(techno music intro) >> Welcome back to theCube's coverage of SuperComputing Conference 2022. We are here at day three covering the amazing events that are occurring here. I'm Dave Nicholson, with my co-host Paul Gillin. How's it goin', Paul? >> Fine, Dave. Winding down here, but still plenty of action. >> Interesting stuff. We got a full day of coverage, and we're having really, really interesting conversations. We sort of wrapped things up at Supercomputing 22 here in Dallas. I've got two very special guests with me, Scott from Intel and David from Dell, to talk about yeah supercomputing, but guess what? We've got some really cool stuff coming up after this whole thing wraps. So not all of the holiday gifts have been unwrapped yet, kids. Welcome gentlemen. >> Thanks so much for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> So, let's start with you, David. First of all, explain the relationship in general between Dell and Intel. >> Sure, so obviously Intel's been an outstanding partner. We built some great solutions over the years. I think the market reflects that. Our customers tell us that. The feedback's strong. The products you see out here this week at Supercompute, you know, put that on display for everybody to see. And then as we think about AI in machine learning, there's so many different directions we need to go to help our customers deliver AI outcomes. Right, so we recognize that AI has kind of spread outside of just the confines of everything we've seen here this week. And now we've got really accessible AI use cases that we can explain to friends and family. We can talk about going into retail environments and how AI is being used to track inventory, to monitor traffic, et cetera. But really what that means to us as a bunch of hardware folks is we have to deliver the right platforms and the right designs for a variety of environments, both inside and outside the data center. And so if you look at our portfolio, we have some great products here this week, but we also have other platforms, like the XR4000, our shortest rack server ever that's designed to go into Edge environments, but is also built for those Edge AI use cases that supports GPUs. It supports AI on the CPU as well. And so there's a lot of really compelling platforms that we're starting to talk about, have already been talking about, and it's going to really enable our customers to deliver AI in a variety of ways. >> You mentioned AI on the CPU. Maybe this is a question for Scott. What does that mean, AI on the CPU? >> Well, as David was talking about, we're just seeing this explosion of different use cases. And some of those on the Edge, some of them in the Cloud, some of them on Prem. But within those individual deployments, there's often different ways that you can do AI, whether that's training or inference. And what we're seeing is a lot of times the memory locality matters quite a bit. You don't want to have to pay necessarily a cost going across the PCI express bus, especially with some of our newer products like the CPU Max series, where you can have a huge about of high bandwidth memory just sitting right on the CPU. Things that traditionally would have been accelerator only, can now live on a CPU, and that includes both on the inference side. We're seeing some really great things with images, where you might have a giant medical image that you need to be able to do extremely high resolution inference on or even text, where you might have a huge corpus of extremely sparse text that you need to be able to randomly sample very efficiently. >> So how are these needs influencing the evolution of Intel CPU architectures? >> So, we're talking to our customers. We're talking to our partners. This presents both an opportunity, but also a challenge with all of these different places that you can put these great products, as well as applications. And so we're very thoughtfully trying to go to the market, see where their needs are, and then meet those needs. This industry obviously has a lot of great players in it, and it's no longer the case that if you build it, they will come. So what we're doing is we're finding where are those choke points, how can we have that biggest difference? Sometimes there's generational leaps, and I know David can speak to this, can be huge from one system to the next just because everything's accelerated on the software side, the hardware side, and the platforms themselves. >> That's right, and we're really excited about that leap. If you take what Scott just described, we've been writing white papers, our team with Scott's team, we've been talking about those types of use cases using doing large image analysis and leveraging system memory, leveraging the CPU to do that, we've been talking about that for several generations now. Right, going back to Cascade Lake, going back to what we would call 14th generation power Edge. And so now as we prepare and continue to unveil, kind of we're in launch season, right, you and I were talking about how we're in launch season. As we continue to unveil and launch more products, the performance improvements are just going to be outstanding and we'll continue that evolution that Scott described. >> Yeah, I'd like to applaud Dell just for a moment for its restraint. Because I know you could've come in and taken all of the space in the convention center to show everything that you do. >> Would have loved to. >> In the HPC space. Now, worst kept secrets on earth at this point. Vying for number one place is the fact that there is a new Mission Impossible movie coming. And there's also new stuff coming from Intel. I know, I think allegedly we're getting close. What can you share with us on that front? And I appreciate it if you can't share a ton of specifics, but where are we going? David just alluded to it. >> Yeah, as David talked about, we've been working on some of these things for many years. And it's just, this momentum is continuing to build, both in respect to some of our hardware investments. We've unveiled some things both here, both on the CPU side and the accelerator side, but also on the software side. OneAPI is gathering more and more traction and the ecosystem is continuing to blossom. Some of our AI and HPC workloads, and the combination thereof, are becoming more and more viable, as well as displacing traditional approaches to some of these problems. And it's this type of thing where it's not linear. It all builds on itself. And we've seen some of these investments that we've made for a better half of a decade starting to bear fruit, but that's, it's not just a one time thing. It's just going to continue to roll out, and we're going to be seeing more and more of this. >> So I want to follow up on something that you mentioned. I don't know if you've ever heard that the Charlie Brown saying that sometimes the most discouraging thing can be to have immense potential. Because between Dell and Intel, you offer so many different versions of things from a fit for function perspective. As a practical matter, how do you work with customers, and maybe this is a question for you, David. How do you work with customers to figure out what the right fit is? >> I'll give you a great example. Just this week, customer conversations, and we can put it in terms of kilowatts to rack, right. How many kilowatts are you delivering at a rack level inside your data center? I've had an answer anywhere from five all the way up to 90. There's some that have been a bit higher that probably don't want to talk about those cases, kind of customers we're meeting with very privately. But the range is really, really large, right, and there's a variety of environments. Customers might be ready for liquid today. They may not be ready for it. They may want to maximize air cooling. Those are the conversations, and then of course it all maps back to the workloads they wish to enable. AI is an extremely overloaded term. We don't have enough time to talk about all the different things that tuck under that umbrella, but the workloads and the outcomes they wish to enable, we have the right solutions. And then we take it a step further by considering where they are today, where they need to go. And I just love that five to 90 example of not every customer has an identical cookie cutter environment, so we've got to have the right platforms, the right solutions, for the right workloads, for the right environments. >> So, I like to dive in on this power issue, to give people who are watching an idea. Because we say five kilowatts, 90 kilowatts, people are like, oh wow, hmm, what does that mean? 90 kilowatts is more than 100 horse power if you want to translate it over. It's a massive amount of power, so if you think of EV terms. You know, five kilowatts is about a hairdryer's around a kilowatt, 1,000 watts, right. But the point is, 90 kilowatts in a rack, that's insane. That's absolutely insane. The heat that that generates has got to be insane, and so it's important. >> Several houses in the size of a closet. >> Exactly, exactly. Yeah, in a rack I explain to people, you know, it's like a refrigerator. But, so in the arena of thermals, I mean is that something during the development of next gen architectures, is that something that's been taken into consideration? Or is it just a race to die size? >> Well, you definitely have to take thermals into account, as well as just the power of consumption themselves. I mean, people are looking at their total cost of ownership. They're looking at sustainability. And at the end of the day, they need to solve a problem. There's many paths up that mountain, and it's about choosing that right path. We've talked about this before, having extremely thoughtful partners, we're just not going to common-torily try every single solution. We're going to try to find the ones that fit that right mold for that customer. And we're seeing more and more people, excuse me, care about this, more and more people wanting to say, how do I do this in the most sustainable way? How do I do this in the most reliable way, given maybe different fluctuations in their power consumption or their power pricing? We're developing more software tools and obviously partnering with great partners to make sure we do this in the most thoughtful way possible. >> Intel put a lot of, made a big investment by buying Habana Labs for its acceleration technology. They're based in Israel. You're based on the west coast. How are you coordinating with them? How will the Habana technology work its way into more mainstream Intel products? And how would Dell integrate those into your servers? >> Good question. I guess I can kick this off. So Habana is part of the Intel family now. They've been integrated in. It's been a great journey with them, as some of their products have launched on AWS, and they've had some very good wins on MLPerf and things like that. I think it's about finding the right tool for the job, right. Not every problem is a nail, so you need more than just a hammer. And so we have the Xeon series, which is incredibly flexible, can do so many different things. It's what we've come to know and love. On the other end of the spectrum, we obviously have some of these more deep learning focused accelerators. And if that's your problem, then you can solve that problem in incredibly efficient ways. The accelerators themselves are somewhere in the middle, so you get that kind of Goldilocks zone of flexibility and power. And depending on your use case, depending on what you know your workloads are going to be day in and day out, one of these solutions might work better for you. A combination might work better for you. Hybrid compute starts to become really interesting. Maybe you have something that you need 24/7, but then you only need a burst to certain things. There's a lot of different options out there. >> The portfolio approach. >> Exactly. >> And then what I love about the work that Scott's team is doing, customers have told us this week in our meetings, they do not want to spend developer's time porting code from one stack to the next. They want that flexibility of choice. Everyone does. We want it in our lives, in our every day lives. They need that flexibility of choice, but they also, there's an opportunity cost when their developers have to choose to port some code over from one stack to another or spend time improving algorithms and doing things that actually generate, you know, meaningful outcomes for their business or their research. And so if they are, you know, desperately searching I would say for that solution and for help in that area, and that's what we're working to enable soon. >> And this is what I love about oneAPI, our software stack, it's open first, heterogeneous first. You can take SYCL code, it can run on competitor's hardware. It can run on Intel hardware. It's one of these things that you have to believe long term, the future is open. Wall gardens, the walls eventually crumble. And we're just trying to continue to invest in that ecosystem to make sure that the in-developer at the end of the day really gets what they need to do, which is solving their business problem, not tinkering with our drivers. >> Yeah, I actually saw an interesting announcement that I hadn't been tracking. I hadn't been tracking this area. Chiplets, and the idea of an open standard where competitors of Intel from a silicone perspective can have their chips integrated via a universal standard. And basically you had the top three silicone vendors saying, yeah, absolutely, let's work together. Cats and dogs. >> Exactly, but at the end of the day, it's whatever menagerie solves the problem. >> Right, right, exactly. And of course Dell can solve it from any angle. >> Yeah, we need strong partners to build the platforms to actually do it. At the end of the day, silicone without software is just sand. Sand with silicone is poorly written prose. But without an actual platform to put it on, it's nothing, it's a box that sits in the corner. >> David, you mentioned that 90% of power age servers now support GPUs. So how is this high-performing, the growth of high performance computing, the demand, influencing the evolution of your server architecture? >> Great question, a couple of ways. You know, I would say 90% of our platforms support GPUs. 100% of our platforms support AI use cases. And it goes back to the CPU compute stack. As we look at how we deliver different form factors for customers, we go back to that range, I said that power range this week of how do we enable the right air coolant solutions? How do we deliver the right liquid cooling solutions, so that wherever the customer is in their environment, and whatever footprint they have, we're ready to meet it? That's something you'll see as we go into kind of the second half of launch season and continue rolling out products. You're going to see some very compelling solutions, not just in air cooling, but liquid cooling as well. >> You want to be more specific? >> We can't unveil everything at Supercompute. We have a lot of great stuff coming up here in the next few months, so. >> It's kind of like being at a great restaurant when they offer you dessert, and you're like yeah, dessert would be great, but I just can't take anymore. >> It's a multi course meal. >> At this point. Well, as we wrap, I've got one more question for each of you. Same question for each of you. When you think about high performance computing, super computing, all of the things that you're doing in your partnership, driving artificial intelligence, at that tip of the spear, what kind of insights are you looking forward to us being able to gain from this technology? In other words, what cool thing, what do you think is cool out there from an AI perspective? What problem do you think we can solve in the near future? What problems would you like to solve? What gets you out of bed in the morning? Cause it's not the little, it's not the bits and the bobs and the speeds and the feats, it's what we're going to do with them, so what do you think, David? >> I'll give you an example. And I think, I saw some of my colleagues talk about this earlier in the week, but for me what we could do in the past two years to unable our customers in a quarantine pandemic environment, we were delivering platforms and solutions to help them do their jobs, help them carry on in their lives. And that's just one example, and if I were to map that forward, it's about enabling that human progress. And it's, you know, you ask a 20 year version of me 20 years ago, you know, if you could imagine some of these things, I don't know what kind of answer you would get. And so mapping forward next decade, next two decades, I can go back to that example of hey, we did great things in the past couple of years to enable our customers. Just imagine what we're going to be able to do going forward to enable that human progress. You know, there's great use cases, there's great image analysis. We talked about some. The images that Scott was referring to had to do with taking CAT scan images and being able to scan them for tumors and other things in the healthcare industry. That is stuff that feels good when you get out of bed in the morning, to know that you're enabling that type of progress. >> Scott, quick thoughts? >> Yeah, and I'll echo that. It's not one specific use case, but it's really this wave front of all of these use cases, from the very micro of developing the next drug to finding the next battery technology, all the way up to the macro of trying to have an impact on climate change or even the origins of the universe itself. All of these fields are seeing these massive gains, both from the software, the hardware, the platforms that we're bringing to bear to these problems. And at the end of the day, humanity is going to be fundamentally transformed by the computation that we're launching and working on today. >> Fantastic, fantastic. Thank you, gentlemen. You heard it hear first, Intel and Dell just committed to solving the secrets of the universe by New Years Eve 2023. >> Well, next Supercompute, let's give us a little time. >> The next Supercompute Convention. >> Yeah, next year. >> Yeah, SC 2023, we'll come back and see what problems have been solved. You heard it hear first on theCube, folks. By SC 23, Dell and Intel are going to reveal the secrets of the universe. From here, at SC 22, I'd like to thank you for joining our conversation. I'm Dave Nicholson, with my co-host Paul Gillin. Stay tuned to theCube's coverage of Supercomputing Conference 22. We'll be back after a short break. (techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone and welcome back to the CUBE's continuous live coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. continuous live coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. Lisa Martin here with David Nicholson. We have two live sets going on, we've got two remote sets, over 100 guests working with AWS and it's a massive ecosystem of partners, really digging into the next decade of cloud innovation and we're pleased to welcome back one of our CUBE alumni, Edith Harbaugh, CEO, and co-founder of LaunchDarkly. We're going to be talking about a blueprint for continuous modernization, Edith, it's great to have you, thanks for coming. >> Thanks for having me. >> So I was doing some research, you guys raised 200 million in series D in August, just a few months ago, that new funding tripled your valuation to 3 billion up more than 3x from the previous funding rounds, so rocket ship. >> Edith: Yeah. >> I also noticed you guys are on the Forbes Cloud 100 2nd year on the list, you jumped dramatically from 100 in 2020 to 47 this year, talk to us about all the innovation and acceleration that's going on at LaunchDarkly. >> Yeah, well, it's, it's great to be here, you know, I'm the CEO and co-founder and we started seven years ago in 2014 and what we were doing back then was a really new field, like I actually came up with the name feature management, just to describe what we were doing and it was this idea that you could release features to different people at different times, which sounds really simple, but it really allows you to have valves to different populations that you can then turn something on, turn something off, run a beta, do personalization and then if something's going wrong out on the field quickly and easily, turn it off. >> So as an engineer, as a long standing engineer, what were the things that really frustrated you, that you thought this, this is missing, we've got to focus on this. >> Oh my gosh, so, I was an engineering manager, I actually do a podcast too called To Be Continuous just about all the bad things I saw happen, the worst thing you could do is, is build something that nobody wants, which is really frustrating, so I think a lot of continuous delivery came out of the urge to just get stuff out quicker. The flip side of that is that if you moved too fast, a release can be catastrophic. We used to call them the push and pray release because you push stuff out and then you're just crossing your fingers that nothing breaks because if something breaks it's extremely stressful. Your mind starts flooding with endorphins and hormones, your heart rate increases and you sometimes make even worse decisions, so what LaunchDarkly and feature management allow you to do is push it out to who you want and if something is going wrong, you could turn it off without a redeploy, if things are going right, you can continue to push it out. >> And when you say feature management, you're talking about, you're talking about a level of granularity that is finer than a release version. that is finer than a release version. >> Edith: Yeah. How do you do that? >> Our customers do it, so we provide a platform where our customers and we have 2,500 worldwide, everything from IBM and Atlassian, down to like three person startups, they decide how to encapsulate a feature >> David: Okay. >> So they could push it to who they want, so, so there's a lot of really neat use cases. >> So knowing that you're providing them with the valves. >> Edith: Yes. Then they can- think differently about how they're actually developing in anticipation of delivering encapsulated features, as opposed to, here's your new release. >> Edith: Exactly. >> Okay. >> Exactly, so we have some customers who've used LaunchDarkly to actually move to the cloud. So like TrueCar was running their own data centers and they wanted a way to start moving all of that data center traffic into AWS, so they could use LaunchDarkly to manage that traffic flow and do it in a controlled way instead of just one quick switch. >> I was looking at that case study of TrueCar, they migrated 500 websites to AWS without downtime and deploying 20x per day, which is up from 1x a week, that's a massive change. >> Yeah, I think really what we give our customers is confidence that if you know that you can always have control over stuff with feature management, you actually move much quicker. You can, you can move 20 times a day if you know that if something goes wrong, you can always turn it off, you have much more confidence. >> Where are your, you having customer conversations? I know you, you coined to the term feature management, I'd love to know a bit more contextually about the evolution from feature flags to feature management and where are those customer conversations happening? are they kind of down in the technical ways? are they more higher level? given the fact that we're in such a, still a, such a state of flux with COVID? >> Yeah, so we, we didn't invent feature flagging like the smart companies like Amazon, Facebook, Netflix have been doing feature flagging for decades now, it was always a secret sauce of this is how they could manage their own functionality. What LaunchDarkly did was kind of changed it to feature management about doing it where any other customer also had the same set of tools and platforms and also on top of that things like a workflow, scheduling, integrations. So that for example, a developer could develop something and then give the keys to the product manager, say product manager, you get to, you get to run the beta now. >> So putting, putting more control back in the hands of the folks that are, that really are touching and feeling and smelling the product. >> Yeah or customer support, you know, >> Yeah or customer support, you know, if something is going wrong in the field, instead of having to wait for an engineer to fix a bug customer support could just turn it off. >> So I'm curious about, you know, when we talk about it's a, this, this sort of dovetails with something that was discussed in the keynote today, out of the gate, Adam comes out and he's talking about microprocessor technology. Now in the era of cloud, generally people would say, that stuff doesn't matter, right? It's all about the feeling of being in the cloud and the flame, you know, the, the, the field of wheat blowing in the wind and it's a feeling that you get, it's really interesting what you're doing under the covers, but who is the, who is the audience? Who, who buys this? Because I can imagine some in the engineering, on the engineering side of things, feeling like maybe they're giving up some control, but really you're giving them more tools, but is it business people who are demanding this? how, how do you go to market? >> Yeah, so it's really interesting because our core audience is developers and VP of engineering, like they love the platform. Like our Net Promoter Score is extremely high, engineers say like, this gave me my weekends back because if a bug happens I don't have to come in. >> David: Okay so they get it. >> They get it. This isn't being pushed down- from executives that don't understand the technology. >> No, I mean, a typical thing is a developer's, like, I need this to do my job and then the business people say, well, if the developers are happy, we're happy, you know, it's, it's a developers world now, you know, they're hard to hire, you have to have them and if you have anything that will make their job easier and them happier, why wouldn't you buy it? >> That's a big facilitator, so you mentioned a high, high NPS, high Net Promoter Score, we, we talk with Amazon folks about their their focus on the customer and their customer obsession if you will, that everything starts backwards, we start from the customer, 2,500 customers in such a short time period, we talked about the funding, I imagine culturally there's similarities there, if one of the things that you're able to confidently give your customers is that confidence in LaunchDarkly. >> Yeah, you know, one of the happiest parts of my job is visiting customers, you know, I, my co-founder and I personally visited, I think the first 10 or 20 customers and if they had a bug, if they wanted something, and if they had a bug, if they wanted something, we built it. And I love going on customer sites, cause it's. And I love going on customer sites, cause it's. >> When they're telling you that you gave them their weekend back. >> Edith: Yeah. >> Huge. >> That's, yeah, that.- that's not an insignificant thing when you think about what people do with their weekends, you know, so? >> Yeah, you know, it, it feels really good to have customers say, like this literally has changed the way they built software for the better. >> I can't imagine this, you know, with everything that's happened in the last 22 months with the acceleration to cloud, but all these massive pivots by businesses, in every industry just to survive in the beginning, were an advantage, something like LaunchDarkly is for those organizations, so you have to move really, really quickly and keep changing direction to kind of figure out how do we stay afloat and now how do we thrive in that, that this has probably been a real lifesaver for a lot of organizations. >> Yeah, I mean, we've seen like a ten year roadmap at our customers compressed into a month, like we had a, a retail chain in the Midwest that was thinking about doing in-store pickup and then when COVID hit, they're like, okay, this changed from a, maybe to a, we need to have this to stay afloat and now, now they can help people pick up, same with, same with restaurants having a mobile app to do delivery or pickup, it used to be when we'll get to that next year, now it's something that you have to have. >> Oh yeah. >> Because if, if you're going to go get coffee and one place has a mile long line and their place has an app, which one are you going to pick? >> So, what do people do that don't have this capability? This, I mean, this might sound like a completely naive question, I know a lot about a lot of things, so I'm okay looking dumb sometimes, it's how I learn, so I'm okay looking dumb sometimes, it's how I learn, but seriously, if you don't have these valves, then aren't you doomed then aren't you doomed to releases that are going to be panic inducing. >> It's really, it's really painful, like, I mean, that's, that's the way I used to, to release, you know, I remember it, like you're released and you would have tried to have caught all the bugs, but it would go out and if something happened, you had to fix it on the fly and even if you have a really good deployment process, that's 20 minutes, maybe two hours. >> David: Sure, and, and. >> Which, which if you're a mobile app, it could be a business killer. >> Yeah, well we're here at AWS reinvent, I mean, how does, how does this dovetail with this, the AWS mission to migrate and modernize into the cloud native world? we're talking about cloud native, you know, development and operations that you're involved with, so there's obviously a synergy there, but why specifically AWS? >> Oh, I mean, I think one of the biggest tailwinds we've had as a business is if you're releasing twice a year, we've had as a business is if you're releasing twice a year, you don't really need a tool like this, or a platform like this, your business process is completely different, but you're going to die as a company cause you can't survive on two releases a year. If you're moving to the cloud, we help you get there and once you're in the cloud, if you want to move at the speed of business, but safely, we give you that platform. Like, so, I think continuous delivery got this bad wrap because people thought that meant that you push out stuff every second and break everything. >> David: Right. >> What we do is we allow you to innovate as fast as you want, but release in a controlled way. >> I got to ask you a question, you, you talked about the customers and your love of being with customers, one of the things I can't help thinking is that what you're helping facilitate is brand reputation. If, you know, if we have an expectation and we want to go on a, on an app and order coffee, and it's down, we're going to go to the next competitor, so from a brand reputation perspective, I'm just wondering if, if any of your customer conversations kind of go in addition to the VP of engineering kind of go in addition to the VP of engineering and it focused on the folks that are leading these companies going, our reputation is on the line, people are, let's face it during COVID far less patience than we've, we've seen a lot of really impatient people, but is, is that something that you also facilitate, is the brand reputation? >> Oh, not just a brand reputation that an outage can be costly of millions of dollars, like. that an outage can be costly of millions of dollars, like. >> Lisa: $5,600 a minute, I think is what Gartner estimates. >> Yeah, but depending on what business you're in, like if you're in a bank, you absolutely need to be reliable. If you're a streaming service like streaming, one of the biggest horse races in Australia, you need to have uptime. >> Everybody needs uptime, let's, let's just be clear if I can't get door dash or whatever, it's a disaster from my perspective as a consumer and yes, we have, we have far less patience than we've ever had. >> Yeah, I mean, we have a really interesting, we have both B2C, like streaming ash, streaming apps, delivery apps, as well as B2B streaming apps, delivery apps, as well as B2B and they both have problems that we solve but honestly, the, the, the business problems with a B2B are much more challenging sometimes. >> Well Edith, thank you so much for joining David and me on the program, talking about LaunchDarkly, what you're enabling organizations to achieve in every industry, it sounds like you're riding a rocket ship. >> It's been really fun, you know, I, I love seeing a customer that's been using us for three, five years. >> David: Wow. >> And how much their life has gotten better. >> And as you said, that's, that's no small statement. Thank you so much for joining us on the program, we appreciate your insights and look forward to hearing more news from LaunchDarkly coming out. >> Thanks. >> All right, for David Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE's coverage of AWS:reinvent 2021, theCUBE, the global leader in live tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>>Hi, everyone. Welcome to the cubes coverage of Avis reinvent 2021 we're onsite in person. It's a virtual event, also hybrid events. I'm Jennifer and my host, David Dante ninth year, Dave, we've been doing Avis reinvent the cube and it's 11th season. We've seen a lot. Yeah, I'll say. >>And the show is pretty packed, John. I mean, I think it's surprised some folks over 25,000 people here. I mean, obviously a lot of sponsors, but >>Customers to a bad event for AWS in terms of attendance is like record-breaking for any other company, people are standing in line for sessions. It's definitely happening. People are here to learn. They're not just all employees. So definitely a successful event in person as well in the live stream. But so much news to talk about. Andy Jassy is now the CEO of Amazon. That's the top story Adam's Lipsky's taking over as CEO of AWS time, Amazonian who left Amazon to take the CEO job of Tableau sold that company to Salesforce under mark Benioff. Now back to take the helm from Andy Jassy and quite the pressure cooker here as he takes the stage, a lot of people are asking, is will he do well? Will he fumble on stage? Will he do the right things? And does he have what it takes to take the cloud to the next generation with AWS as their number one clear far and away, then the second competitor in Microsoft and then a look distant third and Google. So Amazon's are under a ton of competitive pressure. At least from an industry standpoint, everyone's still trying to catch up. It's the same theme, Dave, every year Amazon is out front and the lead just gets extended and extended. And again, here, no exception. Well, the Uber >>Of course there's you mentioned is Andy Jassy is now taking over a CEO of Amazon. And you know, history would suggest that a lot of times that companies falter when there's a CEO transition, but it feels like it's different this time. Andy Jassy was here since the beginning launched AWS versus a profit engine of Amazon brought back Adam sill Lipski who has a deep understand. He's not as technical as Andy, but obviously as a deep understanding of the business, yeah, he was comfortable up in the keynote. It wasn't John, a typical firehose of announcements. Even those, a lot of announcements, they didn't shove them down our throat and they didn't in the analyst session as well. Usually in the analyst session, it's hours and hours and hours of firehose Kool-Aid injection, not this year. Why do you think that is, is that a COVID thing? Is that a change in now? >>I think Adam's Leschi wants to be his own guy. As, as leader here, a lot of things were eliminated from the keynote that Andy Jasmine did, for instance, Andy Jesse loves music. So we always had the music walk up music like you see in sports, uh, which is very cool. That's an Andy Jassy kind of tweak. Andy is all about announcements and he was just, uh, pushing the envelope. Adam was much more laid back. He sees, I think, more of a holistic picture being more of an app guy being more of a data guy, less of a, I would say under the covers nerd like Jassy was, Andy was very deep on, on a lot of the tech stuff as is Adam. But I think Andy a little bit more proactive on that. So Adam was very much more about the impact of 80 of us culturally, as a society, as a company and kind of brought in this kind of think different apple vibe, which is, you know, the people who are Pathfinders, um, as he takes that Jassy kind of, um, approach of leaders, but be a builder, be a change agent, be a game changer. >>Adam took it to another level by saying, Hey, it's okay to be a Pathfinder because it's net new disruption with the cloud. And I think that's the story that I see coming out of this where, uh, in talking to Adam one-on-one Amazon absolutely has a secret weapon in it's chips, custom Silicon. They're absolutely crushing it with how they're thinking about SAS and platforms and they have a huge ecosystem. And I think at the end of the day, and we talked about this in our story on Silicon angle, Amazon could actually wipe out Microsoft. And I think Microsoft's core competitive advantage has always been their ecosystem and their developers. I think right now in the next few years, if Microsoft doesn't match Amazon, they will be decimated anyway, you know? >>Yeah, hold on. Okay. Amazon's not going to wipe out Microsoft. Microsoft has too much of a cash cow. Look at the hanging on to windows. Couldn't, you know, the mistake and missing mobile event initially missing the cloud. Didn't wipe out Microsoft. So they've just got too much of a software cashflow. That's not gonna happen maybe a little bit over the top. >>I thought, but Microsoft has done a great job and it's not going to tell it to kind of stay in the game and do more. But if you look at the major inflection points, Dave where's digital equipment corporation, where's prime computer. Well, >>I think this is the point is again, history would show that those companies, when they handed the reigns over to a new CEO failed, they faltered, it was self-inflicted wounds. It almost happened. You thought it would happen with Microsoft, whether it became irrelevant under bomber, but when Nadella came in, he reinvigorated because specifically they had the cashflow to be able to do that. Now. So the big question is, okay, w what's going to happen. We ran a survey to our community to see what could disrupt Amazon. You know, that the us government wants to break them apart or wants to regulate them. But our survey respondents said there's a 60% plus probability that Amazon will be disrupted by other factors. And that's what I was self-inflicted wound that's Jesse's that's right. And that's, Jessie's big challenge is how to not make those disruptions, how to fight those disruptions. >>The number one, uh, reason why they could be disrupted was self-inflicted wounds, which again, history would show what happened. But one of the things we talked about is that normally happens when companies stop innovating when they rest on their laurels. Right. And you kind of saw that with those companies that you mentioned, but you mentioned their secret weapon. We wrote about that in our article, the chips. So we heard no secret. Everybody knew graviton three was coming, right? And so that is Amazon secret up. And you know, I've been thinking about this. John Amazon makes a lot of money on x86 instances that they've deployed years ago and they charge a lot for, I was wondering, you know, is the, or the old X 86 instances actually more profitable than graviton, maybe at this point in time, but long-term graviton. They control their own destiny because they control the hardware and software stack. And I bet you allows them to get better negotiating leverage with >>M D and it's of course, I mean, pat, Kelsey, we should talk about this all the time, but as bad as Jason Intel, you, if you're not out in the next wave, your driftwood, I think Intel and AMD and others, they have purpose-built general purpose chips. They're probably going to be for the lift and shift stuff when you, but if you're actually seriously writing software as an owner on the cloud, and you want specific advantages of speed and performance, you're going to want the custom Silicon that's purpose-built for your application and write code to that stack. So, so I think there's a whole nother level of platform as a service. Dave, that's kind of coming out of this re-invent that I think could be a multi generational trend, which is, Hey, the cloud is of super cloud or platform. Look at the riser, snowflake and Databricks. Those guys are on Amazon. Like they're super clouds in and of themselves they're platforms. They're not appoint SAS solution. I think Microsoft in my, my analysis is, yeah, they got office 365, okay. Word processing stuff. But what other SAS apps do they have besides SQL server and other things that are actually being built on there? And if, if I'm a developer you're going to want to go to the platform. That's the highest performance for office 365. It's a cash cow. But how long is that going to last >>A long time? I mean, major momentum. We argue about that later, but I wanna, I want to touch on graviton three because I think that was the big announcement of the day 25% faster than graviton to at least twice the floating point performance twice the crypto graphic performance in three times for machine learning, learning workloads, and very importantly, 60% less power. So at Amazon scale, uh, Adam said this in our meeting, he said, the economics really favor us because of our scale. And so, and they've also announced new training them instances and, and, and what, what having custom Silicon allows Amazon to do is release on a much, much faster cadence than traditional x86. And they could do, and they could do really cool things. Nitro is there, Nick they're smart NEC, which it says the basis, their new hypervisor, if you will. So it allows them to bring in x86, uh, Nvidia NPUs some of their own or Nvidia GPU, some of their own Silicon. So optionality is really the key there. You heard them announce, uh, an SAP instance. So that's a memory intensive instance. They can dial things up, dial things down. They've got full control of the stack. And by the way, copying them Google's copy of Microsoft is copying them. And who's leading this charge in custom Silicon, AWS, obviously Tesla, apple. I mean, these are leading companies that I don't think they all got it wrong. I think >>The Silicon angle is to have your own custom Silicon. And that's the, that is the clearly the advantage as it's vertically integrated. But the other thing that's coming out of this reinvents, the purpose built software concept where, you know, they're not copying Microsoft playbook as the wall street journal was saying, and some are saying Microsoft copying Amazon, Amazon has always been this horizontally scalable resource that's cloud, but with machine learning and AI, you now have this purpose-built kind of capability from software into the app itself where data has to be addressable. And I think the people in the data business kind of know this, but as the rest of the world comes out, architecturally having that horizontal observation space and data that's vertically tied to machine learning is a huge architectural shift. This is a complete rethinking of how software is built and that's going to be a game changer. I think Amazon's well out on front of that. And I think that's going to be a huge architectural shift. >>Well, let's quantify this a little bit because you know, you're, you're making the point that Amazon is the number one cloud, which I would agree with. We're talking here about IAS infrastructure as a service in the past layer that sits on top of that. Microsoft defines the cloud is we'll put in an office 365, Google we'll put in its Google apps, Amazon pure infrastructure as a service. And if you just look at that space, that's about $120 billion business. When you add up AWS, Azure, Alibaba and GCP, which I would contend are the only four hyperscalers out there. I don't include Oracle as a hyperscale. I don't include IBM. I get a lot of crap for that sometimes. Yeah, but we're talking big scaler, $120 billion. So actually relatively small compared to the trillion dollar opportunity that they have, but it's growing at 35% a year. Amazon will do more than 60 billion this year, 62 billion, just to quantify it in that ISS space. Microsoft will be about 38, 30 9 billion. Okay. So pretty substantial. Those two are far ahead of the others. Everybody else's, you know, Google is still in, you know, under 10 billion, Alibaba is right around there. So those two, it's really a two horse race. And I asked Microsoft using its software estate. Amazon's gotta be the innovator and has to have the best cloud to win. And it does well >>Also a platform. Let's go back to the little history lesson for the younger folks out there. When Microsoft was had a monopoly, they had windows operating system, which has had DAS under the covers, but windows was the operating system. And office was a suite of applications. They encourage software developers to build on top of windows and they had other servers off SQL server all came out of that small history. So their bread and butter was to have developers build on top of windows. Hence the monopoly, of course they had the application and the system software, hence the monopoly, hence the Microsoft breakup by the government in 1997. Now today cloud is essentially one big kind of PC concept. It's like windows, it's windows equivalent. So cloud is essentially an environment platform that has apps that run on top of it. Okay. In that world, Amazon by far is the number one windows model at Amazon's. >>I mean, Microsoft is used to is okay, I got Azure and I got office 365 that keeps them in business that keeps them from losing. So it's a placeholder. So that what I'm looking at is what is Amazon? I mean, Amazon versus Azure, doing relative to ISV and uptake for developers. And I'm suggesting that this trend of Amazon will go, if it goes uncontested by Azure, they'll wipe the table on ISV and suffer developers. If you're an owner of a software, you're not gonna write software, that's gonna be sub-optimized for a platform. That's not going to be before, >>Unless you're, unless you're a Microsoft developer, nearly all.net days. And there are a lot of those. And that's what, that's what Microsoft is doing. They're they're, they're, they've, they've shifted to cloud, they've gone everything into cloud. So Azure is their platform for innovation and acceleration. >>So those developers are going to build a sub application versus going over here on AWS. >>Well, that's the, that's the story with Microsoft. Good enough. I know >>Again, this is we're speculating, but we're going to watch that, but that is, to me, will be the battlefield of what will determine Azure versus AWS. And I think everything else is smoke and mirrors Amazon Webster way ahead of Azure, but the TeleSign is going to be does 80 bus attract those developers on their cloud with the custom Silicon, with the integrated stack and with the purpose-built software. I mean, it's looking really good. I think they've got a really compelling story. >>I think it's less about Azure versus AWS. I mean, that's an interesting storyline and I love to talk about it, but I think they'll go back to 120 billion out of 4 trillion. That's really the, the larger opportunity for, for both Microsoft and AWS to continue to grow. Because you look at, you look at Dell with apex, you look at HPE with GreenLake, Lenovo, Cisco, they've all got their own clouds. One of the things that didn't get into our article, but Adam Lipski when, when you asked him about hybrid is that hybrid cloud. When we were talking about some of the stuff they're doing, he S he said, look, that's not cloud what those guys are doing. That's not what we did. And he talked today about edge has to be AWS, not like AWS. That was the quote to use. Talk about, you know, private 5g, bringing out posts. And he gave some examples of that. The point is they, AWS is bringing its system, its architecture to the edge it's programming model infrastructure as code to the edge. Now, Kubernetes, Kubernetes does moderate that a little bit, but his point was, that's not AWS. That's not the cloud. >>Yeah. I think in summary, Dave had to wrap up what's the big trend this week is that Amazon web services is a, is a heaven environment for a developer, for the elite people who want to roll their own for the folks in it. In these other environments, you can have prefabricated purpose-built software platform to build on top of. And I think that isn't going to address the whole ease of ease of rollout. So if I'm a SAS developer, I don't, I want, I don't want to rebuild that over again. I don't want to roll my own. I'll take what you got and connects a good example. If you want to call shedder, you can take it and use it and then build on top of it and iterate on it. So I think it's more of here's a platform for you and take it. So I think that to me is the big story and that's not and think about it. How many people out there, a role in their own Amazon, you've got to be pretty strong at Amazon, uh, familiar ups to roll your own gut >>Of other quick points that he barely emphasized the primitives, the API APIs, that multiple databases, right tool for the right job, took a shot at Oracle without mentioning Oracle because they had sort of one database, but I will say this is mission critical. Oracle still owns that. Uh, they talked about a mainframe migration, tooling and runtime from mainframe compatible runtime. That's going to allow them to nip at the edges of those mainframe workloads and Oracle workloads. It, they're not going to get to the core anytime soon. They also talked about role level and cell level security. We think that's the squirrel acquisition from years ago. And then he made a statement. We have three X with Redshift price performance better than any cloud data warehouse sort of interesting shot at, at, at, at a snowflake and Databricks Databricks. So, um, anyway, yeah, >>I mean, I think, I think overall, I thought Adam did a good job. I think he didn't, uh, he didn't disappoint. Okay. But that's comfortable. I think his goal was to get through this and not have people go well, it's not Andy Jassy. I thought he did an awesome job and he did a good job. And he, he got, he got what he needed to do >>Comfortable. And he obviously leaned on some of his Pathfinder customers. NASDAQ, I thought was very impressive. United airlines dish. So, >>Okay. Cutie coverage, ninth year of the cube here at ADP reinvent, uh, 2021 is the cube. You're watching the leader in high-tech coverage. The cube.

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE in ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> Cisco is a company at the crossroads. It's transitioning from a high margin hardware business to a software subscription-based model, which also should be high margin through both organic moves and targeted acquisitions. It's doing so in the context of massive macro shifts to digital in the cloud. We believe Cisco's dominant position in networking combined with a large market opportunity and a strong track record of earning customer trust, put the company in a good position to capitalize on cloud momentum. However, there are clear challenges ahead for Cisco, not the least of which is the growing complexity of its portfolio, a large legacy business, and the mandate to maintain its higher profitability profile as it transitions into a new business model. Hello and welcome to this week's Wiki-bond cube insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we welcome in Zeus Kerravala, who's the founder and principal analyst at ZK Research, long time Cisco watcher who together with me crafted the premise of today's session. Zeus, great to see you welcome to the program. >> Thanks Dave. It's always a pleasure to be with you guys. >> Okay, here's what we're going to talk about today, set the agenda. The catalyst for this session, Zeus and I attended Cisco's financial analyst day. We received a day and a half of firehose presentations, drill downs, interactions, Q and A with Cisco execs and one key customer. So we're going to share our takeaways from these sessions and add our additional thoughts. Now, in particular, we're going to talk about Cisco's TAM, its transformation to a subscription-based model, and how we see that evolving. As always, we're going to bring in some ETR spending data for context and get Zeus' take on what that tells us. And we'll end with a summary of Cisco's cloud strategy and outlook for how it could win in the cloud. So let's talk about Cisco's sort of structure and TAM opportunities. First, Zeus, Cisco has four main lines of business where it's organized it's executives around sort of four product areas. And it's got a large service component as well. Network equipment, SP routing, data center, collaboration that security, and as I say services, that's not necessarily how it's going to market, but that's kind of the way it organizes its ELT, its executive leadership team. >> Yeah, the in fact, the ELT has been organized around those products, as you said. It used to report to the street three product segments, infrastructure platforms, which was by far the biggest, it was all their networking equipment, then applications, and then security. Now it's moved to five new segments, secure agile networks, hybrid work, end to end security, internet for the future and optimized app experiences. And I think what Cisco's trying to do is align their, the way they report along the lines of the way customers buy. 'Cause I think before, you know, they had a very simplistic model before. It was just infrastructure, apps, and security. The ELT is organized around product roadmap and the product innovation, but that's not necessarily the way customers purchase things and so, purchase things so I think they've tried to change things a little bit there. When you look at those segments though, you know, by, it's interesting. They're all big, right? So, by far the biggest distilled networking, which is almost a hundred billion dollar TAM as they reported and they have it growing a about a 9% CAGR as reported by other analyst firms. And when you think about how mature networking is Dave, the fact that that's still growing at high single digit CAGR is still pretty remarkable. So I think that's one of those things that, you know, watchers of Cisco historically have been calling for the network to be commoditized for decades. For as long as I've been watching Cisco, we've been, people have been waiting for the network to be commoditized. My thesis has always been, if you can drive enough innovation into things, you can stave off commoditization and that's what they've done. But that's really the anchor for them to sell all their other products, some of which are higher margin, some which are a little bit sore, but they're all good high margin businesses to your point. >> Awesome. We're going to dig into that. So, so they flattened the organization when Geckler left. You've got Todd Nightingale, Jonathan Davidson, Liz Centoni, and Jeetu Patel who we heard from and we'll make some comments on what we heard from them. One of the big takeaways at the financial analysts meeting was on the TAM, as you just mentioned. Liz Centoni who also is heavily involved in strategy and the CFO Scott Herren, showed this slide, which speaks to the company's TAM and the organizational structure that you were just talking about. So the big message was that Cisco has got a large and growing market, you know, no shortage of available market. Somewhere between eight and 900 billion, depending on which of the slides you pull out of the deck. And ironically Zeus, when you look at the current markets number here on the right hand side of this slide, 260 billion, it just about matches the company's market cap. Maybe an interesting coincidence, but at any rate, what was your takeaway from this data? >> Well, I think, you know, the big takeaway from the data is there's still a lot of room ahead for Cisco to grow, right? Again, this is a, it's a company that I think most people would put in the camp of legacy IT vendor, just because of how long they've been around. But they have done a very good job of staving off innovation. And part of that is just these markets that they play in continue to grow and they continue to have challenges that they can solve. I think one of the things Cisco has done though, since the arrival of Chuck Robbins, is they don't fight these trends anymore, Dave. I know prior to Chuck's arrival, they really fought the tide of software defined networking and you know, trends like that, and even cloud to some extent. And I remember one of the first meetings I had with Chuck, I asked him about that and he said that Cisco will never do that again. That under his watch, if customers are going through a market transition, Cisco wants to lead them through it, not try and hold them back. And I think for that reason, they're able to look at, all of those trends and try and take a leadership position in them, even though you might look at some of those and feel that some of them might be detrimental to Cisco's business in the short term. So something like software defined WANs, which you would throw into secure agile networks, certainly doesn't, may not carry the same kind of RPOs and margins with it that their traditional routers did, but ultimately customers are going to buy it and Cisco would like to be the ones to sell it to them. >> You know, you bring up a great point. This industry is littered, there's a graveyard of executives who fought the trend. Many people, some people remember Ken Olson of Digital Equipment Corporation. "Unix is snake oil," is what he said. IBM mainframe guys said, "PCs are a toy." And of course the history, they were the wrong side of history. The other big takeaway was the shift to software in subscription. They really made a big point of this. Here's a chart Cisco showed a couple of times to make the point that it's one of the largest software companies in the world. You know, in the top 10. They also made the point that Chuck Robbins, when he joined in 2015, and since that time, it's nearly 4x'ed it's subscription software revenue, and roughly doubled its software sales. And it now has an RPO, remaining performance obligations, that exceeds 30 billion. And it's committing to grow its subscription business in the forward-looking statements by 15 to 17% CAGR through 25, which would imply about a doubling of these, the blue lines. Zeus, it's unclear if that forward-looking forecast is just software. I presume it includes some services, but as Herren pointed out, over time, these services will be bundled into the product revenue, same way SAS companies do it. But the point is Cisco is committed, like many of their peers, to moving to an ARR model. But please, share your thoughts on Cisco's move to software subscriptions and how you see the future of consumption-based pricing. >> Yeah, this has been a big shift for Cisco, obviously. It's one that's highly disruptive. It's one that I know gave their partners a lot of angst for a long time because when you sell things upfront, you get a big check for selling that, right? And when you sell things in a subscription model, you get a much smaller check for a number of months over the period of the contract. It also changes the way you deal with the customer. When you sell a one-time product, you basically wipe your hands. You come back in three or four years and say, "it's time to upgrade." When you sell a subscription, now, the one thing that I've tried to talk to Cisco and its partners about is customers don't renew things they don't use. And so it becomes incumbent on the partner, it becomes incumbent upon Cisco to make sure that things that the customer is subscribing to, that they do use. And so Cisco's had to create a customer success organization. They've had to help their partners create those customer success organizations. So it's really changed the model. And Cisco not only made the shift, they've done it faster than they actually had originally forecast. So during the financial analyst day, they actually touted their execution on software, noting that it hit it's 30% revenue as percent of total target well before it was supposed to, it's actually exceeded its targets. And now it's looking to increase that to, it actually raised its guidance in this area a little bit by a few percentage points, looking out over the next few years. And so it's moved to the subscription model, Dave, the thing that you brought up, which I do see as somewhat of a challenge is the shift to consumption-based pricing. So subscription is one thing in that I write you a check every month for the same amount. When I go to the consumption-based pricing, that's easy to do for cloud services, things like WebEx or Duo or, you know, CloudLock, some of the security products. That that shift should be relatively simple. If customers want to buy it that way. It's unclear as to how you do that when you're selling on-prem equipment with the software add-on to it because in that case, you have to put metering technology in to understand how much they're using. You have to have a minimum baseline to start with. They've done it in some respects. The old HCS product that they sold, the Telcos, actually was sold with a minimum commit and then they tacked on a utilization on top of that. So maybe they move into that kind of model. But I know it's something that they've, they get asked about a lot. I know they're still thinking about it, but it's something that I believe is coming and it's going to come pretty fast. >> I want to pick up on that because I think, you know, they made the point that we're one of the top 10 software companies in the world. It's very difficult for hardware companies to make the transition to software. You know, HP couldn't do it. >> Well, no one's done it. >> Well, IBM has kind of done it, but they really struggle. It's kind of this mishmash of tooling and software products that aren't really well-integrated. But, I would say this, everybody now, Cisco, Dell, HPE with GreenLake, Lenovo, pretty much all the traditional hardware players are trying to move to an as a service model or at least for a portion of their business. HPE's all in, Dell transitioning. And for the most part, I would make the following observation. And I'd love to get your thoughts on this. They're pretty much following a SAS like model, which in my view is outdated and kind of flawed from a customer standpoint. All these guys say, "Hey, we're doing this because "this is what the customers want." I think the cloud is really a true consumption based model. And if you look at modern SAS companies, a lot of the startups, they're moving to a consumption based model. You see that with Snowflake, you see that with Stripe. Now they will offer incentives. But most of the traditional enterprise players, they're saying, "Okay, pay us upfront, "commit to some base level. "If you go over it, you know, "we'll charge you for it. "If you go under it, you're still going to pay "for that base level." So it's not true consumption base. It's not really necessarily the customer's best interest. So that's, I think there's some learnings there that are going to have to play out. >> Yeah, the reason customers are shying away from that SAS type model, I think during the pandemic, the one thing we learned, Dave, is that the business will ebb and flow greatly from month to month sometimes. And I was talking with somebody that worked for one of the big hotel chains, and she was telling me that what their CRM providers, she wouldn't tell me who it was, except said it rhymed with Shmalesforce, that their utilization of it went from, you know, from a nice steady level to spiking really high when customers started calling in to cancel hotel rooms. And then it dropped down to almost nothing as we went through that period of stay at home. And now it's risen back up. And so for her, she wanted to move to a consumption-based model because what happens otherwise is you wind up buying for peak utilization, your software subscriptions go largely underutilized the majority of the year, and you wind up paying, you know, a lot more than you need to. If you go to more of a true consumption model, it's harder to model out from a financial perspective 'cause there's a lot of ebbs and flows in the business, but over a longer period of time, it's more cost-effective, right? And so the, again, what the pandemic taught us was we don't really know what we're going to need from a consumption standpoint, you know, nevermind a year from now, maybe even six months from now. And consumption just creates a lot more flexibility and agility. You can scale up, you can scale down. You can bring in users, you can take out users, you can add consultants, things like that. And it just, it's much more aligned with the way businesses are run today. >> Yeah, churn is a silent killer of a software company. And so there's retention is the key here. So again, I think there's lots of learning. Let's put Cisco into context with some of its peers. So this chart we developed compares five companies to Cisco. Core Dell, meaning Dell, without VMware. VMware, HPE, IBM, we've put an AWS, and then Cisco as, IBM, AWS and Cisco is the integrated plays. So the chart shows the latest quarterly revenue multiplied by four to get a run rate, a three-year growth outlook, gross margin percentage, market cap, and revenue multiple. And the key points here are that one, Cisco has got a pretty awesome business model. It's got 60% gross margin, strong operating margins, not shown here, but in the mid twenties, 25%. It's got a higher growth rate than most of its peers. And as such, a much better, multiple than say, for instance, Core Dell gets 33 cents on the revenue dollar. HPE is double that. IBM's below two X. Cisco's revenue multiple rivals VMware, which is a pure software company. Now in a large part that's because VMware stock took a hit recently, but still the point is obvious. Cisco's got a great business. Now for context, we've added AWS, which blows away any company on this chart. We've inferred a market cap of nearly 600 billion, which frankly is conservative at a 10 X revenue multiple given it's inferred margins and growth rate. Now Zeus, if AWS were a separate company, it could have a market cap that approached 800 billion in my view. But what does this data tell you? >> Well, it just tells me that Cisco continues to be a very well-run company that has staved off commoditization, despite the calling for it for years. And I think the big lesson, and I've talked to financial analysts about this over the years, is that if, I don't really believe anything in this world is a commodity, Dave. I think even when Cisco went to the server market, if you remember back then, they created a new way of handling memory management. They were getting well above average margins for service, albeit less than Cisco's network margins, but still above average for server margins. And so I think if you can continue to innovate, you will see the margin stay where they are. You will see customers continue to buy and refresh. And I think one of the challenges Cisco's had in the past, and this is where the subscription business will help, is getting customers to stay with the latest and greatest. Prior to this refresh of network equipment, some of the stuff that I've seen in the fields, 10, 15 years old, once you move to that sell me a box and then tack on the subscription revenue that you pay month by month, you do drive more consistent refresh. Think about the way you just handle your own mobile phone. If you had to go pay, you know, a thousand dollars every three years, you might not do it at that three-year cycle. If you pay 40 bucks a month, every time there's a new phone, you're going to take it, right? So I think Cisco is able to drive greater, better refresh, keep their customers current, keep the features in there. And we've seen that with a lot of the new products. The new Cat 9,000, some of the new service provider products, the new wifi products, they've all done very well. In fact, they've all outpaced their previous generation products as far as growth rate goes. And so I think that is a testament to the way they've run the business. But I do think when people bucket Cisco in with HP and Dell, and I understand why they do, their businesses were similar at one time, it's really not a true comparison anymore. I think Cisco has completely changed their business and they're not trying to commoditize markets, they're trying to drive innovation and keep the margins up, where I think HP and Dell tend to really compete on price versus innovation. >> Well, and we are going to get to this point about the tailwinds and headwinds and cloud, and how Cisco to do it. But, to your point about, you know, the cell phone analogy. To the extent that Cisco can make that seamless for customers could hide that underlying complexity, that's going to be critical for the cloud. Now, but before we get there, I want to talk about one of the reasons why Cisco such a high multiple, and has been able to preserve its margins, to your point, not being commoditized. And it's been able to grow both organically, but also has a strong history of M and A. It's this chart shows a dominant position in core networking. So this shows, so ETR data within the Fortune 500. It plots companies in the ETR taxonomy in two dimensions, net score on the vertical axis, which is a measure of spending velocity, and market share on the horizontal axis, which is a measure of presence in the survey. It's not like IDC market share, it's mentioned market share if you will. The point is Cisco is far and away the most pervasive player in the market, it's generally held its dominant position. Although, it's been under pressure in the last few years in core networking, but it retains or maintains a very respectable net score and consistently performs well for such a large company. Zeus, anything you'd add with respect to Cisco's core networking business? >> Yeah, it's maintained a dominant network position historically. I think part of because it drives good products, but also because the competitive landscape, historically has been pretty weak, right? We saw companies like 3Com and Nortel who aren't around anymore. It'll be interesting to see moving forward now that companies like VMware are involved in networking. AWS is interested in networking. Arista is a much stronger company. You know, Juniper bought Mist and is in better position. Even Extreme Networks who most people thought was dead a few years ago has made a number of acquisitions and is now a billion dollar company. So while Cisco has done a great job of execution, they've done a great job on the innovation side, their competitive landscape, looking out over the next five years, I think is going to be more difficult than it has been over the previous five years. And largely, Dave, I think that's good for Cisco. I think whenever Cisco's pressed a little bit from competition, they tend to step on the innovation gas a little bit more. And I look back and even just the transition when VMware bought Nicira, that got Cisco's SDN business into gear, like nothing else could have, right? So competition for that company, they always seem to respond well to it. >> So, let's break down Cisco's net score a little bit. Explain why the company has been able to hold its spending momentum despite its large size. This will give you a little insight to the survey. So this chart shows the granular components of net score. The lime green is new adoptions to Cisco. The forest green is spending more than 6%. The gray is flat plus or minus 5%. The pink is spending drops by more than 5%. And the red is we're chucking the platform, we're getting off. And Cisco's overall net score here is 25%, which for a company of its size speaks to the relationships that it has with customers. It's of course got a fat middle in the gray area, like all sort of large established companies. But very low defections as well, it's got low new adoptions. But very respectable. So that is background, Zeus. Let's look at spending momentum over time across Cisco's portfolio. So this chart shows Cisco's net score by that methodology within the ETR taxonomy for Cisco over three survey periods. And what jumps out is Meraki on the left, very strong. Virtualization business, its core networking, analytics and security, all showing upward momentum. AppD is a little bit concerning, but that could be related to Cisco's sort of pivot to full stack observability. So maybe AppD is being bundled there. Although some practitioners have cited to us some concerns in that space. And then WebEx at the end of the chart, it's showing some relative strength, but not that high. Zeus, maybe you could comment on Meraki and any other takeaways across the portfolio. >> Yeah, Meraki has proven to be an excellent acquisition for Cisco. In fact, you might, I think it's arguable to say it's its best acquisition in history going all the way back to camp Kalpana and Grand Junction, the ones that brought up catalyst switches. So, in fact, I think Meraki's revenue might be larger than security now. So, that shows you the momentum it has. I think one of the lessons it brought to Cisco was that simpler is better, sometimes. I think when they first bought Meraki, the way Meraki's deployed, it's very easy to set up. There's a lot of engineering work though that goes into making a product simple to use. And I think a lot of Cisco engineers historically looked at Meraki as, that's a little bit of a toy. It's meant for small businesses, things like that, but it's not for enterprise. But, Rocky's done a nice job of expanding the portfolio, of leveraging the cloud for analytics and showing you a lot of things that you wouldn't necessarily get from traditional networking equipment. And one of the things that I was really delighted to see was when they put Todd Nightingale in charge of all the networking business, because that showed to me that Chuck Robbins understood that the things Meraki were doing were right and they infuse a little bit of Meraki into the rest of the company. You know, that's certainly a good thing. The other areas that you showed on the chart, not really a surprise, Dave. When you think of the shift hybrid work and you think of the, some of the other transitions going on, I think you would expect to see the server business in decline, the storage business, you know, maybe in a little bit of decline, just because people aren't building out data centers. Where the other ones are related more to hybrid working, hybrid cloud, things like that. So it is what you would expect. The WebEx one was interesting too, because it did show somewhat of a dip and then a rise. And I think that's indicative of what we've seen in the collaboration space since the pandemic came about. Companies like Zoom and RingCentral really got a lot of the headlines. Again, when you, the comment I made on competition, Cisco got caught a little bit flat-footed, they've caught up in features and now they really stepped on the gas there. Chuck joked that he gave the WebEx team a bit of a blank check to go do what it had to do. And I don't think that was a joke. I think he actually did that because they've added more features into WebEx in the last year then I think they did the previous five years before that. >> Well, let's just drill into video conferencing real quick here, if we could. Here's that two dimensional view, again, showing net score against market share or pervasiveness of mentions, and you can see Microsoft Teams in the upper right. I mean, it's off the chart, literally. Zoom's well ahead of Cisco in terms of, you know, mentions presence. And that could be a spate of freemium, you know, but it's basically a three horse race in this game. And Cisco, I don't think is trying to take Zoom head on, rather it seems to be making WebEx a core part of its broader collaboration agenda. But Zeus, maybe you could comment. >> Well, it's all coming together, right? So, it's hard to decouple calling from video from meetings. All of the vendors, including Teams, are going after the hybrid work experience. And if you believe the future is hybrid and not just work from home, then Cisco does have a pretty interesting advantage because it's the only one that makes its own end points, where Teams and Zoom doesn't. And so that end to end experience it can deliver. The Microsoft Teams one's interesting because that product, frankly, when you talk to users, it doesn't have a great user score, like as far as user satisfaction goes, but the one thing Microsoft has done a very good job of is bundling it in to the Office365 licenses, making it very easy for IT to deploy. Zoom is a little bit in the middle where they've appealed to the users. They've done a better job of appealing to IT, but there is a, there is a battleground now going on where video's not just video. It includes calling, includes meetings, includes room systems now, and I think this hybrid work friend is going to change the way we think about these meeting tools. >> Now we'd be remiss if we didn't spend a moment talking about security as a key part of Cisco's business. And we have a graphic on this same kind of X, Y. And it's been, we've seen several quarters of growth. Although, the last quarter security growth was in the low single digits, but Cisco is a major player in security. And this X, Y graph shows, they've got both a large presence and a solid spending momentum. Not nearly as much momentum as Okta or Zscaler or a CrowdStrike and some of the smaller companies, but they're, these guys are on a rocket ship, but others that we featured in these episodes, but much more than respectable for Cisco. And security is critical to the strategy. It's a big part of the subscriber base. And the last thing, Zeus, I'll say about Cisco made the point in analyst day, that this market is crowded. You can see that in this chart. And their goal is to simplify this picture and make it easier for customers to secure their data and apps. But that's not easy, Zeus. What are your thoughts on Cisco's security opportunities? >> Yeah, I've been waiting for Cisco go to break up in security a little more than it has. I do think, I was talking with a CSO the other day, Dave, that said to me he's starting to understand that you don't have to have best of breed everywhere to have best in class threat protection. In fact, there's a lot of buyers now will tell you that if you try and have best of breed everywhere, it actually creates a negative when it comes to threat protection because keeping all the policies and things up to date is very, very difficult. And so the industry is moving more to a platform model, right? Now, the challenge for Cisco is how do you get that, the customer to think of the network as part of the platform? Because while the platform model, I think, is starting to gain traction, FloridaNet, Palo Alto, even McAfee, companies like that also have their own version of a security platform. And if you look at the financial performance of companies like FloridaNet and Palo Alto over the past, you know, over the past couple of years, they've been through the roof, right? And so I think an interesting and unique challenge for Cisco is can they convince the security buyer that the network is as important a part of that platform as any other component? If they can do that, I think they can break away from the pack. If not, then they'll stay mixed in with those, you know, Palo, FloridaNet, Checkpoint, and, you know, and Cisco, in that mix. But I do think that may present their single biggest needle moving opportunity just because of how big the security TAM is, and the fact that there is no de facto leader in security today. If they could gain the same kind of position in security as they have a networking, who, I mean, that would move the needle like no other market would. >> Yeah, it's really interesting that they're coming at security, obviously from a position of networking strength. You've got, to your point, you've got best of breed, Okta in identity, you got CrowdStrike in endpoint, Zscaler in cloud security. They're all growing like crazy. And you got Cisco and you know, Palo Alto, CSOs tell us they want to work with Palo Alto because they're the thought leader and they're obviously a major player here. You mentioned FloridaNet, there's a zillion others. We could talk all day about security. But let's bring it back to cloud. We've talked about a number of the piece in Cisco's portfolio, and we haven't really spent any time on full stack observability, which is a big push for Cisco with AppD, Intersight and the ThousandEyes acquisition. And that plays into this equation. But my take, Zeus, is Cisco has a number of cloud knobs that it can turn, it sells core networking equipment to hyperscalers. It can be the abstraction layer to connect on-prem to the cloud and hybrid and across clouds. And it's in a good position with Telcos too, to go after the 5G. But let's use this chart to talk about Cisco's cloud prospects. It's an ETR cut of the cloud customer spending. So we cut it by cloud customers. And they're are, I don't know, 800 or so in the survey. And then looking at various companies performance within that cut. So these are companies that compete, or in the case of HashiCorp, partner with Cisco at some level. Let me just set this up and get your take. So the insert on the chart by the way shows the raw data that positions each dot, the net score and the shared n, i.e. the number of accounts in the survey that responded. The key points, first of all, Azure and AWS, dominant players in cloud. GCP is a distant third. We've reported on that a lot. Not only are these two companies big, they have spending momentum on their platforms. They're growing, they are on that flywheel. Second point, VMware and Cisco are very prominent. They have huge customer bases. And while they're often on a collision course, there's lots of room in cloud for multiple players. When we plotted some other Cisco properties like AppD and Meraki, which as we said, is strong. And then for context, we've placed Dell, HPE, Aruba, IBM and Oracle. And also VMware cloud and AWS, which is notable on its elevation. And as I say, we've added HashiCorp because they're critical partner of Cisco and it's a multi-cloud play. Okay, Zeus, there's the setup. What does Cisco have to do to make the cloud a tailwind? Let's talk about strategy, tailwinds, headwinds, competition, and bottom line it for us. >> Yeah, well, I do think, well, I talked about security being the biggest needle mover for Cisco, I think its biggest challenge is convincing Wall Street in particular, that the cloud is a tailwind. I think if you look at the companies with the really high multiples to their stock, Dave, they're all ones where they're viewed as, they go along with the cloud ride, Right? So the, if you can associate yourself with the cloud and then people believe that the cloud is going to, more cloud equals more business, that obviously creates a better multiple because the cloud has almost infinite potential ahead of it. Now with respect to Cisco, I do think cloud has presented somewhat of a double-edged sword for Cisco. I don't believe the current consumption model for cloud is really a tailwind for Cisco, not really a headwind, but it doesn't really change Cisco's business. But I do think the very definition of cloud is changing before our eyes, Dave. And it's shifting away from centralized clouds. If you think of the way customers bought cloud before, it might have used AWS, it might've used Azure, but it really, that's not really multi-cloud, it's just multiple clouds in which I put things in these centralized resources. It's shifting more to this concept of distributed cloud in which a single application can be built using resources from your private cloud, for AWS, from Azure, from Edge locations, all the cloud providers have built their portfolios to support this concept of distributed cloud and what becomes important there, is a highly agile dynamic network. And in that case with distributed cloud, that is a tailwind for Cisco because now the network is that resource that ties all those distributed cloud components together. Now the network itself has to change. It needs to become a lot more agile and microservices and container friendly itself so I can spin up resources and, you know, in an Edge location, as fast as I can on-prem and things like that. But I do think it creates another wave of innovation and networking, and in that case, I think it does act as a tailwind for Cisco, aside from just the work it's done with the web scalers, you know, those types of companies. So, but I do think that Cisco needs to rethink its delivery model on network services somewhat to take advantage of that. >> At the analyst meeting, Cisco made the point that it does sell to the hyperscalers. It talked about the top six hyperscalers. You know, you had mentioned to me, maybe IBM and Oracle were in there. I always talk about four hyperscalers and only four, but that's fine. Here's my question. Practitioners have told me, buyers have told me, the more money and more workloads I put in the cloud, the less I spend with Cisco. Now, even though that might be Cisco gear powering those clouds, do you see that as a potential threat in that they don't own that relationship anymore and value will confer to the cloud players? >> Yeah, that's, I've heard that too. And I don't, I believe that's true when it comes to general purpose compute. You're probably not buying as many UCS servers and things like that because you are putting them in the cloud. But I do think you do need a refresh the network. I think the network becomes a very important role, plays a very important role there. The variant, the really interesting trend will be, what is your WAM look like? Do you have thousands of workers scattered all over the place, or do you just have a few centralized locations? So I think also, you know, Cisco will wind up providing connectivity within the cloud. If you think of the transition we've seen in other industries, Dave, as far as cloud goes, you think of, you know, F5, a company like that. People thought that AWS would commoditize F5's business because AWS provides their own load balancers, right? But what AWS provides is a very basic, very basic functionality and then use F5's virtual edition or a cloud edition for a lot of the advanced capabilities. And I think you'll see the same thing with the cloud that customers will start buying versions of Cisco that go in the cloud to drive a lot of those advanced capabilities that only Cisco delivers. And so I think you wind up buying more Cisco over time, although the per unit price of what you buy might be a little bit lower. If that makes sense here. >> It does, I think it makes a lot of sense and that fits into the cloud model. You know, you bring up a good point, the conversation with the customer was Rakuten. And that individual was essentially sharing with us, somebody was asking, one of the analysts was asking, "Well, what about the cloud guys? "Aren't they going to really threaten the whole Telco "industry and disrupt it?" And his point was, "Look at, this stuff is not trivial." So to your point, you know, maybe they'll provide some basic functionality. Kind of like they do in a lot of different areas. Data protection is another good example. Security is another good example. Where there's plenty of room for partners, competitors, of on-prem players to add value. And I've always said, "Look, the opportunity "is the cloud players spend 100 billion dollars a year "on CapEx." It's a gift to companies like Cisco who can build an abstraction layer that connects on-prem, cloud for hybrid, across clouds, out to the edge, and really be that layer that is that layer that takes advantage of cloud native, but also delivers that experience, I don't want to use the word seamlessly, but that experience across those clouds as the cloud expands. And that's fundamentally Cisco's cloud strategy, isn't it? >> Oh yeah. And I think people have underestimated over the years, how hard it is to build good networking products. Anybody can go get some silicon and build a product to connect two things together. The question is, can you do it at scale? Can you do it securely? And lots of companies have tried to commoditize networking, you know, White Boxes was looked at as the existential threat to Cisco. Huawei was looked at as the big threat to Cisco. And all of those have kind of come and gone because building high quality network equipment that scales is tough. And it's tougher than most people realize. And your other point on the cloud providers as well, they will provide a basic level of functionality. You know, AWS network equipment doesn't work in Azure. And Azure stuff doesn't work in Google, and Google doesn't work in AWS. And so you do need a third party to come in and act as almost the cloud middleware that can connect all those things together with a consistent set of policies. And that's what Cisco does really well. They did that, you know back when they were founded with routing protocols and you can think this is just an extension of what they're doing just up at the cloud layer. >> Excellent. Okay, Zeus, we're going to leave it there. Thanks to my guest today, Zeus Kerravala. Great analysis as always. Would love to have you back. Check out ZKresearch.com to reach him. Thank you again. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Now, remember I publish each week on Wikibond.com and siliconangle.com. All these episodes are available as podcasts, just search "Braking Analysis" podcast, and you can connect on Twitter at DVallante or email me David.Vallante@siliconangle.com. Thanks for the comments on LinkedIn. Check out etr.plus for all the survey action. This is Dave Vallante for theCUBE insights powered by ETR. Be well and we'll see you next time. (light music)

from the cube studios in palo alto in boston bringing you data-driven insights from the cube and etr this is breaking analysis with dave vellante cloud repatriation is a term often used by technology companies the ones that don't operate a public cloud the marketing narrative most typically implies that customers have moved work to the public cloud and for a variety of reasons expense performance security etc are disillusioned with the cloud and as a result are repatriating workloads back to their safe comfy and cost-effective on-premises data center while we have no doubt this does sometimes happen the data suggests that this is a single digit de minimis phenomenon hello and welcome to this week's wikibon cube insights powered by etr some have written about the repatriation myth but in this breaking analysis we'll share hard data that we feel debunks the narrative and is currently being promoted by some we'll also take this opportunity to do our quarterly cloud revenue update and share with you our latest figures for the big four cloud vendors let's start by acknowledging that the definition of cloud is absolutely evolving and in this sense much of the vendor marketing is valid no longer is cloud just a distant set of remote services that lives up there in the cloud the cloud is increasingly becoming a ubiquitous sensing thinking acting set of resources that touches nearly every aspect of our lives the cloud is coming on prem and work is being done to connect clouds to each other and the cloud is extending to the near and far edge there's little question about that today's cloud is not just compute storage connectivity and spare capacity but increasingly it's a variety of services to analyze data and predict slash anticipate changes monitor and interpret streams of information apply machine intelligence to data to optimize business outcomes it's tooling to share data protect data visualize data and bring data to life supporting a whole new set of innovative applications notice there's a theme there data increasingly the cloud is where the high value data lives from a variety of sources and it's where organizations go to mine it because the cloud vendors have the best platforms for data and this is part of why the repatriation narrative is somewhat dubious actually a lot dubious because the volume of data in the cloud is growing at rates much faster than data on prem at least by a couple thousand basis points by our estimates annually so cloud data is where the action is and we'll talk about the edge in a moment but a new era of application development is emerging with containers at the center the concept of write wants run anywhere allows developers to take advantage of systems that run on-prem say a transaction system and tap data from multiple sources in various locations there might be multiple clouds or at the edge or wherever and combine that with immense cheap processing power that we've discussed extensively in previous breaking analysis episodes and you see this new breed of apps emerging that's powered by ai those are hitting the market so this is not a zero-sum game the cloud vendors have given the world an infrastructure gift by spending like crazy on capex more than a hundred billion last year on capex for example for the big four and in our view the players that don't own a cloud should stop being so defensive about it they should thank the hyperscalers and lay out a vision as to how they'll create a new abstraction layer on top of the public cloud and you know that's what they're doing and they'll certainly claim to be actively working on this vision but consider the pace of play between the hyperscalers and their traditional on-prem providers we believe the innovation gap is actually widening meaning the public cloud players are accelerating their innovation lead and will 100 compete for hybrid applications they have the resources the developer affinity they're doing custom silicon and have the expertise there and the tam expansion goals that loom large so while it's not a zero-sum game and hybrid is definitely real we think the cloud vendors continue to gain share most rapidly unless the hybrid crowd can move faster now of course there's the edge and that is a wild card but it seems that again the cloud players are very well positioned to innovate with custom silicon programmable infrastructure capex build-outs at the edge and new thinking around system architectures but let's get back to the core story here and take a look at cloud adoptions you hear many marketing messages that call into question the public cloud at its recent think conference ibm ceo arvind krishna said that only about 25 of workloads had moved into the public cloud and he made the statement that you know this might surprise you implying you might think it should be much higher than that well we're not surprised by that figure especially especially if you narrow it to mission critical work which ibm does in its annual report actually we think that's probably high for mission critical work moving to the cloud we think it's a lot lower than that but regardless we think there are other ways to measure cloud adoption and this chart here from david michelle's book c seeing digital shows the adoption rates for major technological innovations over the past century and the number of years how many years it took to get to 50 percent household adoption electricity took a long time as did telephones had that infrastructure that last mile build out radios and tvs were much faster given the lower infrastructure requirements pcs actually took a long time and the web around nine years from when the mosaic browser was introduced we took a stab at estimating the pace of adoption of public cloud and and within a decade it reached 50 percent adoption in top enterprises and today that figures easily north of 90 so as we said at the top cloud adoption is actually quite strong and that adoption is driving massive growth for the public cloud now we've updated our quarterly cloud figures and want to share them with you here are our latest estimates for the big four cloud players with only alibaba left to report now remember only aws and alibaba report clean or relatively clean i ass figures so we use survey data and financial analysis to estimate the actual numbers for microsoft in google it's a subset of what they report in q121 we estimate that the big 4is and pas revenue approached 27 billion that's q121 that figure represents about 40 growth relative to q1 2020. so our trailing 12-month calculation puts us at 94 billion so we're now on roughly 108 billion dollar run rate as you may recall we've predicted that figure will surpass 115 billion by year end when it's all said and done aws it remains the leader amongst the big four with just over half of the market that's down from around 63 percent for the full year of 2018. unquestionably as we've reported microsoft they're everywhere they're ubiquitous in the market and they continue to perform very well but anecdotally customers and partners in our community continue to report to us that the quality of the aws cloud is noticeably better in terms of reliability and overall security etc but it doesn't seem to change the trajectory of the share movements as microsoft's software dominance makes doing business with azure really easy now as of this recording alibaba has yet to report but we'll update these figures once their earnings are released let's dig into the growth rates associated with these revenue figures and make some specific comments there this chart here shows the growth trajectory for each of the big four google trails the pack in revenue but it's growing faster than the others from of course a smaller base google is being very aggressive on pricing and customer acquisition to that we say good google needs to grow faster in our view and they most certainly can afford to be aggressive as we said combined the big four are growing revenue at 40 on a trailing 12-month basis and that compares with low single-digit growth for on-prem infrastructure and we just don't see this picture changing in the near to midterm like storage growth revenue from the big public cloud players is expected to outpace spending on traditional on on-prem platforms by at least 2 000 basis points for the foreseeable future now interestingly while aws is growing more slowly than the others from a much larger 54 billion run rate we actually saw sequential quarterly growth from aws and q1 which breaks a two-year trend from where aws's q1 growth rate dropped sequentially from q4 interesting now of course at aws we're watching the changing of the guards andy jassy becoming ceo of amazon adam silipsky boomeranging back to aws from a very successful stint at tableau and max peterson taking over for for aws public sector replacing teresa carlson who is now president and heading up go to market at splunk so lots of changes and we think this is actually a real positive for aws as it promotes from within we like that it taps previous amazon dna from tableau salesforce and it promotes the head of aws to run all of amazon a signal to us that amazon will dig its heels in and further resist calls to split aws from the mothership so let's dig in a little bit more to this repatriation mythbuster theme the revenue numbers don't tell the entire story so it's worth drilling down a bit more let's look at the demand side of the equation and pull in some etr survey data now to set this up we want to explain the fundamental method used by etr around its net score metric net score measures spending momentum and measures five factors as shown in this wheel chart that shows the breakdown of spending for the aws cloud it shows the percentage of customers within the platform that are either one adopting the platform new that's the lime green in this wheel chart two increasing spending by more than five percent that's the forest green three flat spending between plus or minus five percent that's the gray and four decreasing spend by six percent or more that's the pink and finally five replacing the platform that's the bright red now dare i say that the bright red is a proxy for or at least an indicator of repatriation sure why not let's say that now net score is derived by subtracting the reds from the greens anything above 40 percent we consider to be elevated aws is at 57 so very high not much sign of leaving the cloud nest there but we know it's nuanced and you can make an argument for corner cases of repatriation but come on the numbers just don't bear out that narrative let's compare aws with some of the other vendors to test this theory theory a bit more this chart lines up net score granularity for aws microsoft and google it compares that to ibm and oracle now other than aws and google these figures include the entire portfolio for each company but humor me and let's make an assumption that cloud defections are lower than the overall portfolio average because cloud has more momentum it's getting more spend spending so just stare at the red bars for a moment the three cloud players show one two and three percent replacement rates respectively but ibm and oracle while still in the single digits which is good show noticeably higher replacement rates and meaningfully lower new adoptions in the lime green as well the spend more category in the forest green is much higher within the cloud companies and the spend less in the pink is notably lower and you can see the sample sizes on the right-hand side of the chart we're talking about many hundreds over 1300 in the case of microsoft and if we look if we put hpe or dell in the charts it would say several hundred responses many hundreds it would look similar to ibm and oracle where you have higher reds a bigger fat middle of gray and lower greens it's just the way it is it shouldn't surprise anyone and it's you know these are respectable but it's just what happens with mature companies so if customers are repatriating there's little evidence here we believe what's really happening is that vendor marketing people are talking to customers who are purposefully spinning up test and dev work in the cloud with the intent of running a workload or portions of that workload on prem and when they move into production they're counting that as repatriation and they're taking liberties with the data to flood the market okay well that's fair game and all's fair in tech marketing but that's not repatriation that's experimentation or sandboxing or testing and deving it's not i'm leaving the cloud because it's too expensive or less secure or doesn't perform for me we're not saying that those things don't happen but it's certainly not visible in the numbers as a meaningful trend that should factor into buying decisions now we perfectly recognize that organizations can't just refactor their entire applications application portfolios into the cloud and migrate and we also recognize that lift and shift without a change in operating model is not the best strategy in real migrations they take a long time six months to two years i used to have these conversations all the time with my colleague stu miniman and i spoke to him recently about these trends and i wanted to see if six months at red hat and ibm had changed his thinking on all this and the answer was a clear no but he did throw a little red hat kool-aid at me saying saying that the way they think about the cloud blueprint is from a developer perspective start by containerizing apps and then the devs don't need to think about where the apps live whether they're in the cloud whether they're on prem where they're at the edge and red hat the story is brings a consistency of operations for developers and operators and admins and the security team etc or any plat on any platform but i don't have to lock in to a platform and bring that everywhere with me i can work with anyone's platform so that's a very strong story there and it's how arvin krishna plans to win what he calls the architectural battle for hybrid cloud okay so let's take a take a look at how the big cloud vendors stack up with the not so big cloud platforms and all those in between this chart shows one of our favorite views plotting net score or spending velocity on the vertical axis and market share or pervasiveness in the data set on the horizontal axis the red shaded area is what we call the hybrid zone and the dotted red lines that's where the elite live anything above 40 percent net score on the on on the vertical axis we consider elevated anything to the right of 20 on the horizontal axis implies a strong market presence and by those kpis it's really a two horse race between aws and microsoft now as we suggested google still has a lot of work to do and if they're out buying market share that's a start now you see alibaba shown in the upper left hand corner high spending momentum but from a small sample size as etr's china respondent level is obviously much lower than it is in the u.s and europe and the rest of apac now that shaded res red zone is interesting and gives credence to the other big non-cloud owning vendor narrative that is out there that is the world is hybrid and it's true over the past several quarters we've seen this hybrid zone performing well prominent examples include vmware cloud on aws vmware cloud which would include vcf vmware cloud foundation dell's cloud which is heavily based on vmware and red hat open shift which perhaps is the most interesting given its ubiquity as we were talking about before and you can see it's very highly elevated on the net score axis right there with all the public cloud guys red hat is essentially the switzerland of cloud which in our view puts it in a very strong position and then there's a pack of companies hovering around the 20 vertical axis level that are hybrid that by the way you see openstack there that's from a large telco presence in the data set but any rate you see hpe oracle and ibm ibm's position in the cloud just tells you how important red hat is to ibm and without that acquisition you know ibm would be far less interesting in this picture oracle is oracle and actually has one of the strongest hybrid stories in the industry within its own little or not so little world of the red stack hpe is also interesting and we'll see how the big green lake ii as a service pricing push will impact its momentum in the cloud category remember the definition of cloud here is whatever the customer says it is so if a cio says we're buying cloud from hpe or ibm or cisco or dell or whomever we take her or his word for it and that's how it works cloud is in the eye of the buyer so you have the cloud expanding into the domain of on-premises and the on-prem guys finally getting their proverbial acts together with hybrid that they've been talking about since 2009 but it looks like it's finally becoming real and look it's true you're not going to migrate everything into the cloud but the cloud folks are in a very strong position they are on the growth flywheel as we've shown they each have adjacent businesses that are data based disruptive and dominant whether it's in retail or search or a huge software estate they are winning the data wars as well that seems to be pretty clear to us and they have a leg up in ai and i want to look at that can we all agree that ai is important i think we can machine intelligence is being infused into every application and today much of the ai work is being done in the cloud as modeling but in the future we see ai moving to the edge in real time and real-time inferencing is a dominant workload but today again 90 of it is building models and analyzing data a lot of that work happens in the cloud so who has the momentum in ai let's take a look here's that same xy graph with the net score against market share and look who has the dominant mind share and position and spending momentum microsoft aws and google you can see in the table insert in the lower right hand side they're the only three in the data set of 1 500 responses that have more than 100 n aws and microsoft have around 200 or even more in the case of microsoft and their net scores are all elevated above the 60 percent level remember that 40 percent that red line indicates the elevation mark the high elevation mark so the hyperscalers have both the market presence and the spend momentum so we think the rich get richer now they're not alone there are several companies above the 40 line databricks is bringing ai and data science to the world of data lakes with its managed services and it's executing very well salesforce is infusing infusing ai into its platform via einstein you got sap on there anaconda is kind of the gold standard that platform for data science and you can see c3 dot ai is tom siebel's company going after enterprise ai and data robot which like c3 ai is a small sample in the data set but they're highly elevated and they're simplifying machine learning now there's ibm watson it's actually doing okay i mean sure we'd like to see it higher given that ginny rometty essentially bet ibm's future on watson but it has a decent presence in the market and a respectable net score and ibm owns a cloud so okay at least it's a player not the dominance that many had hoped for when watson beat ken jennings in jeopardy back 10 years ago but it's okay and then is oracle they're now getting into the act like it always does they want they watched they waited they invested they spent money on r d and then boom they dove into the market and made a lot of noise and acted like they invented the concept oracle is infusing ai into its database with autonomous database and autonomous data warehouse and look that's what oracle does it takes best of breed industry concepts and technologies to make its products better you got to give oracle credit it invests in real tech and it runs the most mission critical apps in the world you can hate them if you want but they smoke everybody in that game all right let's take a look at another view of the cloud players and see how they stack up and where the big spenders live in the all-important fortune 500 this chart shows net score over time within the fortune 500 aws is particularly interesting because its net score overall is in the high 50s but in this large big spender category aws net score jumps noticeably to nearly 70 percent so there's a strong indication that aws the largest player also has momentum not just with small companies and startups but where it really counts from a revenue perspective in the largest companies so we think that's a very positive sign for aws all right let's wrap the realities of cloud repatriation are clear corner cases exist but it's not a trend to take to the bank although many public cloud users may think about repatriation most will not act on it those that do are the exception not the rule and the etr data shows that test and dev in the clouds is part of the cloud operating model even if the app will ultimately live on prem that's not repatriation that's just smart development practice and not every workload is will or should live in the cloud hybrid is real we agree and the big cloud players know it and they're positioning to bring their stacks on prem and to the edge and despite the risk of a lock-in and higher potential monthly bills and concerns over control the hyperscalers are well com positioned to compete in hybrid to win hybrid the legacy vendors must embrace the cloud and build on top of those giants and add value where the clouds aren't going to or can't or won't they got to find places where they can move faster than the hyperscalers and so far they haven't shown a clear propensity to do that hey that's how we see it what do you think okay well remember these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen you do a search breaking analysis podcast and please subscribe to the series check out etr's website at dot plus we also publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com a lot of ways to get in touch you can email me at david.velante at siliconangle.com or dm me at dvalante on twitter comment on our linkedin post i always appreciate that this is dave vellante for the cube insights powered by etr have a great week everybody stay safe be well and we'll see you next time you

>>from >>Around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of IBM think 2021 brought to you by IBM. Welcome to the cubes coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm your host lisa martin today. Have a new guest new to the cube moderate Tabla, the director of strategic partnerships for enterprise application services is joining me moderate. It's nice to have you on the program. >>Thank you lisa. Very excited to be here and hello everyone. >>So different this year. Again Virtual like last year we're going to talk about digital transformation and we saw this huge acceleration in 2020. The massive adoption of SAS applications. We want to talk though about IBM managed services for S AP applications. So before we get into that I'd love for you to be able to describe what your role is to our audience. >>Absolutely lisa. So good day everyone. I've been with IBM for over 23 years and my current role, I run the strategic alliances for IBM basically in the E. R. P. Space S. A. P. Being our primary strategic partner, I have a global team of architects and we basically look at market requirements. Talk to a lot of customers, talk to our business partner S. A. P. Obviously um you know, try to help them would come up with a solution. Well the transformation journey to the cloud and hopefully today, you know, we'll elaborate a little bit more on the exact work that we do in this space. So very happy to be here. Thank you. >>Sure. So we're going to dissect the IBM s. A. P. Relationship. I think you even worked at S. A. P. Before your 23 year tenure at IBM. So we'll get to some of that as well. But help us understand customers have so much choice each day. There is more and more interest why should a customer choose IBM as their strategic partner for this digital transformation journey. >>Well really, IBM has been in this essay p business for many, many decades. As you know Um we have many many certified people in S. A. P. close to 40,000 people actually globally. Um And we can help the clients in various aspects of their journey. So you know the typical cloud journey has four different aspects to it. Um You need the advice so you need basically systems integration services to help customers actually define the scope on, you know what they actually want to either upgrade, bring it to current as well as you know what workloads they want to move to the cloud. We can help customers with our Systems integration services called the Global Business Business Services in IBM we can help them with their entire planning, we can help them with the actual move to the cloud. So IBM offers a whole different variety of services for migration or not only to see ASAP workloads. I mean ASAP typically ends up being the heart of the workloads that any of the major customers run but surrounding SCP, there's a lot of other applications so we can help plan that entire journey for advice and then move it as well as in the interim. You know, there's also another step which can be some customers. They need to build net new and you know upgrade their applications to the latest technologies so we can help them with that. And then once the building move is over, obviously customers need help with the actual steady state run state environment and that's where this key service that we have managed services for SCP applications helps them. So our certifications with S. A. P. And the fact that we have consultants that are certified and all these different aspects of the journey can really help your clients. The other part, I would say that IBM is really a hybrid cloud provider. So obviously we have our cloud service, the IBM cloud, but we can offer this service meeting the customer where they need to be. So we are a client centric service, so if the customer has a choice of AWS or Azure, uh we can meet them left. So this is how, you know, we can really help our customers with our expertise. I know the data point to note that, you know, 70 80 of the enterprise customers still have not moved their workloads to the cloud. So this is a space, especially with Covid, as you've seen what's happened, you know, customers now are really, really looking to accelerate the journey because it's become a necessity, It's no longer something that our Ceo and C I O can push to the right, right, this is something they have to act now. So I began with all these various services, you know, specifically good in the S A. P area. Um, and given that we've been managing these production workloads for a lot of these enterprise customers on our cloud services for many, many years, we have the experience, we can truly help them with their journey >>And as you said, that's so critical of these days. One of the things that I think we learned in 2020 is is there was no time like the present, it really became such a massive shift that for business survival, those that weren't digitized definitely were in some hot water. Talk to me. So you talked about the IBM s, a P relationship being longstanding, Can you talk to me about the different aspects of the alliance and how that helps you guys to meet customers where they are? >>Sure. Um so s. a. p. and idea, we've been strategic partners for over 46 years. That's a long time. The partnership obviously has evolved over the years and I'll talk about you know a few of the different aspects where we've been partners um you know, the alliance initially obviously started, you know, IBM is in multiple businesses as you know, we have our one of the largest systems integrators in the world from a global business services point of view as well as one of the largest application planet services providers. So that's uh you know part of the alliance then we have our server groups, the power systems that IBM has. So that's another dimension of the alliance where um you know 5 6000 plus ASAP clients even today are still running um there? S a the applications on the power systems, whether it's on premise or also in some of the cloud deployment models. Historically we also had obviously the Database DB two alliance, but now with the S. A. P. S moved to Hannah um that's kind of a little bit of a mute point. Obviously it still exists, but most of the clients are now obviously being encouraged really to adopt S. A. P. S latest S four hana from the services standpoint. The other facet, you know, is really around the cloud services. So that's really our topic today right. Um in the cloud services area we have alliances with S. A. P very very strong alliances that have existed for you know, almost a decade now. Um as I said we've been managing the production workloads for very very large customers in many different industries, their entire supply chains. HR financial systems are running on IBM either in the old traditional hosting models um or also in our cloud models for the past 10 plus years. Right as IBM has evolved, so we have made sure that we do a whole different types of certifications with S. A. P. To stay current. Um many of these certifications are done either you know every two years, some are done every year. And if anyone checks, you know, the S. A. P. Service marketplace website which is owned by S. A. P. You can see IBM listed in all these different angles as a certified provider. There isn't another provider that can claim this breath in terms of certifications that IBM has done and that's why customers can benefit either from one or two of these services that IBMS provides or obviously a combination is a single vendor if the customer needs. So, you know, we have the sex, we have the credibility, we have decades of, you know, Delivery excellence in these areas, servicing these clients. Lots of the Fortune, 100 customers actually are running. Um there? S a p workloads on the IBM systems, whether in traditional hosting or in a hybrid cloud deployment. Some cases were actually providing services for customers that run their SCP workloads on premise. So we cater to that, you know, sets of clients as well and then of course others that are purely on our cloud. Um IBM cloud as well as hyper scholars. Yeah, so long >>list of certifications, that seems to be one of the biggest differentiators that you talked about me a little bit about how things have evolved over the last 12 to 18 months. in terms of how is IBMS focus changed for hybrid cloud with S. A. P. >>Yeah, so the focus changed if you know, you know, until last year we will call the cloud and cognitive company. Um This year of course the whole company has changed and we're going through a major transformation at the moment. We are the hybrid cloud company now. And that that name change means a lot. It means a lot in the sense that it gives choices to the customer, that's what the whole mission is all about. We want to make sure that customers are consuming IBM services and the IBM wants to meet them where they want to be. So there's you know, flexibility of choices in terms of hybrid, another cloud deployment model. So most customers in the S. A. P. Area, you know, they're looking for either just a pure private cloud deployment or they're looking for public cloud deployment or a combination and some are because, you know, there? S A. P. S. Footprint sizes are so large. Think about the multinational global companies, you know, and then they operate in so many different regions of the world and their data sizes of their databases are so large. Perhaps, you know, the public cloud really isn't a good fit yet. These customers are looking to move some sort of their workloads to the cloud. So that's where this hybrid cloud helps them. Because customers, you know, 90 plus percent of the clients today are really not choosing one hyper Scaler as their deployment option. They're really looking at multiple. So because they're running their workloads not just ASAP, but everything else, you know, SCP always brings along a whole bunch of other applications like tax applications and other interfaces, homegrown applications analytics that the customers are using. So if you want to take advantage of the true hybrid cloud and the benefits of all the various um, deployments and hyper scale is available in that region. Really, the hybrid cloud strategy from IBM is a perfect fit because we give them choices of deployment. We're not saying that you have to deploy an IBM cloud. Um, we're saying you can deploy either on premise VWs as your idea of cloud. Really what makes sense? You know, best sense for the types of war clothes that the customer is looking at. So that's how the strategy for IBM has completely changed to meet the clients, you know, for what they're actually looking for. Talk to me a >>little bit about the go to market so I B M and S A P longstanding decades old relationship, A lot of certifications that you talked about. We're talking about business critical Applications, you mentioned supply chain a minute ago and I can't help but think it how supply chain has been affected in the last year. What is the good market approach with respect to providing consultation services to help customers determine? Should we migrate to what Hyper Scaler and how and when? >>Yeah, so we can help them with that? Um, so hyper hyper scale is obviously, you know, IBM has been listed for example, as the leader in Gartner 2020 and you know, there's lots of other stats that show them that IBM is a leader in application services, in consulting services, application management services as well as managed services. So these are all different, Right? And you can see us being listed as a leader either it's in Gartner or I. D. C. Or Horse or Wave. And for many reasons and you know, IBM actually has one series of pinnacle awards from S. A. P. Over the U. S. How this helps the clients really determined is that, you know, IBM obviously does a lot of studies externally. We have internal as well as external facing views of comparatives of the various hyper scholars, um you know, including Aws, Azure, G. C. P. And so on. So when a customer comes to us for asking for advice, um, and so on, we basically look at our own intellectual properties, all the analysis that has been done. And more importantly, we look at the full scope of services that the customer wants is doing. What sort of a business are there in. We have industry experts, there's E. R. P. Strategy, um, folks within IBM. So, you know, they go after a certain industry and when they, let's say, you know, they've gone after the oil and gas industry, for example, they will look at multiple customers in that particular space. So based on their experiences, we can actually define the right road map for the client to be able to help them to move their work clothes to this hybrid cloud strategy that I just mentioned. Right? So that's how we can help them because we have the expertise in that industry as well. >>And I'm curious moderate in the last year with so much flux and rapidly changing market conditions, Did you >>see any >>one or two industries in particular really leading the charge here and coming to IBM. S. A. P. For help on this transformation journey which has been accelerated by a couple of years. >>Suddenly the retail industry for sure, right. I mean in spite of the crisis, I think the retail industry did pretty well, right? Because people still have to buy stuff. Of course, the whole buying behavior change. No question. Um You and I don't know about two days of, but for me, you know, I was never a major online shopper. Oh yeah. You know, I just about everything. Um previously it used to be select things here and there, but now it's totally changed, right? So that industry certainly has accelerated. No question. We've had a lot of those coming. The other industries that I've seen. The change in the last 12, 18 months is really, for example, you know, the banking industry and so on. Um IBM basically, you know, launched a lot of services in the financial services sector for this reason. Um So those are of course transforming very fast to keep up with the market. Um and I'm sure there's others, right? But these are the two that come to mind. Yeah, >>two that have been most affected and needed to pivot so quickly. In addition to health care. Let me ask you one final question here. Before we wrap. Talk to me about the advantages of using the PMC partner managed cloud s a P license resale model. The advantages of using that and the benefits. >>Sure. Um so we, you know, so far our discussion was really focused around, you know, the various service capabilities that IBM has in terms of our capabilities for helping clients with hyper scholars and hybrid cloud. We also need to spend a little bit of time talking about the operations model. Right? So when they're running their production workloads on IBM PMC is yet another dimension. So what PMC partner managed cloud is really some very limited partnerships that s A P does And the IBM is the lead on that one in this base. What ASAP allows is the partner, which in this case is IBM to resell the ASAP software license to a customer. So IBM has the rights globally to resell the license and why is that beneficial to the client? Because now, um, IBM can actually turn around the S. A. P license and have the customer pay us in a SAS model. So it basically is now an apex model where the customer is basically paying, you know, a monthly fee as an example, so there's no upfront cost to the client and they basically pay IBM and IBM PS ASAP. So IBM is kind of holding the risk if you will on behalf of the customer, it gives customers more choices, more flexibilities, better pricing approach. So if the customer wants as an example to buy everything the full package, including systems implementation services, deployment models with choices on a cloud, whether it's IBM cloud or others as well as the license itself. IBM has this end to end capability today. We've been selling it to several clients for a few years in several geography is right. So that's the advantage behind it. >>Excellent. Thanks for breaking that down moderate and joining me today talking about what's new with I B M and S A P, the opportunities for customers to accelerate their digital transformation. We appreciate you stopping by. >>Thank you very much, lisa truly enjoyed it. Thank you. >>Good. Me too. For moderate Tabla. I'm lisa martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of IBM think 2021. >>Mm.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the special presentation from theCUBE, where we're exploring the future of cloud and its business impact in the coming decade, kind of where we've come from and where we're going. My name is Dave Vellante, and with me is a CIO/CTO/COO, and longtime colleague, Dan Sheehan. Hello, Dan, how're you doing? >> Hey, Dave, how are you doing? Thank you for having me. >> Yeah, you're very welcome. So folks, Dan has been in the technology industry for a number of years. He's overseen, you know, large-multi, tens of millions of dollar ERP application development efforts, He was a CIO of a marketing, you know, direct mail company. Dan, we met at ADVO, it seems like such a (snickers) long time ago. >> Yeah, that was a long time ago, back in Connecticut. Back in the early 2000s. >> Yeah, ancient days. But pretty serious data for back then, you know, the early 2000s, and then you did a six-year stint as a EVP and CIO at Dunkin' Brands. I remember I came out to see you when I was starting Wikibon and trying to understand. >> Oh yeah. >> You know, what the CIOs cared about. You were so helpful and thanks for that. And that was a big deal. I mean, Dunkin', 17,000 points of distribution. I mean, that was sort of a complicated situation, right? >> Oh yeah. >> So, great experience. >> I mean, when you get involved with franchisees and trying to make everybody happy, yes, that was a lot of fun. >> And then you had a number of other roles, one was as COO at Modell's, and then to fast-forward, Beacon Health. You were EVP and CIO there. And you also, it looked like you had a kind of a business and operational role. You helped the company get acquired by Anthem Blue Cross. So awesome, congrats on that. That must've been a great experience. >> It was. A year of my life, yes. (both laugh) >> You're still standing. So anyway, you can see Dan, he's like this multi-tool star, he's seen a lot of changes in the technology business. So Dan, again, welcome back. Dan Sheehan. >> Oh, thank you. >> So when you started in your career, you know, there was no cloud, right? I mean, you had to do everything. It's funny, I remember I was... You probably know Bill Rucci, CIO of Hartford Steam Boiler. I remember we were talking one day, and this again was pre-cloud and he said, you know, I'm thinking, do I really need to manage my own email? I mean, back then, we did everything. So you had to provision infrastructure so you could write apps, and that was important. That frustrated CFOs, but it was a necessary piece of the value chain. So how have you seen that sort of IT value contribution shift over the years? Let's start there. >> Ah, well, I think it comes down to demand versus capacity. If you look at where companies want to go, they want to do a lot with technology. Technology has taken on a larger role. It's no longer and has not been a, so to speak, cost center. So I think the demand for making change and driving a company forward or reducing costs, there are other executives, peers to the CIO, to the CTO that are looking to do more, and when it comes to doing more, that means more demand, and you step back and you look at what the CIO has for capacity. Looking at Quick Solution's data, solutions in the cloud is appealing, and there are, you know, times where other functions talk to a vendor and see that they can get a vertical solution done pretty quickly. They go off and take that on, or it could be, you know, a ServiceNow capability that you want to implement across the company, and you do that just like an ERP type of roll up. But the bottom line is there are solutions out there that have pushed, I would say the IT organization to look at their capacity versus demand, and sometimes you can get things done quicker with a cloud type of solution. >> So how did you look at that shadow IT as a CIO? Was it something that kind of ticked you off or like you're sort of implying that it made you better? >> Well, I think it does ultimately make you better, but I think you have to partner with the functions because if you don't, you get these types of scenarios, and I've been involved in these just as well. You are busy with, you know, fulfilling your objectives as the leader of IT, and then you get a knock on the door from, let's say marketing or operations, and they say, hey, we just purchased this X solution and we want to integrate it with A, B and C. Well, that was not on the budget or on the IT roadmap or the IT strategy that was linked to the IT, I'm sorry, to the business strategy, and all of a sudden now you have more demand versus the capacity, and then you have to go start reprioritizing. So it's more of, yeah, kind of disrupted, but at the same time, it pushed, you know, the needle of the company forward. But it's all about just working together to make it happen. And that's a lot of, you know, hard conversations when you have to start reprioritizing capacity. >> Well, so let's talk about that alignment. I mean, there's always been a sort of a schism between IT and its ability to deliver, manage demand, and the business will always want you to go faster. They want IT to develop the systems, you know, of course, for less and then they want you to eat the cost of maintaining them, so (chuckles) there's been that tension. But in many ways, that CIO's job is alignment. I mean, it seems to me anyway that schism has certainly narrowed and the cloud's been been part of that, but what do you see as that trajectory over the years and where do you see it going? >> Well, I think it's going to continue to move forward, and depending upon the service, you know, companies are going to take advantage of those services. So yes, some of the non-mission critical capabilities that you would want to move out to the cloud or have somebody else do it, so to speak, that's going to continue to happen because they should be able to do it a lot cheaper than you can, just like use you mentioned a few moments ago about email. I did not want to maintain, you know, exchange service and keeping that all up and running. I moved quickly to Microsoft 365 and that's been a world of difference, but that's just one example. But when you have mission critical apps, you're going to have to make a decision if you want to continue to house them in-house or push them out to an AWS and house them there. So maybe you don't need a large data center and you can utilize some of the best and brightest around security, around managing size of the infrastructure and getting some of their engineering help, which can help. So it just depends upon the application, so to speak, or a function that you're trying to support. And you got to really look at your enterprise architecture and see where that makes sense. So you got to have a hybrid. I see and I have, you know, managed towards a hybrid way of looking at your architecture. >> Okay, so obviously the cloud played a role in that change, and of course, you were in healthcare too so you had to be somewhat careful, >> Yep. >> With the cloud. But you mentioned this hybrid architecture. I mean, from a technologist standpoint and a business standpoint, what do you want out of, you know, you hear a hybrid, multi, all the buzz words. What are you looking for then? Is it a consistent experience? Is it a consistent security? Or is it sort of more horses for courses, where you're trying to run a workload in the right place? What's your philosophy on that? >> Well, I mean, all those things matter, but you're looking at obviously, cost, you're looking at engagement. How does these services engage? Whether it's internal employees or external clients who you're servicing, and you want to get to a cost structure that makes sense in terms of managing those services as well as those mission critical apps. So it comes down to looking at the dollars and cents, as well as what type of services you can provide. In many cases, if you can provide a cheaper and increase the overall services, you're going to go down that path. And just like we did with ServiceNow, I did that at Beacon and also at DentaQuest two healthcare companies. We were able to, you know, remove duplicated, so to speak, ticketing systems and move to one and allow a better experience for the internal employee. They can do self-service, they can look at metrics, they can see status, real-time status on where their request was. So that made a bigger difference. So you engaged the employee differently, better, and then you also reduce your costs. >> Well, how about the economics? I mean, your experience that cloud is cheaper. You hear a lot of the, you know, a lot of the legacy players are saying, oh, no cloud's super expensive. Wait till you get that Amazon bill. (laughs) What's the truth? >> Well, I think there's still a lot of maturing that needs to go on, because unfortunately, depending upon the company, so let's use a couple of examples. So let's look at a startup. You look at a startup, they're probably going to look at all their services being in the cloud and being delivered through a SaaS model, and that's going to be an expense, that's going to be most likely a per user expense per month or per year, however, they structure the contract. And right out of the gate, that's going to be a top line expense that has to be managed going forward. Now you look at companies that have been around for a while, and two of the last companies I worked with, had a lot of technical debt, had on-prem applications. And when you started to look at how to move forward, you know, you had CFOs that were used to going to buy software, capitalize in that software over, you know, five years, sometimes three years, and using that investment to be capitalized, and that would sit below the line, so to speak. Now, don't get me wrong, you still have to pay for it, it's just a matter of where it sits. And when you're running a company and you're looking at the financials, not having that cost on your operational expenses, so to speak, if you're not looking at the depreciation through those numbers, that was advantageous to a CFO many years ago. Now you come to them and say, hey, we're going to move forward with a new HR system, and it's all increasing the expense because there's nothing else to capitalize. Those are different conversations, and all of a sudden your expenses have increased, and yes, you have to make sure that the businesses behind you, with respects to an ROI and supporting it. >> Yeah, so as long as the value is there, and that's a part of the alignment. I want to ask you about cloud pricing strategies because you mentioned ServiceNow, you know, Salesforce is in there, Workday. If you look at the way these guys price, it's really not true cloud pricing in a way, cause they're going to have you sign up for an annual license, you know, a lot of times you got pay up front, or if you want a discount, you're going to have to sign up for two years or three years. But now you see guys like Snowflake coming in, you know, big high-profile IPO. They actually charge you on a consumption-based model. What are your thoughts on that? Do you see that as sort of a trend in the coming decade? >> No, I absolutely think it's going to be on a trend, because consumption means more transactions and more transactions means more computing, and they're going to look at charging it just like any other utility charges. So yes, I see that trend continuing. Did a big deal with UltiPro HR, and yeah, that was all based upon user head count, but they were talking about looking at their payroll and changing their costing on payroll down the road. With their merger, or they went from being a public company to a private company, and now looking to merge with Kronos. I can see where time and attendance and payroll will stop being looked at as a transaction, right? It's a weekly or bi-weekly or monthly, however the company pays, and yes, there is dollars to be made there. >> Well, so let me ask you as a CIO and a business, you know, COO. One of the challenges that you hear with the cloud is okay, if I get my Amazon bill, it's something that Snowflake has talked about, where you know, to me, it's the ideal model, but on the other hand, the transparency is not necessarily there. You don't know what it's going to be at the end of (mumbles) Would you rather have more certainty as to what that bill's going to look like? Or would you rather have it aligned with consumption and the value to the business? >> Well, you know, that's a great question, because yes, I mean, budgets are usually built upon a number that's fixed. Now, no, don't get me wrong. I mean, when I look at the wide area network, the cost for internet services, yes, sometimes we need to increase and that means an increase in the overall cost, but that consumption, that transactional, that's going to be a different way of having to go ahead and budget. You have to budget now for the maximum transactions you anticipate with a growth of a company, and then you need to take a look at that you know, if you're budgeting. I know we were on a calendar fiscal year, so we started up budgeting process in August and we finalized at sometime in the end of October, November for the proceeding year, and if that's the case, you need to get a little bit better on what your consumptions are going to be, because especially if you're a public company, going out on the street with some numbers, those numbers could vary based upon a high transaction volume and the cost, and maybe you're not getting the results on the top end, on the revenue side. So I think, yeah, it's going to be an interesting dilemma as we move forward. >> Yeah. So, I mean, it comes back to alignment, doesn't it? I mean, I know in our small example, you know, we're doing now, we were used to be physical events with theCUBE, now it's all virtual events and our Amazon bill is going through the roof because we're supporting all these users on these virtual events, and our CFO's like, well, look at this Amazon bill, and you say, yeah, but look at the revenue, it's supporting. And so to your point, if the revenue is there, if the ROI is there, then it makes sense. You can kind of live with it because you're growing with it, but if not, then you really got to question it. >> Yeah. So you got to need to partner with your financial folks and come up with better modeling around some of these transactional services and build that into your modeling for your budget and for your, you know, your top line and your expenses. >> So what do you think of some of these SaaS companies? I mean, you've had a lot of experience. They're really coming at it from largely an application perspective, although you've managed a lot of infrastructure too. But we've talked about ServiceNow. They've kind of mopped up in the ITSM. I mean, there's nobody left. I mean, ServiceNow has sort of taken over the whole (mumbles) You know, Salesforce, >> Yeah. >> I guess, sort of similarly, sort of dominating the CRM space. You hear a lot of complaints now about, you know, ServiceNow pricing. There is somebody the other day called them the Oracle of ITSM. Do you see that potentially getting disrupted by maybe some cloud native developers who are developing tools on top? You see in, like, for instance, Datadog going after Splunk and LogRhythm. And there seem to be examples popping up. Well, what's your take on all this? >> No, absolutely. I think cause, you know, when we were talking about back when I first met you, when I was at the ADVO, I mean, Oracle was on it's, you know, rise with their suite of capabilities, and then before you know it, other companies were popping up and took over, whether it was Firstbeat, PeopleSoft, Workday, and then other companies that just came into play, cause it's going to happen because people are going to get, you know, frustrated. And yes, I did get a little frustrated with ServiceNow when I was looking at a couple of new modules because the pricing was a little bit higher than it was when I first started out. So yes, when you're good and you're able to provide the right services, they're going to start pricing it that way. But yes, I think you're going to get smaller players, and then those smaller players will start grabbing up, so to speak, market share and get into it. I mean, look at Salesforce. I mean, there are some pretty good CRMs. I mean, even, ServiceNow is getting into the CRM space big time, as well as a company like Sugar and a few others that will continue to push Salesforce to look at their pricing as well as their services. I mean, they're out there buying up companies, but you just can't automatically assume that they're going to, you know, integrate day one, and it's going to take time for some of their services to come and become reality, so to speak. So yes, I agree that there will be players out there that will push these lager SaaS companies, and hopefully get the right behaviors and right pricing. >> I've said for years, Dan, that I've predicted that ServiceNow and Salesforce are on a collision course. It didn't really happen, but it's starting to, because ServiceNow, the valuation is so huge. They have to grow into other markets much in the same way that Salesforce has. So maybe we'll see McDermott start doing some acquisitions. It's maybe a little tougher for ServiceNow given their whole multi-instance architecture and sort of their own cloud. That's going to be interesting to see how that plays out. >> Yeah. Yeah. You got to play in that type of architecture, let's put it that way. Yes, it'll be interesting to see how that does play out. >> What are your thoughts on the big hyperscalers; Amazon, Microsoft, Google? What's the right strategy there? Do you go all in on one cloud like AWS or are you more worried about lock-in? Do you want to spread your bets across clouds? How real is multi-cloud? Is it a strategy or more sort of a reality that you get M and A and you got shadow IT? What's your take on all that? >> Yeah, that's a great question because it does make you think a little differently around you know, where to put all your eggs. And it's getting tougher because you do want to distribute those eggs out to multiple vendors, if you would, service providers. But, you know, for instance we had a situation where we were building a brand new business intelligence data warehouse, and we decided to go with Microsoft as its core database. And we did a bake-off on business analytic tools. We had like seven of them at Beacon and we ended up choosing Microsoft's Power BI, and a good part of that reason, not all of it, but a good part of it was because we felt they did everything else that the Tableau's and others did, but, you know, Microsoft would work to give, you know, additional capabilities to Power BI if it's sitting on their database. So we had to take that into consideration, and we did and we ended up going with Power BI. With Amazon, I think Amazon's a little bit more, I'll put it horizontal, whereby they can help you out because of the database and just kind of be in that data center, if you would, and be able to move some of your homegrown applications, some of your technical debt over to that, I'll say cloud. But it'll get interesting because when you talk about integration, when you talk about moving forward with a new functionality, yeah, you have to put your architecture in a somewhat of a center point, and then look to see what is easier, cheaper, cost-effective, but, you know, what's happening to my functionality over the next three to five years. >> But it sounds like you'd subscribe to a horses for courses approach, where you put the right workload in the right cloud, as opposed to saying, I'm going to go all in on one cloud and it's going to be, you know, same skillset, same security, et cetera. It sounds like you'd lean toward the former versus going all in with, you know, MANO cloud. >> Yeah, I guess again, when I look at the architecture. There will be major, you know, breaks if you would. So yes, there is somewhat of a, you know, movement to you know, go with one horse. But, you know, I could see looking back at the Beacon architecture that we could, you know, lift and put the claims adjudication capabilities up in Amazon and then have that conduct, you know, the left to right claims processing, and then those transactions could then be moved into Microsoft's data warehouse. So, you know, there is ways to go about spreading it out so that you don't have all those eggs in one basket and that you reduce the amount of risk, but that weighed heavily on my mind. >> So I was going to ask you, how much of a factor lock-in is it? It sounds like it's more, you know, spreading your eggs around, as you say and reducing your risk as opposed to, you know, worried about lock-in, but as a CIO, how worried are you about lock-in? Where is that fit in the sort of decision tree? >> Ah, I mean, I would say it's up there, but unfortunately, there's no number one, there's like five number ones, if you would. So it's definitely up there and it's something to consider when you're looking at, like you said, the cost, risk integration, and then time. You know, sometimes you're up against the time. And again, security, like I said. Security is a big key in healthcare. And actually security overall, whether you're retail, you're going to always have situations no matter what industry, you got to protect the business. >> Yeah, so I want to ask you about security. That's the other number one. Well, you might've been a defacto CSO, but kind of when we started in this business security was the problem of the security teams, and you know, it's now a team sport. But in thinking about the cloud and security, how big of a concern is the cloud? Is it just more, you're looking for consistency and be able to apply the corporate edicts? Are there other concerns like the shared responsibility model? What are your thoughts on security in the cloud? >> Well, it probably goes back to again, the industry, but when I looked at the past five years in healthcare, doing a lot of work with the CMS and Medicaid, Medicare, they had certain requirements and certain restrictions. So we had to make sure that we follow those requirements. And when you got audited, you needed to make sure that you can show that you are adhering to their requirements. So over the past, probably two years with Amazon's government capabilities that those restrictions have changed, but we were always looking to make sure that we owned and managed how we manage the provider and member data, because yes, we did not want to have obviously a breach, but we wanted to make sure we were following the guidelines, whether it's state or federal, and then and even some cases healthcare guidelines around managing that data. So yes, top of mind, making sure that we're protecting, you know, in my case so we had 37 million members, patients, and we needed to make sure that if we did put it in the cloud or if it was on-prem, that it was being protected. And as you mentioned, recently come off of, I was going to say Amazon, but it was an acquisition. That company that was looking at us doing the due diligence, they gave us thumbs up because of how we were managing the data at the lowest point and all the different levels within the architecture. So Anthem who did the acquisition, had a breach back in, I think it was 2015. That was top of mind for them. We had more questions during the due diligence around security than any other functional area. So it is critical, and I think slowly, some of that type of data will get up into the cloud, but again, it's going to go through some massive risk management and security measures, and audits, because how fragile that is. >> Yeah, I mean, that could be a deal breaker in an acquisition. I got two other questions for you. One is, you know, I know you follow the technologies very closely, but there's all the buzz words, the digital transformation, the AI, these new SaaS models that we talked about. You know, a lot of CIOs tell me, look, Dave, get the business right and the technology is the easy part. It's people, it's process. But what are you seeing in terms of some of this new stuff coming out, there's machine learning, you know, obviously massive scale, new cloud workloads. Anything out there that really excites you and that you could see on the horizon that could be, you know, really change agents for the next decade? >> Yeah, I think we did some RPA, robotics on some of the tasks that, you know, where, you know, if the analysis types of situations. So I think RPA is going to be a game changer as it continues to evolve. But I agree with what you just said. Doing this for quite a while now, it still comes down to the people. I can get the technology to do what it needs to do as long as I have the right requirements, so that goes back to people. Making sure we have the partnership that goes back to leadership and the people. And then the change management aspects. Right out of the gate, you should be worrying about how is it going to affect and then the adoption and engagement. Because adoption is critical, because you can go create the best thing you think from a technology perspective, but if it doesn't get used correctly, it's not worth the investment. So I agree, whether it's digital transformation or innovation, it still comes down to understanding the business model and injecting and utilizing technology to grow or reduce costs, grow the business or reduce costs. >> Yeah, usage really means value. Sorry, my last question. What's the one thing that vendors shouldn't do? What's the vendor no-no that'll alienate CIO's? >> To this day, I still don't like, there's a company out there that starts with an O. I still don't like it to that, every single technology module, if you would, has a separate sales rep. I want to work with my strategic partners and have one relationship and that single point of contact that spark and go back into their company and bring me whatever it is that we're looking at so that I don't get, you know, for instance from that company that starts with an O, you know, 17 calls from 17 different sales reps trying to sell me 17 different things. So what irritates me is, you know, you have a company that has a lot of breadth, a lot of, you know, capability and functional, you know that I may want. Give me one person that I can deal with. So a single point of contact, then that makes my life a lot easier. >> Well, Dan Sheehan, I really appreciate you spending some time on theCUBE, it's always a pleasure catching up with you and really appreciate you sharing your insights with our audience. Thank you. >> Oh, thank you, David. I appreciate the opportunity. You have a great day. >> All right. You too. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE on Cloud. Keep it right there. We'll be back with our next guest right after the short break. Awesome, Dan.

>> Go on my lead. >> Dan: All right, very good. >> Five, four. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the special presentation from theCUBE, where we're exploring the future of cloud and its business impact in the coming decade, kind of where we've come from and where we're going. My name is Dave Vellante, and with me is a CIO/CTO/COO, and longtime colleague, Dan Sheehan. Hello, Dan, how're you doing? >> Hey, Dave, how are you doing? Thank you for having me. >> Yeah, you're very welcome. So folks, Dan has been in the technology industry for a number of years. He's overseen, you know, large-multi, tens of millions of dollar ERP application development efforts, He was a CIO of a marketing, you know, direct mail company. Dan, we met at ADVO, it seems like such a (snickers) long time ago. >> Yeah, that was a long time ago, back in Connecticut. Back in the early 2000s. >> Yeah, ancient days. But pretty serious data for back then, you know, the early 2000s, and then you did a six-year stint as a EVP and CIO at Dunkin' Brands. I remember I came out to see you when I was starting Wikibon and trying to understand. >> Oh yeah. >> You know, what the CIOs cared about. You were so helpful and thanks for that. And that was a big deal. I mean, Dunkin', 17,000 points of distribution. I mean, that was sort of a complicated situation, right? >> Oh yeah. >> So, great experience. >> I mean, when you get involved with franchisees and trying to make everybody happy, yes, that was a lot of fun. >> And then you had a number of other roles, one was as COO at Modell's, and then to fast-forward, Beacon Health. You were EVP and CIO there. And you also, it looked like you had a kind of a business and operational role. You helped the company get acquired by Anthem Blue Cross. So awesome, congrats on that. That must've been a great experience. >> It was. A year of my life, yes. (both laugh) >> You're still standing. So anyway, you can see Dan, he's like this multi-tool star, he's seen a lot of changes in the technology business. So Dan, again, welcome back. Dan Sheehan. >> Oh, thank you. >> So when you started in your career, you know, there was no cloud, right? I mean, you had to do everything. It's funny, I remember I was... You probably know Bill Rucci, CIO of Hartford Steam Boiler. I remember we were talking one day, and this again was pre-cloud and he said, you know, I'm thinking, do I really need to manage my own email? I mean, back then, we did everything. So you had to provision infrastructure so you could write apps, and that was important. That frustrated CFOs, but it was a necessary piece of the value chain. So how have you seen that sort of IT value contribution shift over the years? Let's start there. >> Ah, well, I think it comes down to demand versus capacity. If you look at where companies want to go, they want to do a lot with technology. Technology has taken on a larger role. It's no longer and has not been a, so to speak, cost center. So I think the demand for making change and driving a company forward or reducing costs, there are other executives, peers to the CIO, to the CTO that are looking to do more, and when it comes to doing more, that means more demand, and you step back and you look at what the CIO has for capacity. Looking at Quick Solution's data, solutions in the cloud is appealing, and there are, you know, times where other functions talk to a vendor and see that they can get a vertical solution done pretty quickly. They go off and take that on, or it could be, you know, a ServiceNow capability that you want to implement across the company, and you do that just like an ERP type of roll up. But the bottom line is there are solutions out there that have pushed, I would say the IT organization to look at their capacity versus demand, and sometimes you can get things done quicker with a cloud type of solution. >> So how did you look at that shadow IT as a CIO? Was it something that kind of ticked you off or like you're sort of implying that it made you better? >> Well, I think it does ultimately make you better, but I think you have to partner with the functions because if you don't, you get these types of scenarios, and I've been involved in these just as well. You are busy with, you know, fulfilling your objectives as the leader of IT, and then you get a knock on the door from, let's say marketing or operations, and they say, hey, we just purchased this X solution and we want to integrate it with A, B and C. Well, that was not on the budget or on the IT roadmap or the IT strategy that was linked to the IT, I'm sorry, to the business strategy, and all of a sudden now you have more demand versus the capacity, and then you have to go start reprioritizing. So it's more of, yeah, kind of disrupted, but at the same time, it pushed, you know, the needle of the company forward. But it's all about just working together to make it happen. And that's a lot of, you know, hard conversations when you have to start reprioritizing capacity. >> Well, so let's talk about that alignment. I mean, there's always been a sort of a schism between IT and its ability to deliver, manage demand, and the business will always want you to go faster. They want IT to develop the systems, you know, of course, for less and then they want you to eat the cost of maintaining them, so (chuckles) there's been that tension. But in many ways, that CIO's job is alignment. I mean, it seems to me anyway that schism has certainly narrowed and the cloud's been been part of that, but what do you see as that trajectory over the years and where do you see it going? >> Well, I think it's going to continue to move forward, and depending upon the service, you know, companies are going to take advantage of those services. So yes, some of the non-mission critical capabilities that you would want to move out to the cloud or have somebody else do it, so to speak, that's going to continue to happen because they should be able to do it a lot cheaper than you can, just like use you mentioned a few moments ago about email. I did not want to maintain, you know, exchange service and keeping that all up and running. I moved quickly to Microsoft 365 and that's been a world of difference, but that's just one example. But when you have mission critical apps, you're going to have to make a decision if you want to continue to house them in-house or push them out to an AWS and house them there. So maybe you don't need a large data center and you can utilize some of the best and brightest around security, around managing size of the infrastructure and getting some of their engineering help, which can help. So it just depends upon the application, so to speak, or a function that you're trying to support. And you got to really look at your enterprise architecture and see where that makes sense. So you got to have a hybrid. I see and I have, you know, managed towards a hybrid way of looking at your architecture. >> Okay, so obviously the cloud played a role in that change, and of course, you were in healthcare too so you had to be somewhat careful, >> Yep. >> With the cloud. But you mentioned this hybrid architecture. I mean, from a technologist standpoint and a business standpoint, what do you want out of, you know, you hear a hybrid, multi, all the buzz words. What are you looking for then? Is it a consistent experience? Is it a consistent security? Or is it sort of more horses for courses, where you're trying to run a workload in the right place? What's your philosophy on that? >> Well, I mean, all those things matter, but you're looking at obviously, cost, you're looking at engagement. How does these services engage? Whether it's internal employees or external clients who you're servicing, and you want to get to a cost structure that makes sense in terms of managing those services as well as those mission critical apps. So it comes down to looking at the dollars and cents, as well as what type of services you can provide. In many cases, if you can provide a cheaper and increase the overall services, you're going to go down that path. And just like we did with ServiceNow, I did that at Beacon and also at DentaQuest two healthcare companies. We were able to, you know, remove duplicated, so to speak, ticketing systems and move to one and allow a better experience for the internal employee. They can do self-service, they can look at metrics, they can see status, real-time status on where their request was. So that made a bigger difference. So you engaged the employee differently, better, and then you also reduce your costs. >> Well, how about the economics? I mean, your experience that cloud is cheaper. You hear a lot of the, you know, a lot of the legacy players are saying, oh, no cloud's super expensive. Wait till you get that Amazon bill. (laughs) What's the truth? >> Well, I think there's still a lot of maturing that needs to go on, because unfortunately, depending upon the company, so let's use a couple of examples. So let's look at a startup. You look at a startup, they're probably going to look at all their services being in the cloud and being delivered through a SaaS model, and that's going to be an expense, that's going to be most likely a per user expense per month or per year, however, they structure the contract. And right out of the gate, that's going to be a top line expense that has to be managed going forward. Now you look at companies that have been around for a while, and two of the last companies I worked with, had a lot of technical debt, had on-prem applications. And when you started to look at how to move forward, you know, you had CFOs that were used to going to buy software, capitalize in that software over, you know, five years, sometimes three years, and using that investment to be capitalized, and that would sit below the line, so to speak. Now, don't get me wrong, you still have to pay for it, it's just a matter of where it sits. And when you're running a company and you're looking at the financials, not having that cost on your operational expenses, so to speak, if you're not looking at the depreciation through those numbers, that was advantageous to a CFO many years ago. Now you come to them and say, hey, we're going to move forward with a new HR system, and it's all increasing the expense because there's nothing else to capitalize. Those are different conversations, and all of a sudden your expenses have increased, and yes, you have to make sure that the businesses behind you, with respects to an ROI and supporting it. >> Yeah, so as long as the value is there, and that's a part of the alignment. I want to ask you about cloud pricing strategies because you mentioned ServiceNow, you know, Salesforce is in there, Workday. If you look at the way these guys price, it's really not true cloud pricing in a way, cause they're going to have you sign up for an annual license, you know, a lot of times you got pay up front, or if you want a discount, you're going to have to sign up for two years or three years. But now you see guys like Snowflake coming in, you know, big high-profile IPO. They actually charge you on a consumption-based model. What are your thoughts on that? Do you see that as sort of a trend in the coming decade? >> No, I absolutely think it's going to be on a trend, because consumption means more transactions and more transactions means more computing, and they're going to look at charging it just like any other utility charges. So yes, I see that trend continuing. Did a big deal with UltiPro HR, and yeah, that was all based upon user head count, but they were talking about looking at their payroll and changing their costing on payroll down the road. With their merger, or they went from being a public company to a private company, and now looking to merge with Kronos. I can see where time and attendance and payroll will stop being looked at as a transaction, right? It's a weekly or bi-weekly or monthly, however the company pays, and yes, there is dollars to be made there. >> Well, so let me ask you as a CIO and a business, you know, COO. One of the challenges that you hear with the cloud is okay, if I get my Amazon bill, it's something that Snowflake has talked about, where you know, to me, it's the ideal model, but on the other hand, the transparency is not necessarily there. You don't know what it's going to be at the end of (mumbles) Would you rather have more certainty as to what that bill's going to look like? Or would you rather have it aligned with consumption and the value to the business? >> Well, you know, that's a great question, because yes, I mean, budgets are usually built upon a number that's fixed. Now, no, don't get me wrong. I mean, when I look at the wide area network, the cost for internet services, yes, sometimes we need to increase and that means an increase in the overall cost, but that consumption, that transactional, that's going to be a different way of having to go ahead and budget. You have to budget now for the maximum transactions you anticipate with a growth of a company, and then you need to take a look at that you know, if you're budgeting. I know we were on a calendar fiscal year, so we started up budgeting process in August and we finalized at sometime in the end of October, November for the proceeding year, and if that's the case, you need to get a little bit better on what your consumptions are going to be, because especially if you're a public company, going out on the street with some numbers, those numbers could vary based upon a high transaction volume and the cost, and maybe you're not getting the results on the top end, on the revenue side. So I think, yeah, it's going to be an interesting dilemma as we move forward. >> Yeah. So, I mean, it comes back to alignment, doesn't it? I mean, I know in our small example, you know, we're doing now, we were used to be physical events with theCUBE, now it's all virtual events and our Amazon bill is going through the roof because we're supporting all these users on these virtual events, and our CFO's like, well, look at this Amazon bill, and you say, yeah, but look at the revenue, it's supporting. And so to your point, if the revenue is there, if the ROI is there, then it makes sense. You can kind of live with it because you're growing with it, but if not, then you really got to question it. >> Yeah. So you got to need to partner with your financial folks and come up with better modeling around some of these transactional services and build that into your modeling for your budget and for your, you know, your top line and your expenses. >> So what do you think of some of these SaaS companies? I mean, you've had a lot of experience. They're really coming at it from largely an application perspective, although you've managed a lot of infrastructure too. But we've talked about ServiceNow. They've kind of mopped up in the ITSM. I mean, there's nobody left. I mean, ServiceNow has sort of taken over the whole (mumbles) You know, Salesforce, >> Yeah. >> I guess, sort of similarly, sort of dominating the CRM space. You hear a lot of complaints now about, you know, ServiceNow pricing. There is somebody the other day called them the Oracle of ITSM. Do you see that potentially getting disrupted by maybe some cloud native developers who are developing tools on top? You see in, like, for instance, Datadog going after Splunk and LogRhythm. And there seem to be examples popping up. Well, what's your take on all this? >> No, absolutely. I think cause, you know, when we were talking about back when I first met you, when I was at the ADVO, I mean, Oracle was on it's, you know, rise with their suite of capabilities, and then before you know it, other companies were popping up and took over, whether it was Firstbeat, PeopleSoft, Workday, and then other companies that just came into play, cause it's going to happen because people are going to get, you know, frustrated. And yes, I did get a little frustrated with ServiceNow when I was looking at a couple of new modules because the pricing was a little bit higher than it was when I first started out. So yes, when you're good and you're able to provide the right services, they're going to start pricing it that way. But yes, I think you're going to get smaller players, and then those smaller players will start grabbing up, so to speak, market share and get into it. I mean, look at Salesforce. I mean, there are some pretty good CRMs. I mean, even, ServiceNow is getting into the CRM space big time, as well as a company like Sugar and a few others that will continue to push Salesforce to look at their pricing as well as their services. I mean, they're out there buying up companies, but you just can't automatically assume that they're going to, you know, integrate day one, and it's going to take time for some of their services to come and become reality, so to speak. So yes, I agree that there will be players out there that will push these lager SaaS companies, and hopefully get the right behaviors and right pricing. >> I've said for years, Dan, that I've predicted that ServiceNow and Salesforce are on a collision course. It didn't really happen, but it's starting to, because ServiceNow, the valuation is so huge. They have to grow into other markets much in the same way that Salesforce has. So maybe we'll see McDermott start doing some acquisitions. It's maybe a little tougher for ServiceNow given their whole multi-instance architecture and sort of their own cloud. That's going to be interesting to see how that plays out. >> Yeah. Yeah. You got to play in that type of architecture, let's put it that way. Yes, it'll be interesting to see how that does play out. >> What are your thoughts on the big hyperscalers; Amazon, Microsoft, Google? What's the right strategy there? Do you go all in on one cloud like AWS or are you more worried about lock-in? Do you want to spread your bets across clouds? How real is multi-cloud? Is it a strategy or more sort of a reality that you get M and A and you got shadow IT? What's your take on all that? >> Yeah, that's a great question because it does make you think a little differently around you know, where to put all your eggs. And it's getting tougher because you do want to distribute those eggs out to multiple vendors, if you would, service providers. But, you know, for instance we had a situation where we were building a brand new business intelligence data warehouse, and we decided to go with Microsoft as its core database. And we did a bake-off on business analytic tools. We had like seven of them at Beacon and we ended up choosing Microsoft's Power BI, and a good part of that reason, not all of it, but a good part of it was because we felt they did everything else that the Tableau's and others did, but, you know, Microsoft would work to give, you know, additional capabilities to Power BI if it's sitting on their database. So we had to take that into consideration, and we did and we ended up going with Power BI. With Amazon, I think Amazon's a little bit more, I'll put it horizontal, whereby they can help you out because of the database and just kind of be in that data center, if you would, and be able to move some of your homegrown applications, some of your technical debt over to that, I'll say cloud. But it'll get interesting because when you talk about integration, when you talk about moving forward with a new functionality, yeah, you have to put your architecture in a somewhat of a center point, and then look to see what is easier, cheaper, cost-effective, but, you know, what's happening to my functionality over the next three to five years. >> But it sounds like you'd subscribe to a horses for courses approach, where you put the right workload in the right cloud, as opposed to saying, I'm going to go all in on one cloud and it's going to be, you know, same skillset, same security, et cetera. It sounds like you'd lean toward the former versus going all in with, you know, MANO cloud. >> Yeah, I guess again, when I look at the architecture. There will be major, you know, breaks if you would. So yes, there is somewhat of a, you know, movement to you know, go with one horse. But, you know, I could see looking back at the Beacon architecture that we could, you know, lift and put the claims adjudication capabilities up in Amazon and then have that conduct, you know, the left to right claims processing, and then those transactions could then be moved into Microsoft's data warehouse. So, you know, there is ways to go about spreading it out so that you don't have all those eggs in one basket and that you reduce the amount of risk, but that weighed heavily on my mind. >> So I was going to ask you, how much of a factor lock-in is it? It sounds like it's more, you know, spreading your eggs around, as you say and reducing your risk as opposed to, you know, worried about lock-in, but as a CIO, how worried are you about lock-in? Where is that fit in the sort of decision tree? >> Ah, I mean, I would say it's up there, but unfortunately, there's no number one, there's like five number ones, if you would. So it's definitely up there and it's something to consider when you're looking at, like you said, the cost, risk integration, and then time. You know, sometimes you're up against the time. And again, security, like I said. Security is a big key in healthcare. And actually security overall, whether you're retail, you're going to always have situations no matter what industry, you got to protect the business. >> Yeah, so I want to ask you about security. That's the other number one. Well, you might've been a defacto CSO, but kind of when we started in this business security was the problem of the security teams, and you know, it's now a team sport. But in thinking about the cloud and security, how big of a concern is the cloud? Is it just more, you're looking for consistency and be able to apply the corporate edicts? Are there other concerns like the shared responsibility model? What are your thoughts on security in the cloud? >> Well, it probably goes back to again, the industry, but when I looked at the past five years in healthcare, doing a lot of work with the CMS and Medicaid, Medicare, they had certain requirements and certain restrictions. So we had to make sure that we follow those requirements. And when you got audited, you needed to make sure that you can show that you are adhering to their requirements. So over the past, probably two years with Amazon's government capabilities that those restrictions have changed, but we were always looking to make sure that we owned and managed how we manage the provider and member data, because yes, we did not want to have obviously a breach, but we wanted to make sure we were following the guidelines, whether it's state or federal, and then and even some cases healthcare guidelines around managing that data. So yes, top of mind, making sure that we're protecting, you know, in my case so we had 37 million members, patients, and we needed to make sure that if we did put it in the cloud or if it was on-prem, that it was being protected. And as you mentioned, recently come off of, I was going to say Amazon, but it was an acquisition. That company that was looking at us doing the due diligence, they gave us thumbs up because of how we were managing the data at the lowest point and all the different levels within the architecture. So Anthem who did the acquisition, had a breach back in, I think it was 2015. That was top of mind for them. We had more questions during the due diligence around security than any other functional area. So it is critical, and I think slowly, some of that type of data will get up into the cloud, but again, it's going to go through some massive risk management and security measures, and audits, because how fragile that is. >> Yeah, I mean, that could be a deal breaker in an acquisition. I got two other questions for you. One is, you know, I know you follow the technologies very closely, but there's all the buzz words, the digital transformation, the AI, these new SaaS models that we talked about. You know, a lot of CIOs tell me, look, Dave, get the business right and the technology is the easy part. It's people, it's process. But what are you seeing in terms of some of this new stuff coming out, there's machine learning, you know, obviously massive scale, new cloud workloads. Anything out there that really excites you and that you could see on the horizon that could be, you know, really change agents for the next decade? >> Yeah, I think we did some RPA, robotics on some of the tasks that, you know, where, you know, if the analysis types of situations. So I think RPA is going to be a game changer as it continues to evolve. But I agree with what you just said. Doing this for quite a while now, it still comes down to the people. I can get the technology to do what it needs to do as long as I have the right requirements, so that goes back to people. Making sure we have the partnership that goes back to leadership and the people. And then the change management aspects. Right out of the gate, you should be worrying about how is it going to affect and then the adoption and engagement. Because adoption is critical, because you can go create the best thing you think from a technology perspective, but if it doesn't get used correctly, it's not worth the investment. So I agree, whether it's digital transformation or innovation, it still comes down to understanding the business model and injecting and utilizing technology to grow or reduce costs, grow the business or reduce costs. >> Yeah, usage really means value. Sorry, my last question. What's the one thing that vendors shouldn't do? What's the vendor no-no that'll alienate CIO's? >> To this day, I still don't like, there's a company out there that starts with an O. I still don't like it to that, every single technology module, if you would, has a separate sales rep. I want to work with my strategic partners and have one relationship and that single point of contact that spark and go back into their company and bring me whatever it is that we're looking at so that I don't get, you know, for instance from that company that starts with an O, you know, 17 calls from 17 different sales reps trying to sell me 17 different things. So what irritates me is, you know, you have a company that has a lot of breadth, a lot of, you know, capability and functional, you know that I may want. Give me one person that I can deal with. So a single point of contact, then that makes my life a lot easier. >> Well, Dan Sheehan, I really appreciate you spending some time on theCUBE, it's always a pleasure catching up with you and really appreciate you sharing your insights with our audience. Thank you. >> Oh, thank you, David. I appreciate the opportunity. You have a great day. >> All right. You too. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE on Cloud. Keep it right there. We'll be back with our next guest right after the short break. Awesome, Dan.

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE in ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Cloud computing has been the single most transformative force in IT over the last decade. As we enter the 2020s, we believe that cloud will become the underpinning of a ubiquitous, intelligent and autonomous resource that will disrupt the operational stacks of virtually every company in every industry. Welcome to this week's special edition of Wikibon's CUBE Insights Powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, and as part of theCUBE365's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020, we're going to put forth our scenario for the next decade of cloud evolution. We'll also drill into the most recent data on AWS from ETR's October 2020 survey of more than 1,400 CIOs and IT professionals. So let's get right into it and take a look at how we see the cloud of yesterday, today and tomorrow. This graphic shows our view of the critical inflection points that catalyze the cloud adoption. In the middle of the 2000s, the IT industry was recovering from the shock of the dot-com bubble and of course 9/11. CIOs, they were still licking their wounds from the narrative, does IT even matter? AWS launched its Simple Storage Service and later EC2 with a little fanfare in 2006, but developers at startups and small businesses, they noticed that overnight AWS turned the data center into an API. Analysts like myself who saw the writing on the wall and CEO after CEO, they poo-pooed Amazon's entrance into their territory and they promised a cloud strategy that would allow them to easily defend their respective turfs. We'd seen the industry in denial before, and this was no different. The financial crisis was a boon for the cloud. CFOs saw a way to conserve cash, shift CAPEX to OPEX and avoid getting locked in to long-term capital depreciation schedules or constrictive leases. We also saw shadow IT take hold, and then bleed in to the 2010s in a big way. This of course created problems for organizations rightly concerned about security and rogue tech projects. CIOs were asked to come in and clean up the crime scene, and in doing so, realized the inevitable, i.e., that they could transform their IT operational models, shift infrastructure management to more strategic initiatives, and drop money to the bottom lines of their businesses. The 2010s saw an era of rapid innovation and a level of data explosion that we'd not seen before. AWS led the charge with a torrent pace of innovation via frequent rollouts or frequent feature rollouts. Virtually every industry, including the all-important public sector, got into the act. Again, led by AWS with the Seminole, a CIA deal. Google got in the game early, but they never really took the enterprise business seriously until 2015 when it hired Diane Green. But Microsoft saw the opportunity and leaned in heavily and made remarkable strides in the second half of the decade, leveraging its massive software stake. The 2010s also saw the rapid adoption of containers and an exit from the long AI winter, which along with the data explosion, created new workloads that began to go mainstream. Now, during this decade, we saw hybrid investments begin to take shape and show some promise. As the ecosystem realized broadly that it had to play in the AWS sandbox or it would lose customers. And we also saw the emergence of edge and IoT use cases like for example, AWS Ground Station, those emerge. Okay, so that's a quick history of cloud from our vantage point. The question is, what's coming next? What should we expect over the next decade? Whereas the last 10 years was largely about shifting the heavy burden of IT infrastructure management to the cloud, in the coming decade, we see the emergence of a true digital revolution. And most people agree that COVID has accelerated this shift by at least two to three years. We see all industries as ripe for disruption as they create a 360 degree view across their operational stacks. Meaning, for example, sales, marketing, customer service, logistics, etc., they're unified such that the customer experience is also unified. We see data flows coming together as well, where domain-specific knowledge workers are first party citizens in the data pipeline, i.e. not subservient to hyper-specialized technology experts. No industry is safe from this disruption. And the pandemic has given us a glimpse of what this is going to look like. Healthcare is going increasingly remote and becoming personalized. Machines are making more accurate diagnoses than humans, in some cases. Manufacturing, we'll see new levels of automation. Digital cash, blockchain and new payment systems will challenge traditional banking norms. Retail has been completely disrupted in the last nine months, as has education. And we're seeing the rise of Tesla as a possible harbinger to a day where owning and driving your own vehicle could become the exception rather than the norm. Farming, insurance, on and on and on. Virtually every industry will be transformed as this intelligent, responsive, autonomous, hyper-distributed system provides services that are ubiquitous and largely invisible. How's that for some buzzwords? But I'm here to tell you, it's coming. Now, a lot of questions remain. First, you may even ask, is this cloud that you're talking about? And I can understand why some people would ask that question. And I would say this, the definition of cloud is expanding. Cloud has defined the consumption model for technology. You're seeing cloud-like pricing models moving on-prem with initiatives like HPE's GreenLake and now Dell's APEX. SaaS pricing is evolving. You're seeing companies like Snowflake and Datadog challenging traditional SaaS models with a true cloud consumption pricing option. Not option, that's the way they price. And this, we think, is going to become the norm. Now, as hybrid cloud emerges and pushes to the edge, the cloud becomes this what we call, again, hyper-distributed system with a deployment and programming model that becomes much more uniform and ubiquitous. So maybe this s-curve that we've drawn here needs an adjacent s-curve with a steeper vertical. This decade, jumping s-curves, if you will, into this new era. And perhaps the nomenclature evolves, but we believe that cloud will still be the underpinning of whatever we call this future platform. We also point out on this chart, that public policy is going to evolve to address the privacy and concentrated industry power concerns that will vary by region and geography. So we don't expect the big tech lash to abate in the coming years. And finally, we definitely see alternative hardware and software models emerging, as witnessed by Nvidia and Arm and DPA's from companies like Fungible, and AWS and others designing their own silicon for specific workloads to control their costs and reduce their reliance on Intel. So the bottom line is that we see programming models evolving from infrastructure as code to programmable digital businesses, where ecosystems power the next wave of data creation, data sharing and innovation. Okay, let's bring it back to the current state and take a look at how we see the market for cloud today. This chart shows a just-released update of our IaaS and PaaS revenue for the big three cloud players, AWS, Azure, and Google. And you can see we've estimated Q4 revenues for each player and the full year, 2020. Now please remember our normal caveats on this data. AWS reports clean numbers, whereas Azure and GCP are estimates based on the little tidbits and breadcrumbs each company tosses our way. And we add in our own surveys and our own information from theCUBE Network. Now the following points are worth noting. First, while AWS's growth is lower than the other two, note what happens with the laws of large numbers? Yes, growth slows down, but the absolute dollars are substantial. Let me give an example. For AWS, Azure and Google, in Q4 2020 versus Q4 '19, we project annual quarter over quarter growth rate of 25% for AWS, 46% for Azure and 58% for Google Cloud Platform. So meaningfully lower growth rates for AWS compared to the other two. Yet AWS's revenue in absolute terms grows sequentially, 11.6 billion versus 12.4 billion. Whereas the others are flat to down sequentially. Azure and GCP, they'll have to come in with substantially higher annual growth to increase revenue from Q3 to Q4, that sequential increase that AWS can achieve with lower growth rates year to year, because it's so large. Now, having said that, on an annual basis, you can see both Azure and GCP are showing impressive growth in both percentage and absolute terms. AWS is going to add more than $10 billion to its revenue this year, with Azure growing nearly 9 billion or adding nearly 9 billion, and GCP adding just over 3 billion. So there's no denying that Azure is making ground as we've been reporting. GCP still has a long way to go. Thirdly, we also want to point out that these three companies alone now account for nearly $80 billion in infrastructure services annually. And the IaaS and PaaS business for these three companies combined is growing at around 40% per year. So much for repatriation. Now, let's take a deeper look at AWS specifically and bring in some of the ETR survey data. This wheel chart that we're showing here really shows you the granularity of how ETR calculates net score or spending momentum. Now each quarter ETR, they go get responses from thousands of CIOs and IT buyers, and they ask them, are you spending more or less than a particular platform or vendor? Net score is derived by taking adoption plus increase and subtracting out decrease plus replacing. So subtracting the reds from the greens. Now remember, AWS is a $45 billion company, and it has a net score of 51%. So despite its exposure to virtually every industry, including hospitality and airlines and other hard hit sectors, far more customers are spending more with AWS than are spending less. Now let's take a look inside of the AWS portfolio and really try to understand where that spending goes. This chart shows the net score across the AWS portfolio for three survey dates going back to last October, that's the gray. The summer is the blue. And October 2020, the most recent survey, is the yellow. Now remember, net score is an indicator of spending velocity and despite the deceleration, as shown in the yellow bars, these are very elevated net scores for AWS. Only Chime video conferencing is showing notable weakness in the AWS data set from the ETR survey, with an anemic 7% net score. But every other sector has elevated spending scores. Let's start with Lambda on the left-hand side. You can see that Lambda has a 65% net score. Now for context, very few companies have net scores that high. Snowflake and Kubernetes spend are two examples with higher net scores. But this is rarefied air for AWS Lambda, i.e. functions. Similarly, you can see AI, containers, cloud, cloud overall and analytics all with over 50% net scores. Now, while database is still elevated with a 46% net score, it has come down from its highs of late. And perhaps that's because AWS has so many options in database and its own portfolio and its ecosystem, and the survey maybe doesn't have enough granularity there, but in this competition, so I don't really know, but that's something that we're watching. But overall, there's a very strong portfolio from a spending momentum standpoint. Now what we want to do, let's flip the view and look at defections off of the AWS platform. Okay, look at this chart. We find this mind-boggling. The chart shows the same portfolio view, but isolates on the bright red portion of that wheel that I showed you earlier, the replacements. And basically you're seeing very few defections show up for AWS in the ETR survey. Again, only Chime is the sore spot. But everywhere else in the portfolio, we're seeing low single digit replacements. That's very, very impressive. Now, one more data chart. And then I want to go to some direct customer feedback, and then we'll wrap. Now we've shown this chart before. It plots net score or spending velocity on the vertical axis and market share, which measures pervasiveness in the dataset on the horizontal axis. And in the table portion in the upper-right corner, you can see the actual numbers that drive the plotting position. And you can see the data confirms what we know. This is a two-horse race right now between AWS and Microsoft. Google, they're kind of hanging out with the on-prem crowd vying for relevance at the data center. We've talked extensively about how we would like to see Google evolve its business and rely less on appropriating our data to serve ads and focus more on cloud. There's so much opportunity there. But nonetheless, you can see the so-called hybrid zone emerging. Hybrid is becoming real. Customers want hybrid and AWS is going to have to learn how to support hybrid deployments with offerings like outposts and others. But the data doesn't lie. The foundation has been set for the 2020s and AWS is extremely well-positioned to maintain its leadership, in our view. Now, the last chart we'll show takes some verbatim comments from customers that sum up the situation. These quotes were pulled from several ETR event roundtables that occurred in 2020. The first one talks to the cloud compute bill. It spikes and sometimes can be unpredictable. The second comment is from a CIO at IT/Telco. Let me paraphrase what he or she is saying. AWS is leading the pack and is number one. And this individual believes that AWS will continue to be number one by a wide margin. The third quote is from a CTO at an S&P 500 organization who talks to the cloud independence of the architecture that they're setting up and the strategy that they're pursuing. The central concern of this person is the software engineering pipeline, the cICB pipeline. The strategy is to clearly go multicloud, avoid getting locked in and ensuring that developers can be productive and independent of the cloud platform. Essentially separating the underlying infrastructure from the software development process. All right, let's wrap. So we talked about how the cloud will evolve to become an even more hyper-distributed system that can sense, act and serve, and provides sets of intelligence services on which digital businesses will be constructed and transformed. We expect AWS to continue to lead in this build-out with its heritage of delivering innovations and features at a torrid pace. We believe that ecosystems will become the main spring of innovation in the coming decade. And we feel that AWS has to embrace not only hybrid, but cross-cloud services. And it has to be careful not to push its ecosystem partners to competitors. It has to walk a fine line between competing and nurturing its ecosystem. To date, its success has been key to that balance as AWS has been able to, for the most part, call the shots. However, we shall see if competition and public policy attenuate its dominant position in this regard. What will be fascinating to watch is how AWS behaves, given its famed customer obsession and how it decodes the customer's needs. As Steve Jobs famously said, "Some people say, give the customers what they want. "That's not my approach. "Our job is to figure out "what they're going to want before they do." I think Henry Ford once asked, "If I'd ask customers what they wanted, "they would've told me a faster horse." Okay, that's it for now. It was great having you for this special report from theCUBE Insights Powered by ETR. Keep it right there for more great content on theCUBE from re:Invent 2020 virtual. (cheerful music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE conversation. >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante and welcome to this week's CUBE insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we're going to bring in Sagar Kadakia who's the Director of Research at ETR. He's been away for the last couple of weeks, he's really digging into the latest data set, ETR of course it was in it's quiet period. And today, what we want to do is give you three of the macro takeaways from that last two-week analysis and drill into to some of the sectors. So Sagar, that's for coming on, great to see you again. Let's get right into it. >> Let's do it, thanks for having me. >> You've been crazy busy, we started the year at a plus 4%, consensus IT spend. We reported for several weeks and ended up at minus 4%. We're now at minus 5%, after you've gone through and done some additional analysis. So bring us up to date the IT spend projection. >> Yeah no problem, and that's our first macro takeaway, is we're seeing declines in IT budget, a decline of 5%. And remember, coming into the year as you mentioned, consensus assessments were right around that 4% number. And so we've seen this kind of 900 basis point shift downward so that's kind of where we are today, if we kind of look at that chart that we've been tracking for the last few weeks. And then for those that have seen this chart before, you've kind of seen where we've been kind of going the last two, three weeks. And for those that haven't seen the chart, I'll kind of go through it now. So, as many of you know, kind of launched its COVID-19 drill down survey to measure the impact that the virus was going to have on total spend this year and so we kind of launched that drill down on March 11th and so if you kind of look at that blue line there, what you're looking at, is we asked individuals, estimate what percentage impact you think the virus is going to have on your budget versus your original expectations. And since we launched this on March 11th, on that blue line that you're looking at, we got a lot of positivity in the beginning. And so if you look at the blue line all the way through, you follow that, you get about zero percent growth. Now the issue is, as I just mentioned is, we launched on the 11th, and there wasn't a tremendous amount of information available as to how severe the virus was, and so we kind of did this in Venn analysis and we talked about this last time, on the last breaking analysis, where it's probably more appropriate to look at a start date closer to 3/17 or 3/23 when the market really understood the severity of COVID-19. NYC became the epicenter. And if we look at just those customers who indicated a spend impact after that date, you can see it's coming out to about four or 5% decline. And so that's kind of one of our big macro takeaways, and the other thing on this chart, kind of focus on is, and even though we're not looking at, some of the vendors here, is when you think about declines, it's not across the full IT stack, and I think that's really important for the audience to understand. We're seeing focused declines among on-prem legacy pure plays. You're still seeing CIO spend on cloud and SaaS. In fact, they're doubling down there. And so when you kind of think about how things are going to shape up the next three, six, nine months, there's going to be a lot of bifurcation. And we think cloud and SaaS are going to be well positioned with a lot of legacy and on-prem. That's where you're going to see a majority of those declines that you're seeing here kind of play out. >> I've made the case, statement many times that cloud is good, or downturns have been to cloud. You saw this in 2008, 2009 with the shift from CapEx to OpEx. We came out of 2009 into the decade of cloud. And very clearly we're seeing some similar things here as people shift to that work-from-home. We had one CIO on the recent Venns that I want to just delete my data centers. Unfortunately, he's not going to be able to do that overnight, but I think, as Eric Bradley pointed out last week, a lot of customers who weren't even thinking about cloud, or really were sort of reticent to go all in, really have flipped and changed their tune. Let's talk about some of the industries that are impacted by this COVID-19 and the stay-at-home. This slide really kind of underscores that. Why don't you take us through it? >> Yeah, no problem. So on the last slide, you were looking at kind of our COVID-19 drill-down study. On this slide, what we're now going to focus on is a study that we did in tandem, which is called our Technology Spending Intentions Survey. And specifically we conducted this in April. What we did is we asked CIOs to update their 2020 spending intentions versus how they spent in '19. So this survey was originally posed in January and then we're essentially asking for a three-month update now. So we're trying to get an understanding of how much has changed in the last three months because of COVID-19. And when we asked these CIOs, we give them essentially a list of 400 vendors. And they're able to then indicate which ones they're flattening on, decreasing on, maybe accelerating on. And so what you're looking at here is we've aggregated that data by industry. And if you look at the X-axis here, you're going to look at spend intensity versus three months ago. And the Y-axis will be spend intensity versus a year ago. And so what you're seeing here is over the last three months, look at how much verticals, like retail/consumer, airlines, delivery services, financials/insurance, IT/TelCo, services/consulting. Those have really seen some of the largest pullbacks in spend versus three months ago. And those are also some of the industries that have indicated the largest pullback in demand from consumers and businesses. And so this is where we think a lot of the declines that we showed you earlier really kind of focus on some of these verticals. And that's how, when you kind of think about which organization are going to be hurt, which ones might see the most impact, three, six months from now, this is a really good chart to view. >> Yeah, a couple of points I would make on this data. Retail and consumer, again, even that's bifurcated. Obviously the physical stores getting crushed. You see Amazon now trading at all-time highs. Target announced today, I think they said a 200% increase in online shopping, which, of course, is fulfilled. 85% of Target's demand is fulfilled by their stores. So that's kind of mixed. You're going to see an accelerated move toward digital transformation there. Airlines, it's really unclear what's going to happen there. IT/TelCo, on one of the last Venns we talked about MPLS, people trying to get off of MPLS, really moving toward a SD-WAN. Healthcare, pharma, healthcare doesn't have time to do anything right now. No time to take a breather. Financials is interesting. I mean, they're down right now, but they still have a lot of cash. Liquidity is good. And then energy, I mean oil, I've just never seen anything like it. We're concerned obviously about credit risk there and oil companies being able to pay off their debts. So it's really not a pretty picture, is it? >> Yeah, and if focus on energy, even though you're not seeing a huge pullback versus three months ago in energy, it's really important to understand when we did this survey in January, energy was all the way on the left side of that chart. And so it already looked really bad coming into the year. So it got worse. But because of the severity versus last year, like they're just not seeing that much more of a negative impact now. This was before, this survey closed before everything happened the last few days with oil prices. So it is very possible that that data is going to get worse. And we'll know if it gets really-- >> We're not laughing a lot these days, but if you haven't filled up your car in a while, I mean it's, Anyway, let's go into the security piece. We talked about, you guys were really the first to report this work-from-home pivot. Others have sort of more recently coming to that conclusion. And it wasn't just Zoom and WebEx and video collaboration, Teams, et cetera. It really was all kinds of infrastructure, including security. So we can bring up the next chart, guys. Let's sort of get into this. We're going to talk about the sector and some of the vendors in here. Let's go. >> Yeah, no problem, so if we kind of step away from the macro and really start getting into the sectors and vendors in here. If we start with security, what we're really saying is that, look, a remote workforce is really kind of revealing best-in-breed. And we think it's going to lead to the permanent changes. So what you're looking at here is these are the net scores for each individual vendor currently versus three months ago as well as a year ago levels. The yellow bars will be what's currently. And the way to think about net score is just kind of spend intensity. And so the higher your net score, the more spend intensity, the more spend velocity you're seeing from enterprise customers. And what we're really seeing here, if you kind of look at the vendors on the left, you're seeing a lot of acceleration among secure web gateway end point, mobile security, cloud SaaS application security, identity, and these make sense. As we mentioned earlier, as you really accelerate your cloud and SaaS spend, you're going to want to use vendors that best protect those areas. And so if you look to the left here, Okta and Zscaler, Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, some of these really look best positioned moving forward. Palo Alto looks good longer term. Splunk at this point also looked good longer term. And then the other thing to kind of hit on here is the other side in terms of, we talked about the bifurcation that we expect. We're seeing significant declines in net scores among a lot of these legacy vendors. Check points come down quite a bit. Juniper, Trend Micro, Broadcom, Barracuda Networks, SonicWALL, and so you can see the disparity here. It's pretty clear on the image. But we think there's some pretty clear winners and losers here. And I think we may see permanent changes moving forward. >> Yeah, so Twistlock, of course, is now owned by Palo Alto. CrowdStrike, they're a hot company in the sector. Okta, I have the Chief Product Officer coming on shortly here for part of my CXO series. We've talked about Palo Alto and how they sort of fell behind a little bit in the cloud. But you talk to customers, they really see Palo Alto as in the mix. Zscaler came up in the Venn as, to your point, securing gateways and doing a really good job in that space. And so I think the fragmentation, the fragmentation probably continues, but there's also bifurcation, as you pointed out. Let's talk about cloud. As you've said and I said, downturns have been good to cloud. People are obviously looking more toward cloud, whether it's SaaS or cloud type of consumption. Let's bring up the next slide, which looks at the big three, Azure, AWS, and GCP. First of all, all three have very strong net scores. Up in the 60% plus range. But you have Azure pulling away. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. >> Yeah, that's right, and we've kind of been using this analogy of kind of a horse race. Just kind of as context, coming into January you see really GCP accelerating. And so one of the things we said in January was it's becoming more of a three-horse race. Even though GCP doesn't have the same type of market share as the other two, you are seeing the spend intensity increase. And now what you're seeing is Azure pulling away a little bit because of, we think, COVID-19. When you look at Azure's data set, it really looks robust and healthy across all verticals, across most regions. And that is what you're seeing here where it's continuing to kind of accelerate. It looks good. AWS, GCP, it also looks good here, but you're not seeing the same uniform strength. There's a couple verticals for AWS where we're seeing a little bit of a pullback in spend, like retail and industrials. For GCP we're seeing a pullback in mid-size and small enterprises. So that's causing a couple of cracks here and there. Even though they look overall healthy, but we did want to kind of indicate here on cloud where, look one vendor looks like they're pulling away when it comes to spend velocity. >> It's going to be interesting to see. I mean, we reported on the sort of deltas between Azure and AWS and the cloud, the quality of the cloud. I think we're going to carefully watch the quarterly reports. You always have to kind of squint through the Azure numbers to see what's in there. But there's no question that Microsoft, across the board, is really very, very strong. All right, let's talk about collaboration, productivity, video conferencing. I mean, we've certainly seen upticks. But as shown on this slide, you guys, if you could bring the next slide up. You know, it's not all rosy. Talk about this a little bit. >> Yeah, I think, look, there's been a lot of coverage around which vendors look best. And so I kind of want to take the opposite view on this chart for the audience, and say hey look, which vendors are not benefiting? And this is kind of like a hodgepodge sector of productivity and collaboration, video conferencing. What we're saying is it's now of never, so to speak. And you're looking at replacement rates. So if you look at, if you see something on this chart that says 20% replacement, that means one out of five customers indicated for that vendor in our survey, indicated a replacement for them, which is not good. And so you're seeing vendors here like Dropbox, Box and Slack having elevated or accelerating replacement levels. And these vendors, pitch themselves as collaboration tools. And if they're not doing well now and they're seeing elevated replacements, especially as everyone is working from home, that doesn't bode well for the future. >> I think people who know me know I'm not a huge fan of Box and Slack. They drive me crazy. And so this is interesting to see. I mean, we're a Zoom shop, so obviously you Zoom, you like Zoom. I had my first experience very recently with Microsoft teams. I was quite impressed. I thought it was easy to use. Skype, hell was just terrible. And so, much, much improved. Very interesting cut on that one. So again, it's a bifurcated story. Let's drill into teams a little bit. Guys, have you bring up the next slide, Movements reporting. And you guys are really again, first on this, how strong Microsoft is across the board. But really going after it and collaboration. >> On that previous slide you saw that, Dropbox and Slack, we're all seeing replacements. So again, a lot of customers like where was all that spend going? Well, it's going to Microsoft Teams. It's going to One Drive. This is a Slack drilled out, or sorry, a Slack and teams drill down. That we did, earlier this year. And what we're trying to do is measure, how these products were going to do in the next 12 months. And so what you're looking at here is Fortune 500 organizations. What we did is we asked them how much of your organization, is using Microsoft Teams today. What percentage of your organization is going to be using Microsoft Teams 12 months from now? That's going to be in the yellow bars. And you can see the big upticks in 12 months. And we took some mid point averages. Look at how much Microsoft Teams is going to grow, within Fortune 500 accounts in the next 12 months. And if we look at Slack on the next slide, you're really now seeing the exact opposite. Same question, how many folks in your Fortune 500 organization are using Slack today? And what does that look like in 12 months? And the mid point average is actually coming down. And so, it's like Slack is a seat-based model. And so when you have less users that's going to generate less revenue. And so again, this is amongst the existing Fortune 500 customers. This doesn't include new Fortune 500, but this spells problems for Slack, when you kind of think about the next six to 12 months ahead. >> Well it's one thing if you're competing with Microsoft and your AWS. I've not really not worried about AWS, Microsoft, take a note AWS. If you're one of these collaboration platforms, Microsoft, we've seen over the years, first of all, they got great developer affinity. They know how to bundle different products together. Now they got the cloud working so they got their flywheel effect in the cloud. There's just not a ton of room. The thing is they have such a huge software estate, such a giant customer install base and it's just makes it easy for them. The products are good enough or in some cases really good. So that's going to be something to watch, because there's a lot of high valuations going on right now in their collaboration space. >> That's right. And I think, it really hits on the previous slide, or the previous slides on collaboration that we saw, was when you think again about the declines, a lot of that is impacting some of these pure plays. So in security you saw a lot of the legacy names getting in. On the collaboration side, you saw a lot of these pure plays your getting in. And so this is kind of, again when you think about where budgets are going and which vendors are being impacted, it's really concentrated into some specific areas. >> So now, one of the hardest hit areas, and you guys reported on this earlier, was the IT consulting and outsourcing IT. You guys have you bring up that the chart, it's pretty ugly. Maybe you can explain what you're seeing here and why you think that is. >> Yeah, no problem. So again, this is from our technology spending intention survey. We're measuring spend velocity here. Spend intensity, and you can see across, these are just a handful of IT consulting firms. If you look at the blue bars to the yellow bar. So the blue bar is, 2020 spending intent that we captured in January and now we're asking for updated 2020 spending intentions. You can see the deceleration in just the last three months. If you look at our COVID-19 drill down side that we conducted, one of the questions in there we asked was, are you freezing new IT projects or deployments? Almost, 1/4 percentage of customers said they are. And so, that is going to spell problems for this space. When you think about, look, if you're going into uncertain times an easy way to reduce your budget is by, spending less with consulting vendors since you know, you can just less than the number of deliverables, these individuals get paid based on. How many deliverables they can complete. So this is another area that when you kind of think about where the declines are coming from, this is certainly an area to look at. >> A lot of the customers we've talked to have said, we've basically shut down spending on some of the large projects. We're still focusing on some digital transformation, but that's maybe a longer term priority. And then the IBM piece of this chart, guys, if you could bring it back is interesting to me because look, they paid 34 billion for Red Hat. I've always said a key to the Red Hat acquisition was being able to point it at the large consulting base and modernize those applications. IBM actually had a pretty good quarter in services. Although they did mention that respect especially in software that in the month of the quarter software spending shutdown. I don't think we got visibility that this piece of the business, but this could be, somewhat of a concern going forward. I think that's going to be one of the areas that gets slow rolled coming back, Sagar. I don't think it's going to come back tomorrow. So please your thoughts. >> Just to kind of quickly wrap up IBM. So yeah, one of the things we kind of saw in the data was not only eroding spending intention data on a lot of their SaaS portfolio but also eroding market share. And we saw big down takes on Red Hat products and IT services. Even in cloud. And I know they indicated pretty healthy numbers on Red Hat and cloud. But again, we're asking about 2020, forward-looking spending intentions. And of course they pulled their guidance. So we don't know how that's going to look. But in our data, things are really coming down versus three months ago. And so I think just overall, that is a data set that we're quite negative one. >> I think IBM has that sense. Like I said, March was not good for software. That's when the big deals come through. You're right. Red Hat, I think route 20% in the quarter and is now accredited from a cashflow basis, which is one of their targets. I think they beat their target there. Still good cashflow. But I think there's just so much uncertainty, And IBM have to be prepared for that and I'm sure will. That we're at minus 5% now. We're seeing cloud SaaS, we're seeing a bifurcation. We talked about some of the areas that are in trouble. That's kind of part one. Next week we'll be talking about part two. What can we expect? >> Yeah, we'll start going through networking, CDN, ITSM, IT workflows, database, data warehousing, and we'll kind of go through that as well. But again, you're going to see a lot of what we talked about today. Just the bifurcation span where, vendors that are more next gen, more work-from-home friendly like all of the SaaS guys, they're doing really well. And on the on-prem and the legacy, you're just seeing elevated replacements, elevated decreased rates. This is the most bifurcated, I've seen this data set and I've been doing this at ETR for, almost seven, probably going on eight years now. So I think that kind of says something about the environment that we're in and what to kind of expect in the next three to six months. >> And it's kind of like the stock market is right now. You're actually seeing, some great momentum in certain stocks and terrible in others. Those were great balance sheets and maybe COVID is a tailwind for them. Others, tons of uncertainty, a lot of concern. I know in poking around the data set, like you said, some of the analytics, the data warehouses, you see Snowflake, UiPath, Automation Anywhere. A lot of the automation, RPA, momentum is there. Security, we talked about that. There's some real bright spots there but a lot of the on-prem stuff. We'll see product cycles affect that, in the second half of of 2020. We'll continue to report on this Sagar. Thank you so much for we're coming on and we'll definitely see you next week. >> Thanks for having me again, Dave. Looking forward. >> All right, and thank you for watching, this CUBE insights powered by ETR. We will see you next time. Don't forget, all these episodes are available as podcasts, wherever you listen. Go to etr.plus, checkout what's happening there. Siliconangle.com has all the news I publish in there weekly. I also publish on wikibond.com. Thanks for watching this breaking analysis. This is Dave Vellante and Sagar Kadakia, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS re:Invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel, along with its ecosystem partners. >> Hey welcome back everyone as theCUBE live covers Las Vegas day three, we're wrapping up the show for AWS re:Invent. I'm John Furrier, extracting the signal from the noise. I want to thank Intel for sponsoring this amazing set, two sets here. We had double barrel, cube action all week. Thanks to Intel, we wouldn't be able to do it and bring the great content to viewers today. Thank them for supporting our mission. We're going to wrap up the show with Stu Miniman, Corey Quinn, two experts who are scouring the floor. Doing interviews, talking to everybody, and myself. Cory, good to see you. >> It is great to see me, John, thank you. >> You're awesome, got quite a following these days on your work, your business is growing, congratulations. >> Corey: Thank you >> But, I saw you running around at the Wynn, you're definitely working hard. So, what have you learning, what are you seeing, what's the- what's your analysis of the show holistically? >> I think that Amazon, specifically AWS's product strategy, remains what it has been, and that is simply "yes." There is remarkably little that seems that it is beyond something that AWS would take an interest in. If you'd asked me to predict what they would have released at midnight madness, I would have had several guesses, none of which would have been "Well it's a piano keyboard thing that also does Machine Learning." And my follow up would be, well of course it is "Does it also make fries?" And at this point, well sure, it makes it makes a certain twisted sort of sense. Maybe it's too many days of re:Invent in a row, maybe it's just at this point a certain level of cynicism that I can no longer escape. But, at this point, very little surprises me. But it seemed to be a very AWS event through and through. >> The volume and velocity of announcements was at the same level as last year. No real change there. >> Yes, I am saddened to report that the re:Invent house band is still there and has not yet been put to sleep to spare them and ourselves further misery but, we'll see. >> You didn't like the band? >> I think the band is slightly hokey. I would change the lyrics of some of the things that their singing to at least be humorous. If you're going to go corny, go all in. >> The guy did nail the Queen notes. >> Oh, they're terrific performers it has nothing to do with that. But it is 8 O'clock in the morning. So, one has questions. >> I think the keynote could have been a sleeper, without the band, don't you think? >> I do maintain that I want an Alexa skill That is just Andy Jassy reading rock lyrics. I would pay serious money for that. >> Well you did put some thought in. Stu, your thoughts on the show, wrap it up man, what's going on? >> Look I mean, the show as Dave Vallente says "Amazon always delivers with the shock and awe." You know, broadest and deepest, so many pieces here. 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, fifteen 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 buzz word. And there's one or two that really architecturally are different and deliver, and Amazon laid out their strategy even more, and, through the geeky pieces, and transformation was the theme. Hey Corey, talking transformation I met you at this show a few years ago, and your special skill back then was wearing a three piece suit. >> Indeed. The problem is is when you start talking about cloud billing and cloud accounting and that sort of thing, in a three piece suit, you look like you're a CPA that got lost somewhere. So, my brand and personal sartorial preferences have continued to evolve. When you're talking about Outpost though, you're right. It's the clear star of the show, and I love that product so much. Not because of what they say about it, but because of the subtext that comes along with that product. Namely that "Look, you're going to run things on-prem, and the problem of course is that you suck at managing hardware. Now, this is going to take a lot of that away. You're still going to suck at providing connectivity and power, and AWS does not have anything to announce around those at this time, but we're slowly, delicately, prying your grubby little hands off of the hands on hardware server hugger mentality and dragging you, lovingly, kickingly, and screamingly, into the best technology, lets say 2012 has to offer at least." It's modern-ish. >> So, are cloud buyers naive, if they are just going to be buying these solutions from other clouds or prepackaged solutions. Is that really cloud or do they care? I mean, what's the difference between cloud native and cloud naive? What's your perspective? Besides the letter T. >> Of course. I think that there's a definite spectrum on how cloudy something can be. If you want to just take everything running in your existing data center, virtualize it, and then just put that into an AWS region, okay great. There are ways to do that and most of them have a VMware price tag tied to them, but okay, is that cloud? Ish. Is it the best approach? Maybe. I think it's hard to bucket all customers into one. Everyone's in a different place on their journey. And I guess architecture shaming, it's "Oh, what are you going to do with that piece of crap?" Like about eight billion dollars of revenue a year, why do you ask?" There are valid reasons to do a lot of different things and be at different points on your journey. I like seeing Twitter for pets evolve and do the latest and greatest thing. I don't like seeing for example, my bank doing the exact same thing. >> Yeah, I mean, Stu, it's beauty of the cloud is in the eye of the beholder. I mean what he's saying is and what Jassy's saying is "Look it, you can't just take, you know everyone and put them into a bucket, it's what you do with it." >> Yeah. It really comes back to what you want to do. >> I mean, John, I go back to, you know, things Werner said on the Keynote stage, everything fails all the time. The difference between the old architecture, which was "I'm going to do everything I can and I'm going to throw money and hardware at things to make it enterprise." Well, the new enterprise needs to look like what the Hyperscalers have been doing, which is, you build for software. Which means that everything fails all the time. That, our friendly chaos monkey will come in here and it doesn't matter what piece goes down, the application needs to stay up running. It's about the application, you know, application developers at the center of what's going on here, and you know, that modernization. I really liked Andy Jassy's answer, to what I asked him about, is if we go through this cloud Adoption, we talk about simplification and people want to buy over solutions but the successful company of the future will be builders. >> I got to ask you guys this question. I talked to a friend, and yes I have friends. So, he's in IT for a big company. I said "Hey, what do you think, AWS or Azure?" And I won't give away the names but he says look "We don't know what we're doing, like we're old school IT. We're running eight billion dollar business and we have network security. We're classic IT, we know we've got to get there, the boss is saying get to the cloud and, frankly, if we move to Amazon, half my team would either get fired or they wouldn't get it to work. So, we're just going to go with Microsoft because they've been selling us gear and stuff for decades." So, there we go, that's Azure. That has nothing to do with capability, that's a real-life scenario that we're hearing. Stu? Corey? >> It's incredibly important because once upon a time, I was a grumpy Unix admin because there's no other kind of Unix admin. And I was very anti-cloud for a long time. The reason was, I could come up with a whole list of flimsy justifications why the cloud was crap but the honest answer was I had built my sense of identity around the thing that I knew how to do and the cloud felt like it was taking it away from what I was. It wasn't true. There is a growth path, it's not as long as people often think it is but you can't fight the tide forever. And that world is slowly but surely eroding out from under you. Do you go Azure? Do you go AWS? That's going to depend on you, where you are, what your constraints are, what your business concerns are but I also think it's a miss-step to view the migration process solely as one of technology, it's people. >> Hold on, I need to chime in here, John, because I think >> You can slack in here too because people use that instead of chime. >> It is Goldilocks syndrome here. There is one cloud out there that you need to be a PHD and the smartest people out here to do it. There's one cloud out there that we're going to meet you where you are and you don't need to make any changes. What Amazon's trying to do is that balance between, we want to make it uncomfortable enough to make the change so that you can be successful in the future. Whether or not they've struck the right balance, I think, is up for debate and, this is a journey, >> Well, Hyperscale there are varies out there but I think, that's where I see the >> We'll there's two things, psychology of, just the change, right? Your Unix admin example and my friend, which is true, it's legit. Now, the question is what's the indifference of getting the path? But, if you look at the Hyperscalers Dave Vellante pauses that all the time They would spend engineering time to save money, so they'd engineer a solution, save time. Enterprise would spend money to save time. That's the general purpose computing market that used to be. >> Corey: Yeah >> It's not like that anymore. It's not general purpose. >> The entire theme of this show seems to be aimed much more at Big E enterprise than the leading edge type of story. There was a lot more Goldman-Sachs than Netflix, for example. And that's a good thing, and that's okay. >> I think it's a great thing. >> There's still room to grow, I mean, they did not announce an AWS 400. There's no mainframe story in the cloud as such yet. >> That's actually a mini computer, technically, okay >> Oh, I'm sure. >> But proprietary mini computer. >> You don't want to know what the billing model looks like. >> If you know what AS400 is, you're old like us. >> They call them I series now but, yeah, that's right, a U series. Done. >> All right guys, wrapping it up, this is the big point. Final word, Corey, Amazon, long game, still in play, no real impact from competition yet but they're in the rear view mirror. They're seeing stuff. Did Amazon successfully move the distance between them and the competition at this event? At least from a narrative and/or announcement stand point? >> Well, I will say that no other cloud has a Machine Learning piano. So, I think that that definitely is a differentiating factor and it adds another item to a checkbox list somewhere, that someone cares about. But as far as the core competency, I think, Outpost absolutely opens up a world of opportunity for folks who otherwise would not take that step. I think that they're demonstrating a rapid execution story around what it takes to get Big E enterprise workloads migrated and giving an on-ramp that doesn't require everyone being re-tooled, re-skilled and, oh, everything you're doing is great. But it's awful, throw it away and start over. >> And Stu, there's trillions of Dollars of spend coming in to the sector. Certainly, there's clear visibility the operating model's there, there's IT spend trillions are gonna be on the table up for grabs. >> You know what's interesting? Was watching a Netflix documentary about Bill Gates on the way in, talking about what Microsoft went through after the anti-trust piece. It is looming right in front of us, for AWS. The market power they have, it's still a relatively small piece of the overall IT market, absolutely Amazon has the potential to take a big chunk out of that, you know, trillions of dollars there. It is always day one here, they are always impressive as to the feedback loops, the way they are listening and they're growing, so, that was, we said, a year ago, it was the Oval office, the Executive Office, was the biggest threat to Amazon, it still is the biggest threat I see. >> I think the big story here from this re:Invent is Amazon recognizes two things, big enterprises need to transform their way to be successful to take advantage of the capabilities not take a transitional, incremental improvement and, two, they got competition. And they see it. And the pressure's definitely on, they won't admit it, but Microsoft, through their sales machinery, is taking down spend, and if that trend continues and will Microsoft have that ability to keep that going and not have dis-economies of scale for taking short-cuts. Can Amazon keep the pressure on? Because that, to me, is the big story and then it's clear, the narrative is keep pushing hard and try to extend the lead out past everybody. >> The answer is customers win. >> John, Amazon still doesn't use the word multi-cloud, they're architectural design is not to solve multi-cloud as it is to extend AWS and, it's interesting, we will see which design architecture wins out in the future. But, you know. >> Yeah. It's a three horse race, are the going to be number one? I think they recognize multi-cloud, they won't admit it but, why would you? If you were building a PC, why would you promote the Mac? And again, if they're commercial, who's the Mac guy and who's the PC guy, Corey? I mean, who's cooler? Microsoft or Amazon? >> These days? That's starts to become a bit of an open question. There's been fantastic transformational stories, as they say, it's not your grandfather's Microsoft. But, then again, Amazon has made some interesting choices as we go too. >> Stu, the Mac guy was cooler than the PC guy in those famous commercials, >> Absolutely he was. >> Who's cooler? Amazon or Apple? >> Corey, when you look at some of the cultural pieces, absolutely Microsoft has gone through some transformations. But Amazon was, for talking about AWS, they are cloud native. They are cloud. >> So they're cooler as far as Stu stands. Okay, depends how you look at it. This is a wrap up, guys, thanks for coming in, Corey, good to see you. >> Thank you for having me. >> I know you're working hard. >> Corey Quinn, one of the hardest working guys in the business, along with Stu Miniman, Dave Vellante, I'm John Furrier for John Walls, Jeff Frick, Leonard and the whole team, thanks for watching. I want to say, thanks to our sponsors who support our mission, which is to bring theCUBE to events and do as much high quality content as possible, with creators, decision makers, with executives, develop, whoever's got the action, the signal from the noise, we get that support by our sponsors, so without them, we wouldn't be here and of course Intel have the naming rights studio sponsorship as the headline, thank Intel and AWS for supporting, there's two stages here at AWS, so thank them and thanks to the entire team for watching. That's a wrap for AWS re:Invent 2019. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, It's the Cube. Covering AWS reInvent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel along with its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone, we're live here in Las Vegas in the Cube for live coverage of Amazon reInvent 2019. I'm John Furrier here instructing the singer from the noise. We have an amazing guest here, the founder of Aviatrix, I mean the CEO of Aviatrix, Steve Mullaney. Welcome to the Cube, thanks for comin' out. >> Thank you, good to see you. >> So first of all, I want to get into your experience, because I think it's notable having you on, because you've been in the industry for years, you're CEO of a multicloud software, a new kind of company. And this is what Andy Jassy was talking about on his Keynote today, that there's new kinds of companies, there's the born in the cloud, then there's enterprises re-borning in the cloud, my word. It's actually pivoting or re-platforming, re-imagining, whatever you want to call it. This is the new game, and if you're not on that side of the street you could be out of business. >> Steve: Yeah, no 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. That shift has happened, people talked about it five years ago, but they didn't mean it. Now when you talk to enterprises, they are actually moving into the cloud, not just talking about it. And they're saying that is the center of gravity. And what's interesting to me was, I think even just the tone of Andy Jassy today and what he was talking about was 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 clients, a virtual router, basically my hardware router, package it up, put it on the cloud. That's not cloud native, it's cloud naive as we talk, right? So the change that's happened is now everybody realizes that the center of gravity is in the cloud, and you start seeing things like outposts. You see things like wavelength, you see things like TGW network Manager and things getting pushed out. The architecture of the cloud, now actually pushing out and extending out into on premises. >> John: Well, I want to give you a prop for a couple things. One is, for the folks watching, and read my post about my interview with Andy Jassy, I said two things in there that I borrowed or stole from Steve. One was cloud native without the T is cloud naive. And T for trust, T for IT, that was clever. And we're going to get into that-- >> Well I stole that from our sales guy Harold Hilderbrand, so you know what? >> John: Harold shout out to you. The second thing that I heard used when we were talking, we were talking about transitions vs. transformations. I think that is so on point because I think that encapsulates what Jassy's saying and what the industry is feeling right now. Transitions are for incremental improvements, transformations are for flipping the script. >> Steve: Right, right. >> This is really happening. Can you share what you mean by transitions vs. transformations? >> Yeah, so when you're in a computing model, there's been really three computing models. There's mainframe, which was 50's or 60's, to 80's or 90's, there's a 20-30 year period where IBM, DAC and so forth. That was the way you did enterprise computing. Then this PC client server thing came along, which was viewed as a toy at the beginning. For print sharing and work groups and people said are you kidding me? PCs, Servers are just PCs with two power supplies. I'm not running my mission critical infrastructure on PCs. But in the 90's with the internet, IP protocol, it's shifted. That became that transformation. So incumbents never win transformations. DEC, IBM and what happens is they're never in the conversation, because it's a transformation. Incumbents always win transitions, so for the last 20 to 30 years, Cisco, great, fantastic company. Very respected company. John Jamers will talk about transitions and talk about he would pat himself on the back, and how they would win market transitions. You're supposed to win a market transition as an incumbent, don't pat yourself on the back. The customers will force you to win the transition because they don't want another leader when you're in that same model. We are now entering that third transformation, this a model of computing change. This is from the top down business transformation Andy was talking about, which is true. You have companies redefining who they are, and they are leveraging cloud technologies to do that. This is not a cost thing, this is not a bottoms up technology thing that IT guys just say ah I want to learn something new. This is top down business transformation, existential threat to the survival of my company kind of stuff, and we need to move fast, and enterprises all move together. That's now happening and transformations, that confusion creates opportunities, because it moves so fast that the legacy vendors just don't have time. They have the innovators dilemma, they can't move to the new way quick enough. >> Yeah and one of the things I want to get your thoughts on and I want to get your reaction to is as we go to all the events in cloud, in this business, we see everything, the one tell sign, for me, is the security market. Security got unbuckled out of IT, in the board conversation. The jewels are on the table, the security, if you get hacked you're out of business. Talk about threats to the business, security is the leading indicator. What's going on in security? They're building their own staff, they're hiring developers in house. They are really changing the game on how they use technology. That's just in one area. You're talking about a complete reset, or reconsideration of everything that Jassy said. >> Everything, yeah, it's the business, right? Your applications are your business, right? And then all the infrastructure underneath that is there to service the applications and the data, that's why it's there. When you talk to different people, and you talk to customers like NBC and CBS, and content people, they're moving to the cloud. They're now having channels that are 100% hosted on AWS for the first time. Why are you doing that? I asked this of CBS. Because we need to move faster. Guess what, they're competing with Netflix and Amazon. They can't do it the old way, they're going to die. So they're moving all of their channels, hundreds of channels to be now cloud enabled. Because it allows them to deliver it in months as opposed to years. >> Your really interesting background, I'll share with the audience, you have a networking background, the old WellFleet became Bay Networks. Early employee at Cisco, then went to early employee at Palo Alto Networks security company. CEO Of Nicira, which is a big pioneer in software-defined networking. Which, at the time, evolved into the crown jewels of AVMWare. >> Yep, in a sense. >> You would say I would agree with that. And now you're on Aviatrix where it's got a multi-cloud abstraction, so you're kind of riding this new wave. So the question I have for you is, I coined the term being reborn in the cloud. Not born in the cloud. People who are born in the cloud, clean sheet of paper, they can scale up. But an enterprise has got to transform. Has to become reborn with cloud architecture. >> Steve: Yes, yes. >> This is a fundamental, almost look in the mirror moment as an enterprise executive, saying are we being reborn? >> Yes. >> How do companies do that? >> So we have a number of companies, enterprise companies, that are 30 year old, 40 year old enterprise software companies that, honestly, were left for dead. Where people thought, they weren't SaaS. They missed out on the whole Benny Hoff SaaS movement and they were on-prem. They had all the features, all the functionality, but they didn't have the delivery model of SaaS. They were hurting, they were going to die. People left them for dead. Now what they are doing is they've reborn themselves, in the cloud. They are pushing themselves in the cloud. Informatic, Variant, Epsolon, Eluysian, Teradata. We've got tens of these companies, that are, have reinvented themselves and now they're actually doing really, really, well. Because they had the functionality that they've always had, but now they have the delivery mechanism. There not SaaS actually, and the customers like that. Because I get my own three or four VPCs, it's my own network, it's not multi-tenant. It's hosted within AWS and now they're just migrating as fast as they can, all of their on-prem applications of customers into AWS and other clouds. >> John: All right, so I want to ask you about multi-cloud. Jassy didn't use the word multi-cloud, the critics are tweeting away on that. But, of course he's going to say multi-cloud, he's the cloud. He's the one cloud, he wants to be. >> Yeah. >> Multi-cloud is a reality. He did point out in my interview, and I think he might have mentioned on stage, that people are picking up primary and secondary. And then it's not 50/50 it's 70/30, 90/10. Whatever the ratio is then just pick one. Amazon gets picked a lot for the leader. What's your vision and how do you see the multi-cloud playing out? As people start becoming more cloud operations based. >> My view, and people, we are in the first pitch in the first inning of this cloud and people say AWS is a 40 billion dollar run rate, how can that be? Because the money has always been and always will be with large enterprise. They are now just starting to move into the cloud. There's trillions of dollars of spend that's coming into public cloud. So, first off, it's very beginning, early days. Second thing is AWS has done incredibly well with the developers and the born in the cloud people. Enterprises, not so much. And, you know what? Microsoft kind of understands enterprises. So I think we're going to be set up for a little bit of battle here, and it's, by no means, over. So I think AWS recognizes that and every single enterprise that I have talked to says I may not be a third, a third, a third across all three of the big clouds. Maybe I'll have one primary, and I think Andy Jassy says that, which I kind of agree with. I think people will have a primary, but I don't think everyone's primary is going to be AWS. I think there's going to be a lot of Azure primaries. And even some Google primaries, probably more, and I think it will be a two horse race for that. But then they're going to use the other clouds because, I was just talking to a customer today. The signature recognition software runs better in Azure. They're an AWS customer, they're moving to Azure for this. Why, because that app runs better in Azure for some reason. I think people, particularly enterprises, will make that decision. >> All right, so I want to get your take on two things, first of all I agree with you. >> I think that's what will happen. >> I would agree with that, so let's just take this scenario. Amazon wins on capabilities, they're constantly adding new stuff everyday. So, if you're a builder, it's the ultimate tool shed for technology. Azure isn't there yet, they're trying to catch up as fast as they can, they're pedaling as fast as they can. But there's a build out level and then there's a consumption level. So there's having all that capability, but also the customer's consumption has to be addressed. Solutions packaging, ease of use. So delivery mechanisms for infrastructure in the cloud. The consumption, how I buy and use, is now a consideration. Or consumer experience or whatever you want to call it. What's your take on those two dynamics? >> I think you'll see, from AWS, I don't know this, but it has to be, because this is what enterprises want. The phrase 'Go Build' is great for an early adopter. You go tell that to an enterprise, here's the power tools, go build your house. They go, I'm going to cut my hand off. I don't want to go build anything, I want to consume. So I think you're going to see them changing their tune a little bit, because the markets evolved, and I think it's caught them a little bit by surprise as well. I think Microsoft, because they know the enterprise, they won't say 'Go Build'. They're going to say 'Come Consume'. And I think that's going to resonate with enterprises. Because, at the end of the day, they don't really want to do that. Now, either way, I think it's going to be a battle. That's where Aviatrix comes into play. We help enterprises, no matter what cloud you're on, across multiple clouds or one, actually consume services. So we abstract away all the details of those native services. >> Well, I would say, if you got to transform, you have to do some building, but it would have to be the easy kit. >> Steve: Yeah, I want the easy button, I mean. >> John: Paint by numbers. >> Yeah. >> John: Self-installing house. So I got your take on that. So you got a lot of buzz in the analyst community around a phrase I've heard you say. >> Steve: Which one is that? >> There's no more food left in the data center. >> Oh, okay, yeah. >> John: And the animals are leaving the data center. >> And that's right. >> John: Food being the supplier. >> The on-prem data center. >> John: The on-prem are money and the animals being the vendors. So if there's no food in the data center, what's happening? What does that mean? >> Steve: They're goin' through, the center of gravity has moved into the cloud, that's where the food is. So you're going to see a lot of cloud naive legacy vendors put cloud on things, right? It's the same crap they had, they're just going to put cloud on it because, like I said, what do animals do when they run out of food? They go find where the food is, right? If people get mad when I say that because data centers are not going away. I know that data centers aren't goin' away, but they're going to get quarantined like mainframes got quarantined. It's going to be an expense area, it's not going to be an investment. And what do you do with an expense? You quarantine it, you cap it, you hopefully keep it flat, or your reduce it. But, sure, the data centers are going to be around for a long time but all their market caps are based on big growth. And, where people are confused is, for the last five years, everybody said we are moving to cloud. But they were talking. So if you look over the last five years, all the people selling the on-prem have done very well. So, clearly, this whole cloud thing was a hoax, right? Because, for five years, you said it was coming and it hasn't, so therefore I'm good. The problem is you're good right up until you're not good and that just happened. >> And that's happening now in your opinion? >> That's happening now and your seeing it in peoples results, publicly. And they're washing it over. They're saying it's a temporary problem. I compensated the field wrong. Bullshit, I know what's going on and, you know what? There's going to be no hiding from that. >> Yeah, and the expansion's going to be in the cloud where the developers are building apps that drive top line. >> Steve: That's where all the investment's going. >> Okay so, there's a couple of major areas developing with the cloud dynamic. The cloud scale and now data tsunami and data scale. Diversity of data and all those things are happening. You can see that in the announcements. Large scale data, the data layer network, data ops, data as code, infrastructure as code, large scale, all that's great. But networking still becomes the fundamental problem. Jassy talked about it on stage. Hops to the network, they got this wavelength thing for 5G. That's really cool. All the kind of important things that are going on, is going on at the network. Same concepts being applied to a new architecture. >> Yeah. >> Your thoughts? >> Exactly right. One of our customers, I forget who it was, said a phrase to me that I love. Again I steal everything John. >> John: I steal from you. >> Yeah, he said the network comes first. I go that is perfect, I'm going to use that. In fact, actually it's on our website. The network comes first. Because when you're building up that infrastructure, in all of computing. Compute network and storage, what's the most important? Network by far. Why, because if the network isn't architected correctly, you're screwed for life. So you've got to get that right. So that's what everybody is doing right now. Is they look and they say strategically, we're going to go build a city. First thing I got to go and do is get the basic infrastructure, and the network comes first. That is the core of my basic infrastructure. If you get that wrong, life is bad for a long long time. That's what's going on right now. >> Okay, so you've had a great career, you got the CEO of Aviatrix going on. You're also looking at startups, you advise, been on boards. What's your view of the startup landscape if you're advising startups to go at this market, this trillion dollar enterprise market, the money's being thrown in the air and the money's in the middle of the table. How do they attack that money, how do they attack the marketplace? >> First thing, number one, you got to be cloud native. You have got to understand the basic native constructs of Azure, Google, AWS. You cannot be just this thing that plops on top of it, you got to be able to programmatically, program that infrastructure and leverage it. Because all of the hundreds of billions of dollars being spent, you want to use that, right. You don't want to have to go recreate that. So that, to me, is number one. And then number two, I think there's a lot of opportunity in the cloud. Everybody thinks AWS will do anything and everything you need in networking. That is a bunch of crap. There is so many limitations that they have for enterprises. Like hundreds of limitations. The beautiful thing with networking is you push one area, and ten other problems happen. So we've got 20 years of things to do to make networking better. So that's what we're going to do. But also at the edges, right? I would say where the interesting thing happens, is the interface between on-prem and cloud. So BGP, IOS, Cisco IOS, all the things that, because it's kind of like the virtual, the physical interface. It's the cloud to on-prem interface. There's still going to be an interface. >> John: You still need plumbing. >> Then there's still going to be an interface. That interface is where a lot of the complexity and friction comes. So whether it's IoT, edge computing type things, or things that we do of bringing that cloud in a seamless, kind of simple, automated way. Bringing on the on-prem into the cloud world in a very seamless way. >> John: So, I'm got to ask you a final question. You came out of retirement. You had the good life on boards, golfing, clipping coupons, going to the beach every day. Now you're the CEO of a company going grinding it out again. A lot of older ageism coming back into the biz. A lot of people who have been in the systems business. >> Steve: Oh yeah. >> A lot of people coming back into the game. Why did you come back, what was the main driver for you to come back out of retirement? >> 'Cause this is a thousand foot wave and it's ten times bigger than what I saw in client server. It's the biggest opportunity of value creation and innovation that I have ever seen and ever will see in my life. What's also fun is every single one of the customers that we are dealing with are all old guys like me. They're all 40s, 50s, 60s, it's the IT guys from 30 years ago that everyone left for dead. Everyone thought, oh it's the developer-led infrastructure, the developers are going to do everything, uh uh. This is IT, IT is coming back and saying thank you very much developer, we got it from here. This is serious business now. This isn't fun and games anymore. We're taking over. >> But it's serious IT, it's reborn IT, it's not the old IT. >> Not the old IT, they want to do it. It's the old guys. But they're enlightened guys and gals and they want to do it in the cloud way, with the simplicity and the automation. But yet I want to bring the functionality, visibility, and control that I had on-prem. I don't want to do it the old way. I want to do it the new way. Guy today I was just talking to a customer who said, I don't want to build my Dad's network. But he's 50 years old, he's my age, you know. And so, but I think that's the key, they're enlightened networking people, yet they have the 30 years of history of understanding the subtleties of BGP and networking. >> This was our chance to hear you in the Cube, we had such a great time, our team's awesome. It's our seventh year doing reInvent, eight years total of this conference. What's your take of Jassy's Keynote this year? Is this an inflection point? Is this one of those moments where you're going to look back and say this was a time that Amazon made a change, or gassed it extra hard? >> I think, my take is, look every year he says amazing things and every year is another step function. But I think this year will go down as the year that people will look back a couple of years from now and say that was the point, that it got serious, like really serious in terms of big enterprises coming in and I think it's going to send a message to the other public clouds, and a message to all the other enterprises that say hey, maybe I'm falling behind. When you see Goldman Sachs and you see banks are laggers to the cloud. They're not early adopters, they're laggers. You see that and you go well, wait a minute, maybe I'm missing out. I think it's going to actually accelerate because he's seeing it, you know. So I think it will go down as a big inflection point. >> John: Steve Mullaney, President and CEO of Aviatrix, who's going to, you'll be on Thursday to go over some of the stuff you guys do as a company. Appreciate the commentary, and great experience riding the wave. How high was that wave? >> A thousand foot. >> Thousand foot wave. We've been riding this wave for years. What a great time it is to be here at reInvent. Keep coverage, I'm John Furrier. We will be back with more coverage after this short break. Here in the Cube Intel Studios sponsored by Intel. Thanks to Intel for your generous contributions to making the Cube and supporting our mission. We really appreciate it. Thanks for watching, we've got the more coverage after this short break. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)

>>from Las Vegas. It's the Q covering quality security conference 2019. You >>bike, Wallace. Hey, Welcome back. You're ready. Geoffrey here with the Cube were in Las >>Vegas at the Kuala Security Conference here at the Bellagio. 19 years they've been doing this conference star first time here, But we've got a real veteran. Has been here for 16 years who can really add some depth and perspective for happy to welcome submit to car. He's a president and chief product officer for cause like >>to see you. Thank you, >>Jeff. Thanks for having me. >>Pleasure. So just, uh, don't lorry before getting ready for this. Um, this day, listening to the earnings call. And you got a really nice shout out in the nights in the Last Rings call and your promotion just to let everybody know what submits got underneath his plate. R and D. Q A ops, product marketing and customer support and adding worldwide field sales ops. You're busy, guy. >>Yeah, you know. But the good thing is, >>no matter who you are, you only have 24 hours in the >>day. That's true. Just as Leo. But I am curious because you've been here for a >>while, you've seen a lot of technology, you know, kind of waves. And yet here you guys still are. You've got an architecture that's built to take advantage of things like open source to take advantage of things. My cloud is you kind of take a breath between customer meetings and running from panel the panel and you think about kind of the journey. You know what? What kind of strikes you that you know, that you guys are still here, Still successful, Still have a founding CEO. It's >>your position. Yeah, It's actually very interesting >>being here for 16 years. Started a software engineer. And, you know, I've been doing a lot of stuff doing a product management now, engineering and all of that. And I think one thing that's really part of the DNA for us and which is really helped us keep growing, is being innovative continuously, right, because five years ago, nobody would have said container technology docker eso, as new security knew in for sexual pattern times have come about. We've just been on our toes and making sure that we are addressing all these different newer areas. And so the key is not so much about what new technology is going to come, because two years from now there was something that we don't even know about right now. What's key is that we build a platform that we keep adding additional capabilities that continue to quickly and nimbly be able to address customer's needs. From that perspective. >>Yeah, we just had Laureano. She talked quite a bit about your kind of customer engagement model being different than the traditional ones, really trying to build a long lasting relationship and to collect that data from the customers to know what their prairies are all about. >>Yeah, >>and, you know, it's because we've been subscription based since day one. You know, this is the not we're not incentivized to go and try to sell our customers big fact, multimillion dollar deals. Then we don't disappear like enterprise sales usually does on perpetual licenses. So we have to earn our keep, and we want to make sure customers are we understand their needs so that they actually buy and purchase only what they are going to use so we can go back and they can grow more. We show the value. Uh, so that's a very different model on, you know, at the end of the day, that is a model of the cloud. So everybody who was in this consumption based model has to ensure that they are every year, going back and showing the value and earning their subscription back. So in that sense, security. Not a lot of vendors have done that for a long time. We've been the ones since the beginning to kind of follow this model, and it's worked very well for us. It's a great model. Customers were happy as we had more solutions. We showed the value, and it's very easy for them to upgrade and get additional value of quality at a very reasonable of you. No cost to them. >>It's interesting. Feli talked about an early conversation that he had with Marc Benioff details Horse and and I would argue that it was really sales force. That kind of cracked the code in terms of enterprising, being comfortable with a cloud based system and, you know, kind of past the security and the trust in this in that, so to make that gamble on the cloud so early, very, very fortunate and for two days. Thea Other thing I think that does not get enough play which you just touched on is a subscription business model forces you to deliver every month they're paying every month you gotta deliver Your mother is a very different relationship than a once a year. You know, not even once year to go get that big lump sum to get the renewal cause you're in bed with them. Every single say absolutely. Yeah, >>so that's really a very interesting model. >>So as you look forward, I know you're just given Ah, talk on, you know, kind of starting to look at the next big wave of trends. How do you get out ahead of it? What are you thinking about? What keeps you up at night would be excited about. >>So the very cool part about that about my job is that I also heard engineering and product Fork Wallace and Security. So we're living that digital transformation that our customers are going through as well. So we have a massive black farm. We have, like, three trillion data points. Every index, we have one million rights per second on Cassandra Clusters. So we are dealing with the same infrastructure innovation that our customers are doing and so died is helping us also learn how the secular own platform what our customers are thinking. Because as they are moving into Dev ops, we have already moved into that. We have learned our lessons, so we relate to what they're going through. And that's really the next big thing is hard to be enabled. Security tools to really be built into the develops stool chain so that we eliminate a lot of the issues upfront before they ever even become an issue. And, you know, my talk this morning was about started with the notion of t t R, which is the time to remediate, and the best time to the mediator is the time of zero, right? If you don't ever let the issue get into your production environment, you never have to worry about fixing it. And that's really the next big thing for us is how do we create a platform that helps customer not the look at security in multiple silos, but to have a single platform where they can go all the way from develops to production to remediation to response all orchestrated to the same platform, >>right? It's pretty interesting, because that was, uh, Richard Clarke. Keynote the author. You know, we used to always break cos down into two buckets. You know, either those that had that have been breached and those that have been breached just don't know about it yet. Yeah. Yeah. And then, you know, he introduced his third concept, which is those that got breached but actually got on it. Remediated it. Maybe not the time, zero, but in a way that it did not become a big issue. Because, let's face it, you're going to get breached at some level. It's How do you keep it from becoming a big, big nightmare? >>Exactly. And that is really the only measure off effectiveness off your security, right? It's not about how many people you have, how many dollars you spend on security, how big your security team is. Harmony renders you have How quickly can you get in there, find and fix any issue that comes up? That's that. That's the living matter. If you can't do that with no people and no, uh, you know, re sources that are being put to it with automation, then that's great. If you do that with 50 people, that's great. We just need to be able to get to that point. And today, off course with hybrid infrastructure, we are realizing quickly, throwing more people that the problem is not really solving the problem. We just cannot keep going. We need to leverage that seem scalable technology that has been used in the digital transformation to provide that similar stuff from a security perspective through the customers as well, >>right? And even if you even if you wanted to hire the people, there aren't enough people, >>and that's another just our people, right? So the other >>thing that you must be really excited about is on the artificial intelligence of machine learning site and a lot of buzz in the press. Talk about robots and machines and this type of stuff. But, as you know, is we know where that robber really hits. The road is applied a I and bring in the power of that technology to specific problems. Complete game changer, I would assume for which you guys could do looking forward. >>Yeah. I mean, uh, you can really only >>have good machine learning and gold. Aye aye, if you really have a massive historic data that you can really mind to find out trends and understand how patterns have evolved, right, so only cloud based solutions can actually do that because they have a large amount of customer telemetry that they can understand and do that. So from that sense, Wallace Black form is absolutely suited for that. But having said that again, all of these have there specific application. So there's vendors were coming out and claiming that machine learning's going to solve world hunger and everything's gonna be great just because your machine learning but no machine learning and the prediction that comes with that on the privatization is one element off your tool kit. You still have to do your devil options still have to fix things. You still have to do a lot of things. But then how do you predict out of all the chaos, how can you try to focus on some things that may become a real problem, which are not now? So that's really the exciting part is to be able to bring that as an additional tool kit for the customer in their arsenal to be ableto respond to threats much faster and better than they have in the past, >>right? It is a cloud based platform. You guys are sitting in the catbird seat for that. What about on the other side? The on the ed side, Another kind of new thing that's coming rapidly. Edges are are messy. They don't have nice, pristine data. Center your environments. There's connectivity, problems, power problems, all types of issues as you look at kind of edge and an I A. T more generally, you know, increasing the threat surface dramatically. How do you How do you kind of think about that? How do you approach it to make it not necessarily a problem, but really an opportunity for follows? >>I mean, that's Ah, that's a great question because there is no magic pill for that, right? It's like you just have to be able to leverage continuous telemetry collection and the collection to be able to see these devices CDs, patterns on. So that's works really well for us because that to be able to do that right in a global organization to almost every organization is global. Global organization has multiple infrastructure, multiple people in different locations, multiple offices. And, uh, if you look at the eye ot architecture, it is about sensors that are pushing down the one common platform which controls them and which updates them and all of that. That's the platform that Wallace's build since the beginning is multiple of these different sensors that are continuously collecting later, pushing it back into our platform. And that's the only way you can get the visibility across your global infrastructure. So in many ways, we are well suited to do that. And which is the big reason why we gave out of a global ideas and then 20 product for free for customers, because we truly believe that that's the first step for them to start to get secure. And because we have the architecture and the platform and become significantly easier for us to be able to give them that gave every day, which is truly wide and not just say I have visibly in my cloudy here. But then container visibly, somewhere there and I ot visibly somewhere else, we bring all of that together in one place. >>All right, Spencer, I know you've got Thio run off >>to your next commitment. We >>could we could keep going, but I think we have to leave it there again. Congrats on your promotion >>and thank you. All right. He submit. I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cuba Think >>Wallace Security conference in Las Vegas. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. Thanks.

>> Narrator: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by, Cohesity. >> Good morning everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. We are here in the Orange County Convention Center. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with Stu Miniman. Stu, this is Microsoft's Big Show. 26,000 people from around the globe, all descending on Orlando. This is the big infrastructure show. Thoughts, impressions, now that we're on day two of a three day show. >> Yeah, Rebecca. Last year I had this feeling that it was a little bit too much talking about the Windows 10 transition and the latest updates to Office 365. I could certainly want to make sure that we really dug in more to what's going on with Azure, what's happening in 6the developer space. Even though they do have a separate show for developers, it's Microsoft build. They actually have a huge partner show. And so, Microsoft has a lot of shows. So it's, what is this show that is decades old? And really it is the combination of Microsoft as a platform today. Satya Nadella yesterday talked about empowering the world. This morning, Scott Hanselman was in a smaller theater, talking about app devs. And he came out and he's like, "Hey, developers, isn't it a little bit early for you this morning?" Everybody's laughing. He said, "Even though we're kicking off at 9:00 a.m., Eastern." He said, "That's really early, especially for anybody coming from the West Coast." He was wearing his Will Code For Tacos shirt. And we're going to have Scott on later today, so we'll talk about that. But, where does Microsoft sit in this landscape? Is something we've had. I spent a lot of time looking at the cloud marketplace. Microsoft has put themselves as the clear number two behind AWS. But trying to figure out because SaaS is a big piece of what Microsoft does. And they have their software estate in their customer relationship. So how many of those that are what we used to call window shops. And you had Windows people are going to start, Will it be .NET? Will it be other operating systems? Will it come into Azure? Where do they play? And the answer is, Microsoft's going to play a lot of places. And what was really kind of put on with the point yesterday is, it's not just about the Microsoft solutions, it is about the ecosystem, they really haven't embraced their role, very supportive of open source. And trust is something that I know both you and I have been pointing in on because, in the big tech market, Microsoft wants to stand up and say, "We are the most trusted out there. And therefore, turn to us and we will help you through all of these journeys." >> So you're bringing up so many great points and I want to now go through each and every one of them. So, absolutely, we are hearing that this is the kinder, gentler Microsoft, we had Dave Totten on yesterday. And he was, as you just described, just talking about how much Microsoft is embracing and supporting customers who are using a little bit of Microsoft here, a little bit of other companies. I'm not going to name names, but they're seemingly demanding. I just want best to breed, and this is what I'm going to do. And Microsoft is supporting that, championing that. And, of course we're seeing this as a trend in the broader technology industry. However, it feels different, because it's Microsoft doing this. And they've been so proprietary in the past. >> Yeah, well, and Rebecca, it's our job on theCUBE actually, I'm going to name names. (laughs) And actually Microsoft is-- >> Okay. >> Embracing of this. So, the thing I'm most interested in at the show was Azure Arc. And I was trying to figure out, is this a management platform? And at the end of the day really, it is, there's Kubernetes in there, and it's specifically tied to applications. So they're going to start with databases specifically. My understanding, SQL is the first piece and saying, it sounds almost like the next incarnation of platform as a service to our past. And say, I can take this, I can put it on premises in Azure or on AWS. Any of those environments, manage all of them the same. Reminds me of what I hear from VMware with Hangzhou. Vmworld, Europe is going on right now in Barcelona. Big announcement is to the relationship with VMware on Azure. If I got it right, it's actually in beta now. So, Arc being announced and the next step of where Microsoft and VMware are going together, it is not a coincidence. They are not severing the ties with VMware. VMware, of course partners with all the cloud providers, most notably AWS. Dave Totten yesterday, talked about Red Hat. You want Kubernetes? If you want OpenShift, if you are a Red Hat customer and you've decided that, the way I'm going to leverage and use and have my applications run, are through OpenShift, Microsoft's is great. And the best, most secure place to run that environment is on Azure. So, that's great. So Microsoft, when you talk about choice, when you talk about flexibility, and you talk about agility cause, it is kinder and gentler, but Satya said they have that tech intensity. So all the latest and greatest, the new things that you want, you can get it from Microsoft, but they are also going to meet you where you are. That was Jeremiah Dooley, the Azure advocate, said that, "There's, lots of bridges we need to make, Microsoft has lots of teams. It's not just the DevOps, it's not just letting the old people do their own thing, from your virtualization through your containerization and everything in between microservices server list, and the like. Microsoft has teams, they have partners. Sure that you could buy everything in Microsoft, but they know that there are lots of partners and pieces. And between their partners, their ecosystem, their channel, and their go-to-market, they're going to pull this together to help you leverage what you need to move your business forward. >> So, next I want to talk about Scott Hanselman who was up on the main stage, we're going to have him on the show and he was as you said, adorned in coder dude, attire with a cool t-shirt and snappy kicks. But his talk was app development for everyone. And this is really Microsoft's big push, democratizing computing, hey, anyone can do this. And Satya Nadella, as we've talked about on the show. 61% of technologist's jobs are not in the technology industry. So this is something that Microsoft sees as a trend that's happening in the employment market. So they're saying, "Hey, we're going to help you out here." But Microsoft is not a hardware company. So how does this really change things for Microsoft in terms of the products and services-- >> Well right, >> It offers. >> So really what we're talking about here, we're talking about developers right? 61% of jobs openings for developers are outside the tech sector. And the high level message that Scott had is your tools, your language, your apps. And what we have is, just as we were talking about choice of clouds, it's choice of languages. Sure they'd love to say .NET is wonderful, but you want your Java, your PHP, all of these options. And chances are, not only are you going to use many of them, but even if you're working on a total solution, different groups inside your company might be using them and therefore you need tools that can spam them. The interesting example they use was Chipotle. And if there's a difference between when you're ordering and going through the delivery service, and some of the back-end pieces, and data needs to flow between them, and it can't be, "Oh wait, I've got silos of my data, I've got silos of all these other environments." So, developer tools are all about, having the company just work faster and work across environments. I was at AnsibleFest show earlier this year. And, Ansible is one of those tools that actually, different roles where you have to have the product owner, the developer, or the the operations person. They all have their way into that tool. And so, Microsoft's showing some very similar things as to, when I build something, it's not, "Oh, wait, we all chose this language." And so many of the tools was, " Okay, well, I had to standardize on something." But that didn't fit into what the organization needed. So I need to be able to get to what they all had. Just like eventually, when I'm picking my own taco, I can roll it, bowl it, soft or hard shell-- >> It was a cool analogy. >> And choose all my toppings in there. So it is Taco Tuesday here-- >> Yes. >> At Microsoft Ignite and the developers like their choices of tools, just like they like their tacos. >> And they like their extra guac. So going back to one of the other points you made at the very opening. And this is the competitive dynamic that we have here. We had David Davis and Scott Lowe on yesterday from a ActualTech Media. Scott was incredibly bullish about Microsoft. And saying it could really overtake AWS, not tomorrow, but within the next decade. Of course, the choice for JEDI certainly could accelerate that. What do you make of it? I mean, do you think that's still pie in the sky here? AWS is so far ahead. >> So look, first of all, when you look at the growth rates, first of all, just to take the actual number, we know what AWS's, revenue is. Last quarter, AWS did $9 billion. And they're still growing at about a 35% clip. When I look at Microsoft, they have their intelligent cloud bucket, which is Azure, Windows Server, SQL Server and GitHub. And that was 10.8 billion. And you say, "Oh, okay, that's really big." But last year, Azure did about $12 billion dollars. So, AWS is still two to three times larger when you look at infrastructure as a service. But SaaS hugely important piece of what's going on in the cloud opportunity. AWS really is more of the platform and infrastructure service, they absolutely have some of the PaaS pieces. Azure started out as PaaS and has this. So you're trying to count these buckets, and Azure is still growing at, last quarter was 64%. So if you look at the projection, is it possible for Azure to catch up in the next three years? Well, Azure's growth rate is also slowing down, so I don't think it matters that much. There is a number one and a number two, and they're both clear, valid choices for a customer. And, this morning at breakfast, I was talking to a customer and they are very heavily on Microsoft shop. But absolutely, they've got some AWS on the side. They're doing Azure, they've got a lot of Azure, being here at our Microsoft show. And when I go to AWS, even when I talked to the companies that are all in on AWS, " Oh, you got O 365?" "Of course we do." "Oh, if you're starting to do O 365, are there any other services that you might be using out of Azure?" "Yeah, that's possible." I know Google is in the mix. Ali Baba's in the mix. Oracle, well, we're not going to talk about Oracle Cloud, but we talked about Oracle, because they will allow their services to run on Azure specifically. We talked about that a lot yesterday, especially how that ties into JEDI. So, look, I think it is great when we have a healthy competitive marketplace. Today really, it is a two horse race. It is, AWS and Azure are the main choices for customers. Everyone else is really a niche player. Even a company like IBM, there's good solutions that they have, but they play in a multi cloud world. Google has some great data services, and absolutely a important player when you talk about multi cloud for all they've done with Kubernetes and Istio. I'm going to be at Kube Con in a couple of weeks and Google is front and center there. But if you talk about the general marketplace, Microsoft has a lot of customers, they had a lot of applications and therefore, can they continue to mature that market and grow their environment? Absolutely. AWS has so many customers, they have the marketplace is stronger. It's an area that I want to dig in a little bit more at this show is the Azure Marketplace, how much we talked about the ecosystem. But, can I just procure through the cloud and make it simpler? Big theme we've talked about is, cloud in the early days was supposed to be cheap and simple. And it is neither of those things. So, how do we make it easier, so that we can go from the 20% of applications in the public cloud, up to 50% or more? Because it is not about all everything goes to the public cloud, but making customers put the applications and their data in the right place at the right time with the right services. And then we haven't even talked about edge computing which Microsoft has a big push on, especially with their partners. We talked to HP, a little bit about that yesterday. But really the surface area that this show and Microsoft covers is immense and global. >> It is indeed, and we are going, this is our second day of three days of coverage and we're going to be getting into all of those things. We've got a lot of great guests. We have Cute Host, Keith Townsend, Dave Cahill, a former Wikibon guy, a lot of other fantastic people. So I'm excited to get it on with you today, Stu. >> Thank you, Rebecca. Great stuff. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. (upbeat music`)

live from Copenhagen Denmark it's the cube covering Nutanix next 2019 bought to you by Nutanix gut morgen cube inators we are here in Copenhagen Nutanix dot next I'm your host Rebecca night along with my co-hosts to minimun what what I what a what a beautiful day in Copenhagen it's such a pleasure to be co-hosting dot next with you this is a company that you have really what been watching for a long time we're here celebrating ten years of this company I'd love to just get your first uh flick off the cuff thoughts what do you think about this company how has it changed since its inception ten years ago Chuck Rebecca unfortunately is the only Danish that I know so so hopefully you'll bring that but super excited it's the ninth dot NEX that we've had the qubit which is all of them that's the eighth one I've had the pleasure attending and Rebecca as you said uh you know I've watched this company since early early days first time I went to Newt annexes office that the paint was drying on the wall there and D arrives actually the CEO founder of the company showed me here's actually from a real estate standpoint we're going to expand here and move here and if things go well like we think we will move across the street and we can really build out a corporate headquarters and actually all of that has happened so ten years of celebration here over 5,000 employees there are some things that have not changed at all from the very first interview that John Ferrara and I had with dirige it was talking about the complexity of building distributed architectures and software what what Nutanix has learned from the hyper scale players absolutely impacts what they're doing but this landscape has changed so greatly you know you know this was originally everybody thought about it was you know that that term hyper-converged infrastructure came out it was about appliances and how many boxes you have but at the core it always was software and today we're hear them talking about how you live in that hybrid and multi cloud world all of these software pieces many of which you know seem to have it they're loosely coupled with the the core a OS software which itself has gone through complete revision to be ready for cloud native the latest databases all the new things so we know there is so much change going on in our industry um but but I saw what was built here is a culture and a company not just a product and so it is a celebration I love do they started with some of their early customers and partners especially here in Europe so very international flavor of course over 50 companies countries represented at this show we can see the the energy behind us with the expo hall here and yeah you know Nutanix have been public now for about three years going through a lot of transitions and lots of stuff for us to dig into over the next absolutely we're gonna we're gonna get into all that one at one of your tweets from this morning words where you were watching the mainstage and you said Nutanix is finally starting to answer that question what is the value of Nutanix in the data center you have a devoted Twitter followings do so we're all dying to hear what it was how do you see them answering that question it isn't enough well it's actually how they fit into the hyper scale data center because we know where Nutanix fits in the on-premises data center that's where they've lived but as customers are figuring out and you know the you know the thing that gets talked about a bunch here is you know the technologies that you know most of the customers use here is virtualization in VMware of courses that still has a dominant position in this environment while almost half of all new tannic snows that shipped in the last year use ahv the Acropolis hypervisor which is free it's by Nutanix it's based off of the KVM open source the rest of them are using pregnant predominantly VMware it's a little bit of hyper-v in there but when you go to that cloud environment I want some of the same software stack I want to be able to be able to put there so right there's one of the Nuggets that they showed towards the end of the keynote today and they've teased it out a little bit over the last year it's what they calls AI clusters so that is their stack or what they call X in some of those clouds the first one interestingly enough is is AWS and I say interesting because Google has been a solution that Nutanix has been working on but AWS is actually opening up bare-metal instances so it doesn't mean you know we take our stack and we put it on the side and we have specialized hardware it's the ec2 bare-metal instances that we're going to be able to run the new Tannis software and we've seen a number of companies out there pure storages one-day Volante and Lisa Martin were at that show not that long ago talking about you know if I am truly software and I'm independent of location how can i integrate into some of these environments so that's where we see Nutanix looking to go it's in tech preview with AWS GCP something they can do for demo environments but it's not yet open to be able to put in production environments you know the hope from Nutanix and others is that Google will open that up Google is position themselves in the open cloud and then azure will be there too so other clouds so when customers choose their environments and their own data centers they're hosted environment the public clouds we know there's going to be a lot of moves and changes and it's not going to be a one-way or a one-time thing so I want to get this as solutions that give flexibility and allow me to place where I want to and then move things as my strategy needs to adjust so the really interesting stuff definitely something what will geek out with talking about the competitive landscape this is a company that is that is a solid number two of you you've talked about this a lot in your analysts reports and at these various shows too VMware if this is a this is a two horse race there's a lot of money to be made in this market where do you see this is a company somewhat under pressure but where do you see Nutanix strengths and where do you see its biggest obstacles to overcome especially as it as it goes head-to-head with VMware yes so from the early discussion about hyper-converged infrastructure it is down to two companies and it doesn't get talked as as much as it might have a couple of years ago um there were some of my peers in the industry you know three four years ago there were like 30 companies out there there were a few acquisitions Cisco made an acquisition HPE made an acquisition you know VMware has their offerings out there but really it is to you know lead horses out there if you talk from a revenue and a dollar standpoint it is VMware and their partner ships their Dell of course has did the leading offering from VMware and then Nutanix is strong and Nutanix is growing customers they've got over 14,000 customers they added over 3,500 in the last 12 months so growing strong good growth the transition from being both you know soft soft rose at the core but really kind of ridding themselves of the hard we're going to full subscription and software model has been increasing their gross margin they're up to about 80 points of gross margin up if I remember right about three three and a half from from a year ago it has moderated their revenue because if you look traditionally and say okay what's their bookings and what's their Billings it is flat even down a little bit but that is because you're shifting from well I'm pulling along a whole bunch of stuff that I'm really not taking margin on to pure software so they believe they're past the toughest piece of that transition and I'm sure Dee Ridge will be talking about that they've done the faster transition of any company that's done this he sits on the board of Adobe Adobe went to that subscription model from this software subscription so they're doing that on but the big change is really if you talk about okay you know Nutanix is number two well that's the hyper-converged market that's what we were talking about a couple years ago when we're talking the multi cloud market you're talking about companies like Microsoft in Google and Cisco and of course VMware competing there and Nutanix would not be one of the first ones that I would mention but they do have their well positioned to help their customers and what we need in cloud is the simplicity that hyper-converged solutions like Nutanix brought to the data center so Nutanix has that opportunity to reach a much broader audience and a much broader market to go from the 14,000 customers they have to literally hundreds of thousands of companies out there that need these types of solutions and if they are to be 10 years from now at they're 20 years looking back and saying where do they fit in cloud where are they as you know a true you know technology software company for businesses that is the mark that they will need to make you're what you're saying about the simplicity that is what that is the message that we are given here today is that this is all about simplicity choice and delight make computing invisible and do you think I mean that that's so that's their message that's that's the that's the marketing gambit here altogether now do you think that is it is it going to work I mean this it is it is clearly what you say that the market needs but is does Nutanix have the staying power so Rebecca I I think you'll agree what's nice is when you hear the customers out on stage you know they actually give you the reality and it is you know in the early days of these shows it was I loved Nutanix it gave me my weekends back the quote that I had from a customer that I spoke to getting ready for this show is what I loved about this they actually had a customer that the main IT staff was not really in favor of going Nutanix they were certified and knew how to use the existing hardware and software and it spent years working on that um and they followed the rules and he said I don't want IT to follow the rules I want them to try things I want them to break things um you know I want them to be able to get ahead of the business and not just meet the requirements so he said we're spending we're ramping up our spending on training and education than sending them to events like this and Nutanix is an enabler because it doesn't just work it exceeds their expectations it is better performance they have Headroom to be able to try things and throw things at it and that is exciting so it's not just as I said oh this interesting box that I stick in a corner and I don't worry about it it is changing that that culture something I've been looking at you know can some of these technologies actually drive some of that cultural changes because traditionally it's you know executive mandate you put something new in and everybody fights against it so some of this can actually be from the ground level up is I get into these tools and solutions and it changes my workflow it changes how I work between groups how do I get the developers involved there was a lot of talk about the applications the messaging that they unveiled here all together now that that resonates with I can't just have my database my apps and my data itself in siloed as to who can access it and who can use it and have to worry about oh I need nine months and hundreds of thousands of dollars to do anything I want to be able to you know IT needs to be not no or slow but go I shout out you know Cuba Lum Alan Cohen who actually interviewed at the first dot next so he was you know early supporter of Nutanix and you know that that's what the kind of the developer driven mantra is you know IT very much working with the business and if it can drive innovation I mean Rebecca we've been talking important female leader at the moment but exactly talking about how technology can drive cultural change within a large organization because Nutanix is a large organization now it's it's only ten years old but it is it is not a start-up it is it as large complex exceedingly complicated organization and so how do you drive innovation creativity change collaboration communication between different silos these are all these are all topics that we were going to delve into today another word we keep hearing a sort of a cultural buzzword at this conference is resilience and we're going to on the main stage we're going to hear from Caroline Wozniacki who is a very famous tennis player we're gonna hear from the CEO of Noma who was of course Copenhagen's famous kuelen Airy delight and of course Kit Harington yeah so anybody that watch Game of Thrones um you know Jon Snow was definitely resilient to be able to last the eight seasons and everything that happened across it so Andy rich you know one thing we really respect you know we've watched him since the early days he is very thoughtful as to how he goes and when he actually said to me yesterday's it's do you know we are you're going to hear some of the same words that some of the other vendors but the you know the why and the how underneath that for us is different and that's very important and especially in the technology space that that nuance and the you know really how's that work in how does that put together and not just that we can do it but is this the right way it doesn't make sense so they are thoughtful about how they do it and and they're moving forward so you know they definitely believe they're positioned well for the next phase of their journey and always it's been a pleasure to you know watch this and you know to talk to all the the builders the dreamers and yeah dreamers believers and builders is what they came out this morning so well we're gonna be we have a lot of great guests on the show today I'm so excited to be hosting here with you in Copenhagen at this next dot dot next so we have dirige Pandey coming up next i'm rebecca night force two minimun please keep tuned to the cube you're watching the cube

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

>> live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage. It's the Cube covering Veum World 2019 brought to you by IBM Wear and its ecosystem partners. >> Oh, good afternoon and welcome back as we continue our coverage live here on the cue from Mosconi North in beautiful San Francisco. Clouds of melted away In a way, of course, we're still talking about hybrid Multi. They're not going anywhere. In fact, there are very much entrenched into this show. John Wall's Justin Warren. Glad to have You with us. Joined now by Kevin Chats. Camera. Who's the vice president of Product management Enterprise and SP Solutions of Dental Technologies. Kevin. Good to see you again, sir. Nice to see you, too. Two shots in one week on the Q. We love that and Wait Holmes, who's the director of technical product management at Veum? Where? Wade, Good to see you this afternoon. >> But if you also >> so this this is kind of your party here, VM where? I mean, just give me your impression so far. First off, just kind of what you're sensing that the vibe here of the show and, ah, the kind of work that you're getting done. >> So the vibe here is excitement. I mean, I think everyone's excited about a lot of the announcements around either probably Pacific and how we're redefining the V's Fair platform and Tan Xue and now these capabilities on how these capabilities are going to be able to enhance our capabilities of our cloud provider partners. So I'm part of our club fighter salt for business unit, who specifically makes products and solutions for our cloud provider V, C P P program. And I think couldn't beam or excitement. And they've been a crescendo the past few years and be anywhere and b m world. And I think this has been one of the best ever. >> If the waves hitting the shore big time now. So you you talk about cloud providers about service providers. I mean, one of the same. Or Or how do you guys define that now? Or how do you separate that? >> Yeah, I think these terms are largely used interchangeably. To a large degree, I think if we look att at the cloud industry in the provider industry over the last several years, maybe about 5 to 7 years ago, there was a belief from every single cloud provider that they needed to build a scaled platform like a W s like Microsoft Azure like Google Compute. And that they were all in the business of a race to building the most robust, most scalable, most feature rich, most differentiated cloud that was largely erased the bottom from an economics perspective. And I think just about all of all of the service providers and now these cloud providers that we work with have really moved to a different model. What they've recognized is first off. The race to the hyper scale is not a profitable business that you want to race against. Number two. Ah, the transition for large enterprise I t small enterprise medium business to the cloud is so complex that it's not a game of building clouds and not a game of building platforms. It's a game of building practices at this point and cloud providers or building practices that allow them to find their own niche and differentiation off differentiated offerings. Whether that be on Prem Private Cloud hosted Private Cloud and then partnering with the hyper scale er's for the massively scaled multi tenant cloud world. And when we start to realize that this managed offering these cloud practices are there to help the enterprise and small medium business in their transition to the public cloud in transition to cloud and moving towards more managed I t offerings. What we're finding is the reemergence of these cloud providers in a meaningful way, starting to bridge the gap of skill, set, mismatches and expertise. Mismatches at Enterprise I t just doesn't have to embrace cloud technology. >> Yeah, for a long time there, there was the cloud Geraghty, who were saying that the public cloud is the only way this is gonna happen. Everything's going to be there. And some some of us I would count myself among them was a little bit skeptical about that. That approach to things and a lot of it with a lot of the pressure on on service providers was you don't even bother getting into the cloud business. Just shut up shop and go home. This is never going to be a good idea for you to compete in this at all. And it sounds like that that some of these providers have actually gone. You know what we've We've got a viable business here. There are customers here who need things done that we do really well that are not available out in public Cloud. So what are some of the things that some of the things that you're hearing from these cloud cloud providers, that that they are finding from customers that they value, that they not finding anywhere else? >> So I grew 100% that the club wider there, find their business is still growing, and it's due to their expertise. Is Kevin said, that the building practices they understand enterprise customers? Veum, Where business? They understand the platform that they're running the enterprise and are able to provide additional differentiated service's while leverage in the technology that the enterprise they're utilizing in their own data centers. So it's able to pride value out of service is with the same platform that air using in their own premises and providing those capability of same platform in a cloud model. So, given a pragmatic way for enterprises to be able to migrate to a cloud in a hybrid cloud, >> are there specific practices you noticing that is that kind of stand out as being particularly common? >> Yeah, s so I think that through the answer is yes, right? And the answer is that vertical expertise is king here, right? Understanding the industries in which the cloud platforms get deployed and how those industries consume. Resource is the use cases. How they monetize their business is key for success. But I think that what we where we've lived over the last several years is that the building blocks for all of these vertical industries, the only uniform way you had to do it was with the massively scaled public cloud providers. The hyper scale er's what we're doing now, Adele Technologies Cloud is we're enabling a consistent set of building blocks for all of these vertical industries that all of these vertical X three experts in the vertical industries across the cloud providers can then bring a common building block and go address the complex problems of building the use cases, building the monetization models, building the differentiated feature set. >> So I mean, can you give me an example? I mean, what you talking about? It's like if you're going about health care versus transportation versus manufacturing, some things that were going to a different way, we're going to slice this That's right. It's a different >> set of ecosystem partners. It's a different set of vertical applications, a different set of problems. It's different set of monetization models across the board, right? You know, retail has very specific requirements around Leighton See sensitivity and the need to be able to address micro transactions. Security capabilities of those transactions or what not, Health care is governed by hip on various other legislative. When you build in Europe, you have, ah, various data protection and privacy implications to keep in mind. It's right, so all of this is not typically available in public Cloud Public Cloud is built for a lowest common denominator. One size fits all, and then you come bring differentiation. On top of that now is enterprise. I T organizations start to migrate their workloads to Public Cloud. They're looking for consistency in terms of how they've lived before and how they work before how they've operated before. How do they migrate those applications, right? It's not I'm building everything natively for public cloud is that I have an entire set of applications that were designed in my enterprise i d environment that I just want to find a new way to operate in VM wears a consistent abstraction. Layers is really the path forward, So DT Cloud on Deli emcee and TT Cloud leveraging the public cloud providers in the V M wear abstraction with both feet spheres. Well, it's vey cloud foundations, eyes really a commonality that they can now the uses a foundational building block for all their service is >> yes. So where one of the things that a lot of customers have invested over a decade or Maur envy em where? And they have a lot of processes and tools and skills that they have invested in. And it sounds like for some of these cloud providers specializing in a particular industry, that there's a risk there that you will end up with building blocks that, yes, they're customized for one particular thing. But now I have to operate them a little bit differently. And now I've got a lot of different ways of doing things, and particularly as a provider, then that that adds cost. And I want to try to get some of those costs out there because they think that influences my margin. So is the choice. Of'em were one way of dealing with that because I can maintain that same consistent way of managing things. >> Absolutely. And that's key to some of the work that VM wear and Dell has been working together on two. Allow for Kevin Mention, Adele Technology Cloud Platform, which the baseline of that is being more cloud foundation. So been ableto have that homogeneous operational model, and Mona's data plane set is the same V sphere and XXV sand based originality perspective. So the operational model, whether it's in the providers infrastructure or whether it's on premises within enterprise is similar. >> And I think there's even 1/3 vector to this, which is, um, yeah, one public cloud provider is not gonna win. All of the public cloud providers are going to exist, and the scale of a Microsoft azure and the scale of an AWS on a scale of a Google compute put them in position to continue to lead this industry forward. And it's it's difficult to bet on one horse, right? So the GMC model on the DT Cloud model allows us to be able to scale across all of these different cloud providers and as an enterprise organization that's making specific decisions based on region or based on other financials that some of these workloads are going to say in AWS, and some of them are going to sit in Microsoft Azure, etcetera, etcetera is a common abstraction across all of them. >> But at that point, I mean the fact that you're talking about, um, vertical practices, right? Verticals having practices that might be unique to their particular industry. And now you're talking about them deciding that they might all flowed work Thio, maybe an azure. Maybe in Google. Maybe I'd be it. Whatever, Um, I mean multiple complexities for you in dealing with that because you're gonna be the translator, right? You've got to be. You've got to be multi lingual, not only within in the cloud world, but also in a vertical world too. Right? So tough road for you guys to provide that kind of flexibility and that kind of knowledge. >> Oh, I mean, that's the key to the software and solutions that GM was providing and allowing for solutions and sat space capabilities to provide a modernise, softer, defined capabilities across clouds or a and be able to manage things across, such as cost in via cloud health and other manage service's capabilities by our software platform and then be ableto have this. These capabilities in the Bean Imlay consumed by providers and turnkey fashion by utilizing del technologies, bx rail are and VCF one VX rail and having us all package together, and so that providers no longer have to focus on building a core infrastructure. But they're now able to focus on that integration layer. Focus on the additional higher level service is that are able to stitch together the use this multi cloud environment >> decision logic that our customers have. It's just so complex, and I think that the message that we've heard loud and clear from them is that they feel like once they're in particular ecosystem, they're locked into that ecosystem. And the more that we can do that give them flexibility to bring these ecosystems together and leverage the benefits and the capabilities and the regional and geo location of just about all the different ecosystems that exists and build their own ecosystems. On top of that, especially if you're a cloud provider, is really what they're looking to do. And when the foundational building blocks all look different, the integration look different the automation look different. The orchestration look different in the storage. Later look different. It's just It was impossible, right? It's really on us to provide an abstraction to make that easy for them to accomplish their business. >> Consistent foundation is critical, and that's what we're bringing through the cloud provider today. >> One thing that has changed from from technology of 12 12 15 20 years ago is the consumption model that cloud has provided. S. So what are you seeing around service providers, providing that pretty much you have to provide if your cloud provided you have to provide some kind of consumption model because that's what people have in their minds when they think about about Cloud it is. It's not just about the technology side of things. Actually, we're out the business operations about, you know, the financing and the funding models of things. What are you seeing with the cloud providers and service providers? How are they changing the way that they allow people to finance the buy of this infrastructure? >> So that's one of the pieces that, in being where Rendell is working together to allow for not just software, which through the visa program all of our software solutions are consumed through a subscription like model. So it's pay as you go, but also be able to consume hardware and consume the turnkey patches package so that VCF on Vieques rail and the Cloud Provider platform can be consumed in a pay as you go subscription model, which is a way that providers want to be able to then provides software and capabilities to their enterprise customers. >> Have they completely changed across to being purely consumption? Or do we still have a lot of industries that preferred by things that with Catholics >> it would be fantastic if the world converged on one answer? Everything is always easier when there's one answer. But I think, ah, one of the things we recognize is that, ah, and it's true and technology. It's true in business models. It's true. In operational models, there's never in. It's never just a or answer right. It's always an end, and there's a need for us to embrace multiple different models in order to meet the needs of our customers. And even a single service provider will find particular areas that they wanted, consumption based model and others that they realize that it's a well entrenched business for them, and the risk is a little bit lower, and they're willing to take on that risk and look at a Cap IX base model right there. Certainly financial implications to both an Op X and the Catholics model. There's tax implications, and you know where. We're still a little bit all over the map in terms of their preferences. >> Hopefully, we'll see that shake out a little bit and we'll have some standard patents to match the practices that will just make it a little bit easier to design the solution. >> I think the Saturn standard pattern that I expect to emerge is that we have to do everything >> for everyone >> in every way that they want to see. >> Oh, you left there, Kevin. I can't imagine that being too difficult. Everything. Everyone it all at every time. That's right. All right. Hey, thanks for the time of and the discussion and good luck with handling that. I know. That's a that's a big lift on. I know we're joking, but, uh, it's a great world for you. Certainly exciting time. And we thank you for your time here. >> Thank you. Thank you guys appreciate the time. >> I appreciate being World 2019. Coverage continues right here on the Cube. We're live and we're in San Francisco.