeaways. You sort of extending the core PAP platform, injecting AI end some or and more automation end to end automation really taken that full lifestyles lifecycle systems view and the last one is sort of putting it talks to the robot. For every person that sort of citizen automation, if you will, that sort of encompasses your product announcements. So it wasn't just sort of a point Announcement really is a underscores the platform. I wonder if you could just What do we need to know about you guys? Just that out. >>So we think about how we think about the rolls back to a division of robots person how automation can help different roles. And so this product launch $20 for this large scale launch that you just articulated, um, impacts in a fax and helps many different kinds of new roles Certainly process analysts now who examined processes, passes performance improvements. You know, they're a user of our process mining solution in our past. Find a solution that helps speed on our way. Arpaio engine, no testers and quality engineers. Now they can actually use studio pro and actually used test robots are brand new, and our new test manager is sort of the orchestration and management of test executions. Now they can participate in in leveraged power of robots and what they do as well. And we kind of think about that, you know, kind of across the board in our organization across the platform. They can use tools like you have path insights in Europe. If you're an analyst or your, uh ah. B I, this intelligence person really know what's going on with robots in terms of our wife for my organization and provide that up to the, you know, sea levels in the board of directors in real time. So I think that's that's the big part. Here is we're bringing, and we're helping bring in many, many different kinds of roles different kinds of people. Data scientist. You mentioned AI. Now data scientists can build a model. The models applied to ai fabric an orchestrator. It's drag and drop by our developer in studio, and now you can turn, you know, a a mundane, rules based task right into an experience based ones where a robot can help make a decision right. Based on experience and data, they can tweak and tune that model and data scientists can interact, you know, with the automation is flowing through your path. So I think that's how we think about it, right? You know, one of the great new capabilities, as well as the ability to engage line workers, dispatch out workers If you're a telco or or retail story retail store workers you know the robots can work with humans out in the field. We've got one real large manufacturer with 18,000 drivers in a DST direct store delivery scenario. And you know the ability for them to interact with robots and help them do their job in the field. Our customers better after the list data entry and data manipulation, multiple systems. So I this is this makes us very unique in our vision and in our execution. And again, I don't I have not heard of a single ah example by competitors that has any kind of a vision or articulation to be able to help a company enterprise wide and, you know, with the speed and the and the full, full vision that we have. >>Okay, so you're not worried about downturns. You can't control black swans Anyway, you're not worried about the competition. It feels like you know, you're worried about what you're worried about. You want about growing too fast. Additionally, deploying the the capital that you've raised. What worries you? >>Yeah. You know, we're paranoid or paranoid company, right? And when it comes to the market and and trying to drive, I think we've done a lot to help actually push the rock up the hill in terms of really, really driving our market, building the market, and we want to continue that right and not let up. So there's this kind of desire to never let up, right? Well, we always remind ourselves we must work harder, must work harder. We must work harder. And that's that's That's sort of this this mentality around ourselves, by the smartest people. Hire the smartest people you work with our customers, our customers are priority. Do that with really high excellence and really high sincerity that it comes through and everything that we do, you know, to build a world class operation to be, you know, Daniel DNS. When I first met him, he said, You know, I really want to be the enemy of the great news ecology company that serve customers really well. And it was amazing things for society, and and, you know, we're on that track, but we've got, you know, we're in the in the in the early innings. So, you know, making sure that we also run our business in a way that, um, you know, uh, is ready to be Ah, you know, publicly successful company on being able to raise new sources of capital to fund our ambitions and our ideas. I mean, you saw the number of announcements from our 24 release. It reminded me of an AWS re invent conference, where it's just innovation, innovation, innovation, innovation. And these are very real. They're not made up mythical announcements that some of our competitors do about launching some kind of discovery box doesn't exist, right? These are very real with real customers behind them, and and so you know, just doing that with the same level of tenacity. But being, you know, old, fast, immersed and humble, which are four core culture values along the way and not losing that Azeri grow. That's that's something we talk about maintaining that culture that's super critical to us. >>Everybody's talking about Okay, What What's gonna be permanent? Postpone it. I was just listening to Julie Sweet, CEO of Accenture, and she was saying that, you know, prior to Covic, they had data that showed that the top 25% of companies that have leaned into digital transformation were outperforming. You know, the balance of their peers, and I know question now that the the rest of that base really is going to be focused on automation. Automation is is really going to be one of those things that is high, high priority now and really for the next decade and beyond. So, Bobby, thanks so much for coming on the Cube and supporting us in this in this r p. A drill down. Really appreciate it, >>Dave. It's always a pleasure as always. Great to see you. Thank you. >>Alright. And thank you for watching everybody. Dave Volante. We'll be right back right after this short break. You're watching the cube. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

(bright music) >> Narrator: From the Cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube Conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with the cube. We're at our Palo Alto studio today. And we're kind of taking advantage of this opportunity to reach out to the community, as we're going through this COVID crisis, to talk to leaders, get their tips and tricks and advice. As you know, everyone is going through this thing together. It's really a unique situation that everybody has a COVID story, where were you in March of 2020. So we're excited to have our next guest. He's Corey Williams. He's the VP of strategy and marketing for Idaptive. Cory, great to see you. >> Hey, great to see you. Thanks for having me, Jeff. >> Absolutely, I was just thinking the last time that we saw, was late February, it was February 25th. At the RSA conference, 40,000 people I think was the last big show, that I attended for sure, and kind of snuck in, before everything got shut down. It's just amazing, you know, kind of how quick this light switch moment happened to really force first, everybody home, and then you know, kind of all these collateral impacts of that in terms of digital transformation. >> Yeah, it is amazing. I remember that RSA show very well, shaking dozens of people's hands, eating from a buffet, sitting in a crowded room. It's amazing how quickly things have transformed, and how our mindset about, just about everything, but especially what we do for a living and how we interact with each other, had just changed overnight. >> Yeah and it's fascinating too, because when the stay at home, what started to come out, you know, nobody really had time to plan. And you know, and I would argue even if you had, I don't know, six months to plan, nine months to plan, a year to plan, for kind of this cutover, it would still have been a difficult situation. So just to be, you know, kind of thrown in and it's ready said go. Here we are, really unique challenge for people, but also for the infrastructure providers, also for the technology providers, in the space that you operate in, which is security, very different challenge and it wasn't, you know, we're going to plan and get everybody's VPN is all hooked up and configured and tested. It's like, don't come to the office tomorrow. >> Yeah and it literally happened that quickly. It wasn't a matter of being able to plan this, like a normal transition. But it was literally, today we're working in the office, tomorrow, please don't come in, we'll let you know when it's going to change. And I think it really did catch a lot of companies off guard, even those that were used to supporting a remote workforce at least in part. >> Yeah, because it's interesting people been talking about new way to work and work from home and this for a very long time. But you know, this was an incredible forcing function. So let's talk about you know, kind of what you do for the people that aren't familiar with Idaptive. Give us kind of the quick, the quick overview. >> Sure, Idaptive is what's called an identity and access management company. What we do is we make it easier for end users to get access to all their applications, and for organizations to provide that access in more secure manner. As you know, all these cloud applications and devices that we need to have access to, are typically just secured by a password and they all have different passwords, and those passwords often get reused and shared among different employees, and it creates a big problem, for not only for the security of the company, but even for the IT Helpdesk who's got to support account lockouts and password resets and so, Idaptive is one of the leaders in this space. >> As you talk about the password reset and I didn't think really kind of from the IT support side if you don't have a teenager hopefully close by in the room you know, that creates all kinds of challenges, but it's real and the password situation was bad before. Now as you said we've got all kinds of internal applications, you've got all types of access control to your inside stuff, you have all your cloud applications. A lot of times you said passwords are stored in queues or they're stored in caches, or they're stored in your Chrome browser. You guys have written extensively about passwords and getting kind of past passwords to better ways to authenticate people, whenever you can actually written quite a bit recently on blog posts. Talk about your kind of strategy and how you help customers kind of rethink access. >> Yeah, there's sort of two main strategies that I've been writing about. And then our company has been talking to our customers about. The first one we call Next-Gen Access, which is essentially a combination or layers of technology like Single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, provisioning, and analytics provide some user behavior and risk. All of that is intended to provide a more secure experience where we can put additional factors besides just a password, in front of the user, but only do it, when the risk is high, so that we can preserve the user experience. And so that we call a Next-gen access approach. But ultimately, the reason you want to do that is to arrive at a zero trust state of mind. That sort of approach allows you to say that, hey, I've verified every user, that is on my network. I know the device they're using is something that I trust and is in good shape. And I've limited their access to just what they need in order to do their job. >> Now, do you find that most people in this situation are still accessing via a VPN or some secure network or as most of it, you know, it's public internet access, and you're relying really on the applications and the access and the protocols and the two factor to make sure people can only get what they're supposed to get? >> Yeah, I think you kind of bring up a good point. The vast majority of businesses are what I've referred to hybrid enterprises, they still have on-premise applications, they still have their own applications that they build. But they also are in the process of adopting cloud applications like Office 365. And you know, all of the different kind of productivity apps, that are very popular. And so most companies are stuck in this situation where they can't simply be completely virtual company overnight. They still have to provide access to on-premise systems and applications in order to do their business. And so many of them just had the option of saying, okay, here's VPN access for everyone. But as as we know, VPN access is a very blunt instrument. First of all you have it has to be able to scale to a lot of users. Second of all, it gives you access to the whole network from a remote location, both of which are situations that are difficult, especially when you have to turn it on overnight. >> You're right. So you and one of the articles that I saw in getting ready for this, has some really specific as straightforward advice to people, to help them enable their remote workers. I wonder if you could go through some of those key points with us? >> Sure, I think, you know, when you think about remote access or having a remote workforce, you think about a few different things. One is be able to provide them easy kind of friction, free discovery of their applications and providing access. So, having something like a portal of all the applications that you're supposed to have access to whether they're on-premise or in the cloud, and have one click access to those protected in a way that is common to all those applications, using something like a second factor of authentication. That provides some of the immediate convenience of getting people up and productive, even if they're outside the network at home. The second thing we think about is, how do we give access to those on-premise applications? You can use VPN, it's quick, I can tell you that our customers are telling us two things. One is they didn't prepare for that much capacity. So their VPN connections don't scale. So they're having to ration the use of it, which limits the productivity. But also, they haven't necessarily rolled out multi-factor authentication to all of these users who don't typically use VPN. And so they are forced with either having to dial down, the security level, or to scramble and try to find a way to secure that access. So in my writings, we've been talking about providing alternatives to a VPN, something like an application gateway, which would can give you access to just the apps you need, without having to have full network access, and having those apps just be published through the gateway. >> So there's really some kind of creative ways to restructure the access beyond just simply having better access more secure access and as you said VPN and multi-factor cause in fact, you might not be able to implement those things just in the timely manner which you have, as we said, this was a light switch moment. >> Yeah I think definitely the it's something to think about in these emergency light switch moments, what is the easiest way and there's three parties involved. You've got the security folks who are concerned about maintaining a level of continuity with the access to their data. But you also have the end user and they have to do their job. It has to be easy enough for them to be able to do, without having to have a lot of special training. And let's not forget the IT Helpdesk, either. They are getting overwhelmed with requests for about basic technology use and about getting access to the basic resources. The last thing you want to do is pile on a whole bunch of new lockouts. And, you know, barriers have been put in front of users, that can overwhelm them. So you kind of have to think about all three parties, when you're developing a solution for remote workforce. >> All right, and I presume the bad guys are not taking holiday, seeing this opportunity as again, we're constantly talking about this increasing attack surface. It just got a whole lot bigger for the bad guys. >> It certainly did. I mean, if you think about the attack surface, it used to be that if they could get past your network barrier, then they were in. And so he was very concentrated around securing the network. As you start adopting more mobile and cloud applications, now your attack surface becomes all the resources are out in the cloud. Now, when you take all of your workers and disperse them to home, each one of their own systems and networks becomes an extension of that attack surface. And so anything you can do to narrow and lessen the attack surface by making sure you have good user verification, device validation, and other layers of intelligence to help you monitor that access. It reduces the scope to everyone on Earth, from any device on Earth, to just the people that you you trust and if identified, and that's why we talked to our our customers about is putting these layers in that can balance that security, but also provide a more friction free user experience and that's the real trick. >> All right, so I'm just curious to get your take you've been in the business for a long time. And kind of the state of passwords, you know, is this just something we're stuck with forever? Do you see in the not too distant future? Or medium future? Passwords going away? I mean, we've got biometric stuff now, you can touch your phone, you can read your iris, but those things can be spoofed as well. Where do you see, you know, kind of the passwords evolving and what's going to take its place? >> You know, it's a little bit like the clothes in the back of my closet, you can never quite get rid of everything. And I think passwords are will always be with us in some form, because they're baked into technology that's been around forever. As a side note, you've probably heard about these IRS checks going out. And there being problems in some states because these stimulus checks are dependent on systems that were built 50 years ago. And so technology kind of lives forever in some form. So we can't necessarily get rid of passwords, but there are two things we can do, one is we can never depend on passwords alone to secure access, we can layer on, multi-factor authentication and artificial intelligence to determine risk level and put an additional set of factors in front of the user. But we can also develop new applications and technologies, with more of what is being known as a password list experience, which is sort of an ideal thing. And we have some experience with modern technology like facial recognition on our iPhone or a fingerprint on our PC. Those types of experiences can be built in and before COVID happened, I'd say that one of the big trends of 2020 was this idea of password list access. And we have actually recently announced some of our own password capabilities, but it was a hot trending topic. And I think will continue to be because not only is it a more secure experience, but it's also much easier for end users and they would prefer to have a one click access rather than having to remember a complex string that they have changed in 90 days. >> I was going to say, do you think it's an accelerant? Or in terms of having this alternative access method? Or is it a pullback because people are hunkering down, but it sounds on those two attributes, that it's a better thing. >> I think definitely in >> The more secure that seems pretty straightforward. >> Yes, I think definitely, in the medium and long term, this will accelerate the trend. In the short term, yes. Everything is being focused on just enabling those remote users. There was a actually a recent survey done by Mayfield, with their collection of CSOs and CTOs, asking them what the top priorities were in the short term. And of course, the number one priority for IT leaders is enabling that remote workforce. But number two in the short term is actually security enabling that says not only enabling users to work from home productively, but making sure that security is keeping track. So I don't think they've lost sight even in the short term, although I think they're focused on very tactical goals related to scaling out the solutions and supporting their end users. In the medium term and in the long term, this is going to have lasting effects. We know that the remote workforce trend was accelerated and there's no turning back. Companies are going to be more remote, they're going to be more comfortable with remote models. And so having better stronger, better experiences and stronger authentication experiences will be part of how we do things going forward. >> Well, Cory, in everywhere we go, security has to get baked into everything. So it's no longer a bolt in is, as you well know, and so it's not surprising that that's right in there with supporting those remote people cause they got access to the keys to the kingdom. You just can't let that get out there. So give you the final word once we come out of COVID and in terms of, you know, looking directly at what that's driving in terms of priorities. What are some of the other priorities that you hope to get back to, once we kind of get through this period? >> Well, I mean, I think clearly, we're seeing the effect on certain industries like travel and hospitality and others, we certainly and we tell,, we certainly hope that those businesses are able to come back strong. So those are some of the things we're looking forward to. But we know a lot of our customers are really wanting to not just respond to the current activities that are happening, but they want to build their businesses. They want to build better user experiences, they want to put out new digital experiences. We know from the survey as well, from Mayfield that increasing acceleration towards adopting cloud, and towards the digital transformation of user and business processes is going to be key. And so that's what we see the future is not just in providing security to prevent the bad guy, but to enable these new digital experiences and to accelerate these trends like move to cloud, identity and access management is fundamental to all of those efforts. And we see that as being a very positive thing. And hopefully this will end up serving as a catalyst to spurred and acceleration of those adoptions. >> Well, I think there's no doubt about it. I mean, we're not going to go back and the longer this thing goes on, the more new habits are formed, and people aren't just going to want to go back to the old ways. So I think there's no doubt about it. And I really appreciate you sharing your insights. Again, Cory has written a ton of stuff. There's blogs all over the place, do a quick search on Cory Williams with an E, and you'll find some of his blog posts and thanks for taking a few minutes with us here today, Cory. >> You bet, thank you, Jeff. >> All right, he's Corey, I'm Jeff. You're watching the cube. We're in our Palo Alto studios. Stay safe out there, and we'll see you next time. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

absolutely build on some of Ben's comments because I think what he articulated is one of the killer use cases of VMware cloud on a to us that I think is driving that momentum right which is we think it's one of the best solutions in the marketplace and customers have told us this to enable them to migrate and modernize right so let's talk about the migrate piece first right you have customers that have these tremendous enterprise class applications running on vSphere and their data centers they're built on top of that platform they depend upon it for performance availability everything else with VMware Club a native us we can migrate those applications with zero downtime no refactoring no additional cost in a matter of weeks or months as opposed to if you had to refactor everything to take years and millions of dollars right so that cloud migration use case I would say is that is the killer for us and that's you know exactly what Ben was we're definitely seeing that and I think that's the thing that really got me excited about a year ago was watching enterprises make that transition and say you know what the center of gravity has gone from architectures inside the on-prem data center is now moved to in the cloud I mean that shift has happened it happened to people talked about it five years ago but they didn't mean it and now when you talk to enterprises they are actually moving into the cloud not just talking about it and they're saying where that is the center of gravity and what's interesting to me was I think even just the tone of Andy Jesse today and what he was talking about was it's once you define what your architecture is you push it everywhere so cloud 1.0 and 2.0 was really more about taking my architecture that was on prem and pushing it into the cloud so let me take virtual appliance a virtual router basically my hardware router packaged it up put it on the cloud that's not cloud native it's cloud naive as we talk right and so what's the chase has happened is now everybody realizes the center of gravity is in the cloud and you start seeing things like outposts you see things like wavelength you see things like you know tgw network manager things getting pushed out the architecture of the cloud now actually pushing out and extending out into on-premises I've been at it for a couple of decades so in the beginning there was a lot of evangelism that this is safe it's consumable by the enterprise it's not some kind of crazy idea to bring open-source you're not going to lose your intellectual property or things like that those days I mean I I'm sure you can find an exception but those days are largely over in this in the sense that open-source has gone mainstream so I would say open-source is one most large enterprises have an open-source strategy they consider open source as critical to not only how they source software from vendors but also how they build their own applications so the world has really really evolved and now it's really a question of where are you partnering with vendors to build infrastructure that's critical to your business but not your differentiator and where are you leveraging open-source internally for your to differentiate your business I think that's a more sophisticated view it's not the safety question it's not is it is it legally you know that you're bringing legal concerns into the picture it's really a much different conversation and people in the enterprise are looking how can we contribute to these projects so that's really it's pretty exciting actually both are a great place for startups right they're not meters cluesive so I think if you go horizontal the amount of data being created by your applications your infrastructure your sensors time series data ridiculously large amount right and that's not going away anytime soon I recent did investment ain't chronosphere did you guys covered over at coupon a few weeks ago that's talking about metrics and absorbedly data time series data so they're gonna handle that horizontal amount of data petabytes and petabytes how can it query this quickly deeply with a lot of insight that's one play right cheaper better faster at scale the next play like you said is vertical it's how do I own data or slice the data the more contacts they know as can have we talked about like the virtual cycle of data right this the system of the tile well bye own set of da to be healthcare government or self-driving car data that no one else has I can build a solution and to end and go deep and so either pick a lane or pick a geography you can go either way it's hard to do both though it's hard for start-up any big company it's very few companies can do two things well starves especially succeed by doing one thing very well I'm impressed they got two CEOs the CEO of goldman sachs david solomon the CEO of Cerner coming to the show that's kind of rare that the CEO of your customer comes to the show I guess the second thing I'd say is you know Amazon is not a rinse and repeat company at these shows although they are when it comes to shock and awe so they ticked the Box on shock and awe but you're right John they're talking a lot about transformation I would sort of think of it as a disruption here's what I would say to that Amazon has a dual disruption agenda one is its disrupting the horizontal technology stack and two it's disrupting industries it wants to be the platform of which startups in particular but also incumbents can disrupt industries and it's in their DNA because it's in Amazon's DNA and I think it's the last thing I'll say as Amazon is the retai Amazon retail is the you can buy anything here store and now to your point Justin Amazon Web Services is you can get AWS anywhere at the edge and a little mini data centers that they're built on outpost and of course in the cloud absolutely you know I'd say primarily were most kind of pleased with the variety of workloads and these cases the customers are bringing us into you know I think when we started out on this journey we saw a tremendous promise for the technology to really improve the aw psycho system and customer experience for people that wanted to consume block storage in the cloud what we learned as we started working with customers is that because of the way we've architected the product brought a lot of the same capabilities we deliver on our flash arrays today into AWS it's a lot of customers to take us into all the same types of workloads that they put flush arrays into right so that's their Tier one you know mission-critical environments there VMware workloads their Oracle workloads or safety workloads they're also looking at us from everything from you know to do lifts and shifts test and dev in the cloud as well as dr right and and that again i think you know speaks to a couple things it speaks to the durability the higher level of service that were able to deliver in AWS but also the compatibility with which we're able to deliver the same sets of features and you know have it operate in exactly the same way on prime in the cloud because it's look if you're gonna dr the last time you know the last point in time you want to discover that there's a caveat hey this feature doesn't quite work the way you expect is when you have a dr failover and so the fact that we set out with this mission in mind to create that exact level of sameness you know it's really paying dividends in the types of use cases the customers are bringing us into I think we're delighted you know Mike obviously and I've been friends for years he's had some connections with VMware in his past that that that certainly helped in setting up this partnership so we're grateful to Mike and Andy and the team for that and it's you know two and a half to three years now since we announced it tremendous amount of customer interest listen you know we said at the beginning of this when you take sort of the king of the public cloud and the king the private cloud together and don't force customers to say these have to be separate doors you can do them both together customers like that message and what we've been really doing over the course the last 12 18 months is perfecting use cases for this platform I think to us the key word is migrations cloud migrations when people are moving their workloads of an app off vmware vsphere or our cloud foundation we want this to be the best place for it to land we are more cloud and AWS for migration opportunity and anything short of that refactoring app would be you know not something that would be a good use of people's time and money because they should be then modernizing with all the wonderful services that Amazon's built once they've migrated so we've really perfected our message in the course the last six 12 months to two ms migrated and modernized migrated modernized so we could migrate you into this avenue and then modernized with a set of container and other services so that mess is working we put on stage at VMware and there are many of them here too big Amazon customers VMware cloud and Amazon Freddie Mac and IHS market and they were telling are tens of thousands customers at those shows and similarly many of them here that that's the best option to be able to do things yeah so if you know public sector public sector actually has a lot of Windows or Microsoft workloads in it and so we're seeing a lot of public sector customers looking to modernize their Windows workloads in fact we made several announcements just yesterday around helping more public sector customers modernize for example one is Windows Server 2003 and 2008 will go out of support and so we have a great new offering with technology that can help them to not refactor but actually abstract those layers and move quickly to 2016 and 2019 because both of those will go out of support in January and Dave mentioned you know cloud first strategies but we're also seeing a lot of movement around data you know data is really powerful Andy mentioned this as well yesterday but for example in our partner keynote where I just came from we had on stage Avis yeah hey this not public sector customer but what they're doing is the the gentleman said you know your car can now talk to you and that data is now being given to local state officials local city officials they can use it for emergency response systems so that public and private use of data coming together is also a big trend that we're seeing it's all about breaking down I mean if devops is all about breaking down silos between Devon operations and in other parts of the business Deb sack ops or secure dev ops or whatever we want to call it is just bringing more people into the fold and helping security join that party and get at things earlier in the cycle so we can catch it before it you know before before there's a breach that's in the news so you know I think there's going to continue to be convergence between Amazon business in AWS over time and in the marketplace we offer kind of a goods marketplace they offer a software marketplace and a services marketplace and so I think we're still working on how do we harmonize that experience better and we've got a lot of work to do there we have a saying at Amazon that it's always day one and that's a great example where we still have a lot of work to do but one of the things that is another one of our partners Koopa which is a procure-to-pay a platform and a longtime Amazon business partner we've done some pretty creative things to improve the user experience and make it easier for customers use both Koopa and Amazon business and in concert together Koopa announced a couple months ago they've built an integration to the AWS marketplace and so that's a pretty exciting opportunity where people who are provisioning services via AWS be a Dobis marketplace can have that that transaction flows seamlessly into their prepare to pay solution and let you know the user who's provisioning that focus on what they want to do which is developing new solutions to serve customers I mean the spectrum is massive so the our biggest challenge is keeping up with everything and continuing to innovate with all the things that are happening but again the benefits of the platform that we have enables us to do that and the enhancements we weight made this year this year now that our platform is is more open we can connect a collect data from multiple entities not just the New Relic agents that we've that we were built on so the concept of observability and being able to observe the entire application environment it is built on the fact that data's got to come from all these different places then we need to turn that around and curate it into the right experience in the right use case that the customer is looking for so all I can say is that our company's built on innovation we try and stay on the cutting edge of all that trying to stay current with that and meet the customers needs as as everyone here is innovating like crazy at scale well I mean there's a lot of a lot of the technology we build comes from things that we're doing ourselves you know and that we're learning ourselves it's kind of how we started thinking about microservices serverless - we saw the need we know we would have we would build all these functions that when some kind of object came into an object store we would spin up compute all those tasks would take like three or four hundred milliseconds then we spin it back down and yet we'd have to keep a cluster up in multiple availability zones because we needed that fault tolerance and it was we just said this is wasteful and that's part of how we came up with lambda and you know when we were thinking about land that people understandably said well if we build lambda and we build this serverless event-driven computing a lot of people were keeping clusters of instances aren't going to use them anymore it's going to lead to less absolute revenue for us but we we have learned this lesson over the last 20 years at Amazon which is if it's something it's good for customers you're much better off cannibalizing yourself and doing the right thing for customers and being part of shaping something and I think if you look at the history of technology you always build things and people say well that's going to cannibalize this and people are gonna spend less money what really ends up happening is they spend spend less money per unit of compute but it allows them to do so much more that they ultimately long-term end up being you know more significant customer look I mean the the SHA this show estate Volante says amazon always delivers with the shock and awe you know broadest and deepest so many pieces here you know I took a selfie with many people and the biggest celebrity of the show AWS outpost the rack it's over in the corner there and people asking me about all the gear inside I said you should stop asking about that because you will never touch it only AWS will so put a curtain around it it's managed as a service and that's what I think people are still trying to understand we've been talking about cloud for what 15 years now but Amazon's positioning on cloud is still different than everyone else's when I think back to some of the waves there's that buzzword and there's one or two that really architectural er different in deliver and Amazon laid out their strategy even more and through the geeky pieces and transformation was the theme you [Music]

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCube. Covering AWS re:Invent 2019 brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel, along with it's ecosystem partners. >> Hello there and welcome back to theCube's live coverage here in Las Vegas for AWS re:Invent 2019. This is theCube's seventh year covering re:Invent. They've been doing this show for eight years, we missed the first year, I'm John Furr, and my co-host David Vellante. We're here extracting the signal from the noise, and we're here with an amazing guest, our friend, she's been here with us from the beginning of theCube, since inception. Always great to get to comment with her. Sandy Carter Vice President with Amazon Web Services. >> Thank you. >> Now in the public sector handling partners. Great to see you, thanks for coming on again and sharing your content. >> So great to see you guys, so dressed up and looking good guys, I have to say. (laughs) >> You're looking good to, but I can't help but stare at our other guest here, the IoT suitcase. >> First, tell us-- >> Yes. >> About the IoT suitcase. >> Well we, in public sector we have a partner program, and that program helps entrepreneurs. And we're really keen on especially helping female entrepreneurs. So one of our entrepreneurs created this suitcase, that's an IoT based suitcase, you can put your logo's and that sort of thing on it, but more importantly for public sectors, she created this safety ring, John. And so, if I touch it I've de-activated it, but if I touch it, it will call the police for me, if I'm being assaulted. Or if I'm having an emergency, I can touch it and have an ambulance come for me as well. And the really cool thing about it is she worked backwards from the customer, figuring out like how are most people assaulted, and if you have an emergency and you fall, what's the best way to get ahold of someone. It's not your phone, because you don't always carry it, it's for a device like this. >> Or a bigger device that you can't, or you leave on the table somewhere, but that's you know it's attractive. >> It's awesome. >> And it's boom, simple. >> And it's pink. (laughs) >> What I love fast about re:Invent as an event is that there's so much innovation going on, but one of the areas that's become modernized very rapidly is the public sector. Your now in this area, there's a lot of partners, a huge ecosystem going, and the modernization effort is real. >> It is. >> Could you share some commentary on what's going on. Give people a feel for the pace of change, what's accelerating? What are people doubling down on, what are some of the dynamics in public sector? >> Yeah, so if you know public sector, public sector actually has a lot of Windows or Microsoft workloads in it. And so we're seeing a lot of public sector customers looking to modernize their Windows workloads, in fact we made several announcements just yesterday around helping more public sector customers modernize. For example, one is Windows Servers 2003, and 2008 will go out of support, and so we have a great new offering, with technology, that can help them to not re-factor, but actually abstract those layers and move quickly to 2016 and 2019, because both of those will go out of support in January. >> A lot of people don't know, and I've learned this from talking with Andy Jassy in the keynote, as well as hearing from some other folks, is that you got, Amazon runs a lot of Windows. >> Oh, we have 57% Windows workloads on AWS in terms of market segment share. Which is 2x the next nearest cloud provider, 2x. And most customers choose to run their Windows workloads on us, because we are so innovative, we move really fast. We're more reliable. The latest public data from 2018 shows that the nearest cloud provider had seven times more downtime. So if your in public sector or even commercial, who can afford to be down that long, and then finally, we have better security. So one of the things we've been focused on for public sector is FedRamp solutions. We know have over 90 solutions that are FedRamp ready. Which is four times more than the next two cloud providers. Four times more than the two combined. >> That's interesting, so I got to ask the question that's popping up in my mind, I'm sure people are curious about. >> Yeah. >> I get the Windows working on Amazon, and that makes a lot of sense, why wouldn't you want to run on the best cloud. The question I would have is, how would the licensing work, because, that's seems to be lock-in spec, Oracle does it, Microsoft does it, does license become the lock-in. So, when something expires, what happens on the licensing side. Licensing is really tricky, and in fact, October 1st, Microsoft made some new licensing changes. And so, we have some announcement to help our customers still bring their own licenses, or what we call fondly, BYOL over to AWS, so they don't have to double invest on the license. >> So you can honor that license on AWS. >> Yeah, and you have to do it on a dedicated host. Which at midnight madness, we announced new dedicated host solution, that's very cloud-like. Makes it as easy to run a dedicated host instance as it is an EC2 instance. So, wicked easy, very cost effective if your moving those on-premises workloads over. >> I just want to point out John, something that's really important here is a lot of times, software companies will use scare tactics, to your point. They'll jack up the cost of the license, to say, ah you got to stay with us, if you run on our hardware or our platform, you pay half. And then they'll put out, "Oh, Amazon's twice as expensive." But these are all negotiable. I've talked to a number of customers, particularly on the Oracle side, and said, no, no, we just went to Oracle and said look, you got a choice, I either give us the same license price or we're migrating off your database. Okay, all right. But some of it is scare tactics, and I think you know increasingly, that's not working in the marketplace. So I just wanted to point that out. >> So what's the strategy for customers to take, I guess that's the question. Because, certainly the licensing becomes again like they get squeezed, I can see that. But what do customers do, is there a playbook? >> Well there is, and so the best one is you buy your license from Microsoft, and then using BYOL, you can bring that over to AWS. It's faster, more performance, more reliable, that sort of thing. If you do get restricted though John, like they are doing for instance with their end of support, you could run that on Azure, and get all the security fixes. We are trying to provide technical solutions, like the ability to abstract Windows Server 2003 and Server 2008 as it goes out of support. >> I mean certainly in the case of Oracle, it used to be you know 10-15 years ago, you didn't have a choice. Instead of one RDBMS, and now it's so much optionality in databases. >> And I will also tell you that we have a lot of customers today, who are migrating from SQL server, or Oracle over to Aurora. Aurora, is equally as performant, and a tenth of the cost. So we actually have this team called the database freedom team that will help you do that migration. In fact I was talking to a very large customer last night, and I was explaining some of the options. And their like, "Let's do the Aurora thing." Let's do it two-step. Let's start by migrating the database over, Oracle and SQL and then I want to go to Aurora. It's like database built for the cloud, it's faster and its cheaper. So why wouldn't you do that? >> Yeah, and I think the key is, to my question about a friction. What's frictionless? How can they get it done quickly without going through the trip-wires of the licensing. >> Certain workloads are tough, right. You know if you're running your business on high transaction volume. But a lot of the analytics stuff, the data warehouse, you know look at Amazon's own experiences. You guys are just ticking it off, moving over from Oracle to Aurora, it's been fun to watch. >> I want to get you guy's perspective Dave, you and Sandy, because I think you guys might have good insight on this, because everyone knows that I'm really passionate about public sector, I've been really enamored with Teresa's business from Day one, but when she won the CIA deal, that really got my attention. As I dug into the Jedi deal, and that all went sideways, it really jumped out at me, that public sector is probably the most transformative market, because they are modernizing at a record pace. I mean this is like a glacier moving market. They don't really have old ways, they got the beltway bandits, they got old procurement, old technology, and like literally in a short period of time, they have to modernize. So they're becoming more enterprise like, can you guys, I mean pros in the enterprise, what's your take? It just seems like a Tsunami of change in the public sector, because the technology is driving it. What do you guys think about this? Am I on or off base? What are some of the trends that are going on? >> I mean I have a perspective, but please. >> No, okay. So I'll start. So I see so much transformation regardless of what industry your looking at. If you're looking at Government for example working with SAP NS2, we just actually took 26 different flavors of SAP ERP for the Navy, and helped them to migrate to the cloud. For the US Navy, which is awesome. Arkis Global, did the same thing for the UK. We actually have Amazon Connect in there, so that's like a cool call center driven by Machine Learning, and the health care system for the UK. Or you can even look at things, like here in the U.S. there's a company that really looks at how you do monitoring for the children to keep them safe. They've partnered up with a National Police Association, and they are bringing that to the cloud. So regardless of education, non-profits, government, and it's around the world, it's not just the US. We are seeing these governments education, start-ups, non-profits, all moving to the cloud, and taking their own legacy systems to Linux, to Aurora, and moving very rapidly. >> And I think Andy hit on it yesterday, it's got to start with top-down leadership. And in the government, if you can get somebody whose a leading thinker, CIO, we're going cloud first. Mandate cloud, you know you saw that years ago, but today, I think it's becoming more mainstream. I think the one big challenge is obviously the disruption in defense and that's why you talked about Jedi, in defense it's very high risk, and it needs disruption, it's like healthcare its like certain parts of financial services are very high risk industries, so they need leadership, and they need the best platform underneath in a long term strategy. >> Well Jedi actually went different. It was actually the right call, but I reported on that. But I think that what gets me is that Cerner on stage yesterday, on Yaney's keynote highlights that it's just not inefficiencies that you can solve, there's multiple win-win-win benefits so in that health care example, lower the costs, better care, better, the providers are in better shape, so in government in public sector, there's really no excuse to take the slack out of the system. >> Yeah. >> Well, there's regulation though. >> Yeah, and Dave mentioned cloud first strategies, we're also seeing a lot of movement around data. You know data is really powerful. Andy mentioned this as well yesterday, but for example in our partner keynote where I just came from. We had on stage Avis. Now, Avis, not public sector customer, but what they're doing is, the gentleman said, was that your car can now talk to you, and that data is now being given to local state officials, local city officials, they can use it for emergency response systems. So that public and private use of data, coming together, is also a big trend that we're seeing. >> I think that's a great example, because Avis I think what he said is a 70 year old company, I think the fleet was 18 billion dollar fleet. >> 600,000 vehicles. >> 600,000 vehicles, 18 billion dollars worth of assets, this is not a born in the cloud start-up, right. That's essentially transformed the entire fleet and made it intelligent. >> Right, and using data to drive a lot of their changes. Like the way they manage fuel for 600,000 cars, and the way they exchange that with local officials is helping them to you know not just be number two, but to start to take over number one. >> But to your point, data is at the core, right. >> Yeah. >> If you are the incumbent and you want to transform, you got to start with the data. >> Sandy, I want to get your reaction to two memes that have been developing on theCube this week. One is, if you take the T out of Cloud Native, and it's Cloud Naive. (Sandy laughs) The other one is, if your born in the cloud, that's great, your winning, but at the price of becoming re-born in the cloud. This is the transformation. Some are, and they're going to not have a long shelf life. So there's a real enterprise and now public sector re-birth, re-borning in the cloud, the new awakening. This is something that is happening. You're an industry veteran, you've seen a lot of waves, what's the re-born, what's this getting back on the cloud, really happening. What is going on? >> It's really interesting, because now I'm in the partner business, and one of our most successful programs is called our partner transformation program. And what that does, is it's a hundred day transformation program to get our partners drinking our own champagne, which is to be on the cloud. And one of the things, we know we first started testing it out, we didn't have a lot of takers, but now, those partners who have gone through that transformation, they're seeing 70% year to year growth, versus other apion partners, even though they're at an advanced layer, they're only seeing 34% growth. So its 2x of revenue growth having transformed to the cloud. So I think, you know back to your question, I think some of this showing the power. Like, why do you go to the cloud, it's not just about cost, it's about agility, it's about innovation, it's about that revenue growth, right. I mean 2x, 70% growth, you can't sneeze at that. That's pretty impactful. >> And you know this really hits, something of passion for me and Dave and our team is the impact on a society. This is a real focus across all generations now, not just millennials, and born in the web, into older folks like us, who have seen before the web. There's real impact, mission driven things. This is a check for good, shaping technology for good. Educate you guys have. This is a big part of what you guys are doing. >> Absolutely, this is one of the reasons why I really wanted to come work in the public sector, because it's fun helping customers make money, and we still do that. But it's really better, when you can help them make money and do great things. So you know, making with the Mayo clinic, for example, and some of these non-profit hospitals, so they can get better data. The GE example that Andy used yesterday, that data is used in public sector. Doing things, like, I know that you guys are part of re-powered tech. You know we brought a 112 unrepresented minorities and women to the conference. And I have to tell you I got goosebumps when one person came up to me and he said, it's the first time he stayed in a hotel, and he's coming here to enhance his coding. You don't realize when I go back to my country, you will have changed my life. And that's just like, don't you get goosebumps from that, versus it's great to change a company, and we want to do that, but it's really great when you can impact people, and that form or fashion. >> And the agility makes that happen faster, its a communal activity, tech for good is here. >> Absolutely, and we just announced today, right before this in the partner's session, that we now have the public safety and disaster response competency for our partners. Because when a customer is dealing with some sort of disaster or emergency they need a disconnected environment for a long periods of time. They need a cloud solution to rally the troops. So we announced that, and we had 17 partners step up immediately to sign up for that. And again, that's all about, giving back, helping in emergency situations, whether it's Ebola in Africa or Hurricane Dorene, right. >> Well, Sandy congratulations, not only have you a senior leader for AWS doing a great job. >> Thank you. >> Just a great passion, and Women in Tech, Underabridged Minorities, you do an amazing job on Tech for Good. >> Thank you. Well it's such an honor to always be on the show. I love what you guys do. I love the memes, I'm going to steal them, okay. >> Can I ask you another question? >> Absolutely. >> Before you wrap. You've had an opportunity to work with developers, you've experienced other clouds. Now you're with AWS and a couple of different roles. Can you describe, what's different about AWS, is it cultural, is it the innovation, I mean what's tangible that you can share with our audience in terms of the difference. >> I think it's a couple of things, the first one the way they we hire. So we hire builders, and you know what it really starts from that hiring. I actually interviewed Vernor the other day, and he and I had a debate about can you transform a company where you have all the same people, or do you need to bring in some new talent as well. So I think it's the way we hire. We search for people that not only meet the leadership criteria, but also are builders, are innovators. And the second one is, you know when Andy says we're customer obsessed, we're partnered obsessed. We really are. We have the mechanisms in place, we have the product management discipline. We have the process to learn from customers. So my first service I launched at AWS, I personally talked to 141 customers and another 100 partners. So think about that, that's almost two hundred almost fifty customers and partners. And at most large companies, as a senior executive you only spend about 20% of your time with customers, I spent about 80% of my time here with customers and partners. And that's a big difference. >> Well we look forward to covering the partner network this year. >> Awesome >> Your amazing, we'll see Teresa Carson on theCube here at 3:30. We are going to ask her some tough questions. What should we ask Teresa? >> What to jest Teresa? Where did you get those red pants? (everyone laughs) >> She's amazing, and again. >> She is amazing. >> We totally believe in what you're doing, and we love the impact, not only the technology advancement for modernizing the public sector across the board. But there's real opportunity for the industry to make, shape technology for betterment. >> Yeah. >> You're doing a great job. Thank you so much. >> Thank you. I think we should start another hashtag for theCube too, is #technologyforgood. >> Awesome. >> What do you think? >> Let's do it. >> I love that. >> But Jonathan been doing a lot of work in that area. >> I know he has. >> We love that. #technologyforgood, #techforgood. This is theCube here live in Las Vegas for re:Invent. I want to thank Intel and AWS, this is the big stage. We had two stages, without sponsoring our mission we wouldn't be here. Thank you AWS and Intel. More coverage after this short break. (dramatic music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Cover Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE! Lisa Martin, day three of Dell Technologies World coverage on theCube. Two sets, lots of CUBE coverage, we're excited to welcome to theCUBE for the first time Andy Anglin, the Director of Cloud Strategies at Halliburton Landmark. Andy, thanks for joining me on theCUBE this afternoon. >> Oh, you're welcome. Thanks for having me. >> So Halliburton, everybody knows the Halliburton name. In fact, Halliburton's celebrating their 100th year anniversary this year. >> That's right, it's a big year. >> It is a big year. Halliburton Landmark, talk to us about what that is. >> So Halliburton is obviously an upstream oil and gas services provider. Landmark is the business unit within Halliburton that provides petrotechnical software solutions to our customers. >> Okay, so customers all across the country, all across the world. >> All across the world. We work with NOCs, with work with independents, we work with the majors, we work with everybody. >> Okay, so, here we are at Dell Technologies World. How is Halliburton Landmark working with Dell Technologies? We're talking about digital transformation of your business, enabling your customers. >> So we're helping our customers through their digital transformation and one of the things that we're helping them do is move their petrotechnical workloads to the cloud. So we're leading the way right now in providing petrotechnical solutions in the cloud. We do that both on public cloud and on private cloud. And for our private cloud solution, which we call Landmark Earth, we've been partnering with Dell EMC for about four years now on building that solution. >> And this is a co-engineered solution. >> That's correct. >> Talk to us about that. What does that entail? >> So what we did was we worked with the Dell EMC engineers. Originally it was the VxBlock technology, but we've since moved it to the VxRail technology. We took that technology and we built the solution, built an appliance and took our blueprint, put that on top of that and then had the two groups work together to co-engineer that, to bring optimal performance and reliability. We're then able to deploy that anywhere in the world. So initially, most of the customers that were interested in it were the customers that were in locations where you couldn't find any public cloud. But now, because of the performance and the reliability that it's able to deliver, we have customers even in places like North America, where most people were originally looking to go to public cloud, now they're looking for the solution. >> So this sounds like it's giving you quite the competitive advantage. >> Absolutely, yeah. We were a little bit ahead of the competition in putting the solution together. We're looking to push to the cloud quickly. >> That's a good place to be, is ahead of the competition. You talked about kind of the speed, reliability, performance. What are some of the other really key values, business values, that your customers are gleaning from this solution already? >> So, couple things. One of things that we can deliver is faster time to value. So a lot of our customers have tried to go do something on their own, and generally speaking, they've met with a lot of challenges trying to do that. They try to build something themselves. It takes a long time. Ultimately it doesn't really work, and so what we can give them is a proven solution that we can stand up very quickly and deliver value to them very fast. The second thing that I would say is that we can significantly lower their total cost of ownership. >> That's always good. >> So our petrotechnical workloads are a little bit unique from some other industries. They're very heavily dependent on GPUs. So our customers are used to having these really massive, powerful workstations, with heavy duty GPUs in them. And in order to manage that type of environment, not only do you have the upfront cost of buying all these workstations, but you now have to go and manage all these workstations individually with these petrotechnical solutions that you've deployed on them, by leveraging a hyper converged infrastructure like we have with the VxRail. With the Landmark Earth appliance, we can provide all of that in a single hyper converged environment, so now you can manage it in one place. So the total cost of ownership, for ongoing operations, is drastically reduced. We also see performance increases that are pretty significant, like we mentioned before, because one of the major things that we do is we load massive amounts of data. And when you're in a client/server environment, that mass of data is coming from a database that's somewhere else. But when you're in a hyper converged environment, your compute and your data are sitting right next to each other, so we can significantly reduce the time to load that data. >> So, how much of this is sort of a cultural shift for the upstream oil and gas industry? >> Absolutely. So oil and gas industry has historically kind of lagged a little bit behind in terms of keeping up with the latest technology. The oil and gas downturn that we went through in the last couple years has really been an impetus to drive that technology transformation, and so a lot of customers are looking for digital transformation strategies in general. And as part of that, this is something that a lot of them are looking into. A lot of the customers that we go talk to are still using that legacy client/server environment, then this is something new to them. And, you know, they don't expect that they would be able to take something and virtualize it somewhere else and get better performance than what they're used to seeing on the front end. >> How is it also, I've mentioned a few minutes ago, this is Halliburton's 100th year. >> Yep. >> Partnership with Dell EMC. How is what you're doing with them and with the Landmark Earth appliance, how is that changing Halliburton's business as well, and even from a cultural perspective? >> So one of the things that's changed in our business model and how we do this, is that we actually leverage the same environment internally. So as our R&D teams are building the solutions, they actually will build and test them on the same type of appliance, which means that when we go deploy it to a customer, the customer's actually deploying the solution on the same environment that it was tested on in the first place. >> That must give them a lot of confidence. >> It does. >> That you've done this. You've established high performance, the results that they have to get. >> Absolutely, yeah. Because a lot of times, when you download software and install it somewhere, a lot of the typical problems that you may run into may just be from nuances or differences in the environment that you're deploying to. So by deploying in the exact same environment that it was built and tested in, it gives you a level of confidence that it's going to perform. >> So, speaking of confidence, how has your confidence changed over the last three days? Lot of announcements from Dell Technologies. We heard, even on the first day, Michael and Pat and Jeff and Satya Nadella from Microsoft. A lot of collaboration, a lot of integration as well >> Absolutely. >> Give me your perspectives on that and how you think it will influence the direction that you guys are going in. >> Quite honestly, I'm really excited to see where things are going. I mentioned before, we deliver solutions but in the public cloud and in the private cloud. And so one of the challenges that we face is being able to manage these workloads across these different types of environments, and a lot of the announcements that they've made have been about they can simplify that process and make it where I can manage workloads, and even move workloads, across different cloud platforms, without having to go build that capability myself. So I'm kind of excited to see where this is all going. >> What are some of the things personally that you're going to be taking away from this? >> Personally, for me, I'm going to go back and have some of my technical folks talk a little bit more about what we can do with the Dell Technologies Cloud and the VMware Cloud solutions that have been announced. >> And also with the announcement to VxRail, looking at it really as a foundational component of the Dell Technologies Cloud, which was just announced a couple of days ago, how does that potentially impact the appliance that you've built, leveraging that technology? >> So I think what it does, is it gives us the opportunity to integrate that into our broader solution around, with the different cloud platforms. Since we already leverage the VxRail technology today, we already leveraged the VMware software stack on top of that, but now what we can do is we can layer on another management layer on top of that, that would allow us to look at that across multiple cloud platforms, and that's pretty exciting. >> And then in terms of market opportunities, how does this open the door even wider for you? As we talked about, you've got a lot of customers, you've been around for a long time, it's a well-established industry, who are still using a lot of legacy practices. What you've heard this week, how do you think that kind of kicks the door open for Halliburton Landmark? >> That's actually a great question. I mentioned before that, initially, most of the customers that were interested in the private cloud solution were in places where we didn't have public cloud And now, we're seeing more customers, even where there are public cloud capabilities, coming back to the private cloud because of either data privacy concerns or performance concerns or whatever, which we can deliver. But if we can actually manage this across multiple cloud platforms, then that enables you to create a hybrid cloud approach, where you could have some workloads in the private cloud and some workloads not in the private cloud, and could span out to public cloud for different things. So, for example, if you have workloads that are temporary in nature, so you don't have something that's permanent. You want something that you can send it out to public cloud and, you know, run a large scenario, some type of simulation on it, get some results back, and bring that back, but then use your private cloud environment to actually visualize the results of that. So, it creates some really cool opportunities. >> And the conversations around emerging technologies, AI machine learning, where are your customers, in the upstream oil and gas industry, where are they, with respect to embracing, acknowledging that there's a lot of potential there, I mean, the power of the cloud to harness the power of AI. Where are they with some of those emerging technologies? Is it still pretty early? >> It's something that everybody is looking into right now, right? So everybody is looking into how can these various digital transformation technologies be leveraged within the oil and gas industry. And there's a lot of opportunity, there's a lot of places where you can plug it in. For example, there's a lot of physics-based modeling that happens in the petrotechnical workflows, but using AI, now you can start doing some AI-based workflows in places where you need a faster solution, such as at the edge. So at the edge, where you might need some kind of a result quickly, and you don't have time to wait 'cause you have to make a decision at the well, you can now do that with artificial intelligence, and you can couple the two together. >> And speaking of edge, one of the things that Jeff Clarke said yesterday, and I have to say this in a Game of Thrones accent, the edge is comin'. But a lot of people have said to us the last couple of days the edge is already here. In the oil and gas industry, there's so much remote, where are customers in terms of embracing what Dell Technologies are saying, it's edge, core, cloud. >> So, the edge is absolutely here, the edge is real, and everybody has varying levels of sophistication at the edge today, and that's another place where there's a lot of effort going on to understand what's the best value for what we can do. So there are places where you need a solution that may not be as expensive, because of the existing investment that you have. There are places where you may be willing to go out and completely overhaul everything, put something new in. There's also greenfield opportunities, where you're building it from scratch and you have opportunities to put things in place. So everybody's looking into the best way to leverage that right now, and that's something that we're working with our customers on. >> So it's already here, it's not coming. Last question, Andy, for you. How does being a partner with Dell Technologies, how is that enabling your business? How do they help you deliver the solutions that you need to to impact your industry? >> So we've worked very closely together from the very beginning, from initially co-engineering the solution. You know, Dell would bring resources out, we would work together to optimize the solution to make it work. But even the sales motions, I mean, we worked together on marketing efforts, we worked together on our sales efforts. We have global teams that work together, we have regional teams that work together, and we bring all those groups together for every opportunity to make the best of it and provide a solution that works best for the customer. >> Sounds like a pretty collaborative relationship. >> It has been. >> Andy, thank you you so much for joining us on theCUBE today and telling us what you're doing at Halliburton Landmark. Pretty cool stuff. >> You're welcome. Thanks for having me. >> Oh, our pleasure. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Dell Technologies World 2019. Thanks for watching. (synthetic rhythmic music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida It's the Cube covering Enterprise Connect twenty nineteen brought to you by five nine. >> Hi. Welcome back to the Q. We are live at Enterprise Connect. Twenty nineteen. Can you hear the buzz behind Stew, Minutemen and me? It's party time. It's five o'Clock kicking things off, welcoming a couple of guests to our program this afternoon. We've got Blair Pleasant, president and principal analyst at Confusion and co founder of BC Strategies, and Michael Rose, the director brand and corporate communications from five nine. Welcome to the Q. Thank you. >> Good afternoon. >> Welcome to the party. >> I know. With the beer and the wine for us, >> we think it's momentarily momentary. So you have been coming to Enterprise Connect about the last ten years or so. A little bit of an overview about what you're doing at this year's easy. >> Sure, So I'm going to be doing for different sessions here. Esso. On Wednesday, I'm going to be giving a presentation. Well, one is going to be to the Channel partners who are selling, you see, telling them about why they should be selling Contact Center and all the wonders about contact center and customer experience. And I'Ll also be doing a session on unified communications end user adoption, and I'm gonna have a panel of and users who were going to tell about their talk about their adoption programs on Thursday. I'm doing a session on collaboration about team collaboration and how to migrate and things to do there. And then I'm participating in the last note where a bunch of analysts consultants, they're gonna basically wrap up the show and talk about, you know, key findings and key messages, and it's going to really good discussion. >> You have a very busy week ahead. I'm curious as to when I were chatting earlier today about the evolution of this event over the last twenty eight twenty nine years, but also paralleling the massive evolution of communications and collaborations, the rise of the empowered consumers who wants to be able to have a conversation on any channel at any time and have our issues resolved right away. Give us your perspective cause you have a very full week here about some of the turns that you you've seen in the last year that you're looking forward to helping customers understand. You talked about selling, you see, so contact centers of service. Yes. >> So when it comes to unified communications, as I mentioned one thing that I've been really focused on is user adoption because companies will buy technology and they'LL deploy technology. But they don't necessarily. That doesn't mean that uses air actually going to be using it. So that's one thing that they really have to focus on. And then when we turn to the contact center side, it's all about customer experience. And in fact, Michael and I have been doing a lot of work in this area. And so we've been hearing the term customer experience. You know, c X. But what's also important is employees or agent experience and a X, as we're calling it. So getting the agent involved also and making sure that they've got the tools that they need to help them do a really good job. >> Alright, so Michael, you have brand and you did a very nice job bringing us the five nine mugs. Yes, there's water in them, but this customer service index can you bring us inside what you're working on, what we're Blair's been involved and let's get into that. >> It's basically an annual study that we've been doing now for two years, and we plan to continue in the first part of it looks at what the consumers are saying about why they raid a customer experience the way they do want that, what's important to them and, more importantly, what turns them off. And as we found in when we did the analytics with Blair is a bad customer engagement. They're likely to leave you and not to business anymore. We were talking earlier about consumers now have voice and choice. You know, they they've got voice through social media to complain, and they will leave and find another brand to partner with. And so that's sort of a key finding around. What is it the people want? And it's basically a quick response. Know who I am and engage me the way I want to be engaged. >> But what was interesting is they want a quick response. But they're also willing to spend more time on the phone or whatever in an interaction talking to an agent if it means that they're going to get the response that they need and get the information that they need to get their problem solved. So speed is important when it comes to getting an agent on the phone or getting that agent, but then they're willing to take the time if it means I'm going to get my problems solved. Do >> you think that one of the things we chatted about with Ryan can? The CMO of five nine earlier today is is the fact that five nine has five billion recorded customer conversations and we were chatting, I think, also with Jonathan Rosenberg. It's an expectation, right? We call contact Center for whatever product or service or whatnot that we're having an issue with her were enquiring about. And you hear that? So there's an expectation that is going to be reported. How did cos actually glean insight from that data? Because I'm there, I'LL tell you, I never think when I'm on the phone call, I have a problem to resolve. And I don't think that they're recording my conversation to help me and all the customers that probably have the same problem. So I thought that was an interesting sort of way of of looking at it. But it's also interesting that that you found that people are willing to spend more time if the value to them is greater. >> Yep, absolutely. And we're finding that companies are using that data. You know, we hear about Big Data Analytics. So analytics is really the big thing, you know, looking at the the whole picture, getting that holistic view of what's working, what isn't working. And then turning that also into I talked before about the agent experience using this to improve what the agent is doing and how the agent is interacting with the customer. >> And that's that's probably a good build to the next part of the study, which is a business decision maker. And so we survey them to see other, any parallels and what they're thinking compared to the consumer on one of the probably most disappointing findings issue and we're doing a webinar on this next week is the lowest thing they write is employeessatisfaction. So they look ATT, you know, is that the right product we're selling? Do we have the right tools but actually looking after the agent, all the employees that ranks the least on their list of priorities, which is quite distressing and sad. But >> the good news is that they did great customer satisfaction very highly, So when it came when we were looking at what's really important to your business and to growing your revenues. Customer satisfaction was very important. So we're happy about that. >> Which it has to be directly tied to the agent experience like, for example, making sure that an agent has is empowered to make a decision. But they had to have the information. They have to have the content to be delivered through the right channels. So that's interesting finding that you are you expecting to hear on DH talk Claremore this week with companies to say, This is why Employeessatisfaction has got to move up the rights because it is directly tied to customer satisfaction. >> So I've been talking about that for a long time, and it's so important, and I think cos they're starting to get it. And we're also seeing more tools like a I. You know, that's really going to be used to help provide the information to the agents and help them do that. Better job. >> One of things. It's always interesting when you have these annual studies to see what is actually changing over time. You know, I've got background on telecommunications, you know, we talk about Omni Channel today. We talked about, you know, unified messaging twenty years ago, we talked about a today. We talked about intelligence and data decades ago. So what's changing? What? Staying the same. Any insight that you're getting, As as we've been moving with the survey Overtime >> voices still K as in, people want to make a phone call if they need help and believe it or not, that's across all age groups that even tops out number one for Millennials, which surprised you. And I know Blake. You did a little test group at home with that? >> Yeah, I had my twenty somethings. They had some friends over. And I asked him, You know, when you have a problem and you need to call contact customer service, what do you do? It? And the first thing they do is try to do self service, you know, try to figure it out on their own. You know, Google it go to YouTube or whatever, but then, if they can't find the problem, they will pick up the phone and called a contacts and, you know, call customer service and you would think that twentysomethings wouldn't do that. But they know that if it's something important and they need to get that information right away or solve that problem right away. They pick up the phone, and they also do chat and email. But the study found that chat actually went down this year, which were kind of surprised about so the use of email went up. But these of chat went down >> Any thoughts as to why that might be going down? >> I think it's because companies haven't been providing that good experience. So even though they're offering chat, it's it's not optimized. So sometimes you know when you're doing shots, you know you're on a website. You doing chat, you can tell when the agent is talking to like ten other people at the same time. So it's it's really frustrating. So I think companies have the technology, but they're not doing it the right way. >> I mean, I know I've had Sometimes you get a chat and I'm like, I'm not talking to a person. It's a chat, Bott. Oh, is this some outsourced chat that maybe doesn't have the skill level that I need as opposed to? If I pick up the phone, I know most of the time that agent I'm going to get either can answer my question or can escalate to the person that, >> interestingly to the one that's right down near the bottom is social media and it hasn't moved for two years. So we're not saying now that could be a chicken and the egg. Is it because companies are not offering it? So therefore, I don't know. I can use it or don't people want to use it on? We had a theory cause. Social Media's had a bit of a rocky ride in the last year with data and privacy and everything else. So maybe consumers just don't trust it yet. And there are other channels, like email as you said, that we've seen increasing. >> But if customers are unhappy about something, they're going to go on. Social media >> is the first thing I do. When you were saying that it was surprising it was low, because if I at a recent experience with an S B and wasn't getting five minutes with a robot on the phone, couldn't get all I wanted was a tech to come out to my house to fix something, Then I had to have somebody call me back and verify. Have you do the exact same thing I've been through this, so I went to Twitter to escalate that. So that's how I think about that. I appreciate that, they responded, But it's I guess it's a couple of a number of interesting things that you guys have brought up today that surprised you. The X factor being lower millennials actually wanting to talk to human. That's good. But also this the fact that people aren't using social as much as maybe you would've thought, or they may be. They don't release. I can't. Or maybe it's to customers not have appropriate affected social listening programs to respond to the volume. >> So that's the chicken and egg thing Michael was talking about. A lot of companies don't offer social as a channel because they think that customers don't want to use it. The customers aren't using it because they don't realize that companies are offering it. >> So, Claire, while we have you, you've got a good perspective on this space. What's differentiating the leaders in the space from some of the laggards in this space? >> Oh, that's a good question. I think a lot of it has to do with again the Focus on the customer experience, you know? So if you're talking about the vendors, the vendors that are succeeding are the ones that really do. Look at the customer, not just the technology. So so many companies could do technology. The technology is the easy part, its doing it right. It's really making that difference and making things simple, making things unified, making it not complex for customers. Because right now things are just so complex. You have to go no to so many different places. Teo, to make things work. So the more you can make things seamless and simple. I think that's what's really separating. The winners from the losers >> will make Michael Maybe you can elaborate on, you know, delivering a integrated connected on the channel experience. But I think there's still some of maturation curve that it's on, whereby I might have an expectation as a consumer than I'm goingto go through chat or email or another channel. And then if I go through Twitter or social, I'm hoping that this conversation is connected. Where can five nine help customers across industries to really integrate and deliver Omni Channel? >> I think the first thing is the cloud because moving to the cloud enables you to move quickly is a business. And as we were saying today, the software updates all the time and it's easy. It's like your phone, you just downloading away you go. So it's It's the cloud first to get to the data, and we talked about that before, too, and growing. Our CEO calls it the dark data because no one's using it. And you need to mind that data to get the inside, because then the system will start directing the consumer based on what the intelligence is telling them, irrespective of which channel they come through on. Do you really want an experience where I've done tweeting away with a company? And they said, Well, privately email you now because we want to take it off line and then they'LL say, Well, no, now we need to call, but it's it's fluid. All the data and all the information is passed through that communication, So it's seamless for me, the consumer, and it's more rewarding for the agent because they can actually get to the core issue for the customer and resolve it. >> That's a customer there. Maybe Blair, This is a question for you. How does a customer take what's probably traditional silos of customer experiences and culturally evolved as a business to be able to deliver what Michael was talking about? I mentioned that those Silas and that kind of cultural disparity might be kind of a challenge for an organisation to pivot as quickly as they need to when customer lifetime value was on the line. >> Yeah, and it's definitely been a challenge for a lot of companies, but they know that they have to get there. So I think even though some of them might be resistant, they realised that to get the results that they need, they really do have to do that. But it's a cultural change, and you asked before about what's separating some of the winners from losers. I think that's a big part of it is being able to make that change >> player, you know, as I was getting ready for the show, there's general belief that customers are embracing of the cloud. It's no longer we're no longer in the evangelization phases. I've heard five nine, but we're in adoption. I'm curious player. When it comes to a I, though our users ready. Everybody we talk about these technologies are going to be infused with aot. There's some, you know, fear. Sometimes out there is like the robots, or they're going to take my personal data or anything like that. What do you see out there and what should we be aware of and where do we need to go? As an industry, I want to come stay. I So >> as far as consumers, they do need to be worried. You know, they're definitely issues about privacy, and you know what's going to happen with the information. But I think user shouldn't really know that there's a I involved on, and that's also debate we have, like, if you're interacting with the pot, you know, if you're doing a chat, do you know if it's a body or an agent? So some companies, you know, make it clear, you know? Hi. This is, you know, Joe the Bob, But other companies don't. So then you have to say I and I've had these experiences are youa, but no, I am a real person. Okay, prove to me your real person. So it's so it's really interesting. So some companies feel that customers are more open if they're talking to a bomb. And in certain industries, like if it's healthcare or finance, people are going to be more open if it's about because they don't want to share their personal information with a live person. But if it's a computer is like okay, I can share the information. So it were very much in early days, so we don't really I have the experience to drawn yet. So let's talk about this again next year. >> Well, Blair, Michael, thank you so much for joining student. Be on the Cube this afternoon and sharing spending some time since you have such a busy week where we appreciate your insights on the event on enterprise, collaboration and communication. And we appreciate your time. Thank you for soon. Minutemen. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube

>> Live from Washington DC, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome back. It's theCUBE's exclusive coverage. We're here in Washington, D.C. for live coverage of theCUBE here at Amazon Web Services, AWS Public Sector Summit. This is the re-invent for the global public sector. Technically they do a summit but it's really more of a very focused celebration and informational sessions with customers from Amazon Web Services, GovCloud, and also international, except China, different world. John Furrier, Dave Vellante here for our third year covering AWS Public Sector Summit and again our next guest is Max Peterson, the Vice President of International Sales Worldwide for public sector data, Max, good to see you, thanks for coming back. >> It's good to see you again, John, thank you. >> So, we saw you at dinner last night, great VIP Teresa Carlson dinner last night, it's a who's who in Washington, D.C., but also international global public sector. >> Absolutely. >> And so, I want to get your thoughts on this, because AWS is not just in D.C. for GovCloud, there's a global framework here. What's goin' on, what's your take on how this cloud is disrupting the digital nations, and obviously here at home in D.C.? >> Well, John, so first of all, I love your description of this as a celebration, because really that's one of the things that we do, is we celebrate customer success, and so when you look at AWS around the world, we've got customers that are delivering solutions for citizens, new solutions for healthcare, a great solution to education all around the world. In Europe, we serve all those customers from London, Ireland, Germany, Frankfurt, Paris, all open regions, and we're bringing two new regions that we've announced, in the Middle East, which is an exciting part of the Europe, Middle East, and Africa business, and then also up in the Nordics, with Sweden. >> Yeah, so I want to ask you about EMEA, Europe, Middle East and Africa, it's the acronym for essentially international. Huge growth, obviously Europe is a mature set of countries, and it has its own set of issues, but in the Middle East and outside of Europe there's a huge growing middle class of digital culture. >> Yes. >> You're seeing everything from cryptocurrency booming, blockchain, you're seeing kind of the financial industries changing, obviously mobile impact, you got a new revolution going on with digital. You guys have to kind of thread the needle on that. What are you guys doing to support those regions? Obviously, you got to invest, got GDP always in the headlines >> Right. >> Recently, that's Europe's issue, and globally, but you got Europe, and you got outside of Europe. Two different growth strategies, how is AWS investing, what are some of the things you guys are doing? >> Sure, let me try and get all of those questions >> (laughs) Just start them one at a time >> That was very good, yeah. So, let's do the invest and grow piece. Digital skills are critical, and that's one of the challenges with the overall digital transformation, and, by the way, that's not just EMEA, that's all around the world, right? Including the U.S., and so we're doing a lot of things to try to address the digital skills requirement, a program that we've got called AWS Educate just yesterday announced the Cloud Academy Course. So, career colleges, technical colleges will be able to teach a two-year course specifically on cloud, right? For traditional university education, we provide this thing called AWS Educate. We, in the UK, we started a program over 18 months ago called Restart, where we focus on military leavers, spouses, and disadvantaged youth through the prince's trust, and we're training a thousand people a year on AWS cloud computing and digital skills. Taking them, in this case, out of military, or from less advantaged backgrounds and bringin' 'em into tech. And then, finally in April of this year, at our Brussels public sector summit, a celebration of customers in EMEA, we announced that we're going to be training 100,000 people across Europe, Middle East and Africa, with a combination of all of these programs, so skills is absolutely top in terms of getting people on to the cloud, right, and having them be digitally savvy, but the other part that you talked about is really the generational and cultural changes. People expect service when they touch a button on the phone. And that's not how most governments work, it's not how a lot of educational institutions work, and so we're helping them. And so, literally now, across the region, we've got governments that are delivering online citizen services at the touch of a button. Big organizations, like the UK Home Office, like the Department for Wealth and Pensions, like the Ministry of Justice. And then, I think the other thing that you asked about was GDPR. >> Yeah. (laughs) >> Am I covering all the bases? >> You're doing good Max. >> You keep it rollin'. >> You're a clipping machine, here. >> So, GDPR might be thought of as a European phenomenon, but my personal opinion is that's going to set the direction for personal data privacy around the world, and we're seeing the implementation happen in Europe, but we're seeing also customers in the Middle East, in Asia, down in Latin America going, "Hey, that's a good example." And I think you'll see people adopt it, much like people have adopted the NIST definition of cloud computing. Why re-invent it? If there's something that's good, let's adopt it and go, and Amazon understood that that was coming, although some people act like it's a surprise. >> Yeah. >> Did your e-mail box get flooded with e-mail? >> Oh, Gosh. >> God, tons Well the day >> Day before. >> Yes! >> (laughs) >> Yes, day before! Acting like this was, like a surprise. It started two years before, so Amazon actually started our planning so that when the day arrived for it to be effective, AWS services were GDPR compliant so that customers could build GDPR compliant solutions on top of the cloud. >> So, I mean generally I know there's a lot of detail there, but what does that mean, GDPR compliant? 'Cause I like having my data in the cloud with GDPR, 'cause I can push a lot of the compliance onto my cloud provider, so what does that really mean, Max? >> Yeah, well fundamentally, GDPR gives people control of their information. An example is the right to be forgotten, right? Many companies, good companies were already doing that. This makes it a requirement across the entire EU, right? And so, what it means to be compliant is that companies, governments, people need to have a data architecture. They really have to understand where their data is, what information they're collecting, and they have to make the systems follow the rules for privacy protection. >> So how does AWS specifically help me as a customer? >> Right, so our customers around Europe, in fact, around the world build their solutions on top of Amazon. The Amazon services do things that are required by GDPR like encryption, alright? And so, you're supposed to encrypt and protect private data. In Amazon, all you do is click a button, and no matter where you store it, it's encrypted and protected. So a lot of organizations struggled to implement some of these basic protections. Amazon's done it forever, and under GDPR, we've organized those so that all of our services act the same. >> Max, this brings up security questions, 'cause, you know obviously we hear a lot of people use the cloud, as an example, for getting things stood up quickly, >> Yep. >> Whether it's an application in the past, and then say a data warehouse, you got redshifts, and kinesis, and at one point was the fastest growing service, as Andy Jassy said, now that's been replaced by a bunch of other stuff. You got SageMaker around the corner, >> SageMaker's awesome. >> So you got that ability, but also data is not just a data warehouse question. It's really a central value proposition, whether you're talking about in the cloud or IOT, so data becomes the center of the value proposition. How are you guys ensuring security? What are some of the conversations, because it certainly differs on a country by country basis. You got multiple regions developing, established and developing new ones for AWS. How do you look at that? How do you talk to customers and say, "Okay, here's our strategy, and here's what we're doing to secure your data, here's how you can go faster (laughs), keep innovating, because you know they don't want to go slower, because it's complicated. To do a GDPR overhaul, for some customers, is a huge task. How do you guys make it faster, while securing the data? >> Yeah, so first of all, your observation about data, having gravity, is absolutely true. What we've struggled with, with government customers, with healthcare and commercial enterprise, is people have their data locked up in little silos. So the first thing that people are doing on the cloud, is they're taking all that and putting it into a data warehouse, a data repository. Last night we heard from NASA, and from Blue Origin about the explosion in data, and in fact, what they said, and we believe, is that you're going to start bringing your compute to the data because the amount of information that you've got, when you've got billions of sensors, IOT, billions of these devices that are sending information or receiving information, you have to have a cloud strategy to store all that information. And then secondly, you have to have a cloud compute strategy to actually make use of that information. You can't download it anymore. If you're going to operate in real time, you've got to run that machine learning, right, in real time, against the data that's coming in, and then you've got to be able to provide the information back to an application or to people that makes use of it. So you just can't do it in-house anymore. >> You mentioned the talk last night as part of the Earth and Science Program, which you guys did, which by the way, I thought was fabulous. For the folks watching, they had a special inaugural event, before this event around earth and space, Blue Origin was there, Jet Propulsion Lab, much of the NASA guys, a lot of customers. But the interesting thing he said also, was is that they look at the data as a key part, and then he called himself a CTO, Chief Toy Officer. And he goes, "you got to play with the toys before they become too old," but that was a methodology that he was talking about how they get involved in using the tooling. Tooling becomes super important. You guys have a set of services, AWS, Amazon Web Services, which essentially are tools. >> Yeah. >> Collectively tools, you know global, you end up generalizing it, but this is important because now you can mix and match. Talk about how that's changed the customer mindset and how they roll out technology because they got to play, they got to experiment, as Andy Jassy would say, but also, also put the tools into production. How is it changing the face of your customer base? >> Sure, well, one of the things that customers love, is the selection of tools, but one of the most important things we actually do with customers, is help them to solve their problems. We have a professional service organization, we have what we call Envision Engineering, which is a specialized team that goes in and develops prototypes with customers, so that they understand how they can use these different tools to actually get their work done. One quick example: in the UK, the NHS had to implement a new program for people calling in to understand health benefits. And they could've done this in a very traditional fashion, it would've taken months and months to set up the call center and get everything rolling. Fortunately, they worked with one of our partners, and they understood that they could use new speech and language processing tools like Lex, and Amazon's in-the-cloud call center tools, like Connect. In two weeks, they were able to develop the application that handled 42% of the inbound call volume entirely automated, with speech and text processing, so that the other 52% could go to live operators where they had a more complex problem. That was prototyped in two weeks, it was implemented in three more weeks, a total of five weeks from concept to operation of a call center receiving thousands and thousands of inbound calls on the cloud. >> Max, can you paint a picture of the EMEA customer base, how it sort of compares to the US, the profile? I mean, obviously here, in the United States, you got a healthy mix of customers. You got startups, you're announcing enterprises, you got IOT use cases. I imagine a lot of diversity in EMEA, but how does it compare with the US, how would you describe it? Paint a picture for us. >> Yeah sure, candidly, we see the same exact patterns all around the world. Customers are in different stages of readiness, but across Europe, we have central governments that are bringing online, mission systems to the cloud. I mentioned Home Office, I mentioned DWP, I mentioned Her Majesty Revenue and Customs, HMRC. They're bringing real mission systems to the cloud now because they laid the right foundations, right? They've got a cloud native policy, and that's what directs government, that says stop building legacy systems and start building for the future by using the cloud. Educational institutions across the board are using AWS. Science and research, like the European Space Agency is using AWS, so we see, really, just the same pattern going on. Some areas of the world are newer to the cloud, so in the Middle East, we're seeing that sort of startup phase, where startup companies are gettin' onto the cloud. Some of 'em are very big. Careem is a billion dollar startup running on AWS, right. But we're helping startups just do the basics on the cloud. In Bahrain, which is a small country in the Middle East, they realized the transformative opportunity with cloud computing, and they decided to take the lead. They worked with AWS, they produced a national cloud policy, their CIO said we will move to the cloud, and that's key. Leadership is absolutely key. And then they put in place a framework, and they very systematically identified those applications that were ready, and they moved those first. Then they tackled the ones that weren't quite ready, and they moved those. They moved 450 applications in a matter of three months, to the cloud, but it was by having a focused program, top-level leadership, the right policy, and then we provided technical resources to help them do it. >> Max, I want to get one last question before the time comes up, but I want to put you on the spot here. >> Oh good. >> In the United States, Amazon Web Services public sector has really kind of changed the game. You saw the CIA deal that you guys did years ago, the Department of Defense is all in the news, obviously it's changing the ecosystem. How is that dynamic happening in Europe? You said the patterns are the same. Take a minute to just quickly describe, what's going on in the ecosystem? What's the partner profile look like? You've got a great partner ecosystem, and there are different partners. You mentioned Bahrain, Digital Nation, changing the game. You guys seem to attract kind of a new guard, a new kind of thinking, partners. What is the ecosystem partnerships look like for you guys, internationally, and is there the same dynamic going on that's happening in the US with the CIA, and DOD leaders around changing the narrative, changing the game, with technology? >> Sure, good questions. We wouldn't be able to deliver the solutions that we deliver to customers without our partner ecosystem. And sometimes, they're small, born in the cloud partners, the same sort of phenomenon that we have in the US. The example with the National Health Service was delivered by a expert consulting partner called Arcus Global, about a hundred person strong consulting organization that just knows cloud and makes it their business. And we see those throughout Europe, Middle East, and into Africa. We have our large global partners, Capgemini, Accenture, and then I think the other thing that's really important, is the regional partners. So what's happening is we're seeing those regional partners, partners like Everee, or Dee-Ecto, or SCC. We're seeing them now realize that their customers want to be agile, they want to be innovative, they want to be fast, and it doesn't hurt that they're going to save some money. And so we're seeing them change their business model, to adopt cloud computing, and that's the tipping point. When that middle, that trusted middle of partners, starts to adopt cloud and help the customers, that's when it really swings the other direction. >> It's great growth, and new growth brings new partners, new profiles, new brands, new names, and specialty is key. Max, thanks for coming on the CUBE. Really appreciate you taking the time. International, we're riding the wave of home sector with CUBE here in the US, soon we'll see you in some international summits. >> I'm looking forward, >> Alright. >> John, Dave, it was awesome to talk to you. >> Thanks Max. >> Alright, we are here live in Washington, D.C., for Amazon Web Services, AWS, Public Sector Summit 2018, we are in Washington, I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, and also Stu Miniman is here, the whole CUBE team is here, unpacking the phenomenon that is AWS, rocking the government and digital nations around the world. We're back with more, after this short break. (upbeat techno music)

>> From Boston, Massachusets it's theCube. Covering LiveWorx 18. Brought to you by PTC. >> Welcome back to bean town, everybody. This is theCube, the leader in live tech coverage, and we're covering LiveWorx, the three day conference hosted by PTC. We're at the BCEC, which is kind of the Starship Enterprise. I'm Dave Vellante, with my co-host Stu Miniman. As I say, Cube one day coverage of this three day conference. Maciek Kranz is here. He's the Vice President of Strategic Innovations at Cisco. Maciek, thanks for coming on theCube. >> Thank you so much for having me. It really looks like a cube. >> Usually we're out in the open, but they've put us here in a cube, which is great. Of course we were at Cisco Live last week. You were there, it was an awesome show. 27, 28 thousand people. A lot of the innovations that we're talking about here, you guys, you know, at Cisco, are obviously touching upon. Whether it was blockchain or the edge. May I ask you, innovation's in your title. What are you doing here at this conference? >> Basically we're on the mission to make sure that every company, large and small, whatever the industry you're in, gets started on the IOT journey. All of us here, we were talking about it last week at Cisco Live, we are sort of on the mission to make sure that everybody knows how to do it, how to get started, how to go through the journey. So I'm here to promote the cause. >> You had posted a blog a little bit ago on LinkedIn. Check it out, if you go to Maciek's LinkedIn profile you'll see it. Five myths around IOT, and I thought it was quite instructive. I'm going to start with the middle of it, which is IOT is this one big market, and we've been talking about how it's a trillion dollar market. It's almost impossible to size. It's so fragmented, and bringing together the operations technology and information technology world, and there's the edge, there's the core, there's hardware, there's software, there's services. How should we think about the IOT, obviously not as one big market as you pointed out in your blog. >> Right, and you actually nailed it. When you think about sort of a traditional way that technology companies think about the market, it was sort of model of just get a billion people to get on your platform and the good things will happen. Well in the IOT space, as you pointed out, it's a very fragmented market. So you basically need to have two strategies. You either become a horizontal specialist and then you integrate with a vertical specialist to develop a joint solution, or you focus on use case and you focus on one market, and you go deep and focus with customers. So from that perspective the approach is different, but in a nutshell to be successful in this space, it's not only about technology, it's about ecosystem. It's about building the coaliltion of the willing, because at the end of the day, the customers want solutions to their problems. And they don't want to just buy your technology, they want to work with you on developing solutions that drive business outcomes. >> Maciek, one of the things that's been interesting to watch is that people want to try, and they want to try faster. One of the big benefits of public cloud was that I have this sandbox that I could throw some people at, have a little bit of money, and try things and fail and try again. One of the concerns I have when I hear things like PTC and Microsoft get up on stage and say, "It's going to take 20 to 25 partners to put this together." When I hear that it's fragmented, it's going to take time, it's going to take money, help us. Are there are ways I can start playing with things to understand what will and what won't work for my environment, or is this something that I have to throw a million dollars and group of people for a year and a half on? >> It's actually a great point, and it's another, I would say, misconception, which is I need to go deep, have a sort of a big strategy. One of the things that I talk about with the customers is, yes, dream big but start small. So yes, have a sort of a big vision, big architecture, but then focus on a first project, because it's a multi-year, multi-phased journey. So from that perspective, you know, at Cisco we have roughly 14,000 customers that already got started on this IOT journey, and the use cases that we've seen sort of are in four different categories. First one is connect things, so connecting your operations, the second one is remote operations, the third one is predictive analytics, the fourth one is preventive maintenance. So don't be a hero, pick one of these four use cases, try it out, then do a ROI on this, and if your ROI is positive then do a next, maybe more sophisticated, more adventurous kind of a project down the road. So pace yourself. >> This is our 9th year doing theCube, and the one thing we've learned about information technology, operations technology, is it all comes back to data. And you pointed out again, you pointed it out in your piece, it's not just about connecting, it's about the data. So let's talk about the data, the data model. You've got edge, you've got core. You've got this really increasingly complex and elongating data pipeline. You've got physics, you've got latency. So what's your perspective on the data, how that's evolving, and how organizations need to take advantage of the data? >> Dave, I think you nailed it. It may come across funny because I work for Cisco and we connect things, but if you think about the first wave of internet, the main purpose of the devices and the way we were connecting them, was basically for you and I to get access to each other, to get access to the online data, to the online processes. The main purpose we connecting IOT devices, so that they can generate the data, and then we can analyze that data, turn these systems into solutions to drive business outcomes. So from that perspective we're actually seeing a big shift in the sort of data model, and it requires flexibility. Traditionally, we talked about cloud, right? In a cloud we usually see the use cases that require a processing of a lot of data, sort of in the batch possessing mode, or for example if you want to connect a bunch of vending machines, you can connect them directly to the cloud, because these machines actually send only very few packets and they send them very infrequently. Basically saying, "Hey, come on over "and replenish a bunch of supplies." But if you look at connected vehicle, if you look at an oil rig, in the case of oil rig, there's let's say a large one that has 100,000 sensors. These sensors generate a couple terabytes of data per day. You can't just send this data directly to the cloud through the satellite connection, right? You have to process the data on the oil rig based on the policy coming from the cloud. So from that perspective we've seen that there's a need for a more flexible architecture. We call it Fog Computing, which basically allows you to have flexibility of extending the cloud to the edge so you can process the data at the edge. You can execute on the AI functions at the edge as well. So that's one of the big architectural shifts that we've seen with IOT as well. >> Maciek, one of the opportunities of new architectures has been to do a redo for security. When it comes to IOT, though, there's a lot of concern around that, because just the surface area that we're going to have, the devices. Talk to us about how security fits into IOT. >> Yeah, it's hard to talk about IOT without mentioning security, right? And we obviously seen over the last two years a lot of press around IOT denial of service attacks and so forth, and for me I think the silver lining out of all of this news is that, first of all, that we have seen the vendor community finally taking IOT security seriously. So all the security vendors are actually investing in IOT security now appropriately. We now working together as an industry on standards, on interoperability, on sort of come on architectures, even with the device vendors who traditionally didn't pay much attention to security as well. Sort of like what we did with wifi, you remember, about 15 years ago but at a much greater scale. So the vendor community's focusing on it, but more importantly also the businesses are moving from what I would consider sort of a... I would say that kind of a denial. Hoping that their plant is not connected to the outside world and that it's secure. Moving down now to the much more modern model, which is basically a comprehensive architecture working with are-see-sos, across the enterprise, focusing on before, during, and after. So IOT now is being integrated into a broader security architecture, and IT and OT are working together. So yes, there is a concern, yes. There are a lot of events hitting the news, but I also think as an industry we're making progress. >> Just to follow up on that, Cisco obviously has an advantage in security, because you go end-to-end, you guys make everything, and you can do deep-packet inspection, and that seems to be a real advantage here. But then there's this thing called blockchain, and everybody talks about how blockchain can be applied. Where do you see blockchain fitting into the security equation? >> Yeah, I think that's a good question. Maybe a bit more broader story, I actually believe there's four legs to this digital transformations tool. There's IOT generating the data and acting on the decisions, there's AI, there is the fog computing we talked about, and the fourth tool is blockchain, which basically allows us to make sure that the data we're using we can actually trust. At the high level blockchain, people often confuse blockchain and Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, but blockchain is an underlying technology behind sort of the crypto, that allows basically multiple parties to write their transactions in a fast and permanent way. But in the enterprise context, in IOT context, blockchain allows us to actually come up with very new use cases by looking at the provenance, and looking at the data across multiple parties. The data we can trust. For example, the use cases such as counterfeiting, there are use cases like food safety. Like patient records. Like provenance of materials. So now we can enable these use cases, because we have a single source of truth. >> I want to ask you about disruption. I like the mental model and picture that you created before of a horizontal technologies, and you kind of get vertical industries, and it seems like, again I'm bringing it back to data. We heard Super Mario at the host of the conference say this was the largest digital transformation conference. Which we laughed, like every conference is a digital transformation conference. But to us, digital transformation, digital means data. And that picture you drew of horizontal technology and vertical industries, it's all data, and data enables disruption. It used to be a vertical stack of talent and manufacturing and supply chain within an industry, and now data seems to be blowing that to pieces in digital. You see Amazon getting into, you know, buying Whole Foods in grocery. You see Apple in financial services. Others, Silicon Valley type companies, disrupting healthcare, which we all know needs disruption. What do you make of disruption? It seems like no industry is safe. It seems like Silicon Valley has this dual disruption agenda. Horizontal technology and then partnering within industries, and everything is getting turned up on its side. What do you make of it all? >> Dave, I think you nailed it. It is about and verus or, right? When you think about companies, you mentioned Microsoft, Cisco, Amazon, verus PTC or Rockwell, or Emerson and others. 10 years ago we sort of lived on a different planet, right, and rarely these companies even talked to each other. And now, even at this show, these companies are actually showing joint solutions. So that's precisely, I think, what we've seen, which is technology competence coming from the Valley and from traditional technology industry, and then the vertical and market expertise coming from these more traditional vendors. At the end of the day, it is about technology, but it is also about talent. It is about skillsets. It's about all of us pulling our resources together to develop solutions to drive business outcomes. So cloud, obviously, was a very disruptive force in our industry. But when you think about IOT, just based on what you just said, it seems to me given the assets, the resources, the people, the plants, the equipment, it seems like IOT is maybe somewhat evolutionary. Not a completely... It's a disruptive force in that's new and that it's different, but it seems like the incumbents, I mean look at PTC, their resurgence. It seems like the incumbents have an advantage here. What are your thoughts? >> I think that if they play it right they absolutely do. But it requires also a shift in mindset, and I think we seeing it already, which is moving from a vertical, one company does it all kind of mentality, into the lets build an ecosystem based on open systems, open standards, interoperability. And that's sort of a shift I think we are seeing. So for me, I think that the incumbents, if they embrace this kind of a model, they absolutely have a critical role to play. On the flip side, the technology companies realizing that they need to, it's not only about technology, but it's also about partnering. It's about integrating within legacy ecosystems and the legacy infrastructure. So each of the sides of the coin need to learn new tricks. >> Okay, last question, is your initial thoughts, anyway, on this event, some initial take aways. I know it's early, day one, but you've been here. You've heard the keynotes. Final thoughts? >> I think so far it's actually a great start to the event. I have to say, what we've talked about already, my biggest take away is to see, and actually joy, is to see companies from different walks of life working together. You have robotics companies, you have AI companies, you have industrial companies. All of them are coming up with solutions together, and that's basically what we want to see. Is breaking the barriers and multiple companies working together to move the industry forward. >> And you're also seeing the big SIs are here. I can see Accenture, I can see Deloid. I know InfoSys is here, et cetera, et cetera. So if they're here, you know there's a lot of money to be made. So Maciek, thanks very much. It's really a pleasure having you. Alright, keep it right there, everybody. This is theCube, from LiveWorx in Boston. We'll be right back after this short break.

>> Announcer: From New York, it's theCUBE! Covering Blockchain Week. Now, here's John Furrier. Hello everyone this is theCUBE's exclusive coverage here in New York at Blockchain Week New York, #BlockchainNY this is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier your host. Our next guest is Madhu Kutty, who's a partner at Arcadia Crypto Ventures, thanks for joining me here in New York City. We're at the Block Party, a private event here, thanks for joining us during Blockchain Week. >> Yep. >> So you guys do a lot of deals, we had Richard on, who's the managing partner of the firm, early in the space, super early, so you're in the front wave, get all the best deals, now it's competitive, you got to read the white papers, you got to get down and dirty. Still got the pretenders, figure out what's the bad deals, the good deals, and then when you get a good deal make sure it's tailor fit, both the tech matches the economics. (laughing) which I find to be interesting, because, you can have a brilliant entrepreneur come in but their token model's off. Do you see this every day? >> Yeah, we see this a lot. Especially the last year things were much more easier, because most of the people who are coming were generally at least trying to do something good, but this year we see a lot of people who just want to make use of the bail that's happening, just get on the hype and get some quick buck, even on traditional firms that've failed are coming and trying to capture the blockchain hype. >> Yeah, so throw the hail Mary basically, let's do an ICO, and they're going, we're going under throw the hail Mary! >> Yes, that's what we see a lot happening, and then there was a lot of tech projects back in the past so it was a little more easy to evaluate, so, but this year you're seeing more real business applications coming onboard. >> I was talking with Richard about some of the growth things around crypto, and I want to get your take on it because, the internet infrastructure is changing. We see the web 1.0, I mean we hear in these, all the events I go to, similar kind of conversation, TCBIP created inter-networking and inter-operability, HTTP created a whole new way to do things: web 1.0. Now we're hearing token economics and blockchain as a new way, but yet, inter-operating with the old systems, so you have a whole seat change, and there's a real tech-enablement. What's your view on this, because some people get it wrong, they understand what the business logic means, but they want to know what the tech-enablement is. What's the tech that's driving all this new infrastructure? >> So the internet, you could think of it as a way to share information with a worldwide audience, so blockchain, for the first time ever, enables on blockchain, or the inter-crypto infrastructure, first time enables humans to transfer value over the wire. So you could represent one as one over the wire, rather than creating like a duplication of one. So you could have your own Bitcoin stored on the network, and you can access it yourself, and you can send that value across. This was never possible in the history of the human race, so that's what a blockchain enables, it's the solution to basically this general problem, and we always thought that it was not possible but for the first time ever we have a means to achieve that. >> I've also been saying at some of these cube events, that every company needs a chief economic officer, you used to have a CGO, now you need a chief economic officer. So I got to ask you, when you see a technology, you got to kind of make sure it marries the right model. So in the token world, putting security tokens aside, which I like by the way. They're very easy to deal with, utility tokens are different you have two types of utility tokens a work-like token, and a burn-mint equilibrium approach. What's your take on the two strategies there, when should some appoint a burn-mint--or a BME strategy versus say a work token which is much more of a utility classic. >> So a burn token is what has been the work, at least in the past, for building actual platforms, so that solution itself is not fully solved. So once we solve that completely, that's when we see much more utility tokens coming on board, but as this point we see more of the remittance problem that's being solved so that, we have a lot of exchanges, and transferring of currency that's being worked on. So you can think of it like the email in the internet era, though we had all these different .coms, only email worked well. So right now the transfer of value, the remittance on the exchange is the only thing that's working, but as we go forward we'll see much more business models coming out. >> So it's really going to evolve. >> Yep. I think this could be the year that's going to be-- Ethereum was moment when, there was the Ethereum moment when you really could start the next generation of the cryptocurrency movement, so I think this year we could see more business. >> And I've heard some of the conversations here at the consensus event around, a lot of people trying to force blockchain and decentralize, specifically with a centralized business model, so a lot of people are poopooing that. Which is, we just call that blockchain washing, white washing, trying to save themselves. So I got to ask you, I mean first of all, I remember having conversations back when the web started, oh my God, AOL and this 14.4 dial up is so slow, so much slower than a mini computer, technically right, mini computer was much faster than dial up modems to web, but web wasn't replacing the mini computers, replacing direct mail, direct response, analog things. So the question I want to ask you is: what is the analog displacement, what apples-to-apples comparison should we be making when people throw out these idiotic comments like, oh my God blockchain's so slow, because it is kind of slow, the web was slow too, but it replaced something old. Is it right, is blockchain replacing something old, and what is the right comparison? >> So the right comparison is that it is, it has solved, theoretically, the problems, the theoretical solution for these problems we are going to solve the decentralization and decentralizing business, theoretically we have solved it, and we have proved it practically, it's possible, but it is not really there for that-- the mass option for real business to onboard, it has not reached that scale yet. As we all know, if Netflix was in business in 1999, it could never succeed. But then a lot of infrastructure was built up on top of it, and Netflix worked, so the same thing is going to happen here. >> So you're not worried about the complains when people say it's slow? >> No, because there's more in IC, each time I go to these conferences, as you have seen, more and more smart people are jumping in, more and more money is flowing in-- >> The web grew too, more people were using the web, so growth was the key. >> Yeah, growth is the key, and more smart people coming, and they're going to figure it out. >> When you look under the hood of a company they come in and say hey I want to get funding, or I have this great business model, or I take an existing business and tokenize it. What are the things you look for in a good ICO candidate, or just someone who's tryna do token economics, with a technology trying to transition, not pivot, transform into token economics? >> So a lot of it, something people call it is conviction-based investing, so that's a lot, they have a lot in this cryptocurrency space. So we look at the technology, underlying technology, how we can solve some of the issues. We look at the broader aspect of the space, how big the space is so it can solve that, and we also look at the team, and if these three things are in good combination we believe in it can be a rival business. And also the partners, or the founders, have to be a little less greedy, like look for smaller raises that's good enough for the next two years, roughly. >> Well I think entrepreneurs can get liquid faster off token economics, I think it's actually better for the entrepreneur, in my opinion. I want to take change gears a second talk about you personally how did you get here, did you just wake up one day and say I'm going to work for Arcadia Crypto Ventures, were you scratching an itch, did you come from finance, what's your background? >> My background has been in technology and finance, worked with a bunch of Wall Street banks, then private equity firms, then I was running a technology firm when I met Richard, who's very early in the space. So we talked about it and he had a lot of interesting questions about the space so myself and one of my partners we went back and researched on it. So we came back with these answers, he had a little more insight, back in the day, more access to the detail during that time, so we worked with him, and loosely, we worked as some kind of analyst for him and we started working together and then it formalized in a bigger way, now we are working. >> When did you have that moment saying damn this is going to be good? >> I think, so it was once we totally understood the Santoshi Paper, at that point we knew that this is going to change the world. But even I didn't expect that this would be this fast. So what we are seeing today, at that time I thought maybe we'll see that in 2020, 2021, but the space exploded. Ethereum hitting a thousand, which it hit sometime this year I was thinking might happen sometime 2021 or 2022, by then. >> What sector surprised you the most, was it the trading side, the entrepreneur side, what area of the market has surprised you the most? >> What's surprising is the world wide ERD option, and how especially the new generation has kind of lost a bit of interest, not even like they are disillusioned with this other investment model, they are jumping in a big way. And I think this is even ruggedly, everyone has to look for that, these people have come in, so let's get it right for these folks so that they have a belief in the system and they can go forward. >> Madhu I want to get your thoughts on something I think is important for folks to understand, and that is there's a lot of liquidity, Richard mentioned that liquidity is an important part. >> Absolutely. >> So there's a lot of new dynamics and art and science that goes into the trading side of it, much accelerated than a classic IPO or say a hedge-fund kind of deal, where there's always kind of some stuff going on, but here you can get much earlier in on the process. Talk about, for the folks who like now know what a wallet is and might have an account on Coinbase, to the extent that that's their knowledge base. You're so much deeper on some of the trading side, what are the dynamics, how would you break down the trading situation on crypto, give us the crypto trading 101. >> So the idea is that, first of all, there are some huge exchanges, so every cryptocurrency out there wants to be on these exchanges, so these exchanges have much more trading volume, have much more liquidity, that's where you want to be. If you are doing some investment and you want to protect it, you want to be in these highly liquidized ones. And so I would stick to top 10-20 coins for the majority of the portfolio if you want to protect your investment, so that has a lot more liquidity. And then, around I would say 10-20% you would do in sectors that you are interested in, where you really have some kind of idea, that's what I call a conviction-based investment. >> So if I want to convert my crypto to Fiat currency, you're saying stay with the top trading forms, or stay with the sector, what's the advice? >> If you're a regular investor, who's not following the market 24/7 I would say, at least, put like 80% on the top 20 coins where there is much more liquidity and which, you know won't go bust tomorrow. Then you would focus maybe 10-20% of your-- this is, I'm just talking with a crypto portfolio, on something you are going to have some kind of conviction, if you, let's say you are in an automobile space, that's what you understand a lot so any crypto on that, which you think is interesting, you could put your money there. And I'm a tech person, so I would put more money on technology platforms. >> What's your favorite tech coins right now, what're the investments you're putting money into? >> Oh, we've always been long on Bitcoin, Ethereum, so there are a lot of new, exciting stuff coming, like EOS, like we are big on Tezos, it's a very community-driven project, we are very excited about that, what Bloq is bringing, Metronome, I think that's going to be huge. These are very unique in their own ways, you're also offering something as a challenger to Ethereum, Tezos, also in some form, where they're very community-focused. And Metronome, for the first time, offers the ability to do cross-platform transactions. >> Madhu, this space is attracting a lot of young kids, I say kids, coming out of business school, or from a firm like Goldman Sachs, one of these classic firms, kind of bored. They want to do something new. What's your advice to the next generation coming in, jump on the wave, fall down, learn it, get off my wave, get off my beach, I mean what's your advice for the young people? >> If I was in that spot right now, I would just jump in and go with the flow, and you'll figure out what you need to do. At least rather than stick with the traditional companies, this is something new and exciting, and at least the next two-three years, spend on-- >> Get's your hands dirty, don't lose a lot of money. Try not to lose a lot of money. (both laughing) Madhu, thanks for coming on-- >> Thank you! >> Appreciate the commentary. We're here, exclusive coverage, we're at the Block Party, here at the Blockchain Week New York, exclusive continued coverage with theCUBE, we're here in New York City to breakdown all the action inside the ropes of the industry, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (bubbly music)